Elsewhere Today 469
Aljazeera:
Iran welcomes US atomic report
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 04, 2007
13:44 MECCA TIME, 10:44 GMT
Iran has welcomed a US intelligence report and said it was becoming clear the Islamic republic's plans were peaceful.
The report, called the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), released on Monday, said Iran is believed to have put its bid to build a nuclear bomb on hold in 2003.
Asked about the US report, Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, told state radio on Tuesday: "It's natural that we welcome it when those countries who in the past have questions and ambiguities about this case ... now amend their views realistically.
"The condition of Iran's peaceful nuclear activities is becoming clear to the world."
The report contradicts a 2005 US assessment of Iran's nuclear programme.
But Monday's declassified report also said Iran would be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon "sometime during the 2010-2015 timeframe".
It gave late 2009 as the "the earliest possible date", but added "that this is very unlikely".
The report, based on intelligence up to October 31, also found that Iran is "keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons", but admitted "we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons".
Weeks after George Bush, the US president, warned of "world war three" or a "nuclear holocaust" if Iran got nuclear weapons, the National Intelligence Board cited "high confidence" that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in late 2003 and "moderate confidence" that it had not restarted as of mid-2007.
Iran appears "less determined to develop nuclear weapons" than the US government has been claiming for the past two years, the NIE report said, and Tehran may be more susceptible to global pressure than the US previously thought.
White House angle
The White House, however, is continuing with its calls to put pressure on Iran.
Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, said on Monday: "The intelligence ... tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.
"The bottom line is this: for that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran - with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure - and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution.
"The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically - without the use of force - as the administration has been trying to do."
Britain said it favoured increasing the pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme despite the report.
Alireza Ronaghi, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Tehran, reported that Iranian officials maintain that Iran has no plans to develop nuclear weapons, because it is against Islamic law and an edict issued by the Iranian supreme leader.
"Iran does not see nuclear weapons as beneficial for its foreign policy and national security," he said.
Ahmadinejad has been criticised by former government members for his aggressive approach to the nuclear programme and his aggressive foreign policies.
"Now President Ahmadinejad will take advantage of this and will prove, once again, that his policies are right and they are bearing fruit."
Denial
Iran denies that it wants to produce nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian energy programme, but has drawn UN sanctions for refusing to freeze its uranium enrichment.
Ahmadinejad said the issue of his country's nuclear programme was "closed" and that his country was prepared for any eventuality.
"The nuclear issue is now closed," he said while attending the annual summit of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) in Doha, Qatar.
"We do not feel threatened at all and we are prepared for any eventuality or conditions."
Diplomatic wrangling
The report could undermine US efforts to convince other world powers to agree on a third package of UN sanctions against Iran for defying demands to halt uranium enrichment, a process that has both civilian and military applications.
Tensions have deepened in recent months as Washington has increased its anti-Tehran rhetoric.
Two UN resolutions have been passed imposing sanctions on Iran. They have passed unanimously, but only after diplomatic wrangling among the five permanent UN Security Council members - the US, China, Russia, France and Britain - plus Germany.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D29B738E-FE77-4051-98E6-9C92FE5CF994.htm
AllAfrica:
Local Official Brings Power to the People
By Elizabeth Dickinson, Kuje, Nigeria
allAfrica.com NEWS
3 December 2007
Kevin Aniebonem's voice is difficult to hear over the generator roaring in the background. The 24-year-old buys four liters of petrol every day to keep a light bulb running in his showroom of curtains, drapery, and fabric.
The $10 he spends on fuel is money he has to make up for with higher prices and sales every day.
"If we had power," he says, "business would be moving." The new council chairman in Kuje, the town where Aniebonem lives and works outside Nigeria's capital, Abuja, has promised to bring the district power. A new electrical pole was just erected outside the shop. Now Aniebonem is waiting for light.
Down the street in the Kuje Area Council office, the halls and corridors are jammed by 10am, filled with men, women, and youth like Aniebonem who hope the new government chairman, the Honorable Danladi Etsu Zhin, will hear their case. Tracing the line from the chairman's reception to his office door is easy; just follow the crowd's eager expressions. Every few minutes, his office door opens and another is let in.
"This is a grass roots office," explains the council's information officer, who identifies herself simply as Mrs. Olaliye. "He can't run away from the people. The door is always open."
Since his election as council chairman last April, Zhin looks set to meet Aniebonem's and others' expectations. In a district where most have had access to neither electricity nor water in more than 40 years, Zhin started to provide both after just over 100 days in office.
Electrical poles went up in a matter of weeks, stretching from Abuja's airport nearby to Kuje's villages and town center. Newly-purchased tanker trucks have delivered water to communities where boreholes cannot be drilled fast enough. The chairman says that more is planned for his four-year term. "The time is already running short, there is so much we want to do," he says.
Zhin is part of what many Nigerians hope will be a new generation of leadership, led by President Umaru Yar'Adua, a self-proclaimed "servant leader." Seeking to break the pattern set by generations of politicians who looted government treasuries, the President has staked his reputation on following the rule of law and fighting corruption. The violence and irregularities which marred the elections that brought him to power seem to have made him only more determined to succeed.
It is the same with Zhin. A member of the ruling People's Democratic Party, his election as chairman was challenged in a petition to a court, but upheld. Rather than upset his quiet demeanor, the petition seems to have increased his determination to deliver. "This government is for the people; I am just heading it," Zhin says.
Zhin is clear about what Kuje needs: light, health, roads and water are priorities. The Kuje area council is part of the Federal Capital Territory in which Abuja is located, but its roads and buildings bear little resemblance to those of the polished capital city. In Kuje town, commercial business is slowed by unpaved roads which are often impassable except by foot.
Many people from the town work in Abuja's city center but choose to live a 45-minute bus ride away where prices and rent are cheaper. Other residents are farmers, who plant subsistence crops, or cassava and yam to sell in a local market.
The money wasted on generator power is astounding; an electrician in the town estimates that most households spend about $40 a month on petrol while government power would cost only a fraction—as little as $6.50.
Danladi Etsu Zhin, now just 39, grew up in Kuje. He attended the local primary and secondary schools, leaving only to attend college before returning to local politics. Since he came to office, Zhin has been touring his area of jurisdiction.
Down the road from his office in Kuje town, villagers in Kuje Gudaba say he came through some weeks ago to follow up on campaign promises of electricity and water. "We believe him because of what he has shown us," explains civil defense officer Isaac Tyonumi, pointing to new power lines above his home.
In the town's commercial center, men pass cement blocks up a ladder, adding to the near-complete structure of Kuje's first town hall. Now politicians and citizens elsewhere in the capital territory are taking note. Its minister of state, Senator James John Akpanudoedehe, lauded Zhin's performance on a recent visit to Kuje.
Yet not everyone in Kuje is easily convinced. Politicians have made similar promises in the past without result; much of what Zhin now promises has been left undone for over four decades. Unfulfilled contracts, signed only to have payments released, litter Nigeria's budget—particularly in lucrative sectors like infrastructure and power supply.
Zhin says this is exactly what he wants to avoid. In July, This Day newspaper reported that the chairman annulled a contract worth N239m (about $1.9m) after the contractor allegedly left the work site without finishing.
Even if plans for electricity, water, and roads are realized, challenges will remain. Once power lines are up, homes and businesses will have to hire electricians to connect their buildings, something that Kuje residents say costs the prohibitively high sum of N8,000 (about $64).
And there is no guarantee that the government's power grid can supply what is demanded in Kuje. Nigeria, a country of more than 140 million people, produced only about 19 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2004, according to the United States government's Energy Information Administration.
The grid cannot maintain a continuous supply of power, nor does it cover the whole country. So desperate is the energy situation that President Yar'Adua has proclaimed a national emergency to resolve the crisis.
Power lines, like the ones going up in Kuje, are a start to delivery, but production remains too low. Joseph Uko, a local electrician, says his business fixing generators has actually gotten better in recent years, even as more people have connected to the national power grid.
Still, Aniebonem says there are signs of movement—something he has rarely seen in Kuje before. He thinks things will improve "if there is a good somebody there." Danladi Etsu Zhin is that somebody for now.
Expectations of Nigeria's new administration are high. At least in this district, progress in delivering on promises is visible. All of Kuje is waiting for results.
Copyright © 2007 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712030023.html
AllAfrica:
Civilians Face Horrific Sexual Violence
By Nergui Manalsuren, United Nations
Inter Press Service (Johannesburg) NEWS
30 November 2007
Humanitarian workers and U.N. experts say that extreme sexual violence is being used systematically as a weapon of war and terror in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as the international community sits by and watches.
"I was in total shock when I went there," the U.N.'s long-time special rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Erturk, told IPS.
"We knew what was going on in DRC, but the situation is far graver. It is a brutal situation out there. I've been told a story where a whole family was abducted, taken to the forest. Men are at gunpoint forced to rape their own daughters, or other female relatives. And if they refuse, they are killed. People are forced to eat human flesh," said Erturk.
"What happens is that there are too many actors involved, too many interests involved. It is not a situation that you can refer only to the government of the Congo, there is incredible need for strong international action."
Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and John Holmes, the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator, once again briefed the Security Council on the dire situation of civilians living in conflict zones, in particular the ongoing sexual violence in the DRC.
"A leap of imagination is not always easy, sitting in this warm and comfortable chamber, but let us remember the essential background," Holmes began his statement.
He said that rapes and sexual abuse are being committed with unprecedented cruelty, and the perpetrators have devised the most humiliating and degrading acts they can inflict on their victims. A large number of rapes occur in public places and in the presence of witnesses. Four types of rape have been identified: individual rape, gang rape, rape in which victims are forced to rape each other, and rape involving objects being inserted into the victims' genitals. In many cases, the rape victims are tortured and others are murdered.
Holmes and Ban proposed the establishment of a Security Council working group on the protection of civilians that would report to and assist the Council in moving decisively towards action, including the creation of special courts to try the perpetrators of sexual violence.
"Combating sexual violence, and the impunity on which it thrives, requires a rethink of how we use the tools of the international community and, in particular, the Security Council," Holmes said.
"We need for instance, to look at referring situations of grave incidents of rape and other forms of sexual violence to the International Criminal Court [in The Hague]," he said.
He also suggested imposing targeted sanctions against governments and non-state armed groups that flagrantly perpetrate or support such crimes.
However, after eight hours of impassioned testimony and speeches, the Security Council failed to act on the proposals, instead reiterating a previous statement on "the need to end impunity for such acts as part of a comprehensive approach to seeking peace, justice, truth and national reconciliation."
The DRC recently emerged from a five-year conflict between government forces and various rebel groups that has claimed an estimated three million lives. Despite a peace deal and the formation of a transitional government in 2003, the threat of civil war remains.
The United Nations has 17,000 peacekeepers deployed in the DRC, but it is not enough to safeguard the populace in a country whose size is comparable to all of Western Europe.
"I think that much was invested into democratic process, but that is not enough unless serious actions are taken to restore justice, because that is what missing in DRC," said Erturk.
The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it has treated 7,400 rape victims at the Bon Marché hospital in Bunia, capital of DRC's volatile Ituri district - more than one-third admitted over the last 18 months. Most of the victims are women and girls, but 2-4 percent are men and boys.
Despite an overall easing of the violence in Ituri over the last three years, MSF says that its health care workers continue to see 15 to 120 people a month who have suffered from sexual violence.
"There are known criminals," Erturk said. "Unless these high-profile criminals who are implicated for rape, mass rape and other human rights violations, unless they are punished, impunity invites crime to be repeated. So that itself destabilises society. Some of these high-profile criminals hold a command position within an army itself."
At the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a provincial capital in the eastern DRC, medical workers treat about 10 women a day, of whom a third need major surgery to repair the horrific wounds they suffered during rape.
