RANAR-BARI...means Rana's home

Leading Canada's public healthcare to the free-market guillotine

2011-12-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

(A very interesting, day by day dismantling of Canada, happenning here)
"Beyond 2016-17 the plan is to bind federal healthcare spending to GDP growth, a fundamentally dangerous move toward codifying Canada's public healthcare into capitalist economic terms."

from rabble.ca by Stefan Christoff

http://rabble.ca/news/2011/12/leading-canadas-public-healthcare-free-market-guillotine

National discussion in Canada on the Conservative government's new healthcare financial ultimatum, a take-it-or-leave-it-style proposal, largely revolves around myths. First that financing alone is key to securing a sustainable public healthcare system and second that free-market economic winds will provide sustainable guidelines, via GDP, for viable future government healthcare financing.

A surprise delivery from Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to provincial finance ministers, over a fancy lunch-in at the Chateau Victoria Hotel this past Monday, the plan offers no space for negotiation toward collective national solutions for public healthcare.

Essentially, the Conservative proposal works to strip federal responsibility in crafting, via national negotiations, coherent and sustainable healthcare systems in Canada's provinces and territories. A clear move away from the flawed but important Canada Health Act and a political node to provincial governments already working to allocate federal healthcare financing toward enhancing the corporate, for-profit sector role in delivering healthcare, as already seen extensively in Alberta and Québec.

In reality, the Conservative plan will see six per cent healthcare funding increases until the 2016-17 fiscal year, with little regulation over provincial governments increasing experimentation with public-private partnerships. Beyond 2016-17 the plan is to bind federal healthcare spending to GDP growth, a fundamentally dangerous move toward codifying Canada's public healthcare into capitalist economic terms.

Essentially, the Conservative deal stands as cash for healthcare in the near future and uncertainty for the long term. Cash solutions are never long-term solutions to collective challenges, fast money and free market thinking will not solve the deep problems facing public healthcare in Canada.

Beyond important calls for the Conservative government to negotiate viable terms to sustain public healthcare in Canada, with politicians from provincial and territorial governments, also note that zero official opportunity for the people of Canada to contribute ideas toward the future of public healthcare have been outlined.

In reality, a viable and democratic process in Canada, relating to public healthcare's future, would encourage neighbourhood assemblies and participatory political processes coast-to-coast, similar to the general assembly model celebrated by the Occupy movement.

* read full article at rabble.ca

http://rabble.ca/news/2011/12/leading-canadas-public-healthcare-free-market-guillotine

* illustration for article by Elisabeth Belliveau.

http://www.elisabethbelliveau.com/homepagehopfully.html

---

No More Holywood, No More Rock Star

2011-10-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

I read the news today, oh boy!.....and before I recirculated it (see at the bottom) I realized it is that point in time...

-that simply passing around these news bytes about the 99% will not fly much further,

-that staying at "home" and imbibing some radical mirth in each other is perhaps wasteful,

-that writing witty, intelligent and quirky pieces or writing purportedly analytical but dismissive pieces from a political high ground is querulous and counter-productive

-that the pulse in the streets of the world is demanding an end to this philosophy of greed and replace it with a philosophy of better humanism, cooperative outlook, respect for the environment and for greater equity amongst people...

-that this will not be a revolution which will bring about change of government or a change of guard in the palace or in the temples of obduracy

-that all the organized movements in the world have lagged behind in mass mobilization on the basis of a minimum program for change and the time has come to re-examine broader unity--and the 99% are a significant statement of that unity

-that falsehood, falseflag, hypocrisy, secret assasinations, drone killings, the entire gamut of creating "coalitions" and carpet bombing nations to secure the energy and geo-political needs of one or two corporate-military-financial nation-entities, known as the "west" is now publicly discredited and ordinary folks have realized that this veneer of "freedom" to oppress, colonize, grab land and masquerade as wielders of "democracy" must finaly go

-that the defenders of "freedom", "free speech", "free Market" "free world" are the perpetrators of violence against the 99% for too long and their mask has fallen down....

