coluichedubita: Elsewhere Today 466

Aljazeera:
Mourning declared after Gaza deaths

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2007
7:52 MECCA TIME, 4:52 GMT

Three days of mourning have begun across the Palestinian territories a day after at least seven people were killed in violence in Gaza.

More than 100 others, including Hamas and Fatah members, were reportedly wounded on Monday after gunfire erupted at a rally where hundreds of thousands of people were commemorating the death of Yasser Arafat.

Both Fatah and Hamas blamed each other for the deaths.

The office of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in the West Bank town of Ramallah said on Tuesday the period of mourning was to "pay homage to the martyrs killed by the bullets of the putschists," referring to the Hamas police.

Flags are to be flown at half-mast on buildings of the Palestinian Authority, the government run by the Fatah party founded by Arafat.

The Palestinian Authority which Arafat set up in 1994 now controls only scattered, autonomous areas of the occupied West Bank with Hamas, which opposed Arafat's policies during his lifetime, ruling the Gaza Strip after routing their Fatah party rivals after fighting in June.

Witnesses said the shooting broke out as crowds of Fatah supporters threw rocks at Hamas security forces and chanted "Shia, Shia", accusing them of serving the interests of Iran.

Nour Odeh, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza City, said gun battles between Fatah and Hamas fighters intensified as people fled.

The event drew as many as half a million people, according to Ahmed Hellis, a senior Fatah official.

'Horrible crimes'

Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister in Abbas's government, said in a statement from his office: "Senior officials in Hamas ordered these crimes which were carried out by the Hamas militia in order to terrify the people ... Now their punishment is a national duty."

Abbas, on official television denounced "these horrible crimes committed by a band of rebels ... before the eyes of the entire world".

Fatah officials accused Hamas forces of opening fire from the nearby Islamic University, but Hamas said its men had come under attack from Fatah fighters and fired back.

The rally, seen as a demonstration of Fatah support, came as Abbas prepares for new peace talks with Israel, starting with a US-hosted Mideast conference in Maryland later this month.

Abbas is also struggling to fend off claims by Hamas that he does not have a mandate to negotiate.

In a gesture of support for the Fatah leader, Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, plans to release more than 400 Palestinian prisoners before the conference, according to Israeli legislators.

Around 9,000 Palestinians are held by Israel, and Abbas's government has asked for 2,000 to be freed before the meeting at the planned Annapolis peace conference in Maryland, US.

'Harsh response'

Israel's Shin Bet security service has said it would grant amnesty to additional Fatah gunmen in the West Bank, after declaring its first amnesties of about 100 Fatah members a success.

Mohammed Dahlan, Fatah's former security chief in Gaza, said Hamas's harsh response was a sign its grip on Gaza is weakening.

"What is happening in Gaza today is the beginning of the end of Hamas on the popular, religious and moral level," he told Palestine TV.

Hamas said Monday's events were an attempt to exploit Arafat's memory in order to "cause chaos and confront Hamas".

Ihab al-Ghosein, the spokesman for the Hamas-controlled interior ministry, said: "Fatah is responsible for continued incitement against the Palestinian police, and there was a clear attempt to bring back chaos."

More clashes erupted later on Monday during the funeral for one of the victims, 19-year-old Ayoub Abu Samra, who witnesses said had been shot dead after getting into a scuffle with a Hamas policeman.

During the funeral, mourners fired in the air, and said Hamas police fired at the procession. Hamas police denied opening fire, saying the marchers threw stones at them.

Three people were hurt, rescue workers said.

Thousands of Palestinians turned out for the Fatah-organised rally - the largest
to date to commemorate the death of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat [AFP]

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1DA736AA-CD10-46DC-8D16-3AD4BC31475C.htm

AllAfrica:
A President And a General Face Off

By Lawrence Delevingne, New York
Inter Press Service (Johannesburg) ANALYSIS
13 November 2007

Instability continues to loom large in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with President Joseph Kabila having demanded that renegade General Laurent Nkunda disarm and reintegrate his approximately 5,000 troops into the national army.

It is unclear whether the Tutsi guerrilla leader will do so, or whether the president will follow through on his promise to disarm the general's followers if needs be.

Nkunda has wavered since Kabila's threat of force in early October. But despite promises to co-operate, most of his soldiers remain in the thickly forested hills of North Kivu province.

The general promised to send 500 men to surrender as a gesture of good faith, but the United Nations - which has 17,000 peacekeepers in the DRC - has only confirmed the surrender of 200 troops. Claims by the Congolese army that 750 of Nkunda's men have turned themselves in only served to make the situation murkier.

Furthermore, last week saw the worst clashes since Kabila's call for disarmament erupt near Sake, a town close to the Rwandan border, this as Congolese soldiers traded fire with Nkunda's men.

Nkunda has long been reluctant to join the national army. This is ostensibly because he wishes to protect Tutsis from armed groups, some of which comprise Hutus who participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Upwards of 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed during the genocide.

The Hutu groups in eastern DRC allegedly support Kabila; however, Kinshasa denies the link and has promised to disarm or drive out Hutu and other faction fighters from the region. On Sunday, foreign affairs ministers from the DRC and Rwanda also issued a joint statement reiterating the importance of disarming Hutu militias in the area.

Nonetheless, "In North Kivu there haven't been many steps in the right direction, but rather the inflammation of fears," said Séverine Autesserre, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University in New York, in reference to prospects for the integration of troops from various factions into the army.

"The large majority don't want to disarm because they believe their land and communities are in danger."

Sporadic fighting in the east has severely affected civilians. Skirmishes between the army, Nkunda and various militias have displaced some 370,000 people this year in North and South Kivu - the epicentre of the conflict, according to the United Nations.

Human rights abuses by all sides are common. Rape, in particular, has characterised the conflict - while the use of child soldiers is growing. "Further combat is likely to generate more crimes against civilians," noted an October report from the New York-based Human Rights Watch on conflict in the east. "What is clear is that unless political will is found to address these core issues, it will be the people of North Kivu who will suffer most."

The mineral rich east has long been an area of conflict. But last year's multi-party elections, the first in the DRC since 1965, brought renewed hope for calm to a population that has experienced near constant unrest since Mobutu Sese Seko's ouster in 1997.

Between 1997 and 2003, two wars occurred in the vast Central African nation, leading to the death of an estimated four million people, mostly from disease and starvation. This death toll was unprecedented in any country since World War Two.

President-elect Kabila promised peace - sharing power with erstwhile rebel leaders, rooting out recalcitrant Hutu forces, and repairing relations with Rwanda and Uganda. These neighbouring countries and their proxies fought against Congolese troops during the recent conflicts.

Kabila's forces have been unable - or perhaps unwilling - to root out certain factions that government backed during the war years, such as the Mai Mai and the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (Forces Démocratiques de Liberation de Rwanda, FDLR), which includes genocidaires. In late October, however, several dozen Mai Mai surrendered.

Nkunda previously fought for the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy-Goma - a leading rebel group - but after a ceasefire joined the transitional government that led the DRC ahead of polls. He broke with the state in 2004, also on the pretext of protecting Tutsis.

Despite being wanted by Kinshasa for war crimes, Nkunda was allowed to rejoin the Congolese army in late 2006 to hunt the Hutu militias. Using the cash and weapons he received from Kinshasa, Nkunda extended his power in the east, launching attacks on the militias and other persons - actions that sparked additional conflict in the region.

Kabila set an Oct. 15 deadline for Nkunda's men to join the national army by surrendering at various U.N-supervised integration centers.

But Nkunda stalled, and under intense diplomatic pressure Kinshasa extended the deadline indefinitely. On Oct. 26 Kabila met U.S. President George Bush in Washington and asked for help securing the east. Three days later U.S. officials announced an agreement to train a Congolese army rapid reaction force to that end.

However, the Bush administration's 2008 budget request for the DRC is less than for this year - approximately 80 million dollars - and is focused on humanitarian assistance, not the disarmament programmes which are key to preventing further conflict in eastern Congo.

"Efforts to resolve the conflict have not yet brought relief for the local population," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher on the DRC for Human Rights Watch, in a recent press release. "Politicians need to take action, right now, if Congolese citizens are to be protected and justice delivered for the crimes of the past."

Congo Global Action, a recently formed international coalition based in Washington, is working to focus more attention on the DRC, this as activists and decision-makers grapple with events in several African hot spots - not least Darfur in western Sudan. The group is planning a U.S. conference and lobbying effort in the first months of 2008.

The latest tensions threaten to draw Rwanda back into conflict with the DRC, which it has previously entered to hunt Hutu genocidaires. However, President Paul Kagame denies his troops are preparing to cross the border, despite reports that he is backing Nkunda.

Burundi, which has experienced its own share of Hutu-Tutsi tensions, could also join the fighting if violence between the two ethnic groups spills across the border.

"Kabila is looking to a military solution, but the problem is that his fighters have a consistent record of failure in addition to being the greatest perpetrators of human rights abuses in the country," said Herbert Weiss, a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and a longtime observer of the DRC.

"It's doubtful that (Kinshasa) has the resources and stomach to defeat Nkunda and/or the FDLR."

Copyright © 2007 Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200711130058.html

AlterNet: Is the Military Our Last,
Best Hope for Averting War with Iran?

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on November 13, 2007

The last, best hope for averting a war with Iran lies with the United States military. The Democratic Congress, cowed by the Israel lobby and terrified of appearing weak on defense before the presidential elections, will do nothing to halt an attack. The media, especially the electronic press, is working overtime to whip up fear of a nuclear Iran and tar Tehran with abetting attacks against American troops in Iraq. The American public is complacent, unsure of what to believe, knocked off balance by fear and passive. We will be saved or doomed by our generals.

The last wall of defense that prevents the Bush administration from targeting Iran, an attack that could ignite a regional conflagration and usher in apocalyptic scenarios in the Middle East, runs through the offices of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates; Adm. William Fallon , the head of the Central Command (CENTCOM); and Gen. George Casey, the Army's new chief of staff. These three figures in the defense establishment have told George W. Bush and the Congress how depleted the U.S. military has become, that it cannot manage another conflict, and that a war with Iran would make the war with Iraq look like an act of prudence and common sense.

The reliance on the military command, however, to be the voice of reason in the debate about a new war is not a healthy sign for our deteriorating democracy. Compliant generals can always be found to carry out the Dr. Strangelove designs of a mad White House. Those who resist implementing decisions can easily be removed. The protective cover provided by these figures in the defense establishment could vanish.

The United States is able to launch a massive and devastating air attack on Iran's military installations. It can obliterate the Iranian air force. It can cripple if not dismantle effective communications and military command and control. It can destroy some of Iran's underground nuclear facilities. But our intelligence inside Iran, as was true in Iraq, is uneven. We do not know where all of Iran's nuclear facilities are. And it is probable that an Iranian response against American targets, such as the Green Zone in Iraq, as well as Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks on American soil, would follow. Shiites in the region would interpret an attack as a war on the Shiite community and would unleash unrest, terrorism and violence against us and our allies from Lebanon to Pakistan.

The battle is between the Cheney camp, which would like to carry out strikes on Iran before Bush leaves office, and Gates and his senior generals. Cheney, who has always been able to push aside the feckless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is having a tougher time with the military. Fallon, for example, was successful in his attempt to block efforts by Cheney to move a third aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf earlier this year and bluntly said that "there would be no war against Iran" as long as he was chief of CENTCOM.

Gen. Casey informed Congress this fall that the Army was "out of balance" and added: "The demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply. We are consumed with meeting the demands of the current fight, and are unable to provide ready forces as rapidly as necessary for other potential contingencies."