"There's also a problem of survival: some victims need to be treated for one or even more years," Christophe Illemassene, an official with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affiars in DRC, told IPS.
"For example, at Panzi Hospital, some patients have been there for up to three years, having gone through several operations. The hospital provides food and clothes to these patients at no cost, but very few organisations do the same. So how can a woman who needs to be treated for a long time survive without food?"
Moreover, Illemassene said that after receiving medical and psycho-social care, women must return to their villages and are often rejected and stigmatised by the communities.
"Sadly, some women return to their villages to be raped again, and the vicious circle continues," said Illemassene.
Erturk believes that the number of sexual victims reported by humanitarian workers is the "tip of the iceberg".
"There is need for targeted intervention not only for health care, but also for support systems for these women who try desperately on their own to survive," she emphasised.
Many women fail to seek help because they are afraid of the reaction within their family or community. In some villages, up to 80 percent of women have been raped, according to Erturk.
And there are simply not enough doctors and hospitals to provide necessary treatment. At Panzi, six doctors are currently receiving training to increase capacity, and an additional 100-bed ward is being built.
But Illemassene and Erturk stressed that the problem must addressed at its roots - which is the widespread impunity surrounding sexual violence in the DRC.
"The whole problem is very complex and difficult; it is not something that is going to be solved easily. I think we have to be realistic about that," Erturk told IPS.
"We need to develop very strong international mechanisms where a strong message is given that these kinds of things are not tolerable. Wars will always happen, but I think that there are rules to the war as well - that's what the Geneva Convention is all about," she said.
Copyright © 2007 Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200711301090.html
AlterNet:
The Problem with Christmas
By Bill McKibben, Grist Magazine
Posted on December 4, 2007
The problem with Christmas is not the batteries. The problem isn't even really the stuff. The problem with Christmas is that no one much likes it anymore.
If you poll Americans this time of year, far more of them regard the approaching holidays with dread than anticipation. It has long since become too busy, too expensive, too centered around acquiring that which we do not need. In fact, it's the perfect crystallization of the American economy - the American consumer experience squeezed into a manic week, a week that people find themselves hoping will soon end so that on Jan. 2 they can return to the mere routine hecticity of their lives.
From that central truth, a few propositions follow:
* Replacing regular stuff with green stuff isn't getting very close to the root of the problem. If for some reason you need to give someone a motorized spice rack, then a motorized spice rack with a more efficient motor is quite clearly better. But it's also quite clearly beside the point.
* Stuff itself is a problem less because of its environmental toll (though that is quite high) than because it's increasingly meaningless. Think of your friends. Are many of them lacking in stuff? Or is the first question that forms in their minds when a new gift arrives from under the tree: "Where am I going to put this?"
* But this pleasure gap allows for a concentrated opportunity to begin rethinking our economic life. If stuff isn't valuable anymore, what is? Time, clearly. A gift of time - a coupon for a back rub, or a trip to the museum, or a dinner prepared someday in the future - is a gift whose exchange rate is figured in a stronger currency (if you're an economics major, think euros vs. dollars). Or gifts can come embedded with time already spent: a jar of homemade jam, a stack of firewood in the back yard.
* Gifts can also be reconfigured to remove some of the hyperindividualism that marks our consumer society. Ask yourself what you'd rather receive: another thing, or a homemade card saying that, say, a cow had been purchased in your name and was now providing milk for a Tanzanian family that hadn't had milk before. (Note: this line of reasoning is probably especially strong for those of us who are Christians, and recall that the occasion we're celebrating is the birth of a man who said to give all that we had to the poor.)
* Since Christmas has long been in the business of baptizing consumption, it's a good place to start eroding consumption's allure. Newfound pleasures from a simpler holiday - some silence, some companionship - suddenly start to seem attractive. Maybe that attraction will remain with us even unto February.
That would be good, because our environmental problem, at root, isn't that the stuff we're buying uses too much energy or too much plastic, or that its paint has lead in it, or that it's been shipped too far. Our environmental problem is that we consume way too much because we've agreed to try and meet basic human needs - status, respect, affection - with material ends. And no time more so than at Christmas, when Santa rides in on a Norelco razor. It's a kind of joint conspiracy that few of us dare break out of, even though we all understand at some level that it's not working. What if you don't give your kids a "proper Christmas"?
But the second you do break out of it - the second your family becomes one of those that exchanges used books at Christmas, or decides to follow St. Francis' Yule tradition of wandering the park and throwing seed so that the birds too could celebrate, or makes it an annual custom to serve turkey dinner at the homeless shelter - then you start sharing in the deep human secret that consumer society is set up to obscure: the things that please us most are almost always counterintuitive. We need to be out in the cold air, we need to think about others, we need to serve.
There are, of course, some who will say that a course like the one I'm describing here will damage the economy - that anyone who proposes a different Yuletide is a "grinch." (This, by the way, is a major literary faux pas. Close reading - even cursory reading, or even viewing the annual television special, will remind one that it was in fact the grinch himself who believed that Christmas came in a box. He turned out to be wrong, as the Whos of Whoville, those communists, made clear.) You could answer those people by saying, "Well, it won't all happen at once, and the economy will have time to adjust." Or you could answer by saying, "Maybe you're right. And maybe the economy isn't therefore quite as rational and as obvious as we would like to believe, if in fact it depends on a corrupted celebration of Jesus' birth to stagger on for another year."
The second answer appeals to me. We need a kiss to break our enchantment, and a kiss (a coupon for a kiss! Or a dozen!) is a perfectly fine gift to give for Christmas.
Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/69068/
Asia Times:
Hirsi Ali, atheism and Islam
By Spengler
Dec 4, 2007
Few public figures have done more to earn our sympathy than the Muslim apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fugitive from her native Somalia, and now a virtual exile from her adopted country, the Netherlands. Under constant threat since the 2004 murder by an Islamist of her collaborator, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali warns the West that Islam presents a mortal threat to its freedoms.
America took her in last year when the Dutch government connived to remove her refugee status, but she remains something of an embarrassment to the George W Bush administration. This autumn the Dutch government removed her security detail, and the Americans have taken no steps to protect her. That is a stain on the honor of both countries.
Although she has the credibility of a witness as well as the moral standing of a victim, Hirsi Ali remains a bystander civilian in the great war of our times, whose broadest front is in the global South. That is, she proclaims herself to be an atheist. Millions of Muslims reportedly convert to Christianity each year, mainly in Africa. Islam is stagnant in Asia while tens of millions become Christian. Yet all the Muslim apostates whose voices we hear are atheists - not only Hirsi Ali, but also Salman Rushdie, the celebrated author of The Satanic Verses, the Syrian poet Adonis, and the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq, author of Why I am not a Muslim and several compendia of Koranic criticism.
Why do Muslim apostates gravitate towards atheism? That is not true of other religions. Many Jewish converts achieved prominence in 20th-century Christianity - for example, the recently deceased Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the martyred Carmelite nun Edith Stein (now canonized), and the great Protestant theologian Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy. But the name of no prominent Muslim convert to Christianity (much less to Judaism) comes to mind.
It is easy to change what we think, but very hard to change how we think. Contrary to superficial impressions, Islam is much closer in character to atheism than to Christianity or Judaism. Although the "what" of Muslim and atheistic thinking of course are very different, I shall endeavor below to prove that the "how" is very similar.
Hirsi Ali states that the West is at war with Islam, not with "terrorism", "Islamism", "radical Islam", or "Islamo-fascism". Here is a snippet from her November exchange with Reason [1]:
Reason: The Polish Catholic Church helped defeat the [Wojciech] Jaruzelski puppet regime [1990]. Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?
Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.
Reason: Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it's defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It's very difficult to even talk about peace now. They're not interested in peace.
Reason: We have to crush the world's 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, "defeat Islam"?
Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there's no middle ground in wars.
Nonetheless Hirsi Ali has no clear idea how a war with Islam might proceed. Again, from the Reason interview:
Hirsi Ali: Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they're the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, "This is a warning. We won't accept this anymore." There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.
Reason: Militarily?
Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don't do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.
The implication that the West will crush Islam by force borders on the absurd. Western armies, to be sure, could make short work of the military forces of any Muslim country, but what would they do then? Would they order Muslims to abandon their spiritual life in favor of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the heroes of Hirsi Ali? The West cannot stop Muslims from burning in effigy the editors of a Danish newspaper in their own countries.
Secular liberalism, the official ideology of almost all the nations of Western Europe, offers hedonism, sexual license, anomie, demoralization and gradual depopulation. Muslims do not want this. In Africa, Christian missionaries go to Muslims and offer them God's love and the hope of eternal life. But I am aware of no Christian missionaries active in the Muslim banlieue (outskirts) of the Paris suburbs or the Turkish quarters of Berlin.
By contrast, there is indeed a war with Islam, and it is being won in parts of the world where Christians wage it on spiritual grounds. No Christian army has had to march in its support. Europe, meanwhile, is losing ground to Islam because it declines to fight.
Hirsi Ali, to be sure, sympathizes with Judaism and Christianity, and allows that the two sister religions might be instrumental in countering Islam - but only because they are compatible with secular liberalism. As she told the London Spectator on November 28:
Christianity is different from Islam because it allows you to question it. It probably wasn't different in the past, but it is now. Christians - at least Christians in a liberal democracy - have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state. In Islamic doctrine such a separation has not occurred yet. This is what makes it dangerous!
I remember Hobbes as a hard-handed apologist for Oliver Cromwell's dictatorship rather than as a liberal democrat, but that is a quibble. The pressing question is why Muslim apostates cling to the secular liberalism that has failed so thoroughly in Western Europe. The trouble is that old habits of mind die slowly. That is not only true of Muslims. The sort of Eastern European Jews who hailed the false messiahs of the 17th century, for example, were attracted to the messianism of Karl Marx. Marxist intellectuals found it easy to convert to the so-called neo-Thomism colored by the Enlightenment rationalism of Francisco Suarez. Bolshevik brawlers in Germany in the 1930s often crossed the line from Red to Brown. And Muslims find it easier to be atheists than to be Christians or Jews.
Allah, as I have argued in this venue elsewhere, is a very different sort of god than YHWH and Jesus. As Benedict XVI explained in his September 2006 Regensburg address:
For Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here [Professor Theodore] Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that "nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice" idolatry.
What does it mean for God to be "absolutely transcendent"? In the normative doctrine of the 11th-century Muslim sage Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Allah does not limit himself by ordering the world through natural law, for natural laws would impinge on his absolute freedom of action.
There are no intermediate causes, in the sense of laws of nature. Mars traverses an ellipse around the sun not because God has instituted laws of motion that require Mars to traverse an ellipse, but because Allah at every instant directs the angular velocity of Mars. Today, Allah happens to feel like pushing Mars about in an ellipse; tomorrow he might just as well do figure-eights.
Allah is everywhere doing everything at all times. He sets the spin on every electron, measures the jump of every flea, the frequency of every sneeze. That notion of a god who accepts no limitation, not even the limit of laws of nature that he created, characterizes mainstream Muslim thought since the 11th century. St Thomas Aquinas wrote of its deficiency, drawing on the critique of the 12th-century Jewish theologian and philosopher Moses Maimonides.
A century ago, the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig summarized the problem as follows (my translation):
This has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. The whole impact of divine creative power crashes into every individual thing at every single moment. It is not so much that every thing is "renewed" at every moment; rather, it is "created" with hide and hair. Nothing can save itself from Allah's frightful, infinitesimally-split providence. The idea of "renewal" of the world [in Christian thought] maintains the connection between the individual thing and the one creation, and thereby with the unity of existence, precisely because it comprehends it within the whole, and thus grounds providence within creation.