-that at this point in time, the widest age group of people, with the leadership of a young and radical intelligentsia have been inspired to lead and the working people of all ages must now stand by them in solidarity and defend the gains and not let things slide....

-that the belly of the beast has been taken by surprise and they will want to distract by concocting incidents somewhere else..

-that this is a call for the end of that body of thought that was supposed to work when it had the "human touch" (and that liberal baloney must be diss-ed once and for all) , but that it is actually a ruthless system run by financiers and bankers who have hidden their nefarious role for too long and they have now come to full exposure finally and that the meltdown was their cold-ass iceberg value-systems and not the values of the people of the world

-that the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush-Bush-Mulroney-years of deceit, distortion, lies and extremism masquerading as "common sense" to privatize, globalize and seize the world's resources in the name of innovation and the "free spirit", has come to a philosophical end, but must be physically put down now....

-that corporate lawyers like Obama, who rode the wave of a similar dissent and hijacked the emotions and sentiments of the young, must also now pay the price and not hijack the movement with sweet double talk, as Obama is now famous for--no more Hollywood, no more rock star....

-that this is a movement against not only the symbols of corporate greed, but also those nations who have based their existence on plundering the resources of developing nations, using debt financing to print money and go to war to postpone their own intellectual demise

-that this is also a battle against those settler-racist-colonialist forces who divide the people by invoking religion, race and profess a philosophy of superiority...

-and it is great and excellent that the people of the United States have realized that they must stand by not only themselves, but the people of the world and it is their involvement and historic engagement that will inspire change everywhere, because it is only when you disturb the guts of the monster, will the beast start unravelling....

: Movement Breaks Borders
October 16, 2011

An unprecedented wave of protest against the international financial elite and prevailing economic policies swept the globe on October 15. And New Mexico, Mexico and the greater US-borderlands were no exceptions. Protests were chalked up in San Diego, Tijuana, Las Cruces, Ciudad Juarez and Mexico City, among many other places. In El Paso, an encampment was announced beginning Monday, October 17, in the city’s downtown San Jacinto Plaza.

In neighboring Ciudad Juarez, protesters from several groups began their action in the downtown plaza but culminated at the US Consulate, where they blasted US economic domination. The world economy, said activist Julian Contreras, was “leaving many people abandoned while privileging the banks and big businessman and not generating employment or letting the young people study…”
Demonstrators also criticized proposals to legally allow soldiers the ability to search homes without a warrant issued by a judge. The Ciudad Juarez event was held at a time when the city is in the middle of a gala, two-week event organized by the government and private sector to improve the city’s image and attract more investment.
In Mexico City, different protests involving hundreds of young people likewise linked issues of violence related the so-called drug war to economic inequities.
“We should unite all the young people, use the social networks to make a new revolution, and construct a new democracy in which there is no violence and inequalities,” said one student at a new protest encampment set up at the Revolution Monument.
Other Mexican protests were reportedly held or planned in Guadalajara, Morelia, San Cristobal de las Casas, Oaxaca City, Cancun, and more than a dozen other cities.
“From American to Asia, from Africa to Europe, the people are rising up to reclaim their rights and ask for an authentic democracy,” declared dozens of pot-banging demonstrators in Monterrey, Mexico’s violence-torn, old industrial powerhouse of the north.
Two days prior to October 15, more than 100 students rallied at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces in a local manifestation of a new national student movement that’s grown out of the original New York City occupation of Zuccotti Park, now rechristened Liberty Square, on the edge of Wall Street.
Other New Mexico cities witnessing October 15 weekend protests included Carlsbad, Roswell, Farmington, Taos, Santa Fe and, of course, the state’s largest city of Albuquerque.
The October 15 Duke City demonstration was a fusion of Americana, Third World iconography and working-class history.
Members of the AFSCME and 1199 unions were plainly visible in a highly spirited display of pent-up outrage against the economic powers-that-be. A younger crowd of protesters marched up Central Avenue from the Occupy/Liberate Albuquerque encampment at the University of New Mexico (UNM) to hook up an older, sign-waving group already positioned in front of a Wells Fargo Bank in the Nob Hill district.
Amid many fluttering American flags, a Che Guevara banner was draped across a bank fence while a nearby sign quoted the late comedian George Carlin on the American Dream.