This White House has a habit of dismissing recalcitrant generals. Gen. Eric Shinseki, when he was chief of staff of the Army, ended his career when he told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on the eve of the war in Iraq that "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would probably be required for postwar Iraq. Gen. Peter Pace also ran afoul of the White House and was not nominated for a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he publicly defied Donald Rumsfeld. At a press conference in November 2005 he stood next to Rumsfeld as the secretary of defense asserted that "the United States does not have a responsibility" to prevent torture by Iraqi officials. Pace pointedly disagreed with Rumsfeld, saying, "It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it." Pace also openly dismissed White House claims that Iran was supplying weapons and explosively formed penetrators to Iraqi insurgents. He too was shown the door.

The White House, isolated and reviled at home and abroad, believes it is on a higher mission to save the world from itself. The instability in the Middle East could undermine Gates and his generals. A limited Israeli strike on suspected Iranian nuclear production facilities, currently under discussion in Jerusalem, could trigger retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel and U.S. targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The clamor for revenge, fueled by a rapacious right-wing media, coupled with our feelings of collective humiliation, could sweep aside all reasoned objections to war with Iran. It happened after the attacks of 2001. It can happen again.

There is a petition circulating that was put together by Marcy Winograd from the Progressive Democrats. The petition is addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all U.S. military personnel. It urges them to defy orders to attack Iran. It points out that a pre-emptive war with Iran is a war crime under international law. It reminds military personnel of the statute in the Army Field Manual 27-10, Section 609, and Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 92, that states: "A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the law of the United States. ..."

The petition notes that any provision of an international treaty ratified by the United States becomes the law of the United States. The United States is a party and signatory to the United Nations Charter, of which Article II, Section 4, states, "All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. ..."

Iran has not attacked the United States. The U.S., as a party and signatory to the U.N. charter, would be in clear violation of international law and the laws enshrined in the Constitution if it went to war with Iran. If the citizens and their representatives in Congress refuse to resist and uphold the rule of law, perhaps the military can be prodded to halt our slide into despotism. It is not the best option, but it may be the only one left.

We live now at the mercy of events. A provocation by Iran, aided by a bellicose White House, could plunge us into another war. It could unleash the primitive chant for violence and revenge that rises up from a population that feels vulnerable, uncertain and afraid. There are forces in our society ready and willing to fan the blood lust for a wider circle of war and mayhem. The Iranians, like us, are cursed by their leadership. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as primitive, inept and paranoid as George Bush. They are the perfect dance partners for a waltz into Armageddon.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. He spent seven years in the Middle East and reported frequently from Iran. His latest book is American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/67654/

Asia Times:
In Iraq, the silence of the lambs

By Ali al-Fadhily
Nov 14, 2007

BAGHDAD - The separation of religious groups in the face of sectarian violence has brought some semblance of relative calm to Baghdad. But many Iraqis see this as the uncertain consequence of a divide and rule policy.

Claims are being made that sectarian violence in Iraq has fallen because that the US military ”surge” has succeeded in reducing attacks against civilians. But Baghdad residents say that they now live in a largely divided city that has brought an uneasy calm.

”I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased and that everything is fine,” retired general Waleed al-Ubaidy told Inter Press Servce (IPS) in Baghdad. ”But the truth is far more bitter. All that has happened is a dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq.”

And as with Baquba and other violence-hit areas of Iraq, he says a part of the story in Baghdad is that there is nobody left to tell it: ”Most of the honest journalists have left.”

Ahmad Ali, chief engineer for one of Baghdad's municipalities, told IPS: ”Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and neighbourhoods. There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni Baghdad to start with. Then, each is divided into little town-like pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes.”

Many Baghdad residents say that the claims of reduced violence can be tested only when the refugees go back home. Many areas of Baghdad that were previously mixed are now totally Shia or totally Sunni. This follows the sectarian cleansing in mixed neighborhoods by militias and death squads. On the Russafa side of Tigris River, al-Adhamiya is now fully Sunni; the other areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely Sunni except for Shula, Hurriya and small strips of Aamil which are dominated by Shia militias.

”If the situation is good, why are 5 million Iraqis living in exile?” asks 55-year-old Abu Mohammad, who was evicted from Shula in west Baghdad to become a refugee in Amiriya, a few miles from his lost home. ”Americans and Iranians have succeeded in realizing their old dream of dividing the Iraqi people into sects. That is the only success they can talk about.”

Violence is no longer hitting the headlines, but it clearly continues. Bodies of Iraqis killed after being tortured are still found in garbage dumps, although fewer than a few months ago.

”Iraqi and American officials should be ashamed of talking of 'unidentified bodies',” said Haja Fadhila, from the Ghazaliya area of western Baghdad. ”These are the bodies of Iraqis who had families to support, and names to be proud of. But nobody talks about them, there is no media. It is as if it is all taking place on Mars.”

The Iraqi ministries for health and interior have said that they are finding on average five to 10 ”unidentified bodies” on the streets of Baghdad every day. ”Those Americans and their Iraqi collaborators in the Green Zone talk of five or 10 bodies being found every day as if they were talking of insects,” Thamir Aziz, a teacher in Adhamiya, told IPS. ”We know they are lying about the real number of martyrs, but even if it's true, is it not a disaster that so many innocent Iraqis are found dead every day?”

Most people blame the Iraqi police for the sectarian assassinations, and the US military for doing little to stop them. ”The Americans ask [Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations when they know very well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing,” said Mahmood Farhan of the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group.

A UN report released in September 2005 held Interior Ministry forces responsible for an organized campaign of detentions, torture and killings. It said special police commando units accused of carrying out the killings were recruited from the Shia Badr and Mahdi militias.

Ali al-Fadhily is Inter Press Service's correspondent in Baghdad.

(Inter Press Service)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK14Ak03.html

Clarín:
La moral como instinto

ENTREVISTA A FRANS WAAL

El biólogo Frans De Waal, que estudia desde hace décadas la conducta de los simios, avanza hacia la idea de que la moral es producto de la naturaleza, no de la cultura. Pero discute también con quienes bregan por los "derechos animales".

DANIEL SCARFO
10.11.2007 | Clarin.com | Revista Ñ

Frans De Waal fue elegido uno de los cien científicos más importantes del planeta por la revista Time. Desde hace treinta años estudia a los primates: investiga el origen de la reciprocidad y de las conductas que llevan a la resolución de conflictos. En su libro Chimpanzee Politics desafió la idea de que los animales no tienen "intenciones". Comparó las luchas de poder de los chimpancés -a quienes llegaba a adscribir habilidades maquiavélicas- con las de nuestros políticos. ¿Por qué -se preguntaba- debería haber diferentes esquemas para estudiar especies con tanta historia evolutiva compartida frente a conductas similares? En el ensayo Primates y Filósofos, recién traducido al castellano, De Waal aplica sus estudios al análisis del origen biológico de la moralidad y la justicia en la sociedad. En Our Inner Ape explora estas relaciones tan cercanas en dos sociedades bien diferentes: la brutal y guerrera de los chimpancés y la erótica y pacífica de la especie bonobo. La humana naturaleza -dice- es mezcla de ambas.

-Muchos de los trazos que definen a la moralidad: empatía, reciprocidad, reconciliación, consuelo -dice- ya están presentes en los primates. ¿La moralidad es anterior a la humanidad?

-Yo no estoy diciendo que los animales son morales de la misma manera que nosotros, pero la moralidad humana no se desarrolló de la nada. La apuntala toda una psicología, incluyendo la capacidad para formular y seguir reglas, la capacidad de empatía y simpatía, cooperación y reciprocidad. Nuestra regla de oro, por ejemplo, es una regla de empatía y reciprocidad (no hagas a los demás lo que no quieras que te hagan a ti). Esta psicología básica se encuentra ya en nuestros parientes primates; hay -como sugirió Darwin- continuidad entre el comportamiento de estos primates y la moralidad humana.

Según De Waal, en los primates hay moralidad, empatía y altruismo. La empatía está en los animales, capaces de imaginarse las circunstancias de otro (algo presente en los bebés humanos que lloran cuando escuchan llorar a otros bebés). La autoconciencia y las formas más elevadas de empatía habrían surgido juntas en la rama evolutiva que conduce a humanos y simios (esto se ve también en elefantes y delfines). La visión kantiana de que llegamos a la moralidad por la razón es, para De Waal, bastante problemática. Es obvio, afirma, que nos unimos para luchar contra un adversario: la hostilidad hacia fuera del grupo habría reforzado la solidaridad interna al punto de hacer surgir la moralidad, con la ironía de que ésta sería el resultado de la guerra: de hecho, la primera herramienta para reforzar el tejido social. Así, la moralidad resulta más enraizada en el sentimiento -más vinculada a la empatía del bonobo o a la reciprocidad del chimpancé- que en la cultura o la religión. Sería un producto del mismo proceso de selección que formó nuestro lado competitivo y agresivo, capaz de destruir el planeta y a otros seres humanos, aunque posea también reservas de amor y empatía más profundos.

-¿Qué paralelos pueden trazarse entre la conducta primate y la conducta humana? ¿Por qué estudiar la conducta animal nos ayuda a entender la humana?

«r-Los humanos somos animales; primates. Anatómicamente nos parecemos lo suficiente (tenemos pelo, corazón, pulmones, manos que pueden asir y ADN como los demás primates) como para considerarnos uno de ellos. También mentalmente hay enorme similaridad: somos primates; quizás primates especiales. Tenemos nuestro lenguaje: ésa es la gran diferencia.

Darwin y el origen del bien

Las observaciones de De Waal procuran entender la conducta humana a la luz de la teoría evolutiva: no es por accidente -dice- que la gente se enamora en todos lados y, sexualmente hablando, es celosa, siente vergüenza, busca privacidad (también figuras maternas o paternas) y valora las compañías estables. Hasta los "salvajes" hedonistas de Malinowski tendían a formar hogares exclusivos en los cuales hombres y mujeres cuidaban a los niños. El orden social de nuestra especie, deduce De Waal, se desarrollaría a partir de este modelo de familia nuclear (y, a la vez, cada animal tendría su propia historia). Pero contra el abuso de la teoría evolutiva, que lleva hasta a equiparar darwinismo y selección natural con una competencia sin límites, como si Darwin hubiera sido un darwinista social, De Waal sostiene que el estudio de la conducta primate desde un marco evolucionista debería recordarnos que la compasión no es una forma de debilidad recién aprehendida por la especie humana sino un poder formidable: parte de lo que somos, igual que las tendencias competitivas y agresivas.

De Waal desdibuja la tendencia a imaginar la naturaleza animal como meramente violenta. Explica cómo primero se creía que lo que nos separaba de los animales eran las herramientas. Cuando vimos que hasta los cuervos las fabrican, se dijo que era el lenguaje. Cuando vimos simios con lenguaje de signos se puso el énfasis en la sintaxis de nuestros lenguajes. Sin duda nos distingue una mayor autoconciencia, pero ya no tenemos la imagen tradicional de esa naturaleza violenta en la que debilidad significa eliminación: hoy -resalta De Waal- sabemos que los animales cuentan con considerables niveles de tolerancia y apoyo.

- ¿Por qué se evita adscribir intenciones o emociones a los animales? ¿Cómo lidia con eso?

-Esto empezó con el conductismo norteamericano, que cree que sólo podemos conocer la conducta animal pero no su vida interior: los conductistas no niegan que los animales tengan emociones, pero dicen que no podemos conocerlas. Si con eso quieren decir que no podemos sentir lo que un animal siente, tienen razón, pero esto no es motivo para eludir cualquier discusión sobre las emociones animales. En el caso del miedo, la agresión, el afecto, sabemos que en humanos y ratas se ven afectadas las mismas áreas cerebrales cuando se trata de obtener ciertas respuestas: todo indica que los mecanismos cerebrales subyacentes son los mismos. Entonces ¿por qué no llamarlos con el mismo nombre?

-¿Cómo empezó a estudiar los mecanismos de reconciliación y reciprocidad entre animales?

-Bueno, habitualmente no tenemos que enseñarles a nuestros niños a pelear sino a encontrar soluciones mediante acuerdos, a dar respuestas "integradoras": comportamientos que ayudan a unirse, como la reconciliación después de una pelea, cuando dos personas se besan y abrazan o, como los bonobos, que tienen sexo después de la pelea. Me interesan mucho estas "respuestas integradoras", necesarias para mantener la cohesión social.