But this [Islamic] interpretation of providence as constant interference on the part of the creator destroys any possibility of such a connection. In the first case, Providence seen as the renewal of the act of creation through events is the fulfillment of what essentially is set into creation; in this [Islamic] case, providence - despite its intrinsic interference into creation at every moment and in every case - is a permanent competition between acts of creating and the unity of creation, in fact, a competition between God the Ruler of the World, and God the Creator. It is magic, not a sign made by God the World Ruler for God the Creator. Despite its vehement and haughtily carried-forward idea of the unity of God, Islam slides into a monistic paganism, if one might use that expression; God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending gods of the pagan pantheon rolled into one (emphasis added).
Allah is no more subject to laws of nature than the nature-spirits of the pagan world who infest every tree, rock and stream, and make magic according to their own whimsy. The "carried-forward idea of the unity of God" to which Rosenzweig refers, of course, is the monotheism carried forward in outward form from Judaism, but dashed to pieces against the competing notion of absolute transcendence.
As Rosenzweig observes, "An atheist can say, 'There is no God but God'." If God is everywhere and in all things, he is nowhere and in nothing. If there are no natural laws, there need be no law-giver, and the world is an arbitrary and desolate place, a Hobbesian war of each aspect of nature against all. Contemplation of nature in Islam is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. It is not surprising that Islamic science died out a generation or two after al-Ghazali.
It is a commonplace observation that Islam is "fatalistic". Muslims typically conclude any statement about the future, eg, "I'll see you at work tomorrow morning," with the qualifier, "Insha'Allah", "God willing". Because God is everywhere and in every action, acting without intermediate causes, the Judeo-Christian concept of divine providence is inconceivable in Muslim terms. If Allah refuses to be entangled by intermediate causes, no divine plan could possibly exist that humankind cannot understand directly, but works itself out through God's intermediaries. Rather than providence, Islam believes in the old pagan fate, the summation of the innumerable capricious acts that Allah in his absolute transcendence performs at every instant.
Allah is everywhere, which is to say that Allah is nowhere in particular. Allah's world is indistinguishable from the primeval world of paganism, in which the "colorfully contending pantheon" of nature-gods arranges a chaotic and incomprehensible show at every moment. The world without Allah would look not much different; if Allah acts in a whimsical manner without the constraint of laws of nature, we cannot tell the difference between Allah's actions and chaos.
It would be misguided to file this away as a curious relic of Medieval theology without direct bearing on the spiritual character of Islam. On the contrary, the absolute transcendence of Allah in the physical world is the cognate of his despotic character as a spiritual ruler, who demands submission and service from his creatures. The Judeo-Christian God loves his creatures and as an act of love makes them free. Humankind only can be free if nature is rational, that is, if God places self-appointed limits on his own sphere of action. In a world ordered by natural law, humankind through its faculty of reason can learn these laws and act freely. In the alternative case, the absolute freedom of Allah crowds out all human freedom of action, leaving nothing but the tyranny of caprice and fate.
The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.
Hirsi Ali has my unqualified admiration. The courage which guided her journey from Somalia to the Netherlands still prompts her to warn of the dangers before the West at great risk to her own life. I have a similar admiration for Orhan Pamuk, now in virtual exile from his native Turkey, and Rushdie, who remains in danger of a Muslim death warrant, and other Muslim apostates who refuse to be intimidated. Courage, Winston Churchill said, is the first of the virtues, for without it, one does not have the opportunity to exercise the others. Yet it is not the only virtue, and I hope that Hirsi Ali's journey takes her further, beyond atheism.
Note
1. The Trouble Is the West, Reasononline, November 2007.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IL04Aa01.html
Clarín:
Venezuela Rojo Chávez
CRÓNICAS LATINOAMERICANAS
Mañana los venezolanos deciden en las urnas la modificación de la Constitución que le daría la reelección indefinida a Chávez. Aquí una perspectiva de la Venezuela que se divide entre el amor y el odio al líder y no avizora una reconciliación posible. Lucrecia Escudero, semióloga, realiza una lectura sígnica de Chávez y su discurso y dice que hoy lo anacrónico es el discurso neoliberal.
HECTOR PAVON ENVIADO ESPECIAL A CARACAS
01.12.2007 | Clarin.com | Revista Ñ
Territorio de miss mundos y de cuerpos rollizos a base de arepas; donde sobra el petróleo y falta la leche; de salseras y fiestas electrónicas; de pobres y ricos; de chavistas y antichavistas... ¿Qué queda en el medio de Venezuela? Nada o muy poco, no hay matices, tal vez por eso Hugo Chávez termina sus alocuciones y firma documentos con el cubanísimo "Socialismo, patria o muerte". A todo o nada.
Este es el escenario en el que en pocas horas se sabrá si Chávez podrá aspirar a ser reelecto indefinidamente para terminar su propia utopía: el socialismo del siglo XXI. Mañana Venezuela vota un referéndum por Sí o por No donde se juega la reforma de 69 artículos de la Constitución que profundizan el rumbo revolucionario. Chávez ha dicho recientemente que le gustaría quedarse hasta el 2030. Hay miedo y entusiasmo; odio y amor.
Para muestra bastan dos botones apasionados. Una estudiante de la Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas (privada) protesta en la estación de subte Parque del Este con una pancarta que dice: "Mamá, quiero ser astronauta. Bueno, hijo, pregúntale al presidente..." Ella forma parte del fortalecido movimiento estudiantil que milita por el No a la reforma constitucional. Los estudiantes se quejan y dicen que Chávez pondrá cupos a las vocaciones y que privilegiará a quienes elijan carreras que sirvan a su proyecto de país. Cambio de escenario, estamos en Gramovén de Catia, uno de los barrios más pobres de Caracas donde el presidente Hugo Chávez no compite con Dios, él es Dios. Allí funciona el Núcleo Endógeno Fabricio Ojeda donde confluyen más de 50 cooperativas textiles, de construcción, ecología y donde también funciona un completo centro médico inspirado en el modelo cubano de medicina de prevención. Un grupo de jubiladas con sus remeras rojo chavista no dejan dudas sobre el origen divino de Chávez: "Como muchos aquí, yo aprendí a leer y escribir a los 60 años, a Chávez lo queremos para siempre, es como Dios".
Sábado a la noche, el hotel Alba se sacude. Lo que mueve las estructuras de este ex Hilton, ex cinco estrellas, expropiado por el gobierno es una fiesta electrónica que se desarrolla en el Parque Las Caobas. Lloviznaba y una multitud se entregaba al éxtasis de la música "trans". Pero hay miedo. Una semana antes en una fiesta donde se presentaba el DJ Carl Cox, entró un hombre armado a cobrarse una cuenta y la fiesta terminó con cuatro muertos. La imagen de los cadáveres desparramados en la pista de baile se multiplicó por Internet. El odio está presente.
Espacios de poder
Edgardo Lander es profesor de la Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), es un intelectual que sigue el proceso chavista. En la revista OSAL (Clacso) escribió: "La dinámica de la sociedad venezolana actual presenta extraordinarias diversidades; procesos de experimentación y aprendizaje; rupturas y continuidades con mucho de lo peor de la sociedad que se quiere trascender; un Estado que simultáneamente impulsa y frena la participación; y genuinos procesos democráticos de organización popular, con frecuencia en tensión con estructuras institucionales y dinámicas políticas que, a la vez que promueven dichos procesos democráticos, los frenan al dificultar su autonomía". Más adelante agrega y advierte: "Todo remite a tensiones entre la concentración y una distribución amplia del poder en la sociedad. De las formas en las cuales se resuelven estas tensiones dependerá el carácter más o menos democrático del Estado y de la sociedad que se están construyendo en Venezuela". ¿Es posible repartir el poder?
El país en general, pero Caracas en particular, tiene el corazón partido. Chávez ha generado antinomias de difícil resolución al estilo peronistas y antiperonistas. En nuestro país ese duelo tuvo un primer final sangriento con los bombardeos de Plaza de Mayo y después de la masacre, el odio clasista no sólo continuó sino que se acentuó y desembocó en la resolución bárbara de 1976.
En los shoppings y bares de Palos Grandes y Altamira, zonas distinguidas del municipio Chacao de Caracas y también en Las Mercedes, se respira aire opositor. También allí se alude al prócer Simón Bolívar. Su figura estampada en una pancarta prolija y visible pende de los palos de alumbrado. "Nada es tan peligroso como dejar permanecer largo tiempo en un mismo ciudadano el poder" recita un Bolívar altivo que esta vez es levantado por los "escuálidos" nombre despectivo con el que Chávez bautizó a la oposición. Los chavistas dirán que es una frase sacada de contexto y que en su letra completa, Bolívar se refería con esas palabras a las dictaduras que no dan posibilidad de elegir.
La oposición también acusa a Chávez de atacar la libertad de prensa, especialmente después de la clausura de Radio Caracas Televisión, un hecho que conmovió y escandalizó al mundo entero ante lo que se entendió como un atentado a la libertad de expresión. El gobierno dijo que se trató simplemente de la no renovación de licencia. Por otro lado, la mayoría de los medios gráficos y televisivos se expresa sin tapujos y hasta tratan al mismísimo presidente como "mico" o "bruto". El columnista Antonio Pasquali del diario El Nacional lo llamó: "un incurable dinosaurio congelado en su admiración años sesenta por el sóviet..."
Con el barril de petróleo a 100 dólares las arcas venezolanas rebosan de divisas y ése es el principal sostén del plan chavista. Un proyecto que entre otras cosas ha desarrollado el sistema de las "misiones". Se trata de un plan de acceso de los excluidos a la alfabetización; educación, con un sistema paralelo al oficial para in cluir a los que nunca estudiaron; salud; trabajo y vivienda. El sistema ha dado sus frutos y hasta ha sido descripto y elogiado indirectamente por The New York Times recientemente.
Del verde oliva al rojo
El 4 de febrero de 1992 el nombre de Hugo Chávez cruzó toda la Tierra cuando lideró una rebelión militar en contra del presidente Carlos Andrés Pérez. El intento fracasó y Chávez fue detenido. Salió de la cárcel y en 1998 fue elegido presidente contando con el apoyo del partido fundado por él, Movimiento V República (MVR), y una alianza popular llamada "Polo Patriótico" que incluía a toda la izquierda.
2002 fue decisivo. Protestas contra la reforma agraria y contra el acercamiento a Cuba, entre otras excusas, confluyeron en un golpe de Estado el 11 de abril. En la resistencia al golpe encabezado por empresarios y militares murieron 14 personas, Pero el día 13, Chávez fue restituido en el gobierno por un movimiento cívico militar y la oposición debió rendirse. Dos años después los antichavistas consiguieron un referéndum para destronarlo pero el resultado ratificó al presidente en el poder. En 2005, el chavismo ganó ampliamente las elecciones legislativas y un año después Chávez fue reelecto con más del 63% por un periodo que culmina en 2013.
La historiadora Margarita López Maya publicó en coautoría el libro Chávez, una revolución sin libreto. Allí sostiene que las estrategias del proyecto bolivariano para sobrevivir de manera exitosa a las embestidas nacionales e internacionales despertaron un creciente interés por esta experiencia, que es ahora foco de análisis, publicaciones y diversas polémicas. "Los esfuerzos de la oposición por encontrar afuera, específicamente en el apoyo de las fuerzas conservadoras de los Estados Unidos y su gobierno, los apoyos políticos de los que carecen internamente, no son sino un aspecto de las diversas tendencias autoritarias que hemos visto en estos actores del golpe de Estado a esta parte. Sin embargo, la lucha hegemónica, librada todos estos años, ha tenido la virtud de acercarnos a todos, tirios y troyanos, a la realidad 'real', deslastrando a diversos sectores de la realidad ficticia en la que vivían, y fortaleciendo en sectores cada vez más amplios de la sociedad una cultura democrática, que era poco menos que inexistente cuando comenzó el oleaje fuerte por la lucha por el poder entre actores rivales y proyectos políticos divergentes."