A leaflet handed out at the event and bearing a picture of a huge mother pig criticized Wells Fargo’s lending practices and contrasted the earnings between an average bank teller and 2007-2008 company Chairman Richard Kovacevich, who the authors’ claimed made more than 662 times the pay of a teller.
A visual sampling of signs quickly revealed the crowd’s political sentiments: “No One Elected the Koch Brothers, “End Plutocracy,” “Bring Back Sherman Tillman and Glass Stegall,” “My Son Deserves a Future,” “Stop the Wars..,” “We are the Real Tea Party,” “Honk if you are Underpaid.”
And numerous motorists honked back, tapping their horns in such a crescendo of bleeps that it was difficult to hear at times. “We are the 99 percent,” “This is what Democracy looks like” and “People Power” chanted a crowd of hundreds made up of the old, the young and the middle-aged. A man was heard urging the return of FDR.

Covered with placards and armed with a list of websites related to a movement that is leaping across continents and rattling political establishments from north to south and from east to west, a woman who identified herself as Tami from Mountainair said October 15 was directed “against globalization and privatization that the banks are spearheading with their massive amounts of money…we bailed them out, we own them.”

A pair of women discovered an innovative use for one of the orange barrels used in the endless road work that makes driving around Albuquerque these days a navigational nightmare, transforming the barrier into a makeshift drum, while down the sidewalk the Raging Grannies musical combo delivered a round of a capella favorites including “Where Have all Our Taxes Gone,” performed to the tune of the old folk classic “Where Have all the Flowers Gone.”

Addressed to mayors and police chiefs, a printed message protested the clearing of Occupy Movement protesters in cities like Denver and reminded authorities of the existence of something called the First Amendment.

“When people across the Middle East occupied public squares, leaders in Washington mostly cheered these protesters and warned Middle Eastern governments not to use force to clear them…” read the statement.

On one corner Elizabeth Mirra carried a sign that read “Save Military Retirements.” In comments to Frontera NorteSur, Mirra said she was very concerned about proposals heard on Capitol Hill of late to slash military retirement pay by 20 percent and raise health insurance premiums for veterans. Until now, Mirra said she and her retired husband, who served 22 years in the military, have been able to live a very good life on his pension but cuts could force the couple “back to work.”

Mirra said the talk about cushy pensions perhaps fits “admirals and generals,” but the criticisms don’t apply to most veterans who receive 50 percent of their active-duty pay. A one-year resident of Albuquerque, Mirra said she also stood with teachers and other workers whose pensions were similarly threatened. “It infuriates me that that one percent of the people like hedge fund managers and war profiteers pay 15 percent (tax),”she added.
The demonstrators’ demands as well as warnings against state repression were strikingly similar to those heard in Mexican protests that erupted after the 1994/95 economic crisis and bank bail-out, events which ushered in an era of austerity and public debt that is still being paid off years later.

Like other places, the Occupy/Liberate movements in New Mexico are not ending with October 15. A teach-in is planned for UNM this coming week, while the Albuquerque City Council is poised to issue a proclamation on Monday, October 17, in support of the protests.

Backed by City Council Vice-President Rey Garduno, the proclamation puts the contemporary movement in historical context, declaring that “Albuquerqeans know that being the 99% also means dealing with the historical legacy of occupation by foreign powers in pursuit of profit; being targeted today by polluting industries; and watching our tax dollars go to bail out wealthy corporations while young people can’t afford to go

to college….

In continuation, the proclamation declares that workers, people of color, immigrants and indigenous nations “know all too well what occupation really means,” and that the privileged one percent of the population and “their protectors in government” threaten to slash and squeeze safety nets and economically beneficial programs.