Como otras especies, la nuestra -muestra De Waal- depende en gran medida de la cooperación para la supervivencia, Para él, la reconciliación y el compromiso serían parte de nuestra herencia evolutiva al igual que la tendencia a la violencia y la guerra. Se suele suponer que hacer las paces sería una habilidad social adquirida en la cultura y no un instinto. Sin embargo, no se suele investigar cómo resolvemos los conflictos. De Waal dice haber hallado pruebas en su investigación sobre la conducta de los primates para afirmar que evolucionamos a partir de una larga serie de especies animales que cuidan de los miembros más débiles de su especie y cooperan mediante transacciones recíprocas. La reconciliación -afirma- no sólo existe sino que está muy presente en los animales sociales Hasta el perdón -sostiene De Waal-, a veces considerado exclusivo de la especie humana podría ser una tendencia natural entre los animales cooperativos. En la medida que los datos de la vida social se conservan a largo plazo en la memoria -en la mayor parte de los animales y humanos- hay una necesidad de superar el pasado en beneficio del futuro. Así, la tendencia a reconciliarse sería un cálculo de carácter político o social que varía según la especie, el género y el tipo de sociedad (el nivel de agresión de una especie, sin embargo, nos dice muy poco sobre las posibilidades de esa misma especie para llegar a la paz, dice).

Según De Waal, los tres primates más capacitados evolutivamente para compartir con los demás, por fuera de la familia, son los humanos, los chimpancés y los monos capuchinos: las tres especies aman la carne, cazan en grupos, y comparten (incluso entre machos adultos). Si el gusto por la carne está en la base del compartir -se pregunta De Waal-, por qué negar que la moralidad se encuentra ya en la sangre.

La política más allá del zoo

Las raíces de la política, cree De Waal, son más antiguas que la humanidad, al igual que nuestras tendencias violentas tienen raíces en los hábitos asesinos de los primates. La idea de un origen en el "simio asesino" fue muy atractiva para los biólogos. Desde Konrad Lorenz a Richard Dawkins -y sus equivalentes neoconservadores en la política- se nos ha condenado como humanidad a una arena hobbesiana: si mostramos generosidad es sólo para engañar al otro. El biólogo Michael Ghiselin lo ilustró bien: "Rascá a un altruista y verás cómo sangra un hipócrita". Todo el siglo XX, recuerda De Waal, enfatizó nuestra necesidad de elevarnos por encima de la naturaleza, a partir de una equívoca visión del darwinismo. En 1960, Jane Goodall presentó a los chimpancés como el buen salvaje de Rousseau pero con el descubrimiento del lado oscuro de los chimpancés, dice De Waal, Rousseau salió por la puerta y entró Hobbes por la ventana. Los esfuerzos por destacar el lado bueno de los chimpancés resultó inútil.

Aristóteles decía que quien está fuera de la pólis es un dios o una bestia. De Waal objeta qué características supuestamente distintivas de la humanidad -la política, la cultura, la guerra, la moralidad, el lenguaje- pueden tener precedentes en otras especies. La negación de esto es antropodenial: ceguera para ver las características humanas en otros animales o las características animales en humanos. Pero si pensamos que los animales son nuestros hermanos, el antropomorfismo se vuelve inevitable y científicamente aceptable.

-En los estudios sobre animales se nos advierte contra el antropomorfismo. ¿Qué significa "antropodenial"?

-Antropodenial es el rechazo a priori de semejanzas entre la conducta animal y la humana. Si los humanos se besan tras una pelea y los chimpancés hacen lo mismo, un pensamiento de tipo cartesiano nos dirá que es mejor dar nombres diferentes a esas conductas puesto que no sabemos si el comportamiento animal y humano es el mismo. Quien use mismos términos para referirse a ambas especies -como al hablar de conductas de "reconciliación" en ambos casos- es acusado de antropomorfismo. Pero usar términos diferentes es una forma de antropodenial, una manera de oscurecer similitudes importantes que pueden estar allí presentes; es actuar como si ya supiéramos que son comportamientos de naturaleza diferente, cuando es más probable que los humanos y los chimpancés, si actúan de manera similar, estén motivados de modo similar. Por lo tanto, sostengo que el punto de partida para el análisis de especies estrechamente vinculadas debería ser: el comportamiento similar está motivado de modo similar. Una afirmación esencialmente darwiniana.

-¿Qué aporta el estudio de los bonobos? ¿Por qué se los conoce poco?

-Los bonobos son los hippies del universo primate: pacíficos y sexys. Manifiestan muy poca agresividad y tienen mucho sexo. Creo que son menos conocidos que los chimpancés en parte porque fueron descubiertos mucho después y hay menos ejemplares. También porque su conducta no encaja con el pensamiento generalizado de que los humanos somos una especie agresiva. A la gente le gusta pensar que somos simios asesinos, y los bonobos no dan lugar a este cuento.

El problema de compartir las experiencias con seres que poseen diferentes formas de sensibilidad fue bien expresado por el filósofo Thomas Nagel: "¿Cómo es ser un murciélago?", se preguntaba Nagel. Según él no podríamos saberlo. Pero para De Waal, cuanto más cercana es una especie, más fácil es entrar en su mundo interno. El antropomorfismo no sólo es tentador sino también, en el estudio de simios, difícil de rechazar sobre la base de que no podemos saber cómo perciben el mundo: sus sistemas sensoriales son esencialmente los mismos que los nuestros. En última instancia, se trata de evaluar qué riesgo estamos dispuestos a correr: ¿sobrestimar la vida mental animal o subestimarla?

Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2007/11/10/u-01611.htm

Guardian: Bhutto: I will not serve as PM
as long as Musharraf is president

Newsblog: Crisis in Pakistan - day 11

Declan Walsh in Lahore, Julian Borger, diplomatic editor, and agencies
Tuesday November 13, 2007

Pakistan's opposition leader Benazir Bhutto today moved closer to an open rupture with the president, General Pervez Musharraf, as she ruled out serving under him in a future government.

As she was placed under house arrest for the second time in five days, Bhutto hardened her criticism of the man with whom she had been negotiating a power-sharing deal, calling on him to resign.

"I will not serve as prime minister as long as Musharraf is president," Bhutto told Reuters. "Even if I wanted to work with him, I would not have the public support.

"Negotiations between us have broken down over the massive use of police force against women and children. There's no question now of getting this back on track because anyone who is associated with General Musharraf gets contaminated."

Stepping up the ante, Bhutto said it was now likely her Pakistan People's party (PPP) would boycott January's parliamentary elections and that she would work with the exiled former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to restore democracy.

Bhutto has previously called on Musharraf to step down as head of the army and become a civilian leader, but this is the first time she has called for him to resign as president.

In the southern city of Karachi, gunmen opened fire on two police stations as Bhutto supporters protested against her house arrest, but no one was hurt.

"About 35 to 40 armed men fired while the PPP workers were holding a protest rally," said senior police official Fayyaz Khan.

The attacks occurred in the PPP-dominated Lyari neighbourhood but it has not been confirmed if the gunmen were party supporters, he said.

As relations between Bhutto and Musharraf deteriorated, thousands of troops and police were deployed in order to stop Bhutto and her supporters from undertaking their planned 180-mile, three-day march from Lahore to Islamabad in protest at the state of emergency imposed last week.

Safdar Abbasi, a senator aide to Bhutto, said her supporters would storm the barricades, but police detained the first demonstrators who tried to approach her residence.

The Lahore police chief, Aftab Cheema, told the media in a speech outside Bhutto's house that 35 to 40 people were detained this morning for holding an unlawful demonstration and that there were probably suicide bombers in the city.

"We have very specific information that two to three foreign suicide bombers are on this mission," he said. "These people are trying to explode themselves in the rally or procession. They are foreign."

Bhutto escaped an assassination attempt by suicide bombers in October during a homecoming procession in Karachi. She was unhurt but about 140 people died in the attack.

With Bhutto under house arrest, her supporters started today's march without her. Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the president of Bhutto's party for Punjab, said he was leading a column of 200 vehicles from Lahore.

Police tried to stop them at several points and arrested some of the leaders, but the convoy was continuing southward, Qureshi said by phone.

As Musharraf tries to deal with the challenge from Bhutto, he faces increasing international pressure.

Commonwealth foreign ministers last night threatened Pakistan with expulsion from their organisation if Musharraf failed to repeal the state of emergency and step down as army chief in the next nine days.

The government in Islamabad shrugged off the threat, saying it would manage the transition to democracy in its own way and on its own timetable.

The threat to suspend Pakistan from the Commonwealth, for the second time since Musharraf seized power in 1999, came from an "action group" meeting of foreign ministers in London. A joint statement condemned the suspension of Pakistan's constitution, describing the arrest of opposition activists and restrictions on the press as "violations against Commonwealth fundamental values of freedom of expression and human rights".

The foreign ministers welcomed Musharraf's pledge to hold elections by January 9, but said the vote "would not be credible unless the state of emergency is removed and constitutional rights of the people, political parties and independence of the judiciary are restored".

They said that unless he reversed the emergency, Pakistan's membership would be suspended on November 22. Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and UN, who represented Britain at the meeting, later told the BBC: "This was a pretty tough message of one last chance."

Pakistan's high commission in London responded by saying Musharraf had already "outlined the road map for transition to full democracy in Pakistan".

Two major opposition parties, the PML-N and Jamaat-e-Islami, threatened to boycott the January elections yesterday.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2210132,00.html

Jeune Afrique: La justice tchadienne devrait statuer
aujourd'hui sur une demande de liberté des Français

TCHAD - 13 novembre 2007 - par AFP

La justice tchadienne devrait statuer ce mardi sur une requête de remise en liberté des six membres français de l'association L'Arche de Zoé, inculpés au Tchad d'enlèvements de mineurs pour avoir tenté d'emmener 103 enfants en France, a indiqué lundi une source judiciaire.

Le juge d'instruction en charge de l'affaire "devrait statuer au plus tard demain", mardi, sur la requête déposée par l'avocat des six Français, Me Abdou Lamia, a déclaré cette source à N'Djamena.

Il devrait se prononcer en même temps sur une demande similaire déposée par Me Jean-Bernard Padaré pour trois des quatre responsables tchadiens de la ville de Tiné, à la frontière tchado-soudanaise, également inculpés dans cette affaire, a ajouté la même source. Selon une autre source judiciaire, le procureur de la République a transmis lundi soir ses réquisitions sur ces requêtes au juge d'instruction.

Onze des 21 inculpés dans cette affaire qui a éclaté le 25 octobre ont déjà été remis en liberté. Tous - trois journalistes français, sept membres espagnols de l'équipage d'un avion devant emmener les enfants d'Abéché (est du Tchad) en France et un pilote belge les ayant convoyés de la frontière à Abéché - ont pu regagner leurs pays respectifs mais restent inculpés.

L'Arche de Zoé a tenté d'emmener en France 103 enfants originaires de la zone frontalière en les présentant comme des orphelins du Darfour (région de l'ouest du Soudan ravagée par la guerre civile) nécessitant une évacuation sanitaire.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP23207lajussianar0

Mail & Guardian:
DRC refugees flee camp after attack

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
13 November 2007

Thousands of refugees fled camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's violent Nord-Kivu province on Tuesday after the army said Tutsi-dominated insurgents attacked its positions nearby.

Army officials said they repelled the dawn raid on their positions near the Mugunga camp, 10km from the provincial capital, Goma, killing 27 fighters loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda.

A military spokesperson for Nkunda denied his forces had anything to do with the attack.

"There's a massive movement of displaced towards Goma. It's thousands of people. They're packed on to the road, carrying whatever they can," Aya Shneerson, director of the United Nations's World Food Programme in Goma, said by telephone from the main road from the camps into the city.