López Maya es una intelectual, de las pocas, que acompaña el chavismo pero mantiene cierto nivel de crítica. A principio de 2007 advirtió que "la pluralidad estaba a punto de perderse". El mismo Chávez le contestó que debería cambiar los lentes para que recuperara la visión y entendiera que nunca había habido tanta democracia en Venezuela. Muchos de sus colegas tanto de la universidad pública como de las privadas emigran constantemente hacia universidades norteamericanas, especialmente, y europeas acusando falta de libertad para trabajar y pensar.
El poder es así
El futuro de Chávez depende de Chávez mismo. El poder en Venezuela se construye día a día y la única posibilidad de mantenerlo que aparece en el horizonte es a través de una alianza de clases. Un objetivo lejano. Por un lado, los odios entre unos y otros se acrecientan y pareciera imposible una reconciliación entre chavistas y antichavistas. Y por otro, no aparece entre los objetivos del gobierno porque el proyecto socialista no incluye a quien no adhiere al ideario revolucionario. Chávez dijo que los que voten al No son antipatrias: no hay posibilidad de diálogo mientras el presidente busque el conflicto permanente. El enemigo de turno puede ser España, Colombia, Estados Unidos, la oposición.
Dicen que la vida de Chávez corre peligro, que pusieron una bomba en uno de los autos presidenciales, que sufrió una gripe difícil de curar producto de un envenenamiento. El también es enemigo.
Desde el diario El Universal, el columnista Asdrúbal Aguiar dice que el peligro de Chávez "y también su debilidad, reside, justamente, en creerse el amo de la pradera o encarnar una 'soberanía' equivalente a la libertad salvaje y en estado de naturaleza: tanto que los demás no serán sino presas para su caza". Desde El Nacional, el constitucionalista Ricardo Combellas recomienda resistir al gobierno con manifestaciones o "movilizaciones populares que pueden llevar a la rebelión civil e incluso, lamentablemente, desencadenar situaciones violentas". La temperatura sube al ritmo de la salsa que se baila en "El maní es así", las miradas apasionadas se cruzan dentro y fuera. En la salsera para seducir, en la calle para odiar.
López Maya y Lander concluyen que no está del todo claro hacia donde se inclina Chávez. "La situación de la oposición es igualmente confusa. Hay también allí fuerzas en pugna que se expresarán próximamente. De la interacción de todas estas fuerzas y actores al interior de cada uno de los polos y de las relaciones que establezcan estos bloques entre sí, dependerá el rumbo que tome la sociedad venezolana en los próximos años."
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2007/12/01/u-01011.htm
Guardian:
US spies give shock verdict on Iran threat
Intelligence agencies say Tehran halted weapons programme in 2003
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Tuesday December 4, 2007
US intelligence agencies undercut the White House yesterday by disclosing for the first time that Iran has not been pursuing a nuclear weapons development programme for the past four years. The secret report, which was declassified yesterday and published, marked a significant shift from previous estimates. "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons programme suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," it said.
The disclosure makes it harder for President George Bush, to justify a military strike against Iran before he leaves office next year. It also makes it more difficult to persuade Russia and China to join the US, Britain and France in imposing a new round of sanctions on Tehran.
Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney have been claiming without equivocation that Tehran is bent on achieving a nuclear weapon, with the president warning in October of the risk of a third world war. They were briefed on the national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Wednesday.
The White House national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, at a press conference yesterday, denied there were echoes of the intelligence failure over Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction. He said that Iran was "one of a handful of the hardest intelligence targets going" and the new intelligence had only arrived in the past few months. As soon as it did, both the president and Congress had been briefed. He warned that there would be a tendency now to think "the problem is less bad than we thought, let's relax. Our view is that would be a mistake."
The NIE, which pulls together the work of the 16 American intelligence agencies, is entitled Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities. It concluded: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme." It had not been restarted as of the middle of this year.
In a startling admission from an administration that regularly portrays Iran as the biggest threat to the Middle East and the world, the NIE said: "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." That contradicts the assessment two years ago that baldly stated that Tehran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons".
The British government, which is planning to discuss the report with its US counterparts during the next few days, has also repeatedly said it suspects President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government of seeking a nuclear weapons capability. It will claim that the weapons halt shows that diplomacy - in particular the threat of sanctions - can work.
The weapons halt roughly coincided with a visit by British, French and German foreign ministers to Tehran in October 2003.
The Iranian government has insisted throughout that it is only pursuing a civilian nuclear programme.
Although a halt to the nuclear weapons programme is significant, the NIE is far from a clean bill of health for Iran. Tehran is pushing ahead with its uranium enrichment programme, which has only limited civilian use and could be quickly converted to nuclear military use. The NIE warned that Iran could secure a nuclear weapon by 2010. The US state department's intelligence and research office, one of the agencies involved, said the more likely timescale would be 2013. All the agencies concede that Iran may not have enough enriched uranium until after 2015.
The White House will continue to try to intensify international pressure on Iran. Russia and China, two of the permanent members of the UN security council, have scuppered attempts by the US over the past six months to impose tough new sanctions on Iran.
The decision to publish the NIE is aimed at trying to recover the public credibility lost when the agencies wrongly claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the years leading up to 2003.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2221486,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Sarkozy dénonce
le système colonial et annonce des contrats
ALGÉRIE - 4 décembre 2007 - par AFP
Le président français Nicolas Sarkozy poursuit sa visite de trois jours en Algérie où il a dénoncé lundi le système colonial et appelé à combattre à la fois l'antisémitisme et l'islamophobie, dans une intervention devant des chefs d'entreprises algériens et français.
Arrivé lundi en milieu d'après-midi à Alger pour sa première visite d'Etat en Algérie, M. Sarkozy avait été accueilli par son hôte algérien Abdelaziz Bouteflika, avec lequel il a immédiatement eu un premier entretien à la résidence d'Etat de Zeralda, avant d'assister à un forum des chefs d'entreprises algériens et français.
Le président Sarkozy a confirmé devant les patrons français et algériens que des sociétés françaises allaient signer pour plus de 5 milliards d'euros de contrats. "Il s'agit pour l'essentiel d'équipements structurants pour la modernisation de l'Algérie" dans les transports, la pétrochimie, l'énergie et l'eau, a-t-il dit. Il a souhaité aussi que l'Algérie achète à l'avenir à la France des TGV (trains à grande vitesse), des Airbus et des centrales nucléaires.
M. Sarkozy a également annoncé que la France et l'Algérie allaient signer mardi un "accord de partenariat" dans le secteur de l'énergie nucléaire civile. Cet accord, qui sera signé en présence des deux chefs d'Etat, porterait, dans un premier temps, sur la formation et des échanges d'expérience notamment dans le domaine de la sécurité nucléaire.
Outre ces contrats, le groupe pétrolier français Total va investir 1,5 milliard de dollars dans la construction d'un vapocraqueur, tandis que Gaz de France (GDF) va investir 1 milliard de dollars dans un champ gazier et reconduire ses contrats d'approvisionnement en gaz algérien jusqu'en 2019. L'Algérie est le 3e fournisseur de gaz de la France.
Le président Sarkozy, qui aura un deuxième entretien avec le président Bouteflika, se rendra mardi matin à Tipaza, un site archéologique situé sur la côte ouest d'Alger. Il déposera une gerbe devant le Sanctuaire des Martyrs de la guerre d'Indépendance (1954-62) et s'adressera, en début de soirée, à la communauté française d'Algérie
M. Bouteflika avait désavoué son ministre et M. Sarkozy avait calmé le jeu en maintenant sa visite en Algérie où, a-t-il dit, il se rendait "en ami. "Oui, le système colonial a été profondément injuste, contraire aux trois mots fondateurs de notre République: liberté, égalité, fraternité", a déclaré M. Sarkozy, quelques heures après son arrivée à Alger.
"Mais il est aussi juste de dire qu'à l'intérieur de ce système, il y avait beaucoup d'hommes et de femmes qui ont aimé l'Algérie, avant de devoir la quitter. Oui, des crimes terribles ont été commis tout au long de la guerre d'indépendance, qui a fait d'innombrables victimes des deux côtés", en soulignant que "c'est toutes les victimes que je veux honorer".
M. Sarkozy a aussi appelé à combattre "avec une détermination sans faille toute forme de racisme, d'islamophobie et d'antisémitisme".
Ces déclarations interviennent dans un contexte ma rqué par une vive polémique déclenchée par les propos du ministre algérien des Moudjahidine (Anciens Combattants) Mohammed-Chérif Abbas, sur les origines juives du chef de l'Etat français et sur le soutien que lui apporterait un prétendu "lobby juif", qui serait, selon lui, le "véritable architecte de l'ascension (de M. Sarkozy) au pouvoir".
"Le racisme, l'islamophobie et l'antisémitisme ne s'expliquent pas, ils se combattent. Ce qui vaut pour la France vaut partout ailleurs. Il n'y a rien de plus semblable à un antisémite qu'un islamophobe. Tous deux ont le même visage, celui de la bêtise et de la haine", a ajouté le président français.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP52747sarkostartn0
Mail & Guardian:
Postcards from a sick island
Irin
03 December 2007
It is hard not to resort to clichés when writing about Mauritius: white, sandy beaches, sunny blue skies and swaying palm trees. This Indian Ocean island paradise is the stuff travel brochures are made of. Stepping off a plane filled with eager tourists and a group of honeymooners proudly flashing “just married” T-shirts, it is easy to see how tourism has become the main source of income.
Tourists are not the only ones pouring into the country: extensive air and sea connections to South and Southeast Asia, Australia, Africa and Europe, combined with free ports and an offshore banking industry, have made Mauritius a drug trafficker’s paradise.
“There are families who’ve been in drug trafficking for four generations ... it’s a big business in Mauritius. This is one way of making money - a lot of money,” said Imran Dhannoo, director of the Dr Idrice Goomany Centre, an addiction treatment facility.
The UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) said syndicates have expanded their network of transit areas through Ethiopia, Mauritius, Tanzania and Uganda to try to disguise trafficking routes. The countries are used as arrival points for illicit drugs from Asia, which are then taken to Kenya, South and West Africa, the main regions for onward drug distribution to Europe and North America.
Some of the narcotics end up on the busy streets of the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, to satisfy growing domestic demand. Heroin is by far the drug of choice, with half the local drug users preferring to inject.
Sitting on a volcano
Dr Fayzal Sulliman, head of the only centre offering methadone treatment, a substitute substance used to wean heroin users from their addiction, conducted an assessment three years ago and now estimates that 20 000 Mauritians are injecting drug users (IDUs) - the highest prevalence of this type of abuse in Africa.
“I was 20 when I became addicted,” said Marie-Ange Frivert. “It was after my son was born. He was three years old. My husband and I had separated ... I just couldn’t cope on my own. I started with opium; I was smoking it, but I wasn’t addicted. Then, when opium disappeared, I used heroin.”
She was 41 when she sought help at the Chrysalde drug treatment centre, which caters for women. After “graduating” from the rehabilitation programme she become a volunteer at the centre.Three years later she does outreach work in the sex industry. “I go to all the places where they sell drugs. I offer them counselling and refer them to the centre. I also offer them condoms.”
Most female drug users sell sex to support their habit. “They need the drug and it costs a lot ... so this is a quick and easy way to make money,” said Frivert.
The calculations are simple: if you charge 100 rupees ($3) a client, two clients will give you one “dose” of heroin. “An addict needs about three or four doses a day, so that means at least six or eight clients a day,” she said. In his assessment Sulliman found that 50% of drug users reported sharing needles, 80% never used a condom and, of the 4 800 commercial sex workers who were IDUs, 25% reported sharing needles.
The findings indicate an ideal setting for HIV transmission. Apart from risky sexual behaviour, sharing contaminated needles is an efficient way to exchange blood and, therefore, to transmit the HI virus from infected to uninfected users.
“The picture has changed in Mauritius. There’s been a shift and now injecting drug use is the primary mode of transmitting HIV,” said Sulliman.