The proclamation ends, “We are the 99 percent and we stand with the Occupy Wall Street Movement.”
By Sunday, October 16, less than a month after the first spark was lit in New York, nearly 2,000 cities worldwide were involved in one way or another in the new movement that’s beginning to shake up global politics, according to the website occupytogether.org.

I'd rather not be Anna

2011-08-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

(Trust her silence.....she does not liveblog mindlessly, does not pop up on the mainstream TV subjecting herself to shrill journalists, is precise, lays down the line and then cuts to the chase...now, lets not simply be reactive to her and break out into hives.... Sibal, Jaitley, Tewari etc need to be nailed for being the front men for India's authoritarian neo-liberalism...BUT Hazare is not India. r)

Arundhati Roy

From The Hindu Arundhati Roy.

While his means maybe Gandhian, his demands are certainly not.

If what we're watching on TV is indeed a revolution, then it has to be one of the more embarrassing and unintelligible ones of recent times. For now, whatever questions you may have about the Jan Lokpal Bill, here are the answers you're likely to get: tick the box — (a) Vande Mataram (b) Bharat Mata ki Jai (c) India is Anna, Anna is India (d) Jai Hind.

For completely different reasons, and in completely different ways, you could say that the Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common — they both seek the overthrow of the Indian State. One working from the bottom up, by means of an armed struggle, waged by a largely adivasi army, made up of the poorest of the poor. The other, from the top down, by means of a bloodless Gandhian coup, led by a freshly minted saint, and an army of largely urban, and certainly better off people. (In this one, the Government collaborates by doing everything it possibly can to overthrow itself.)

In April 2011, a few days into Anna Hazare's first "fast unto death," searching for some way of distracting attention from the massive corruption scams which had battered its credibility, the Government invited Team Anna, the brand name chosen by this "civil society" group, to be part of a joint drafting committee for a new anti-corruption law. A few months down the line it abandoned that effort and tabled its own bill in Parliament, a bill so flawed that it was impossible to take seriously.

Then, on August 16th, the morning of his second "fast unto death," before he had begun his fast or committed any legal offence, Anna Hazare was arrested and jailed. The struggle for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill now coalesced into a struggle for the right to protest, the struggle for democracy itself. Within hours of this `Second Freedom Struggle,' Anna was released. Cannily, he refused to leave prison, but remained in Tihar jail as an honoured guest, where he began a fast, demanding the right to fast in a public place. For three days, while crowds and television vans gathered outside, members of Team Anna whizzed in and out of the high security prison, carrying out his video messages, to be broadcast on national TV on all channels. (Which other person would be granted this luxury?) Meanwhile 250 employees of the Municipal Commission of Delhi, 15 trucks, and six earth movers worked around the clock to ready the slushy Ramlila grounds for the grand weekend spectacle. Now, waited upon hand and foot, watched over by chanting crowds and crane-mounted cameras, attended to by India's most expensive doctors, the third phase of Anna's fast to the death has begun. "From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is One," the TV anchors tell us.

While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won't have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.

Whether it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

Meanwhile the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag waving of Anna's Revolution are all borrowed, from the anti-reservation protests, the world-cup victory parade, and the celebration of the nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we are not `true Indians.' The 24-hour channels have decided that there is no other news in the country worth reporting.

`The Fast' of course doesn't mean Irom Sharmila's fast that has lasted for more than ten years (she's being force fed now) against the AFSPA, which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on right now by ten thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant. `The People' does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila's fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagatsinghpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley. Nor do we mean the farmers in NOIDA, or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country, resisting the takeover of the land.

`The People' only means the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a 74-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. `The People' are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our TV channels, like Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the hungry. "A billion voices have spoken," we're told. "India is Anna."

Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough we've heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer's suicides in his neighbourhood, or about Operation Green Hunt further away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmer's agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn't seem to have a view about the Government's plans to deploy the Indian Army in the forests of Central India.