More than 370 000 people have fled fighting in Nord-Kivu between government soldiers, Nkunda's insurgents, Rwandan Hutu rebels and local Mai Mai militia since the beginning of the year.

More than 20 000 of them have taken refuge in a string of camps outside Goma, close to the border with Rwanda.

Nkunda has waged his latest campaign against government forces since late August, when he abandoned a January peace deal and pulled thousands of his fighters out of special mixed army brigades.

"They did this to show that [the army] is not capable of protecting the people. That was their objective," General Vainqueur Mayala, the army's top commander in Nord-Kivu, said by phone from the scene of the fighting.

Reuters

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=
324784&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

Mail & Guardian:
Drive slowly: Trouble ahead for Lagos's bridges

Jacques Lhuillery | Lagos, Nigeria
13 November 2007

Without its immense highway bridges spanning the lagoon, Lagos, the tentacular commercial capital of Nigeria, would be paralysed.

Every day, well before dawn, tens of millions of vehicles set out to cross bridges that were the envy of the African continent back in the Seventies. Deprived of maintenance ever since, they are now showing signs of wear and tear.

A cursory glance at a report by Lagos State government reveals vibrations, water seeping into the pillars, concrete worn away at the base of the pillars, an absence of safety railings and numerous potholes.

Some bridges also serve as parking lots for the city's rusty buses.

And with the lots come the vendors, selling everything from pirated DVDs to peeled oranges to underwear. A three-lane bridge is rapidly reduced to one lane.

But in a city where few can afford to live close to their place of work, there is no option but to use the bridges.

Stuck in complete gridlock on a bridge the commuter can read the signs at leisure: "Drive slowly. This bridge is under investigation" on Third Mainland; or "Do not urinate, do not defecate," on Falomo Bridge.

Third Mainland, which links the Ikoyi business and residential district to the mainland and the airport, is the longest of the bridges with an 8km segment spanning the lagoon.

Ademola Oyedepo, a public works engineer, warns that the bridge is "reaching a point where it should no longer be used".

"That doesn't mean it will necessarily collapse, but it needs maintenance work pretty quickly if we are to avoid it getting worse," he said.

The only consolation of being in a go-slow is that commuters can do their shopping. Hawkers skip in and out of the traffic selling onions, phone cards, dark glasses, lavatory seats, Bill Clinton's memoirs - you name it.

Salimotu Adediji (38) leaves her distant Egbeda suburb every morning when it is still dark to commute to a restaurant on Victoria Island where she works.

"Every morning I close my eyes. You can feel all sorts of vibrations on the bridges, but what can we do? We don't have any choice," she said.

The state authorities do their best to play down the danger.

"There is nothing to be afraid of. The bridges are in a good state of repair. We're always inspecting them. They're not going to collapse," said Gani Johnson, a state government advisor on infrastructure.

Asked for statistics on how many people take the main bridges each day, however, he looks blank.

A document consulted by Agence France-Presse at the federal Ministry of Transport vindicates Oyedepo's concern. An inspection of 94 bridges and link roads carried out in Lagos two years ago indicated they are generally in a state of weakness.

And once again Third Mainland is singled out for attention. The report notes potholes, a poor road surface and bumps where the segments are joined.

"My fear is that nothing has been done since they drew up that report," said Oyedepo.

Sapa-AFP

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/
breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=324789

Mother Jones: The Yield of Magical Thinking:
Better Agriculture Through Cosmic Rituals

Can the wizardry of biodynamic farming save organics? Or even your soul?

Novella Carpenter
November/December 2007 Issue

the making of Preparation 503 began just after dawn on a cold October morning at Stephen Decater's Live Power Community Farm. As the sun rose over Northern California's bucolic Round Valley, Decater waited near the barn where an 18-month-old Angus cross named Red was chewing his last breakfast. Although he seemed relaxed, this was a solemn affair for the 59-year-old Decater, who's spent the last 23 years running his family's 40-acre farm under the principles of biodynamics, an alternative organic farming method that attaches near-religious significance to otherwise mundane activities such as planting, harvesting, and slaughter.

"Before I prepare to kill an animal from the farm, my attitude is one of gratitude for the animal's life," he told me. He said a silent prayer, moved quietly to Red's stall, pointed a .22 rifle between the bovine's chocolate-brown eyes, and fired a single shot that dropped nearly 1,000 pounds of animal to the ground.

Red's sacrifice was part of a ritual repeated every autumn, when Decater harvests the raw materials to make homemade tinctures or, as they are called in biodynamic-speak, "preparations" or "preps." After the cow is butchered, Decater and a handful of volunteers pull out its entrails and stuff them, sausagelike, with chamomile and other flowers, creating Preparation 503, which is added to the farm's compost piles. They also tamp its manure into cow horns, which are buried. Come spring, the horns are unearthed, their rotted contents transformed into Preparation 500, believed to stimulate root formation. For every acre, five tablespoons are mixed with five gallons of water, then applied to the crops and the soil. Over the course of the growing season, other preps such as 501 (quartz in a horn) are sprayed on the plants and into the air around the farm; 505 (oak bark) and 506 (dandelion) are put in compost and then worked into the soil. It's like homeopathic medicine: Small, almost imperceptible quantities of substances imbued with special forces are supposed to have a beneficial effect on the vitality of the soil and the crops.

To hear its adherents tell it, a biodynamic farm isn't just a place to produce food; it is a convergence zone for cosmic forces that work on the plants, animals, soil, microbes, and—maybe most importantly—the farmer. This is what convinced Decater to convert from organic agriculture to biodynamic in the mid-1980s. "I was out pruning my trees, the fruit trees," he recalled, "and I realized, 'I have no idea what I'm doing.'" Not in a literal sense, but in a spiritual sense. Now he envisions his farm as a self-sufficient organism: Horses till the fields, sheep provide meat, chickens lay eggs, cows give milk—and all of them contribute manure, which feeds the plants, which feed the people, who care for the land. "Everything is serving something else," he said. "Biodynamics is trying to talk about reverence for everything in the world. We want to bring beauty and light into the world."

Biodynamic farming has been well known, if not mainstream, in Europe since the late 1920s, but perhaps due to its mystical bent it's been slow to catch on in the United States. Yet that may be changing as more people see it as an alternative to Big Organic. After all, biodynamic adheres to strict rules that large commercial and corporate organic operations can't hope to follow. As one agricultural theorist writes, biodynamic "makes typical organic farming look like strip mining." Currently, there are only 102 biodynamic farms and 40 biodynamic wineries in the United States. But that number is steadily growing. Jim Fullmer, the executive director of Demeter usa, which issues its trademarked biodynamic seal to farmers who follow its guidelines, says he's struggling to keep up with the demand from farmers to be certified.

i first heard about biodynamic at one of those Bay Area dinner parties where no one had ever been to a Wal-Mart, yet everyone was appalled that it was selling lettuce stamped with the usda Organic label. The alternative to the new organic-industrial complex, one woman offered, was biodynamic. She said the biodynamic food she'd eaten in France had been the tastiest she'd ever had; the lettuce had had a certain "force" to it. As the daughter of organic back-to-the-landers, I'm fascinated by alternative farming methods, though I like to temper my enthusiasm with a side order of skepticism. Which is how I came to spend several weekends working at the Live Power farm, breaking my back harvesting its melons, prodding its revered compost piles, witnessing the cosmos-capturing steer slaughter, and quietly wondering if this wasn't all just a bunch of hocus-pocus.

Before my visit, I did a background check on biodynamic. All roads led to one elusive man: Rudolf Steiner. In America, the Austrian philosopher is most famous as the father of the holistic Waldorf education movement. In Europe, he's also known as the father of biodynamic agriculture, which he introduced nearly 20 years before the organic movement took off. Steiner had little practical knowledge of farming, but that didn't stop him from laying out detailed ideas for an agriculture that relied upon cosmic forces instead of chemical fertilizers. The theory behind biodynamic isn't exactly easy to grasp; Steiner's lectures feature cryptic statements such as, "At the moment when the seed is placed in the soil it is strongly worked upon by the terrestrial forces and it is filled with the longing to deny the cosmic forces, in order that it may spread and grow in all directions." Steiner once admitted to an audience, "To our modern way of thinking, this all sounds quite insane. I am well aware of that."

However, Steiner expected that science would eventually support his theories, and he may yet be proved right. When I mentioned biodynamics to Garrison Sposito, one of the world's most well-regarded soil chemists, I was surprised that he agreed with its basic principles. What about sticking valerian root and dandelions into a compost pile? "Small amounts of certain things can make a difference," said Sposito, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley. "There might be microbes that are activated, or they might slow-release certain enzymes."

In the early 1990s, John Reganold, a soil science professor at Washington State University's Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, started comparing conventional and biodynamic farms. His research, published in Science, found that biodynamic farms had higher quality soil than conventional farms and were just as economically viable. Later studies found no difference between biodynamic and organic crops, and Reganold noted that no one really knows how the preps work. "I'm not an organic freak," he told me, yet he called biodynamic "the most holistic system I've seen."

But being biodynamic isn't easy. Demeter usa has codified the world's most stringent organic agricultural guidelines, delineated in a 25-page document that frowns upon artificial fertilizers, petroleum products, and other features of "unsustainable agriculture-related industry." Which partly explains why the Decaters have no tractors, just four enormous Belgium draft horses. Antique farm implements are strewn about the farm. I thought the tools were touchstones of authenticity a la Martha Stewart until I watched sweat pour off an apprentice's brow as he tilled a field, the horses straining to pull a steel plow through dark, weedy earth. Demeter also has a strict ban on "parallel production"—a farm must be entirely biodynamic or not at all. Monocrops are forbidden and 10 percent of a farm's acreage must be set aside as a natural preserve.

Biodynamic's small scale and anticorporate ethos mean that you won't find it at Whole Foods or even at your local farmer's market anytime soon. Live Power only distributes its harvest through a community-supported agriculture program in which customers "subscribe" to a year's worth of produce.

Finding biodynamic wine is another story, however. Winemakers have always prided themselves on their terroir, the unique taste that a vineyard's soil imparts on its grapes—a very Steinerian idea. And winemakers have never been afraid to embrace whatever it takes to set their products apart. French winemakers started going biodynamic in the 1990s; in 1997, the snooty, 300-year-old Domaine Leflaive vineyard made the switch after blind taste tests almost unanimously favored its wine made from biodynamically grown grapes. (Vineyards are exempt from the no-monoculture rule.)

Californian winemakers, still smarting from organic wine's mediocre reputation, were initially slow to see biodynamic's cachet. (See "Taste the Magic," above.) But soil scientists such as Reganold are now courted by well-heeled wineries, and it's not uncommon to see a reverential photo of a pile of cow horns in the wine section of a California newspaper. When a biodynamic viticulture consultant writes that "the grape is a truly cosmic plant," wine drinkers don't smirk; they reach for their checkbooks. A biodynamic Napa Valley Araujo Cabernet Sauvignon 2003 recently earned a 91 from Wine Spectator and sells for $215 a bottle.

after red was killed, a small crowd assembled as a traveling butcher skinned the carcass and winched it into the air. The entrails, the size of a small sofa, slid out in one giant blob and were laid out in the afternoon sunlight. Then the volunteers set out to harvest the rest of the prep-making materials. We walked around the pasture, heads bowed, looking for the holy in cow pies. Harald Hoven, a biodynamic farmer and instructor at California's Rudolf Steiner College, paused to consider a fresh specimen. "Notice how it is perfectly round," he said with a slight German accent, remarking on "how much life and vitality it has."

Flies and yellow jackets buzzed a couple stuffing chamomile flowers into a soggy section of small intestine. Hoven deposited Red's head near a hose, where two girls were on brain-removal detail. Normally, these sights would have sent me running, but the group was calm and purposeful. Its faith in the importance of what it was doing had a mesmerizing effect. "By collecting the manure and further contracting it into a cow's horn, we're sort of filing away the energy of the farm for the winter," explained Marney Blair, who runs a biodynamic farm. She said she's been called crazy for believing in things like Preparation 503. "Sometimes it feels like we're floating way out there. But there's a longing to connect in an extremely deep way. It's gospel."