The numbers are changing too. In 2005 HIV prevalence in Mauritius was a low 0,1% to 0,5%, but new government statistics show that HIV prevalence in Mauritius is an estimated 1,8%.
“Mauritius is sitting on a volcano that is going to explode very loudly ... and the Indian Ocean region is in for big trouble,” said Dr Farida Oodally of UNAids in Mauritius. She said movement between the islands was common and governments had to start waking up to the new threat.
The number of IDUs has increased in the Seychelles, which also has a large population of men who have sex with men. IDUs have been reported on the coast of Madagascar, which has seen alarmingly high levels of sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Response
Treating drug users for addiction as well as HIV is highly controversial, both in developed and less-developed regions of the world. Where treatment is available, a programme might treat a specific drug dependency, including drug-substitution treatments like methadone. Needle and syringe exchange programmes provide users with clean equipment.
Government resistance to these programmes is strong, because they are sometimes believed to encourage non-injectors to use drugs, even though there is no evidence for this. Public objection to such initiatives, especially in more conservative countries, has at times been heated.
There are mixed views about how well and how quickly the government in Mauritius has responded. In a 2006 report on drugs and HIV in Mauritius, Sulliman, Imran Dhannoo and UNODC’s Reychad Abdool acknowledged that “the changing pattern of HIV infection, with injecting drug use emerging as the most prominent mode of transmission, has stimulated the government to take a number of drastic measures”.
Legislation was passed early in 2006 to make the therapeutic use of methadone for detoxification or maintenance possible. The methadone pilot programme has been running for a year. About 350 drug users have been treated.
The government also works with NGOs to prevent HIV infection among drug users, while the health ministry’s HIV/Aids unit and NGOs have initiated a number of programmes to reach untreated IDUs, encourage them to be tested for HIV and enter drug rehabilitation.
Oodally said condom distribution has increased and condoms are more easily accessible in pharmacies and at health facilities.
The government has legalised needle exchanges. On November 12 the government officially launched its needle exchange programme in collaboration with CUT (Collectif Urgence Toxida), a coalition of NGOs working to tackle drug abuse and HIV, said Nathalie Rose of CUT.
Rose, who is a social worker at Pils (Prevention, Intervention et Lutte contre le Sida), an Aids support organisation, is frustrated at the pace. “It’s still slow; there are too many delays,” she said, adding that it has taken a long time to convince the government to kick-start needle exchange campaigns.
Sulliman agreed: “Mauritius is a bit late in implementing harm-reduction measures, but it’s understandable; it’s a difficult decision for a government to make.”
But Dhannoo said “drugs and Aids don’t go according to the whims of a government. This is an alarming situation - 1,8% HIV prevalence is most alarming. We have good documents and frameworks. We no longer need a plan, we need action - political leadership with vision and action - the work is not being done in a coordinated way.”
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=326625&area=/insight/insight__africa/
Mail & Guardian:
Oxfamming the whole black world
Binyavanga Wainaina: CONTINENTAL DRIFT
03 December 2007
“Among white Americans the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans it was 106. Among Jewish Americans it was 113. Among Latino Americans it was 89. Among African-Americans it was 85. Around the world studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Saharan Africans 70.” - “Created Equal” by William Saletan in Slate magazine
Hello kitty kitty kitty … Are you an orphan? Are you Sudanese? Chadian? Are you a sub-Saharan African suffering from mild mental retardation? Are you an African woman suffering from the African male? Would you like an Oxfam biscuit? Organic antiretrovirals? Have you been raped? You might not know it, but you are an orphan, a refugee. Can we fly 103 of you to France to be loved? We can breastfeed you. We can make you a Darfur orphan. Even if you are not. If you are black and under 10 years old, please come talk to us.
Come kitty kitty.
We can save you from yourself. We can save ourselves from our terrible selves. Help us to Oxfam the whole black world, to make it a better place.
We want to empower you. No, your mother cannot do this. Your government cannot do this. Time cannot do this. Evolution, it seems, cannot do this. Education cannot do this. Your IQ cannot do this.
No one can empower you except us. And if you don’t listen to us, our bad people, those RepublicanToryChineseOilConcessioningIanSmithing racists will come to get you: your choice is our compassionate breast or their market forces.
In our loving breast you will be a vegan. We will eliminate your carbon footprint, your testosterone, your addiction to religions. You will be kept away from bad bad people, like ALL MEN.
We don’t live in harmony with nature and we are farting greenhouse gases all over the place. We will teach you how to live without farting greenhouse gases.
We will shut all your industries and build our organic Jeffery Sachs-designed school inside your national parks, where you can commune with nature, grow ecologically friendly crops, trade fairly with eco-tourists and receive visitors from the United Nations every month who will clap when you dance.
Instead of sweatshops, we will have Ubuntu shops where you can arrive in biodegradable loincloths to make bone jewellery for caring people who earn $1million a year, live in San Francisco or Cape Town and feel bad about this. In our future world you will have three balanced meals a day.
In the afternoons Jeffery Sachs will come and show the boys how to build a gender-friendly communal anti-poverty village where all base human emotions - lust, greed and competition - will be sustainably developed out of your heads, along with truly dangerous ideas such as rebellion. After playing non-violent games (rope-skipping and hugging), you will write letters to your loving step-parents in Toronto. For an hour a day we will teach you how to make clothes, shelter and shoes out of recycled bottle tops in Ndebele colours.
We have learned from people and bonobos living in harmony in forests and deserts what your fate is and we will help you fulfil it. By the time we are done you will all be having non-sexist multiple orgasms, you will be pacifists (we make and market organic pacifiers), you will dance and make merry with stone-milled, recycled mango wines that contain herbs to make you experience sudden and overwhelming universal love.
Some of us believe that if you all abandon industries and grow gentle herbs, your IQs will increase by 30%, because you are not eating toxins. Others believe that if the high IQ of the West is unsustainable, it is important to lower the level of world IQs.
Whatever side we are on here, we think you are special. If we are chimps, you are bonobos. Chimps are violent because they are smarter than bonobos.
For those of you with crude oil, we will help you use this resource - sustainably, mind you - to light your eco-candles and to make locally produced hair oil. The rest of the oil is bad bad bad. Leave it alone (we’ll take it).
We will keep the Chinese out. Look how they are suffering because they abandoned Buddhism. We will allow only eco-tourists and poverty tourists in your countries.
Trust us. You can’t do it yourselves. We have dedicated our lives to you. Come kitties, come to mummy.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=326628&area=/columnist_wainaina/
Mother Jones: Heritage Foundation on Hunger:
Let Them Eat Broccoli
Poor people aren't hungry; they're fat.
James Ridgeway
December 03 , 2007
While most Americans were planning for the annual ritual of overconsumption known as Thanksgiving, the good folks at the Heritage Foundation, America’s leading architects of conservative thought for at least three decades, were doing their part to add to the holiday cheer. According to a November 13 Heritage article, well-off revelers could stuff their faces unhampered by guilt about the less fortunate, because there are no longer any hungry people in the United States.
You have to hand it to Heritage for always being first out of the gate to exploit the latest event or finding to advance its aims—this is the same think tank that issued a comprehensive strategy, two weeks after Katrina hit shore, for using the hurricane as an excuse to slash federal social programs. This time, its thinkers found inspiration in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual report on Household Food Security in the United States, which is as close as the federal government comes to providing statistics on hunger among the nation’s poor. The latest report states that 11 percent of Americans were "food insecure" for some part of 2006, and 4 percent—11.1 million people—experienced "very low food security."
These Orwellian euphemisms are a triumph for the conservative agenda; the USDA altered its terminology last year on the recommendations of an "expert panel" convened back in 2003. "Very low food security," for example, used to be "food insecurity with hunger." The experts asked the department to eliminate "hunger," which, they argued, "should refer to a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness, or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation." To some, that might better describe starvation, but the panel's reasoning wouldn't be a stretch for the Bush administration, which claims "torture" must entail pain "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
But the Heritage folks are looking beyond semantic tweaks: Far from having too little to eat, they argue, poor people are eating too much. By the time the USDA report went public, Heritage had readied its own salvo, titled "Hunger Hysteria: Examining Food Security and Obesity in America." In recent years, the U.S. media and public have become increasingly obsessed with the "obesity epidemic." And what better way to attack the idea of deprivation among the poor than to note that they are getting fatter? Rightly or not, people still associate obesity with the sins of gluttony and sloth, which jibes nicely with the concept that welfare recipients are lazy people who would rather feed at the public trough than get an honest job.
"Hunger Hysteria" is the work of Robert Rector, Heritage's senior domestic-policy man and a main proponent of welfare "reform." He argues that while the USDA's numbers might sound "ominous" on the surface, "the government's own data show that the overwhelming majority of food insecure adults are, like most adult Americans, overweight or obese." While "they may have brief episodes of reduced food intake, most adults in food insecure households actually consume too much, not too little food."
His next step is to attack proposals that would give the poor more cash for food “despite the fact that most...already eat too much." More food money, he suggests, will only make them fatter. Instead, Rector says, they ought to be encouraged to "avoid chronic overconsumption of calories" and to simply "spread their food intake more evenly over the course of each month to avoid episodic shortfalls."
Rector goes on to attack common "misconceptions," such as the argument that "poor people become obese because they are forced, due to lack of financial resources, to eat too many junk foods that are high in fat and added sugar." Junk foods, he counters, aren't particularly cheap—for example, Coke and Pepsi cost more than milk. "Snack foods such as potato chips and donuts [sic] cost two to five times more per calorie than healthier staples such as beans, rice and pasta." In other words, if the poor want to eat junk food and get fat, fine, but let’s not finance such behavior. The solution, Rector argues, resorting to the perennial trope, isn’t a more-equitable society or expanded social programs, but greater "personal responsibility" on the part of poor people.
There's another side of the story, of course, that addresses realities Heritage and its followers choose to ignore. Adam Drewnowski, professor of epidemiology and director of the University of Washington's Center for Obesity Research, believes diet is determined by economic and social factors far more than by personal choice. "Healthier diets are more expensive," he says flatly. It's easy to point to specific exceptions like doughnuts vs. beans or Coke vs. milk (well, not always; my local Safeway charges 40 cents more for a half-gallon of milk than for a two-liter bottle of Coke). But research generally has shown that "energy-dense foods," which often are high in refined grains and added sugar and fat, "provide dietary energy at a far lower cost than do lean meats, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit," as Drewnowski wrote in a 2004 article for Nutrition Today. Processed foods also dominate store shelves in poor neighborhoods, are quick to prepare, and simply taste better to some people than some nutritious foods available on the cheap—think cabbage, condensed milk, and canned fish.
Drewnowski calls Rector's arguments "rubbish, written from a position of class privilege—let them eat broccoli, indeed." He cites the suggestion that the poor should purchase cheap, nutritious foods rather than processed stuff. "When you suggest that people buy rice, pasta, and beans," he says, "you presuppose that they have resources for capital investment for future meals"—since these healthy staples come in large bags—"a kitchen, pots, pans, utensils, gas, electricity, a refrigerator, a home with rent paid, the time to cook. Those healthy rice and beans can take hours; another class bias is that poor people's time is worthless. So this is all about resources that middle-class people take so much for granted that they do not give them another thought. Not everybody has them."
On the other hand, he says, "buying a doughnut for dinner does not involve any of those middle-class resources. You pay 55 cents for this meal only and there you are. Yes, rice would be cheaper if only people had the time and were not working two jobs on minimum wage."
The Food Research and Action Center, a D.C. public interest advocacy group, seconds Drewnowski’s findings in a position paper: "One factor that may contribute to the coexistence of obesity and food insecurity is the need for low-income families to stretch their food money as far as possible. Without adequate resources for food, families must make decisions to maximize the number of calories they can buy so that their members do not suffer from frequent hunger."