He does however support Raj Thackeray's Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the `development model' of Gujarat's Chief Minister who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.)

Despite the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now have the back-story about Anna's old relationship with the RSS. We have heard from Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community in Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no Gram Panchayat or Co-operative society elections in the last 25 years. We know about Anna's attitude to `harijans': "It was Mahatma Gandhi's vision that every village should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on. They should all do their work according to their role and occupation, and in this way, a village will be self-dependant. This is what we are practicing in Ralegan Siddhi." Is it surprising that members of Team Anna have also been associated with Youth for Equality, the anti-reservation (pro-"merit") movement? The campaign is being handled by people who run a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors include Coca-Cola and the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation in the last three years. Among contributors to the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and SEZs, and run Real Estate businesses and are closely connected to politicians who run financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are they all so enthusiastic?

Remember the campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer. For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were disgraced and it seemed as if some major Captains of Corporate India could actually end up in prison. Perfect timing for a people's anti-corruption agitation. Or was it?

At a time when the State is withdrawing from its traditional duties and Corporations and NGOs are taking over government functions (water supply, electricity, transport, telecommunication, mining, health, education); at a time when the terrifying power and reach of the corporate owned media is trying to control the public imagination, one would think that these institutions — the corporations, the media, and NGOs — would be included in the jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed bill leaves them out completely.

Now, by shouting louder than everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away at the theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have very cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonising only the Government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for the further withdrawal of the State from the public sphere and for a second round of reforms — more privatisation, more access to public infrastructure and India's natural resources. It may not be long before Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.

Will the 830 million people living on Rs.20 a day really benefit from the strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and driving this country to civil war?

This awful crisis has been forged out of the utter failure of India's representative democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We're watching India being carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle being waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at stake.

A Global Manifesto in .txt

2011-08-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

Rana Bose © Aug 2011

It start out as 11/9

“Bring the wall down”

“De-regulate” he say,

“Cut the fed to size”

“Fire the Unions”

Blow the Jobs away.

Reagan, the actor,

Has his way.

Catch the fire, now,

Fix the fuckin’ left

Once and forever

“Open the Border,

cut de taxes”

Let’s have “free trade!”

Lets bleed the rest.

Them open the border

Them dice the globe

And lo and behold

They fail, they sink

‘Cos the Ol’ Company

No follow,

No rule so great.

They maximize the margin

They curtail the hard workin’

No matter what

they ship the jobs away.

Then, they lose the game

They lose the fray

So they weep and they fret

To devalue the yen

Cos they can’t pay, mes amis

They Can’t pay.

So the deficit go up

A fool man’s game

Its a social deficit, silly,

That matters mostly

But war can save the day.

War is war,

Everything be fair,

So they get hit big time

The Towers come down

And footsie with Jihadi

Is over with a frown

Now they need the war

the many wars

No Soldier on the ground

(Lesson from Vietnam)

So they use the Hellfire

The predator,

And the MOAB

The mother of all Bombs

A Million dead

No war crime for sure!

The coalition they say,

Of the willing and the brave

But they lose the surplus

They get the debt

Now they play the stock

They play the subprime

And go belly up, dead.

And still they blame

Its US and Them

And they reinvent,

They debate

They check JM Keynes

They check with KM in

Highgate

How the market esta free!

And the vida esta loca!

They blame the poor

They blame the middle class

They blame everyone

They blame the call centre

But not the upper class

Now the dollar take a dive

The empire set the sun

Soon, not yet

Riots everywhere.

In Spain, in ancient Greece

And in jolly inglan

The people run amuck

They burn, they loot

Like Luddites rule

The epilogue

Is what it is.

Neo-liberal is it

They nevah thought

That the native could play

The bourgie game

Checkmate the empire

In their own game

So they scowl mighty hard

Multiculti is a big fail

They say,

Senator in Arizona

Massacre in Utoya

But, still they say,

Him loner

Psycho, juste l’etranger

Not the rule

Just the exception.