As the day came to a close, the group filed over to a large pit that Decater and his three teenage sons had dug the day before. I gasped. I had already witnessed the death and dismantling of a large mammal and magic-potion making. But nothing prepared me for this: four feet of topsoil the color of a moist fudge brownie. Over the decades, millions of worms and billions of microbes had created this loamy home. Maybe they really do like yarrow, dandelion, chamomile, and cow poop. Hoven reached into the hole and began to stack the manure-laden horns, tips up. The chamomile-and-intestine sausages were to be taken to a place where snow would eventually cover them so, as Steiner had proclaimed, "the cosmic-astral influences will work down into the soil where the sausages are buried."

The ritual was over, and so was the season. It was up to the subterranean creatures to finish the job. Before I took my leave, I remembered my initial visit to the farm. One morning, I had met Decater in a sweet-smelling herb field, where he patiently demonstrated the proper way to clip basil. As we picked, I noticed that his basil had a durability to it that the plants in my backyard garden lacked. The leaves and stems felt stronger.

When Decater carried away a full lug box, I snuck a leaf into my mouth. It certainly tasted better than my own crop. Somehow it seemed richer, with a complex tingle that stayed on my tongue. Or maybe I was imagining things.
Grape Britain?

the last time England had a reputation for its wine was more than 700 years ago, when British monks took advantage of the 400-year-long Medieval Warm Period to grow and press grapes. Today, a new round of climate change is putting the island's wines back on the map.

Thanks to its newly hot, dry summers, the south of England is now considered wine country. Nearly 400 vineyards are producing $31 million worth of wine annually, and they're drawing attention for their surprisingly good rosés, whites, and sparkling wines. England swept the sparkling wine category at the 2006 International Wine and Spirit Competition; the Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 1998 from West Sussex was named the world's best sparkling wine outside of France's Champagne region.

As the latitudinally challenged English wine biz heats up, climate studies predict that established grape-growing regions like France, Spain, and California will be struggling; Napa Valley could see its wine production drop up to 80 percent in this century. Meanwhile, formerly gauche newcomers such as Tasmania and Canada are being touted as the next "star regions." Last year, British vintner Thomas Shaw released his vintage three weeks before Beaujolais Nouveau, a French wine that is traditionally the first of the season. "The temperatures made a huge difference," Shaw told a British paper. "The fruit was coming off faster than had ever been known before." —Jen Phillips

Taste the Magic

tasting wine is best done in natural light and with real wine glasses. We had neither, but that didn't stop us from blind taste-testing California syrahs to see if we could swirl and sniff our way through the biodynamic hype. The verdict: You get what you pay for. Here's our in-house oenophiles' (and a few philistines') rankings, from least drinkable to most:

Frey Vineyard Redwood Valley Syrah 2005
Biodynamic, $16
Comments: "Full flavor, but all over the map"; "Velvety, a bit of leather";"Smells like Band-Aids and tastes like old tire."

Pepperwood Grove California Syrah 2005
Conventional, $9
Comments: "Not brilliant but good"; "Too sweet"; "Tastes more of tin or some other metal than of grape. I wouldn't make stew with this."

Bonterra Vineyards Mendocino Syrah 2004
Organic, $16
Comments: "Bright berry flavor"; "Undistinctive"; "Smells like a barnyard, stings like a bee."

Patianna Mendocino Syrah 2003
Biodynamic, $30
Comments: "Full, velvety, jammy"; "A touch of Manischewitz"; "Long flavor profile with rounded peaks, flowers in the finish, fruity, crisp mouth feel."

Clos Saron Sierra Nevada Syrah 2003
Biodynamic (uncertified), $35
Comments: "Comes alive on the tongue"; "Very full. Yummy"; "Bright dramatic flavor that jumps out at you." —N.C.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/
2007/11/pv-the-yield-of-magical-thinking.html

New Statesman:
Benazir and the General

Never before has a military-backed government found it necessary to initiate its own military coup

Ziauddin Sardar
Published 08 November 2007

My friend Asma Jahangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, was among the first to bear the brunt of General Musharraf's crackdown. Within minutes after the "emergency" was declared on 3 November, she was put under house arrest for 90 days. Later, she was transferred to Court Lakpath jail. Arrests of thousands of lawyers, judges and human rights activists followed - many were dragged from their homes and brutally beaten before being thrown into prison.

Pakistan is used to military coups. But never before has a military-backed government found it necessary to initiate its own military coup. The official reason for Musharraf's dastardly actions is the exponential rise of extremism and terrorism. But it is clear that the martial law has nothing to do with terrorism.

It is an act of terror against civic society and its institutions. The constitution has been suspended, human rights have been declared irrelevant, free speech forbidden, private television stations closed, offices of major newspapers raided, free assembly outlawed and the entire country has been shrouded in darkness.

While the Pakistani army is being thrashed by militant insurgents sympathetic to the Taliban, the military is pouncing on unarmed journalists, members of the judiciary, leaders and workers of opposition parties, and anyone who dares to criticise the General.

Among those arrested is the brilliant and courageous lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan, the newly elected president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, who has played a key role in lawyers' agitation. He was sent to the Adiala jail, where he may be tortured. Imran Khan, the former cricketer and the leader of the Justice Party, was put under house arrest but escaped and is now on the run. The Pakistan Muslim League, the party of the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, claims that 1,200 of its national and district leaders have been arrested. Most of the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the right-wing religious party, are under house arrests or in prison, too.

The tipping point for Musharraf came when it became evident that the Supreme Court was likely to rule against the notion that a man in military uniform can be elected as president of Pakistan. In his address to the nation, in which he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, Musharraf clearly stated that he wants a compliant judiciary. The executive, legislature and the judiciary must be "in harmony", he said. Since he controls both the executive and the legislature, this amounts to a declaration that the General must have absolute power.

The most disturbing element of the crackdown is the role played by the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. She sees her route back to power via accommodation with Musharraf, which has not endeared her to those now leading the resistance against him.

Bhutto was informed that the emergency was on its way and left the country - only to return. She is the only politician to move freely around Pakistan; and her party has largely been spared the military's wrath. While she has criticised martial law, her protests against the General have been muted.

Supreme Court judges, such as Wajihuddin Ahmed, have claimed she is colluding with Musharraf, who issued a special ordinance to get her off corruption charges. Musharraf now wants Bhutto to lead a caretaker government. But she is holding out for a minimum two-year period as prime minister. The more desperate she seems for power the less likely she is to be a viable fig leaf for an interim administration.

It seems probable that popular unrest will swell into open revolt, generating new alignments. Grand coalitions of liberal secular and religious parties might materialise much as they did in Iran prior to the overthrow of the Shah. Pakistan's religious parties have never been significant electoral players. But they can become a potent force in a broad coalition against Musharraf and the army.

There is unrest in the army, too. Gorged on foreign financing, it is riven by factions. The disintegration of the army is even more likely if its power and privileges appear to be threatened by the increasing strength of civil society. Musharraf has already had to deny reports that elements within the army have moved against him, holding him temporarily under house arrest. But today's rumours can become tomorrow's reality. The General would not be the first Pakistani military leader to be eliminated by elements within the army who have concluded that he has outlived his usefulness.

Having invested so much in Musharraf, more than $10bn at the rate of some $130m a month since 9/11, the US is now caught in the worst of all possible conundrums. Far from being "strong for freedom", as President Bush described him during their joint press conference at the White House last year, Musharraf is the great impediment in the way of the real forces of democracy that have languished within Pakistani society for decades. Bush's ambiguous response to the emergency seems to imply that Musharraf can remain in power if he restores the constitution and takes off his uniform. But this is likely to further polarise popular opinion in Pakistan against both Musharraf and America.

The General has unleashed an avalanche. Avalanches, once the ground begins to move, are impossible to control and highly destructive. It is not easy to predict where and how the dust will settle. But we can be sure that the increasingly demented Musharraf will not give up power easily - he will have to be dragged screaming and fighting from the throne.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200711080016

Página/12:
El exabrupto

Por Eduardo Pavlovsky
Martes, 13 de Noviembre de 2007

El lenguaje de Chávez está lleno de exabruptos –se necesitan esos exabruptos–, muchos más serán para buscar un lenguaje que no sea el acostumbrado retórico y bizarro de las cumbres. La búsqueda de un lenguaje de exabruptos intempestivo, violento, sorpresivo, que rompa el lenguaje vacío y anodino de las reuniones de los presidentes. El 30 por ciento de los latinoamericanos vive debajo de la línea de pobreza, ese era el tema a discutir; el otro lenguaje, el de las formas, queda en el anecdotario de las reuniones sociales de los chismes. Pero ese lenguaje carece de la fuerza del exabrupto. El que expresa la miseria y el dolor del hambre, el que no abdica, el que grita la enfermedad y las enfermedades neurológicas de los niños latinoamericanos por desnutrición. Chávez es un impulsivo que denunció la complicidad del gobierno español en el golpe que lo quiso derrocar en el 2002. Chávez grita ensordecedoramente. Chávez guaranguea.

La figura del ex presidente Aznar junto a Bush y Blair en la foto del imperialismo criminal del ataque a Irak. Imborrable en su obsecuencia extrema. Grito ensordecedor de la traición de la ética, ¡no olvidemos la foto por favor! Necesitamos un lenguaje nuevo, lenguaje de páramo sin alimentos, sin agua, sin salud, sin esperanza. Lenguaje nuevo que exprese la miseria y nos duela el cuerpo al escucharlo –inventar un nuevo lenguaje que no produzca belleza, sino hambre infinita, mortalidad infantil, donde nuestros ojos se desorbiten como esos monstruos sin lactancias–, palabras sensaciones son las de Chávez que no dejan de callarse nunca, que produzcan convulsiones como respuestas, que seamos epilépticos por un rato, que nos cadavericen, exabruptos bien venidos. Exabruptos nuevos, obscenos por lo subversivo, la gran desgracia que ya se interiorizó como normal es la resignación, la tristeza, la adaptación. El exabrupto es la esperanza, aunque se ofendan los reyes por un rato, el nuevo lenguaje confrontativo del mestizo Hugo trae nuevas esperanzas, como cuando lo liberó bajando de los cerros la humildad humillada de los pobres y menesterosos que se convertían en humanos al liderarlos Chávez.

Basta de edificios de lenguaje que no nos sirven más para expresar nada, que ya no abarcan nada, que ya no explican nada, palabras vacías de conferencias y simposiums. Necesitamos exabruptos que expresen los ojos reventados de hambre, los dolores infinitos, los aullidos. Que exploten toda la impostura y de esos escombros el lenguaje nuevo. La belleza de los restos, poesía de los escombros. A la hoguera con los lenguajes viejos, olor a trampa, a impudicia, a corrupción por todos los rincones. Necesitamos el lenguaje de las patas en las fuentes de los cabecitas del 17 de octubre. De los indios de Morales que tanto escandalizan a los blancos bolivianos. Construyamos un lenguaje lleno de exabruptos. Chávez es obsceno. Potencia de nuevas palabras que cambien el lenguaje que ya no dice nada, de retórica bizarra y encallecida que envejece y escucharla ya da vergüenza.

Un nuevo lenguaje alegre potente para un nuevo hombre. Pero necesitamos de muchos exabruptos para que no haya más vidas desquiciadas, desperdigadas, subhumanas en nuestro continente. Un aullido muy grande. Para eso te necesitamos mucho, querido Hugo Chávez, peleando siempre con la fuerza de tu lenguaje. Exabrupto puro siempre. Que los burgueses y los terratenientes se escandalicen, pero vos nos haces sentir invencibles por un rato. Las revoluciones sociales siempre han sido grandes exabruptos. Escandalosas. Con tu maestro, el gran Fidel, el inmortal, siempre a tu lado.