The situation is likely to worsen, since rising food costs have outpaced inflation. According to the Department of Labor, prices rose more in the first half of 2007 than in all of 2006. If this continues, 2007 will mark the largest annual increase in food costs (7.5 percent) since 1980. Nutritious foods are even harder to afford; a study by Adam Drewnowski and Pablo Monsivais just published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association shows that prices for the healthiest foods have ballooned nearly 20 percent in the past two years, while those for fatty and sugary fare have actually decreased a bit.
Against this backdrop, the safety net of food stamps and other social-welfare programs continues to shrink. Since the Reagan years, Washington has been dominated by New Victorian attitudes championed by neoconservative doyenne Gertrude Himmelfarb—wife of Irving Kristol and mother of William—who in her writings seems to yearn for the days of nineteenth-century Britain, when "every measure of poor relief...had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the poor." Reaganites worked hard to trade the entitlement programs of the despised New Deal and War on Poverty for the tough love of faith-based charity, where a prayer could get you a bowl of soup.
Democrats bought into a version that was only nominally kinder and gentler. In the 1990s they signed on to President Bill Clinton’s famous welfare-reform bill—the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996”—suggesting that the causes and the solution to poverty lay with the poor themselves. At times these pious and punitive ideologies have taken a more inventive, supposedly scientific turn, hiding behind statistics and the seemingly disinterested policymaking of such things as risk-benefit analysis. But they have seldom been seriously challenged by either party.
Indeed, President Bush appears determined to cut funding to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. The program, which provides healthy foods, nutrition counseling, and healthcare referrals to some 8.5 million low-income pregnant and post-partum women and children under five, heretofore has had bipartisan backing in both Republican and Democratic governments and has been considered quite effective. But Bush has threatened to veto the 2007 farm bill unless cuts are made to discretionary spending, including WIC. If Bush prevails, local WIC centers will have little choice but to turn women away, putting some on a waiting list and cutting others from the rolls—more than 500,000 mothers and young children would be dropped from the program.
The fate of food stamps is also tied to the farm bill. "Cuts Congress enacted in 1996 are shrinking the value of food stamps more with each passing year, making it increasingly difficult for millions of poor families to afford a healthy diet," says Robert Greenstein, director of the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Right now, food stamps average only about $1 per person per meal, well short of what these families need."
The House has passed a version of the bill with measures to help food stamps keep pace with inflation, but the legislation—problematic in many other ways—is stalled on the Senate floor. "The single biggest thing we can do to improve the diets of food-stamp families," Greenstein says, "is to raise their food purchasing power so they can afford more nutritious foods instead of having to rely on cheap high-calorie, low-nutrient foods."
This is the context in which Heritage is attacking better funding for food stamps and other nutrition programs for the poorest Americans. Instead of having well-off taxpayers feel for poor people in New York or Los Angeles trying to survive on a buck a meal, the organization has them think about all those fat people they saw last time they drove through a low-income neighborhood with the windows rolled up. But even the comfortable may not remain forever distant from the realities of hunger in America. Of the food supplies and resources middle-class people take for granted, Adam Drewnowski remarks, "Given the current economic situation, many people may not have them for much longer."
James Ridgeway is Mother Jones' senior correspondent.
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/washington_dispatch/2007/12/hunger-let-them-eat-broccoli.html
New Statesman:
Blogging Bali
The World Development Movement's Peter Hardstaff reports from the Bali conference on climate change
Peter Hardstaff
Published 03 December 2007
Ok, let’s get it straight from the outset. The irony is not lost on me that many hundreds of people have flown across the world – no doubt with the total carbon footprint equivalent to the entire annual emissions of a poor country – in order to attend a conference on climate change. How can this use of precious ‘resources’ (oil and the atmosphere) possibly be justified?
Well, for governments, that depends on whether they do the right thing and create a process that will give us a fighting chance of getting out of this climate change mess we have created. And let’s face it, there’s no way this can happen without governments meeting in person.
Anyone who works in an office will know how badly wrong communicating by e-mail can go. One typo (‘I do apologise Mr Chinese Environment Minister, I missed an ‘r’ in the message I sent last week. I meant to say “we have some concerns over the draft document you submitted.” The British Government wishes to apologise for any offence and to assure you that I have been re-assigned to a junior position in the tea and biscuits department.’)
And even with the wonders of modern technology, it’s hard to imagine video conferencing between dozens of countries. So they need to meet. Granted, it seems pretty bizarre coming to the holiday island of Bali to do the job – maybe they thought the stifling heat would help increase the pressure for a deal. Who knows?
As to the cost/benefit of the rest of us flying across the world for the climate conference, I feel less certain. The guys I play football with in London were quick to raise an eyebrow when they heard about this trip – particularly given what I do and who I work for - and I imagine many others would think the same.
To be honest, there’s no simple and compelling reason why myself, or any other individual campaigner, should be here. However, I strongly believe that some campaigners need to be here and the extent to which it is worthwhile depends on whether we can play an active and positive role in making something happen.
Again, the face-to-face stuff is important. Governments need to be scrutinised and kept to their word. The way these things develop - with constant shifts in positioning and tactics during the talks – it’s useful to have people who don’t work for the government keeping an eye on things. There might have been a time when it could have been argued that it is the media’s job to keep tabs on the powers that be, expose hypocrisy and keep governments to their word. But these days, with some notable exceptions, most journalists covering the climate talks simply have not had the experience, or been given the time by their employers, to understand the detail of what is happening.
So there it is. Alongside governments, ‘civil society’ as they call it, in all its myriad forms - from business lobby groups and academic researchers to local authorities and development/environment campaigners - is here en masse. Whether every single one of us needs to be here is a reasonable question, but I’ll leave it to you to work out the complex algebra needed to create a fair quota system that reduces overall numbers while giving all interested parties a voice.
For now, let’s just hope the outcome in 12 days time makes all this worthwhile.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200712030004
Página/12:
Jesús viaja en Rolls-Royce
Por Jorge Majfud*
Martes, 04 de Diciembre de 2007
En un movimiento político algo inusual, el senador republicano por Iowa, Charles Grassley, ha iniciado una investigación sobre posibles malas prácticas económicas de los mayores teleevangelistas de Estados Unidos. De ahí se ha derivado al cuestionamiento sobre una práctica común en la mayoría de los países del continente: las iglesias están eximidas de pagar impuestos, mientras sus líderes, pastores y empresarios se vuelven cada día más ricos. Esta práctica de privilegio para las iglesias se ampara, en Estados Unidos y en América latina, bajo el aceptado principio de libertad de religión. No está claro, sin embargo, por qué el pago de impuestos por parte de una iglesia podría significar un ataque a la libertad de culto. La prescripción de dar al César lo que es del César y a Dios lo que es de Dios no corre en estos casos.
En una reciente entrevista en vivo por CNN, Kyra Phillips y Don Lemon cuestionaron a nuestro vecino de College Park de Georgia, el multimillonario reverendo Creflo Dollar, por poseer dos Rolls-Royce, jets privados, casas y apartamentos de varios millones de dólares cada uno, además de una iglesia multimillonaria enriquecida por las donaciones de ricos y pobres, muchos de ellos con serias dificultades económicas.
Estos ministerios califican como iglesias y no están obligados a llenar declaraciones de impuestos como sí deben hacerlo otras “nonprofit organizations” (organizaciones sin fines de lucro). La tradición de justificar las riquezas materiales mientras se predica el desprendimiento de lo mundano para la salvación del alma es muy antigua. La Iglesia Católica –con excepciones, como los teólogos de la liberación y otros “curas de barrio”– ha sido, desde hace mucho tiempo, especialista en la materia. En el caso de las megaiglesias protestantes, además de una práctica empresarial, la tradición está apoyada por la ética calvinista: la riqueza no es un obstáculo para entrar al Paraíso sino una prueba de las preferencias de Dios, que ha resuelto castigar a los pobres por su pobreza. Este aspecto teológico es muy semejante al karma hindú y sus resultados sociales también: la moral de la casta alta es consumida, principalmente, por las castas más bajas. En todo caso, los pobres sirven para que los ricos ejerzan su compasión.
Uno de los periodistas de Atlanta le recordó al reverendo Dollar la recomendación que hiciera Jesús al joven rico que fue a pedirle consejode desprenderse de sus bienes materiales para entrar al Reino de los Cielos. Recomendación que terminó con la tristeza del hombre rico y la observación del Maestro sobre la dificultad que podía tener para entrar al Cielo, como la de un camello que quisiera pasar por el ojo de una aguja. No obstante, el reverendo Dollar razonó que si eso fuese exactamente así, ningún rico podría entrar al Paraíso. De este razonamiento se deduce que el Mesías debía estar bromeando o tal vez exageraba un poco. Está bien que el Hijo de Dios haya bajado a la Tierra con un montón de utopías subversivas, pero tampoco era para tanto. Con la realidad no se puede.
Citando artículo y versículo correspondiente, el reverendo recordó que, en realidad, Jesús había dicho que por cada cosa de la que uno se desprenda iba a recibir un premio multiplicado varias veces. Algunos pensaron que Jesús se refería a un premio moral o al Reino de los Cielos, no al Reino del Dinero. Pero siempre es tiempo de aprender. Por esta nueva razón teológica, la riqueza de un hombre con fe significa que ha sido premiado por el Cielo por su hábito de desprenderse generosamente de una parte de sus posesiones. No otra es la lógica de la Bolsa de Valores: quien invierte se desprende de algo para multiplicarlo. Ningún empresario razonable espera invertir un dólar en Wall Street, en Amsterdam o en Shanghai y recibir un beso o el ascenso espiritual del que hablaba el Buda. Se espera recibir más de lo mismo.
En el siglo XVI, invertir en indulgencias significaba que por unos cuantos florines de oro un violador podía obtener el perdón del Vaticano y, consecuentemente, el perdón de Dios. Más antiguo, y todavía en curso, es el lavado de la conciencia con el buen uso de la limosna. La institución de la limosna es fundamental, porque el desprendimiento debe ser voluntario y sin comprometer las ganancias. Como dicen muchos conservadores religiosos por televisión, con su eterna ansiedad proselitista, sólo así, por un acto de voluntad, se prueba la bondad del donante. Si la bondad pasa por el Estado, mediante el compulsivo cobro de impuestos a los ricos, Dios no puede distinguir los buenos de los malos. Tampoco puede Dios recibir en el Paraíso a toda la Humanidad. El Paraíso es un resort VIP con acceso limitado, no un derecho democrático. Algunas iglesias, incluso, han definido el número exacto de miembros posibles. Como si en el día de la creación de la Humanidad Dios se hubiese divertido imaginando un Infierno eterno donde arderían sus pequeñas creaciones, para regocijo de sus pocos preferidos que contemplarían desde las alturas semejante espectáculo de tortura colectiva o, peor, dando vuelta la cara al horrible destino de sus hermanos. No vamos a decir que necesitamos un Dios más humanista, porque no vamos a decirle a Dios lo que tiene que hacer. Pero no haría mal una lectura más humanista de las Sagradas Escrituras para dejar de atribuirle a Dios conductas tan sectarias, elitistas y materialistas.
El mexicano José Vasconcelos, fervoroso opositor de la hegemonía norteamericana, recordó en La raza cósmica (1925) una fiesta diplomática en Brasil: “Contrastó visiblemente la pobreza de la recepción americana con el lujo de otras recepciones; pero en honor a la verdad, a mí me parece admirable y digno de imitación el proceder yanqui, pues no tienen los gobiernos el derecho de hacer derroches con el dinero del pueblo”. Sin embargo, así como Estados Unidos había sido fundado por revolucionarios que se oponían a la tradición monárquica y religiosa de Europa y ahora se identifica con los valores opuestos del conservadurismo ortodoxo, así también el original espíritu “republicano” que fue sinónimo de austeridad y democracia hoy representa la ostentación y el elitismo. Así también el cristianismo primitivo fue todo lo contrario al hoy triunfante cristianismo del emperador (San) Constantino.