No pension, no savings

No credit, no bail

the Economist

cry “lord, what go wrong?’

Why we fail?”

The dollar fail

The nations prevail

They trade and exchange

In dinar, peso, rupee,

Rouble and yen.

Riots in Detroit

In Brooklyn, in LA

Lyon on fire

London like Ghostown

Like the Specials say,

The sea from the North

Come sweeping down

The melting polar

Make a beachhead

Right Downtown.

The Music fail,

The concerto is frail

The painting is falling

The Museum is closing

The pillars of the varsity

Are retreating and cracking.

School and colleges

Not for poor,

Libraries on the wane.

China offers the green card

To grads from Iowa

Mumbai offers jobs

in tea Garden,

For Glasgow engineer

But this solve no problem,

no balm.

The working poor,

Don’t take no beating,

No more,

They come from the ruelle

They take to the rue

They Block the highway

They block the state

In Iran, in Israel, In

Algiers, in Cairo, in Delhi

In DC,

They block the square,

They lock the police

This Reagan actor they say

Gotto go!

The papers, the media,

They debate,

Lack of Role Model

They say,

Entitlement

And moral decay!

They don’t get,

The malaise is deep

The system is sick

Oil and grease

Will not lubricate

Is too late

This Reagan actor

Gotto go, they say.

The BBC will never re-broadcast this again!

2011-08-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

My son sent me this saying that the BBC will never rebroadcast this again...

The BBC, the exalted mouthpiece of British stiff-lipped impartial, cut-above-the-rest journalism, talk just like Murdoch's Fox, Skynews and CNN style Breaking News--- high strung, hysteric, boom-bang, swishy missile-sound accompanied vapididty. Screaming, hollering, censuring types...who only want to plant certain catch phrases......through the lips of the interviewee..They want their predominantly white, upper middle class audiences to hear the usual crap..."do you condone" "You were a rioter, werent you once a rioter"...what floosy, ignorant-ass, bitchy nonsense......and then comes the usual finger pointing at immigrants...And who are they interviewing? Darcus Howe, well known writer and editor of Race Today....and the way this person speaks to him...hostile, ignorant, rushed....Its a shame how women get discredited...remember the Galloway interview? Check this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcus_Howe

And everyone is watching TV and counting how many blacks, how many whites, how many browns...just to salve their predetermined notions of what went wrong..Everybody is rolling their eyes and their heads...and talking about destruction and landmarks etc etc...and how they care about the heritage stones from 1931.... Well shit! .Aint nobody interested in how the cops put 3 bullets thru the head of a black man...? the same old story in Montreal, in LA, everywhere...then a commission will come up with a story about how the black man was acting dangerous, suspicious inside his car, wriggling around like a beast? maybe? ready to pounce?about to pull out a kleenex? Father of four obliterated.... so they put 3 bullets through his head? Did Jagger once sing about this....hello? and now its become routine.....and then they tried to plant a bullet on police wireless set as coming from him.. turned out it was police issue bullet!!...So that story has dissolved more or less. Meanwhile what these foolish people just dont get is that people riot..not because they want to steal and embellish their apartments...they want to F------- DESTROY...that is what the real reason is...They are disaffiliated, disenfranchised, rejected..... they see vapid looking mannequins staring at them with clothes that cost 500 dollars...and they see it day after day.....as they walk to the unemployment lines in tottenham...and now the usual shit has started...muslims...foreigners...gypsies...carribeans.... and crying south asian shop owners sprinkled in to keep the divisions intact...I guess they never learnt from Watts, Rodney King, Fredy Villanueva.... Check this hastily retrieved phone-saved video....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o&feature=player_embedded

YouTube - Videos from this email Reply Forward

I have pics of Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron looking mighty deranged...