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/subnotas/94589-29940-2007-11-13.html

Página/12:
Furia y naufragios en el mar Negro

DESASTRE AMBIENTAL, TRES MUERTOS Y VEINTE DESAPARECIDOS

Una tormenta huracanada provocó que ocho barcos naufragaran o encallaran. Miles de toneladas de combustible y azufre al agua.

Por Pilar Bonet *
desde Moscú
Martes, 13 de Noviembre de 2007

El temporal y los vientos huracanados sobre los mares de Azov y Negro amenazaban con provocar un desastre ecológico en aquella zona fronteriza entre Ucrania y Rusia, donde se registraron vertidos de por lo menos 2000 toneladas métricas de aceite combustible, formado por una mezcla de hidrocarburos, y 2000 toneladas de azufre, como consecuencia de los naufragios de un petrolero y un carguero, respectivamente. Un mínimo de ocho buques naufragaron, encallaron o sufrieron percances graves por los fuertes vientos reinantes en la zona que arrastraban la contaminación. Anoche aparecieron tres cadáveres en las orillas del mar Negro.

El empeoramiento del tiempo a lo largo de todo el día dificultó las tareas de limpieza y el rescate de los desaparecidos en la singular catástrofe marítima. El domingo, los marineros desaparecidos eran 23, de ellos 15 pertenecientes a la tripulación del carguero “Shaj Ismail”, que transportaba metal desde Mariupol a Tartu bajo bandera georgiana. Los otros ocho desaparecidos eran tripulantes del carguero “Najicheván”.

Poco antes de las cinco de la mañana el petrolero “Volganeft139”, que se hallaba en el puerto ruso de Kavkaz (en el estrecho de Kerch), se partió por la mitad con 13 personas a bordo. El petrolero llevaba cerca de 4700 toneladas de aceite combustible, según el Ministerio de Situaciones de Emergencias de Rusia. Se desconoce exactamente qué parte de esta cantidad fue vertida al mar, pero los representantes rusos manejan cifras que oscilan entre las 1000 y las 2200 toneladas. La tripulación del “Volganeft139” quedó a la deriva con la mitad de popa y con ayuda del motor consiguió mantenerse a flote hasta encallar en la parte suroccidental de la isla de Tuzla, donde pudieron ser rescatados gracias a un remolcador ucraniano.

“Resolver el problema llevará varios años”, afirmó Oleg Mitvol, jefe del servicio de inspección del medio ambiente ruso. “Mañana resolveremos qué medidas adoptar, pero para comparar diré que la semana pasada, cuando ocurrió el vertido de productos petroleros en San Francisco y fueron a parar al agua 250 toneladas de sustancias contaminantes, el gobernador de California Arnold Schwarzenegger declaró el estado de emergencia”, dijo Mitvol.

Ucrania no esperó para comenzar las tareas de limpieza y el Ministerio de Emergencias de aquel país ordenó el desplazamiento de buques especiales para comenzar la descontaminación. En el Ministerio de Combustibles de Kiev se formó un grupo especial presidido por el ministro Yuri Boiko para luchar contra las consecuencias del huracán, que produjo cortes de suministro eléctrico, derrumbe de edificios y de árboles en la península de Crimea.

“Es una catástrofe ecológica de gran envergadura”, manifestó Vladimir Sliviak, de la organización Defensa Ecológica de Rusia, refiriéndose al naufragio del “Volganeft 139”. Según Sliviak, la sustancia tóxica va a desprender su veneno, tanto si flota como si se deposita en el fondo marino. En este último caso, no será posible recogerlo, señaló.

“Rusia debe tener un actitud más escrupulosa y atenta a la hora de dar licencias a los buques y en lo que respecta a las condiciones de seguridad en el transporte de semejantes productos”, afirmó Sliviak. Por su parte, Evgueni Svartz, el director de la sección rusa del WWF (Fondo Mundial para la Naturaleza), opinó que los riesgos de contaminación de la superficie marina y el litoral son “muy elevados”.

Varias horas después del percance del “Volganeft139”, el mal tiempo provocó el naufragio del carguero ruso “Volnogorsk”, con más de 2000 toneladas de azufre a bordo, en el estrecho de Kerch. Según Mitvol, el azufre no supone un peligro ecológico, pero no así el combustible de los depósitos del buque naufragado.

* De El País, de Madrid. Especial para Página/12.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-94592-2007-11-13.html

Página/12:
Aldea global

Por Adrián Paenza
Martes, 13 de Noviembre de 2007

Si pudiéramos en este momento encoger la población de la Tierra hasta llevarla al tamaño de una villa de exactamente 100 personas, manteniendo todas las proporciones humanas existentes en la actualidad, el resultado sería el siguiente:

- Habría 57 asiáticos, 21 europeos, 14 americanos y 8 africanos.

- 70 serían no blancos; 30 blancos.

- 70 serían no-cristianos; 30 cristianos.

- 50 por ciento de la riqueza de todo el planeta estaría en manos de 6 personas. Los 6 serían ciudadanos de los Estados Unidos.

- 70 serían analfabetos.

- 50 sufrirían de malnutrición.

- 80 habitarían viviendas de construcción precaria.

- Sólo 1 tendría educación de nivel universitario.

¿No es cierto que creíamos que la Humanidad había alcanzado un mayor nivel de desarrollo? Estos datos corresponden a una publicación de las Naciones Unidas del 10 de agosto de 1996. Si bien han pasado casi diez años, no dejan de ser sorprendentes.

a) Estados Unidos tiene el 4 por ciento de la población mundial. Sin embargo, produce el 25 por ciento de los bienes que se consumen.

b) En este momento, 250 millones de chicos en el mundo van a trabajar en lugar de ir al colegio.

c) El patrimonio de las tres personas más ricas del mundo es equivalente a los ingresos de las 600 millones de personas que viven en los 48 países más pobres de la Tierra.

d) En China, la cultura de la cadena McDonald’s cambió las costumbres de los chicos. Primero: los chicos en China sólo comían lo que se les ponía delante en el plato. No salían a comer por las suyas. McDonald’s cambió eso y ahora salen y comen con su propio dinero. Segundo: los chicos no festejaban sus cumpleaños al estilo occidental. McDonald’s estableció una nueva tradición y promovió sus fiestitas como las que hacen en Estados Unidos. Y cambió la cultura.

e) Las formas más comunes de americanización y no de globalización:

1. La cultura pop.

2. Las películas.

3. La música.

4. Los shows en la televisión.

5. Los diarios.

6. Las transmisiones vía satélite.

7. La fast-food, o comida rápida.

8. La ropa.

f) En Canadá, a pesar del esfuerzo del gobierno en preservar su cultura local, sólo el 2,1 por ciento de las entradas vendidas para ver cine son para ver películas canadienses. Más aún: tres cuartas partes de lo que se ve en televisión es norteamericano. Cuatro de cada cinco revistas que se venden en los kioscos son norteamericanas. Y el 70 por ciento del contenido de la radio que se escucha es norteamericano también. Por último, la amplia mayoría de los productos foráneos que se venden son de origen norteamericano.

g) Para terminar, en la parte francesa de Canadá, en Quebec, hay una ley provincial que estipula que si un negocio pone un cartel en inglés, tiene que poner uno equivalente en francés, del doble de tamaño en sus letras.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-94603-2007-11-13.html

The Independent: A revolution in teaching
promises the solution to dyslexia

By Richard Garner, Education Editor
Published: 13 November 2007

A ground-breaking project which has had extraordinary success in helping hundreds of dyslexic children and others struggling to read and write at primary school is poised for a major expansion across Britain.

Springboard for Children, an education charity which now has the enthusiastic backing of the British Dyslexia Association, has achieved a 90 per cent success rate in returning children with severe literacy problems to mainstream classrooms. The revolutionary scheme is being used in a dozen schools in Manchester and London, and the plan is now to set the scheme up in 10 other inner-city areas – bringing a lifeline to around 10,000 children suffering from dyslexia and other difficulties with reading and writing.

Experts say there would be no shortage of volunteers for the programme, with estimates putting the number of dyslexic pupils in state schools at more than 300,000. In addition, national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds show around 120,000 youngsters a year leave primary school failing to reach the required standard in English. A recent survey by the National Union of Teachers showed the majority of teachers (77 per cent) believe they are not well enough trained to teach dyslexic pupils.

The secret of the scheme's success is getting immediate help to youngsters once a reading problem is identified in their first term in primary school. Pupils helped by the unit are normally selected by their schools by the end of their first term.

Dyslexia is thought to be neurological in origin although there is also growing evidence of a genetic link. Tens of thousands of parents have only realised that their child may suffer from the condition when he or she falls behind in school. The Springboard project, which has also transformed the reading and writing skills of non-dyslexic children suffering severe literacy problems, relies on intense one-on-one tuition for up to two years, during which a host of innovative techniques are employed to improve the child's skills.

Volunteers are recruited to read and work with the children. Springboard also uses a mixture of games and quizzes as well as reading to children to encourage a love of learning among the pupils it helps.

In one session, children take part in a card game – matching up the names of animals and objects on a dozen cards with those on a tray. If they get them all right, the tray flips over to form a perfect pattern.

It works because pupils like eight-year-old Rachel Lomas, who has dyslexia, finally get a sense of joy from reading if they succeed in making the pattern after years of frustration and anguish in the classroom, experiencing at last a sense of progress.

The most startling success has been achieved in Oliver Goldsmith primary school in Peckham, south London – which serves one of the most deprived inner city areas in the country – and was once on the "hit list" of failing schools compiled by Ofsted, the education watchdog.

The scheme was launched by a local resident, Jane Hastings, who had become concerned about literacy problems in the area and volunteered to teach at the school. The school's pupils come mainly from a tough council estate nearby.

The school, which has 530 pupils, was in "special measures" – the phrase used to describe those that have failed their inspection, but has now been taken off the list. In their latest report on Oliver Goldsmith, inspectors concluded: "The school has improved considerably since the last inspection."

One of the reasons for the success story has been the setting up of the Springboard unit in the school – which now provides a guaranteed 70 hours of one-to-one reading a year for 75 pupils singled out by the school as being in need of special help.

Inspectors said of the unit: "Pupils respond well to the support given by the Springboard charity which provides help in English and enjoy working in classes and individually."

Mark Parsons, the school's headteacher, said: "It has made a significant contribution to enabling us to improve educational standards and come off special measures." Volunteers on the project now receive extensive training and it is assisted by the British Dyslexia Association.

Springboard for Children is now launching a fund-raising drive to spread its work to other inner city schools – called the "10/10" campaign because it aims to start the project in 10 more cities within the next 10 years.

Brian Basham, a former journalist and management PR consultant who has worked to improve resources for dyslexic pupils for years, is spearheading the funding drive. He himself suffered from dyslexia while at school – a condition which many teachers did not recognise at that time. He is planning to approach leading city institutions for financial support within the next few months.

Springboard already receives financial aid from a variety of trusts and charities – including some set up by businesses including HSBC in the Community and the Company of Actuaries Charitable Trust Fund.

In a document outlining its plans for expansion, the charity says: "Children develop peer group awareness at around age eight. It then becomes progressively more difficult for them to learn almost anything that will help them make their way in the world and hugely more expensive to provide teaching and support."

The end result of failure, Springboard for Children argues, can be seen in prisons where 70 per cent of offenders are functionally illiterate. Children who are functionally illiterate, it adds "stand a great risk of failing to gain decent employment and of drifting into a life of poverty, anger against their lot in life, addiction, crime, imprisonment and social alienation".

According to Janet Bristow, education director of the charity, referrals can be made for a number of reasons. "Most of our schools have seen improved standards," she said. "Ten years ago it was just in three schools. Now it is in 12.

"Children come and ask us if they can join. There is no social stigma attached to coming to the unit – as might have been the case in the past with some provision for those struggling to read".

The scheme that strips away fear and stigma

Eight-year-old Rachel Lomas's natural inclination is to read and write words backwards – a symptom of her dyslexia.