Casi al final de la entrevista, el periodista le preguntó si pensaba que Jesús hubiese andado en un Rolls-Royce, a lo que el reverendo Dollar contestó, con calma, algo así como: “Pienso que sí. ¿Por qué no? El Señor anduvo en un burro en el que ningún otro hombre antes había andado”.
Dejo al lector que descubra la lógica de este reverendo razonamiento teológico.
* Escritor uruguayo. Profesor de literatura latinoamericana en The University of Georgia, EE.UU.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-95695-2007-12-04.html
The Independent: Voters reject Chavez's
attempt to become president for life
By David Usborne in New York
Published: 04 December 2007
A humbled Hugo Chavez has paid tribute to his opponents and conceded that the sweeping constitutional changes he had sought to accelerate his socialist revolution in Venezuela and enable him to seek re-election indefinitely had been narrowly defeated in Sunday's national referendum.
"I thank you and congratulate you," President Chavez told his opponents after the results were announced after hours of delay at almost 2am yesterday. Electoral officials confirmed that the referendum had gone down by 51 per cent against 49 per cent. Mr Chavez also called for calm.
It was a stunning reversal for the usually cocksure leader who has never been defeated at the polls since first coming to power in 1999. The former military officer with a fiercely anti-US tongue underestimated resistance to his proposed amendments, which would have removed all limits on his ability to stand for re-election, allowed him to suspend civil liberties in times of emergency, seize private property and significantly expand his grip in the regions. Opposition leaders warned of an impending socialist dictatorship.
In the first hours after the closing of polling stations, three government ministers predicted victory, citing exit polls. But as the evening wore on without any appearance by Mr Chavez on the balcony of the Miraflores, the presidential palace, it became apparent that something had gone awry. When the loss was confirmed, opposition supporters poured on to the streets honking horns and beating drums.
For the US, the largest foreign purchaser of Venezuelan oil, the outcome was sweet relief. "We felt that this referendum would make Chavez president for life, and that's not ever a welcome development," said the US under-secretary of state, Nicholas Burns. "In a country that wants to be a democracy, the people spoke, and the people spoke for democracy and against unlimited power."
The loss may diminish the standing of Mr Chavez across Latin America. While moderate leftist governments, for instance in Brazil and Chile, have kept him at arm's length, he has been a strong ally for other recently elected populist leaders, notably in nearby Bolivia and Ecuador.
But it is unlikely to snuff out his dream of a socialist Venezuela. In the past year, Mr Chavez has moved boldly, closing a television station critical of him, nationalising the utility and telecoms sectors and asserting state ownership of the oil industry. He also retains control of all the major levers of power.
Indeed, in conceding yesterday, Mr Chavez hinted that he intends to press forward. "For me, this isn't a defeat. This is for now," he declared, saying he would "continue in the battle to build socialism". He may also have done himself a favour with his instant and gracious acceptance of the referendum's result.
"This defeat has two sides to it for Chavez," argued Luis Vicente Leon, head of the polling organisation Datanalisis. "He came out the loser after a tough plebiscite campaign but he also gets rid of the accusation that he is a dictator." Nonetheless, the result implies that 2012 will be his last year in office.
Barely half of the 16 million eligible voters went to the polls. A large swathe of voters who might have backed Mr Chavez opted to stay at home. Though he remains popular, mostly with the poor, this time he appears to have over-reached.
"Venezuela said 'no' to socialism, Venezuela said 'yes' to democracy," declared an ecstatic Leopoldo Lopez, the popular Mayor of Caracas, who emerged as a powerful opposition voice during the hard-fought referendum campaign.
Others who lined up against Mr Chavez included huge numbers of students, the Catholic Church, much of the business sector and even some important former allies. Notable among them was the former defence minister, Raul Baduel, who warned that the proposed amendments would amount to a "constitutional coup d'état".
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3220969.ece
The Independent: A different venue,
but the pious claims and promises are the same
Robert Fisk
Published: 29 November 2007
Haven't we been here before? Isn't Annapolis just a repeat of the White House lawn and the Oslo agreement, a series of pious claims and promises in which two weak men, Messrs Abbas and Olmert, even use the same words of Oslo.
"It is time for the cycle of blood, violence and occupation to end," the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. But don't I remember Yitzhak Rabin saying on the White House lawn that, "it is time for the cycle of blood... to end"?
Jerusalem and its place as a Palestinian and Israeli capital isn't there. And if Israel receives acknowledgement that it is indeed an Israeli state – and in reality, of course, it is – there can be no "right of return" for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled (or whose families fled) what became Israel in 1948.
And what am I to make of the following quotation from the full text of the joint document: "The steering committee will develop a joint work plan and establish and oversee the work of negotiations (sic) teams to address all issues, to be headed by one lead representative from each party." Come again?
We went through all these steering committees before – and they never worked. True we've got a date of 12 December for the first session of this so-called "steering committee" and we have the faint hope from Mr Bush, embroidered, of course, with all the usual self-confidence, that we're going to have an agreement by 2008. But how can the Palestinians have a state without a capital in Jerusalem? How can they have a state when their entire territory has been chopped up and divided by Jewish settlements and the settler roads and, in parts, by a massive war?
Yes of course, we all want an end to bloodshed in the Middle East but the Americans are going to need Syria and Iran to support this – or at least Syrian support to control Hamas – and what do we get? Bush continues to threaten Iran and Bush tells Syria in Annapolis that it must keep clear of Lebanese elections, or else...
Yes, Hizbollah is a surrogate of Iran and is playing a leading role in the opposition to the government of Lebanon. Do Bush and Condoleezza Rice (or Abbas or Olmert for that matter) really think they're going to have a free ride for a year without the full involvement of every party in the region? More than half of the Palestinians under occupation are under the control of Hamas.
Reading the speeches – especially the joint document – it seems like an exercise in self-delusion. The Middle East is currently a hell disaster and the President of the United States thinks he is going to produce the crown jewels from a cabinet and forget Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran – and Pakistan, for that matter. The worst element of the whole Annapolis shindig is that once again millions of people across the Middle East – Muslims, Jews and Christians – will believe all this and will then turn – after its failure – with fury on their antagonists for breaking these agreements.
For more than two years, the Saudis have been offering Israel security and recognition by Arab states in return for a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories. What was wrong with that? Mr Olmert promised that "negotiations will address all the issues which thus far has been evaded". Yet the phrase "withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories" simply doesn't exist in the text.
Like most people who live in the Middle East, I would like to enjoy these dreams and believe they are true. But they are not. Wait for the end of 2008.
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3204054.ece
The Nation:
McMansions Meet the Mortgage Crisis
by BARBARA EHRENREICH
[posted online on December 3, 2007]
Another utopia seems to be biting the dust. The socialist kibbutzim of Israel have vanished or gone increasingly capitalist, and now the paranoid residential ideal represented by gated communities may be in serious trouble. Never exactly cool-remember Jim Carrey in The Truman Show"?-these pricey enclaves of privilege are becoming hotbeds of disillusionment.
At the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington last week, incoming association president Setha M. Lowe painted a picture so dispiriting that the audience guffawed in schadenfreude. The gated community residents Lowe interviewed had fled from ethnically challenging cities, but they have not managed to escape from their fear. One resident reported that her small daughter has developed a severe case of xenophobia, no doubt communicated by her parents:
We were driving next to a truck with some day laborers and equipment in the back, and we stopped beside them at the light. She [her daughter] wanted to move because she was afraid those people were going to come and get her. They looked scary to her.
Leaving aside the sorry spectacle of homeowners living in fear of their landscapers, there is actually something to worry about. According to Lowe, gated communities are no less crime-prone than open ones, and Gopal Ahluwalia, senior vice president of research at the National Association of Home Builders, confirms this: "There are studies indicating that there are no differences in the crime in gated communities and non-gated communities." The security guards often wave people on in, especially if they look like they're on a legitimate mission-such as the faux moving truck that entered a Fort Meyers' gated community last spring and left with a houseful of furniture. Or the crime comes from within, as in the Hilton Head Plantation community in South Carolina where a rash of crime committed by resident teenagers has led to the imposition of a curfew.
Most recently, America's gated communities have been blighted by foreclosures. Yes, even people who were able to put together the down payment on a half-million dollar house can be ambushed by Adjustable Rate Mortgages. Newsweek reports that foreclosures are devastating the gated community of Black Mountain Vista in Henderson NV, where "yellow patches [now] blot the spartan lawns and phone books lie on front porches, their covers bleached from weeks under the desert sun." Similarly, according to the Orlando Sentinel, "countless homeowners overwhelmed by their mortgages are taking off and leaving behind algae-filled swimming pools and knee-high weeds" in one local gated community.
So, for people who sought, not just prosperity, but perfection, here's another sad end to the American dream, or at least their ethnically cleansed version thereof: boarded-up McMansions, plastic baggies scudding over overgrown lawns, and, in the Orlando case, a foreclosure-induced infestation of snakes. You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.
All right, some gated communities are doing better than others, and not all of their residents are racists. The communities that allow owners to rent out their houses, or that offer homes at middle class prices of $250,000 or so, are more likely to contain a mixture of classes and races. The only gated community I have ever visited consisted of dull row houses protected by a slacker guard and a fence, and my host was a writer of liberal inclinations. But all these places suffer from the delusion that security lies behind physical barriers.
Before we turn all of America into a gated community, with a 700-mile steel fence running along the southern border, we should consider the mixed history of exclusionary walls. Ancient and medieval European towns huddled behind massive walls, only to face ever-more effective catapults, battering rams and other siege engines. More recently, the Berlin Wall, which the East German government described fondly as a protective "anti-fascism wall," fell to a rebellious citizenry. Israel, increasingly sealed behind its anti-Palestinian checkpoints and wall, faced an outbreak of neo-Nazi crime in September-coming, strangely enough, from within.
But the market may have the last word on America's internal gated communities. "Hell is a gated community," announced the Sarasota Herald Tribune last June, reporting that market research by the big homebuilder Pulte Homes found that no one under fifty wants to live in them, so its latest local development would be un-gated. Security, or at least the promise of security, may be one consideration. But there's another old-fashioned American imperative at work here, which ought to bear on our national policies as well. As my Montana forebears would have put it: Don't fence me in!
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071217/ehrenreich
ZNet | Venezuela:
What’s Really Happening In Venezuela?
by Lee Sustar; Socialist Worker; December 03, 2007
For the U.S. mainstream media, Venezuela’s vote on constitutional reforms December 2 is simply the latest power grab in authoritarian President Hugo Chávez’s bid to crush dissent, make himself president for life and impose a state-controlled economy.
The view from the streets of the Caracas barrio of 23 de Enero, however, is very different.
A densely populated, impoverished neighborhood seldom visited by U.S. reporters, it is famous for its role in mobilizing in January 1958 to overthrow a Venezuelan military dictator on the date that gave the barrio its name.
These days, it is home to an active local branch, or battalion, of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, according to its Spanish initials). On a rainy mid-November evening, activists gathered to distribute copies of the proposed reform by going door to door.
Of the 30 or so people who turned out-all but four of them women-just two had prior political experience in Chávez’s original political party, the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR). Only one-Rosaida Hernández-is an experienced politico, having served as a functionary of the Fifth Republic Movement and won election to Caracas’ municipal council.
More typical was Iraima Díaz, a neighborhood resident in her 30s who had long supported Chávez and benefited from his government’s social programs, but hadn’t been politically active. “I got involved to solve the problems of my community,” she said.
Another activist, Lúz Estella, a social worker whose father lives in the area, also became active recently, fed up with the opposition media and wanting to get involved.