She was selected for the Springboard unit at her school, Oliver Goldsmiths primary in Peckham, south London, for specialist help.

Rachel is slightly older than the average pupil at the unit – but her tutor, Claire Collins, is in no doubt that it has been able to help her to catch up on her reading and writing skills.

She receives two hours of one-to-one tuition a week. She most enjoys the use of games to stimulate her interest in learning.

She is given 12 cards with the names of animals or objects which she then has to marry with 12 different images on a tray – and is asked by her tutor to spell out the name of the image that she is placing on the tray.

If she gets all 12 correct, she can flip the tray over and find a perfect pattern has been formed. If any of her answers are incorrect, then she can try again until she does form the perfect pattern.

The scheme strips away the fear and stigma, to the extent that children at the unit are proud enough of their achievements to have their photographs taken while learning in it.

http://news.independent.co.uk/education/education_news/article3155062.ece

The Independent:
Holocaust denial in the White House

The Turks say the Armenians died in a 'civil war', and Bush goes along with their lies

Robert Fisk
Published: 10 November 2007

How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only "them or us", who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against "world terror" on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not.

The "story so far" is familiar enough. In 1915, the Ottoman Turkish authorities carried out the systematic genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging – real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War – to show that the first Holocaust of the 20th century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of six million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim.

But the Turks won't let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western powers – including our own British Government, and now even the US – to kowtow to their shameless denials. These (and I weary that we must repeat them, because every news agency and government does just that through fear of Ankara's fury) include the canard that the Armenians died in a "civil war", that they were anyway collaborating with Turkey's Russian enemies, that fewer Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians.

And now President Bush and the United States Congress have gone along with these lies. There was, briefly, a historic moment for Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of genocide. Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey's fossilised generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.

Listen, first, to General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish armed forces, in an interview with the newspaper Milliyet. The passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was "sad and sorrowful" in view of the "strong links" Turkey maintained with its Nato partners. And if this resolution was passed by the full House of Representatives, then "our military relations with the US would never be as they were in the past... The US, in that respect, has shot itself in the foot".

Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. "We all deeply regret the tragic suffering (sic) of the Armenian people... But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror." I loved the last bit about the "global war on terror". Nobody – save for the Jews of Europe – has suffered "terror" more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that Nato should matter more than the integrity of history – that Nato might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world may have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany – beggars belief.

Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who claim they are winning the war in Iraq. They include the increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, and the increasingly delusional US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian genocide bill would "harm the war effort in Iraq". And make no mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust denial.

Former Representative Robert L Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12m from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey would bar US access to the Incirlik airbase through which passed much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit Turkey.

In the real world, this is called blackmail – which was why Bush was bound to cave in. Defence Secretary Robert Gates was even more pusillanimous – although he obviously cared nothing for the details of history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, "believe clearly that access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes...".

How terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very "roads and so on" down which walked the hundreds of thousands of Armenians on their 1915 death marches. Many were forced aboard cattle trains which took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which they travelled ran due east of Adana – a great collection point for the doomed Christians of western Armenia – and the first station on the line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the huge airbase that Mr Bush is so frightened of losing.

Had the genocide that Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik. There is still alive – in Sussex if anyone cares to see her – an ageing Armenian survivor from that region who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a pile of living Armenian babies on the road close to Adana. These are the same "roads and so on" that so concern the gutless Mr Gates.

But fear not. If Turkey has frightened the boots off Bush, he's still ready to rattle the cage of the all-powerful Persians. People should be interested in preventing Iran from acquiring the knowledge to make nuclear weapons if they're "interested in preventing World War Three", Bush has warned us. What piffle. Bush can't even summon up the courage to tell the truth about World War One.

Who would have thought that the leader of the Western world – he who would protect us against "world terror" – would turn out to be the David Irving of the White House?

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3146418.ece

The Nation:
Writers Strike, Silence Falls

by BARBARA EHRENREICH
[posted online on November 12, 2007]

In solidarity with the striking screenwriters, there will be no laugh lines in this blog, no stunning metaphors, and not many adjectives. Also, in solidarity with the striking Broadway stagehands, no theatrics, special effects or sing-along refrains.

Yes, I realize the strike could deprive millions of Americans of news as Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, and the rest of them are forced into re-runs. If the strike and the re-runs go on long enough, the same millions of Americans will be condemned to living in the past and writing in Kerry for president in 08. But are re-runs really such a bad thing? After opening night, every Broadway show is a re-run in perpetuity, yet people have been known to fly from Fargo to see Mamma Mia.

And yes, it's a crying shame that so many laugh-worthy news items will go unnoted on the late night talk shows: The discovery of Chinese toys coated with the date rape drug. The news that pot-smoking Swiss teenagers are as academically successful as abstainers and better socially adjusted. Bush's repeated requests for Musharraf to take off his uniform. Could there be a simple explanation for the powerful affinity between these two men?

True, a screenwriters' strike is not as emotionally compelling as a strike by janitors or farmworkers. Screenwriters are often well-paid-when they are paid. All it takes is for a show to get cancelled or reconceptualized, and they're back on the streets again, hustling for work. I know a couple of them-smart, funny women who clamber nimbly from one short-lived job to another, struggling to keep up their health insurance and self-respect.

But my selfish hope here is that the screenwriters' action will call attention to the plight of writers in general. Since I started in the freelancing business about thirty years ago, the per-word payment for print articles has remained exactly the same in actual, non-inflation-adjusted, dollars. Three dollars a word was pretty much top of the line, and it hasn't gone up by a penny. More commonly in the old days, I made a dollar a word, requiring me to write three or four 1000-word pieces a month to supply the children with their bagels and pizza. One for Mademoiselle on "The Heartbreak Diet." One for Ms. on "The Bright Side of the Man Shortage." One for Mother Jones on pharmaceutical sales scams, and probably a book review thrown in.

There was a perk, of course-the occasional free lunch on an editor's expense account. These would occur in up-market restaurants where the price of lunch for two would easily exceed my family's weekly food budget, but I realized it would be gauche to bring a plastic baggie for the rolls. My job was to pitch story ideas over the field greens and tuna tartare, all the while marveling at the wealth that my writing helped generate, which, except for the food on my plate, went largely to someone other than me.

For print writers, things have gone steadily downhill. The number of traditional outlets-magazines and newspapers-is shrinking. Ms., for example, publishes only quarterly now, Mother Jones every two months, and Mademoiselle has long since said au revoir. You can blog on the Web of course, but that pays exactly zero. As for benefits: once the National Writers' Union offered health insurance, but Aetna dropped it and then Unicare found writers too sickly to cover. (You can still find health insurance, however, at www.freelancersunion.org.)

So, you may be thinking, who needs writers anyway? The truth is, no one needs any particular writer, just as no one needs any particular auto worker, stagehand, or janitor. But take us all away and TV's funny men will be struck mute, soap opera actors will be reduced to sighing and grunting, CNN anchors will have to fill the whole hour with chit chat about the weather, all greeting cards will be blank. Newspapers will consist of advertisements and movie listings; the Web will collapse into YouTube. A sad, bewildered, silence will come over the land.

Besides, anyone who's willing to stand up to greedy bosses deserves our support. A victory for one group, from Ford workers to stagehands, raises the prospects for everyone else. Who knows? If the screenwriters win, maybe some tiny measure of respect will eventually trickle down even to bloggers. So in further solidarity with striking writers, I'm going to shut up right now.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/ehrenreich

The New Yorker:
Norman Mailer

by Louis Menand
November 10, 2007

No one would say of Norman Mailer, who died on November 10th, at the age of eighty-four, that he hoarded his gift. He was a slugger. He swung at everything, and when he missed he missed by a mile and sometimes ended up on his tush, but when he connected he usually knocked it out of the park. He was immodest about his failures and modest about his successes, which is a healthy trait for a writer and probably a healthy trait for life. He left a huge footprint on American letters.

Mailer was a performer. He went on television talk shows and engaged in public debates and held press conferences; he directed movies and acted in them; he hosted wild parties and wrecked a few; he ran for mayor of New York City and did not finish last. It is important to acknowledge, though, that he was a singularly bad performer. He entertained and he instructed, but he also irritated, alienated, baffled, and appalled. He told dirty jokes that were not funny, and he tried on outfits and accents that were preposterous—a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he sometimes dressed like a sea captain and affected a Texas drawl—and he had a few moments, deservedly notorious, of disastrous misjudgment. Even people who wished him well, and who loved the fact that, good, bad, or ugly, he was always in the game, were obliged to cope with a lot of moral and intellectual klutziness.

It is a decorum of modern criticism that there is the writer and then there is “the work”—that all that matters is the books, considered as stand-alone verbal artifacts. To apply this decorum to Mailer is to miss the point. Beginning with his comeback book, “Advertisements for Myself,” in 1959, he bled his life and his personality into his writing. He had enjoyed a precocious success eleven years before, with “The Naked and the Dead,” the first of the major Second World War novels, and written in the third-person naturalist style of James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos. Mailer was twenty-five when it came out, and was duly lionized. But then he produced two books that attracted few admirers, “Barbary Shore,” which is sort of about politics, and “The Deer Park,” which is sort of about Hollywood, and he was desperate to have a second act. His solution was to make himself—his opinions, his grievances against the publishing industry, his ambitions—part of his subject. He did this sometimes by inventing outsized fictional alter egos—the bullfighting instructor and Village cocksman Sergius O’Shaughnessy, the wife killer Stephen Rojak—but mostly by making himself a character in his nonfiction writing: “The Armies of the Night” (about the 1967 march on the Pentagon), “The Prisoner of Sex” (about the women’s movement, a phenomenon not readily assimilable to the Mailer cosmological system, at no time a flexible instrument of analysis), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (about the Apollo space mission), “The Fight” (about the Ali-Foreman championship bout in Zaire, and one of Mailer’s finest books).

Some readers found all these Normans obnoxious, a display of egotism. But Mailer was simply making apparent something that modern literature and, in particular, modern journalism preferred to disguise, which is that a book is written by a human being, someone with professional ambitions, financial needs, tastes and distastes, and this human being is part of the story whether he or she appears in the story or not. It was not important for readers to like this person; it was important to know him. Mailer did not put the first person into journalism; he took it out of the closet.

This was so even in what is, stylistically, his least Maileresque—and, for many people, most successful—book, “The Executioner’s Song,” about the execution, in Utah, of the murderer Gary Gilmore, in 1977. Half of that book is Gilmore’s story; half is about the unseemly scramble by publishers and television producers to buy the rights to tell it. People made money off Gilmore’s death, and Mailer lets you know that he was one of them.

Mailer liked to think of his books as his children, and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least critically appreciated—“Ancient Evenings” and “Harlot’s Ghost,” great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer. He did not pretend that those books did not exist. He put himself, with all his talents and imperfections, before his audience. Not many writers have been so brave with themselves.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/11/19/071119ta_talk_menand

Utne Reader:
A Feast of Ideas

by J. Trout Lowen

The dining room windows are foggy with conversation. Every seat, nearly every piece of floor space in Marnita Schroedl’s modest three-bedroom house in Minneapolis is occupied. Patio furniture has been pressed into February service. Guests perch on radiators and test the limits of the pet-weary sofa, juggling paper plates, plastic wine glasses, and animated discussions.

Although space is tight, the more than 50 people who have crunched through fresh snow to get here tonight don’t seem to care. They’ve come to meet six international doctors who specialize in HIV/AIDS and to meet each other. All of them have some connection to the disease. Over the next four hours, they swap stories about how it has changed their lives and their communities and grope for new strategies and answers.

Some of them have met before, but many are strangers. A teenager who was born HIV-positive chats with a sales representative for an AIDS drug manufacturer. A big donor to an HIV/AIDS organization pitches in on kitchen duty alongside someone from a needle exchange program. Occasionally, a melodic hooting rises above the hubbub, signaling that members of a support group for older HIV-positive women have heard something they agree with.

As the evening winds down, a ritual that is familiar to anyone who has attended Marnita’s Table, as Schroedl’s dinners are known, begins: Each person takes the floor to share something about the evening’s topic and how it intersects with his or her life.

One after another, three young people rise to speak, and the hush in the room solidifies into rapt silence as they describe what it’s been like to grow up HIV-positive: the stigma, the fear of being found out, the relentless regimen of medications, and the endless appointments with often brusque and impersonal doctors. It is the first time two of them have spoken publicly about HIV.

“It was such a moving experience, because these teens were talking from their heart about their experience being HIV-positive,” recalls Lisa Rudquist, who sells AIDS drugs for Abbott Laboratories. “Before hearing them talk, I’d heard of the stigma and the judgment and those types of things, but you don’t really understand the gravity of that until you hear from these teens what it’s actually been like.”

At 23, Lisel Christian is already a veteran at sharing her HIV story with others. For the past several years she has been an advocate for Camp Heartland, a camp for children living with HIV. But that night, Christian says, something different happened: “It showed me that there’s this whole other group of people that I didn’t know cared, like doctors and medical personnel . . . they actually care and they’re passionate about it.”

It’s breakthrough moments of clarity like this that keep people coming back to Marnita’s Table, a four-year-old experiment in building social capital through food, fellowship, and cross-cultural communication. Part salon and part dinner party, Marnita’s Table is a place where the high and mighty nosh next to the just folks—often as many as can squeeze in the door.

There are no name tags, and few rules: Eat. Talk. Move. Don’t stay long in the same chair or in the same conversation. Civility is expected, but there are no sacred cows as all manner of topics are served up for examination over steaming bowls of Asian hot pot, savory plates of Mexican mole, Argentine mixed grill, or thick Irish stew.

“It arouses many points in your mind that make you think,” says Cecil Gassis, a 27-year-old immigrant from Sudan who attended a May table on immigration. “It basically all comes to one point, which is making where you live a better place.”

In a society seemingly famished for authentic interaction, Marnita’s Table is a place for stick-to-your-ribs conversation on issues like the Iraq War, affordable housing, immigration, and AIDS. But Schroedl and her husband, Carl Goldstein, say their mission isn’t just to nourish a few select people’s need for stimulating conversation; it’s to build a model for social change that others can replicate.

At the base of Marnita’s Table is the idea that social networking is fundamental to social change. Who we know shapes everything from who we hire to who we vote for to who we choose to live next door to. And in our increasingly self-selecting society, those networks are becoming smaller, more insular, and less welcoming. Breaking bread together helps strangers find common ground with “the other.”

“It’s not going to do any good to seat people in a room and tell them to like someone who’s different,” Schroedl says. “But if I’m a white person living in [a suburb] and you’re a black person living in [the inner city] and we have something in common, now we have a way to talk. Now maybe I’m going to your neighborhood, you’re going to mine, and maybe it’s easier for me to see why I should fund the schools on your block.”

Schroedl and Goldstein are themselves a study in difference. Short and round with a head of close-cropped black curls, Schroedl exudes energy and personality. She talks with her hands, laughs freely, and has the in-your-face directness that comes from parenting teenagers.

Her biological father was of African American and Latin descent, her mother a Danish Jew, but she was adopted as a toddler by a white couple and grew up the only black-skinned person in a small town in rural Washington.

“My family was great,” she says, but “it was not a very happy childhood” in terms of community acceptance. “When my family brought me home when I was 2, the town had a meeting about ‘we don’t want those people in our town.’ ”

As a teenager, she moved to Portland, Oregon, to live with her older sister and tried to integrate herself into the black community, only to find out that black teens saw her as too white. “I was never an ‘us,’ always a ‘them,’” she says.

At 17 she left Oregon with five dollars in her pocket and a deep sense of alienation. She was determined that her life would be different. “I decided I’d never felt welcomed anywhere, so I was always going to make room at my table. For anybody who came and behaved civilly, there would always be a space. We’d just keep adding cups of water to the soup and more chairs to the table.”

She embarked on a career in publicity that eventually brought her to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where in 2000 she met Goldstein, a freelance journalist who had grown up in Ohio and worked for years in Southeast Asia. Both recently divorced, they bonded over their kids and their shared feeling of isolation. The Twin Cities seemed an insular community, closed to anyone who wasn’t a native-born Minnesotan. It wasn’t long after they moved in together that Schroedl began to reach out to other transplants and to communities of color. Goldstein, who is much less social, was horrified when a New Year’s Day brunch mushroomed into a party for more than 50 people. Although he had asked Schroedl “not to do anything embarrassing,” she couldn’t resist ending the evening on a touchy-feely note. She gave guests candles and asked each of them to share their wishes for the new year.

One by one, they voiced their hopes and dreams as they touched candle to flame. That same sharing ceremony closes each dinner at Marnita’s Table; it is a ritual that Goldstein now embraces.

In 2002 Schroedl and Goldstein were asked to host a meal for the visiting ambassador from Argentina through the Minnesota International Center. It had originally been conceived as a formal sit-down for 12 to 14, but the guest list had mushroomed to 45 by the day before. Schroedl and Goldstein improvised, rearranging the furniture and the menu, replacing linen and china with paper and plastic. They decided to make the event more than just a staid state dinner. Schroedl researched Argentine food and music, while Goldstein put together information on the country’s current political and economic issues.

The Argentine ambassador canceled at the last minute, but the number two official arrived in his stead, and no one seemed to mind. Conversation flowed late into the night as guests savored the food and fellowship.

A few weeks later, the couple hosted a dinner and dialogue to discuss a local author’s new book. Word spread. Over the next couple of years they blew through their savings hosting dinners to feed their need for connection and conversation.

Then a nonprofit philanthropic organization asked them to design an event to help its mostly white board members connect better with those it helps, most of whom are people of color. It was their first paid event, and the first time they began to think of Marnita’s Table as a business. Now, in addition to social networking dinners, they organize corporate team-building events and host dinners to introduce newly hired people of color to the community.

After the original HIV/AIDS discussion, DIVA Minnesota, a fund-raising and grant-making organization, asked Schroedl and Goldstein to convene three dinner conversations focused on community-based solutions for stemming the alarming spread of HIV/AIDS among women of color, who in 2006 represented 68 percent of the state’s new HIV infections.

The dinners took place over six weeks, and within a few months 60 individuals from 27 organizations had joined together and signed the DIVA Collaborative, a plan to reach out to and educate women of color about HIV/AIDS.

Despite the size and complexity of the group, the experience was intensely personal, says DIVA’s Mike Cassidy, “because you’re in a very intimate atmosphere, and people are interested in what you think, not what your organization thinks.”

The result, says Peter Carr, head of the Minnesota Health Department’s sexually transmitted diseases and HIV section, was a surprising spirit of collaboration and cooperation. Too often, he says, organizations trying to work together end up competing as each tries to protect its interests and its turf.

“It was wonderful, a really refreshing perspective,” Carr marvels.

One key to their success, say Goldstein and Schroedl, is cultivating participants from across the economic, political, and cultural spectrum.

“It’s about making sure that you’re really inclusive and inviting the right players, not just people you know,” Schroedl says.

Specifically, they try to make sure that at least half the participants are people of color and half are people living below the poverty line. This is important, Goldstein says, “because if you have 30 white people and 5 black people or other people of color, that’s an entirely different experience. . . . In fact, for whites to be in a room where they are in the minority is a very powerful experience.”

“Very rare and very powerful,” Schroedl adds.

Cecil Gassis, who came to the United States from Sudan in 2003 and now oversees a YWCA program for new immigrants, says Marnita’s Table offers the kind of conversation many immigrants long for. “We wish we could stop somebody in the street and say, ‘I have some questions that I would like to get answers for.’ ”

But it was her conversations with other immigrants at Marnita’s Table that have really stayed with her, she says: “At Marnita’s Table there were people who looked different [yet] that did not stop them being successful and helping other people. . . . It was very encouraging, because I always thought that I had to find a way to be, if not normal, close to normal, close to the standards here.”

Just what constitutes “normal” can often become a thorny conversation, and debate over issues like immigration sometimes get heated, but only once, say Schroedl and Goldstein, have things threatened to spiral out of control. A dinner in April 2005 organized around some visiting Iraqi religious leaders who were touring the United States with the State Department nearly turned explosive over the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Also at dinner that night were a former military adviser to Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi American academic prominent in the anti-Saddam movement, and several people who had experienced war in their home countries of Croatia, Syria, and Lebanon.

The dialogue between the academic and the general grew so heated that they separated themselves to “honor the spirit of welcome and respect” at the table, Goldstein says. Later, they took the discussion into a corner and kept at it until some kind of understanding was reached.

“By the end of the evening,” Goldstein says, “they were laughing with their arms around each other.”

http://www.utne.com/2007-11-01/Politics/A-Feast-of-Ideas.aspx

ZNet | Economy:
Private equity is on the prowl

by Ignacio Ramonet;
Le Monde Diplomatique; November 11, 2007

While critics of the economic horrors of globalisation argue, a new and even more brutal form of capitalism is in action. The new vultures are private equity companies, predatory investment funds with vast amounts of capital at their disposal and an enormous appetite for more (1).

Their names, among them the Carlyle Group, KKR, the Blackstone Group, Colony Capital, Apollo Management, Cerberus Partners, Starwood Capital, Texas Pacific Group, Wendel, Euraze, are still not widely known. And while still a secret they are getting their hands on the global economy. Between 2002 and 2006 the capital raised by these funds from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and the assets of the super-rich rose from $135bn to $515bn. Their financial power is phenomenal, more than $1,600bn, and they cannot be stopped. In the United States, the principal private equity firms invested some $417bn in takeovers last year and more than $317bn in the first quarter of 2007, acquiring control of 8,000 companies. One American in four and almost one Frenchman or woman in every 12 now works for them (2).

France is now their prime target, after the United Kingdom and the US. Private equity firms, mainly American or British, acquired 400 companies in France last year for $14bn. They now manage more than 1,600 French companies, including such famous names as Picard Surgelés, Dim, the Quick restaurant chain, Buffalo Grill, Pages Jaunes (the French Yellow Pages), Allociné and Afflelou, and they are looking at other big names on the French stock market index, the CAC 40.

Predatory funds are not new. They first appeared about 15 years ago but have recently reached alarming proportions, encouraged by cheap credit facilities and sophisticated financial instruments. The basic principle is simple: a group of wealthy investors buys up companies and manages them privately, without reference to the stock exchange and its restrictive rules and without having to answer to shareholders (3). The idea is to get round the fundamental principles of capitalist morality and back to the law of the jungle.

That is not quite how the system works, though. To acquire a company worth 100 units, the fund invests an average 30 units from its own pocket and borrows 70 from the banks, taking advantage of current very low interest rates. The fund spends three or four years reorganising the company with the existing management, rationalising production, developing new activities, and taking some or all of the profits to pay the interest on its debt. It then sells the company on for 200 units, often to another fund which repeats the process. After repaying the 70 units it borrowed, it will come away with 130 units for an initial investment of 30, a 300% return in four years. Not bad (4).

While the directors of these funds make private fortunes, they have no qualms about applying the four great principles of rationalisation to the companies they buy: downsize staff, reduce wages, increase work rates and relocate. With the blessing of public authorities who dream, as they do in France now, of modernising production, and to the detriment of the unions, for which the process signifies the end of the social contract. Some people thought that, with the advent of globalisation, capital was sated. It is now clear that there is no end to its greed.

Translated by Barbara Wilson

(1) See Frédéric Lordon, “High finance – a game of risk”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2007.

(2) See Sandrine Trouvelot and Philippe Eliakim, “Les fonds d’investissement, nouveaus maîtres du capitalisme mondial”, Capital, Paris, July 2007.

(3) See Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, “Le retour des rapaces”, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 19 July 2007.

(4) See Trouvelot and Eliakim, op cit.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=14249

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

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