Now Díaz and Estella find themselves members of Chávez’s own PSUV battalion-the president often turns up at the weekly Saturday meetings held at the military museum in the neighborhood.
The facility also serves as a place for enrollment in government “missions”-national social welfare programs initiated by Chávez in 2003, which evolved from offering free medical care to literacy and education programs, subsidized grocery stores and a great deal more, thanks to revenues from oil exports and some of the fastest economic growth rates in the world.
Despite its well-known member and proximity to local missions, the 23 de Enero PSUV battalion faces a challenges common to its counterparts across the country-how to mobilize the 5.7 million people who have registered for the party since it was formed earlier this year through a merger of parties of Chávez’s governing coalition.
Nevertheless, as the group, singing campaign songs, made its way through the narrow streets on steep hillsides of the barrio, people came to their windows to take copies of the reform and discuss it briefly-an elderly man alone in his small apartment; a young woman of African descent breastfeeding an infant; the proprietor of a tiny store situated in what was once a living room, with a window facing the street; a group of young men in their 20s gathered outside a small restaurant.
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THE IMPACT of Chávez’s reforms is visible on the streets of 23 de Enero and other barrios-people are better fed and better dressed.
As is often the case in Venezuela, the political direction in the barrios is the opposite Caracas’ well-off neighborhoods and the suburbs, where the upper middle class and the wealthy live in luxurious gated communities and drive Hummers and Land Rovers.
As opposition to Chávez’s reforms sharpened-first with protests by largely middle-class college students; then the defection of a longtime Chávez ally, former army chief of staff and defense minister Raúl Baduel-the mass of Chávez supporters began to mobilize.
Nevertheless, the opposition, tainted by the coup of 2002 and the subsequent lockout of oil workers by industry bosses, has been able to refresh its image.
Key to this was the student mobilization last summer over the government’s refusal to renew the broadcast license of the privately owned, opposition-controlled RCTV channel.
Wrongly portrayed in the Western media as a “closure” of a media outlet, the decision was made as the result of RCTV’s active role in supporting the coup. Nevertheless, the government’s refusal to renew the channel’s broadcast license gave Venezuela’s right the opportunity to claim the mantle of “democracy,” a theme it has continued in protests aimed at forcing a delay in the vote for constitutional reform.
Significantly, the student protests took shape as a national social movement, led mainly by middle class and wealthy students who predominate at Venezuela’s elite universities, such as the UCV in Caracas.
While portraying themselves as nonviolent in the face of allegedly armed Chavista students-two students were wounded on the UCV campus November 7-the opposition student protests have often turned violent. The U.S. media focused on the supposed gunplay of Chavista students, but it was the right-wing protesters who besieged pro-Chávez students in UCV’s law and social work schools, physically destroying both.
Still, the student protesters have carried the day politically on campus, with the opposition winning a reported 91 percent of votes in student government elections soon afterward.
The opposition got another boost when it was joined by Baduel, the former general and defense minister.
A key figure in preventing the 2002 military attempt to oust Chávez, Baduel has used the word “coup” to describe the impact of Chávez’s proposed constitutional changes.
While Baduel’s impact on the reform vote is probably limited, his turn may point to something more serious-concern among senior military brass over a constitutional reform that would reorganize and centralize the armed forces and give the president authority to promote all officers, not just top generals.
Already, Chávez has dropped a call to convert the reserves into “Bolivarian Popular Militias” to support the regular armed forces, presenting it in the constitutional reforms instead as a “National Bolivarian Militia.”
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IN ANY case, the retooled opposition presents a new challenge for activists of the “Bolivarian revolution”-named for the 19th century anti-colonial leader.
In the past, Chávez could mobilize his base among the poor on clear-cut issues-protesting the right-wing coup attempt of April 2002, voting to keep him in office in the recall election of 2004, re-electing him as president a year ago.
The constitutional reforms, however, are more complicated and controversial within the Chávez camp itself.
At issue is the balance between the creation of communal councils to enhance what Chávez calls “popular power,” and measures that would strengthen the powers of the presidency and the central state in several respects.
These include the removal of presidential term limits and lengthening the term from six to seven years; the ability to appoint an unrestricted number of secondary vice presidents; the authority to determine boundaries of proposed “communal cities” of municipalities and states; and control over the use of foreign currency reserves with no constitutional limits.
The right to recall the president still exists, but the number of signatures required to trigger a vote would increase from 20 percent to 30 percent of eligible voters.
Other constitutional measures debated on the left would give the president and National Assembly the ability to impose states of emergency in which the right to information is waived-probably a response to the private media’s complicity in the 2002 coup. The National Assembly would also gain the right to remove Supreme Court judges and election officials through a simple majority vote.
These changes hardly amount to the “Chávez dictatorship” conjured up in the mainstream media, and the Venezuelan constitution would remain more democratic in many respects than the U.S. Constitution, a relic of the 18th century.
The question, however, is whether the constitution promotes a transition to “popular power” and “socialism,” as Chávez would have it.
Essentially, the reforms reflect the contradiction at the heart of Chávez’s project-an effort to initiate revolutionary change from above.
The expansion of communal councils and creation of workers councils are seen by grassroots Chavista activists as a legitimate effort to anchor the “revolutionary process” at the grassroots.
However, the additional powers for the presidency and the reorganization of the armed forces highlight the fact that Chávez apparently sees the presidency-and the centralized state-as the guardian of the revolution.
Tellingly, it is the military, the most rigidly hierarchical institution in society, which is to protect the newly decentralized democracy, while remaining aloof from such changes internally.
Chávez’s effort to combine what he calls an “explosion of popular power” with greater centralism may reflect his military past. But if the government is able to portray itself as creating “motors” of revolutionary change, it’s because grassroots organizations, social movements and organized labor have so far failed to create sizeable organizations of their own.
While there is no doubt of Chávez’s popularity, particularly among the poor, their role thus far has been to defend Chávez from the right during the coup and lockout, and turning out for elections. The constitutional reforms, along with the creation of the PSUV at Chávez’s initiative, are intended to close the gap between these periodic mass mobilizations and the lack of day-to-day organization.
To consolidate this base, the proposed constitutional reforms offer further social gains. For example, virtually unmentioned in U.S. media accounts is the fact that the reforms would provide, for the first time, social security benefits to the 50 percent of Venezuelan workers who toil in the informal sector as street vendors, taxi drivers and the like. The workweek would be limited to 36 hours.
There are other advances as well, including the consolidation of land reform, outlawing discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation, lowering the voting age from 18 to 16, guaranteed free university education, gender parity in politics and political parties, public financing of political campaigns, recognition of Venezuelans of African descent, and more.
Critics on the right claim these measures constitute a bribe to the mass of Venezuelans-handouts in exchange for political support, a version of the traditional clientleism used Latin American populists such as Argentina’s Juan Perón.
In fact, Perón and other 20th century populists went far beyond Chávez in terms of nationalizing industries-Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA, has been government owned since the 1970s, and the recent state takeover of the telecommunications and electrical power companies are renationalizations.
But the Chávez project aims at a more thoroughgoing social transformation than populists of the past. The aim is to build what Chávez calls “socialism of the 21st century” by trying to bypass the capitalist state with new structures and enshrining new forms of “social,” “public” and “mixed” property to promote “endogenous” economic development-that is, growth not dependent on the oil economy.
These efforts are, in turn, supposed to mesh with “communes” created by communal councils-which, under the proposed constitutional changes, will receive at least 5 percent of the national budget to manage local affairs. The text of the reform proposal explains: “The state will foment and develop different forms of production and economic units of social property, from direct or communal-controlled, to indirect or state-controlled, as well as productive economic units for social production and/or distribution.”
Moreover, the proposed reform on “popular power” also calls for the creation of councils for workers, students, farmers, craftspeople, fishermen and -women, sports participants, youth, the elderly, women, disabled people and others.
This new “geometry of power,” as Chávez calls it, is apparently designed to engineer social change while avoiding direct confrontation with big business, whose property rights are in fact safeguarded in the constitutional reforms. As Chávez himself said last summer, “We have no plan to eliminate the oligarchy, Venezuela’s bourgeoisie.”
Funds for social reforms have so far come from state oil revenues, rather than any transfer of wealth through higher taxes, and the nationalization of companies has been achieved by paying market price for stock market shares.
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THE QUESTION on the Venezuelan left is whether all this amounts to a transition to socialism, as Chávez and his supporters would have it.
For Orlando Chirino, a national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) labor federation, Chávez’s reforms herald the “Stalinization” of the state and state control of the labor movement “along the lines of the Cuban CTC labor federation,” he said in an interview.
Chirino, a key leader of the C-CURA class-struggle current of the factionalized UNT, is among the most prominent figures on the left to oppose the reforms. He made waves on the left when he granted an interview with a leading opposition newspaper and appeared on the platform with leaders of the CTV, the corrupt old trade union federation implicated in the 2002 coup.
Today Chirino, along with an oil workers union official, José Bodas, is a founder of a new group calling for an independent workers party.
Chirino’s and Bodas’ opposition to the reforms put them at odds with the majority of UNT national coordinators and organizers in C-CURA, such as Ramón Arias, general secretary of the public sector workers’ union federation, FENTRASEP. Arias is a supporter of the Marea class-struggle current of trade unionists in the PSUV, which calls for purging of employers, bureaucrats and corrupt elements in the new party.
Despite some criticisms of the centralizing aspects of the constitutional reform, including the new provisions for states of emergency, the Marea current has joined the majority of the Venezuelan left in calling for a “yes” vote to achieve social gains and defeat the opposition.
Arias and his C-CURA allies are already at loggerheads with prominent members of the PSUV, including Oswaldo Vera, a member of the National Assembly and leader of the Bolivarian Socialist Labor Front (FSBT), a faction of the UNT that also controls the ministry of labor.
The labor ministry refuses to negotiate a contract with FENTRASEP-which covers 1 million workers-because, it says, there is a dispute over union elections. As a result, many public sector employees are among the 73 percent of Venezuelan workers who earn the minimum wage-which, although the highest in Latin America, is still low in relation to the soaring prices caused by Venezuela’s rapid economic growth, to say nothing of enduring economic inequality.
Arias and other FENTRASEP leaders say that public sector workers are casualties of a larger factional struggle between the FSBT and C-CURA. This in turn is part of an internecine conflict that has prevented the wider UNT labor federation from holding a proper congress since it adopted a provisional structure at its founding event in 2003.
Now, C-CURA, the largest grouping in the UNT, is itself split over the PSUV and constitutional reform, which means organized labor’s voice is barely heard in the political debates of the day.
This sets the stage for a battle over the workers’ councils to be formed in the future, in which both factions of C-CURA expect to contend with an effort by the FSBT to exert control over the labor movement.
On the political terrain, the C-CURA activists of the Marea current inside the PSUV aim to make alliances with others on the left who have succeeded in being elected as spokespeople and delegates to the founding conference.
With the PSUV founding conference still in the future-it has been postponed repeatedly-it isn’t clear if, or how, such groupings will exist within the party, which already has a provisional disciplinary committee that reportedly expelled a prominent Chavista (the commissioners subsequently denied that this was the case).
Certainly the PSUV is a highly contradictory formation, and includes key members of the government apparatus and local elected officials who are unpopular among grassroots Chavistas. Marea’s slogan calls for a PSUV without bosses, bureaucrats and corrupt elements.
Whether the far left will be able to operate openly, be expelled or decide to leave to organize openly are open questions.
In any case, stormy weather is ahead, said Stalin Pérez Borges, a UNT national coordinator and supporter of the Marea current. Political polarization and class conflict, ameliorated in recent years by rapid economic growth, are unavoidable, he said.
“The constitutional reform marks Chávez’s consolidation of power, so the oligarchy can’t just wait for him to go,” he said. “Chávez wants to discipline and control the bourgeoisie. But they want to be in control themselves.”
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=14428
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