2011-07-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

It is quite telling that the reaction in the mainstream media (after the Norway mass murders) is immediately prone towards using expressions like "fringe elements" , "loners"--(when the Arizona politician was shot , there was continued projection of the lunatic looks of the killer, as if he was not part of a larger consensus against immigrants, but a solitary madman....) whereas when describing an attack by Islamic extremists, a massive web of conspiracies are spun, experts are brought in to describe the connections with some dormant cell of al-queda or "home grown" terrorist networks, bearded imams are shown shrieking hysterically, wreaking havoc etc and CNN makes "breaking news" out of the implications of snow falling over Ramallah.

In this case, the real conspirators are Sarkozy, Cameron and Merkel who only weeks ago lashed out at multiculturalism as a "complete failure." It was a calculated move....Why is that not being shown repeatedly? They are the ones who instigated this......I have many pictures of Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron making pretty nasty, murderous gestures, flickering their eyebrows menacingly, twisting their lips in a sinusoidal wave of disdain towards others....Hello? Is there an International Criminal Court handling this? This was a mass killing, innit? Instigated by a wave of racism against the Roma in Europe, against, Muslims everywhere, against brownskin temporary workers in the US, against Arabs in Canada.... Harper has made borderline statements of the same sort and of course his minister Jason Kenney follows through methodically with deportations, posting of nasty looking guys on the web (all non Caucasian) as dangerous for Canada... Who are the real instigators, I ask?

Here is an alternate take below.

Bombing, Mass Shooting Kill At Least 87 In Norway

By Mike Head

23 July, 2011

A bombing and mass shooting in Norway on Friday have left at least 87 people dead. Following a large explosion directed against government buildings in the capital, Oslo, a right-wing anti-Islamic extremist opened fire with automatic weapons on youth at a camp run by the ruling Labour Party on nearby Utoya Island.

At 3:30 p.m. Friday, powerful explosions rocked a government quarter in downtown Oslo that is home to the office of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, the finance ministry and the country’s biggest tabloid newspaper Verdens Gang (VG). Seven people died and 15 were wounded in the blasts.

Some two hours later, a massacre occurred at the youth camp, attended by about 600 people. The gunman, dressed as a police officer, fired repeatedly on a crowd of mostly 15- and 16-year-old campers, killing at least 80. More deaths are expected to be confirmed as police and rescue teams search the island and the surrounding lake for bodies and wounded survivors.

Police authorities subsequently arrested Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old native Norwegian with known links to anti-Islamic Christian fundamentalist groups. Norwegian media said Breivik had many right-wing connections, including a Facebook account in which he described himself as a Christian conservative.

Norway’s national broadcaster NRK and other media posted pictures of Breivik. According to Norwegian TV2, the suspect belongs to far-right groups in eastern Norway and may have registered two weapons—an automatic weapon and a Glock-type pistol—under the name of one of the groups. The Swedish news site Expressen said he was a self-described nationalist and had written a number of posts critical of Islam.

The island shootings were cold-blooded. Terrified witnesses described young people jumping into the lake or hiding behind buildings in a desperate attempt to escape the gunfire. One, 21-year-old Dana Berzingi, said the fake police officer ordered people to come closer, then pulled weapons and ammunition from a bag and started shooting.

Another 15-year-old eyewitness, Elise, told the Associated Press: “He first shot people on the island. Afterward he started shooting people in the water.” Others said the gunman repeatedly shot his victims to make sure they were dead.

Rune Thomas Ege, one of the only journalists on Utoya when the shootings took place, reported: “We saw people still being dragged out of the water. We saw people being taken care of by paramedics on the shore. There were some horrific scenes of the young kids, some crying, some shaking while watching paramedics trying to save their best friend’s life.”

Earlier, in the city, huge blasts blew out windows and caused structural damage. Images on Norwegian television showed the prime minister’s office and other buildings heavily damaged, footpaths covered in broken glass and smoke rising from the area. “People are lying in the street covered in blood,” Ingunn Andersen, a journalist with public radio NRK, said from the scene.

Before details about the alleged killer emerged, political leaders, both domestic and international, insinuated that the attacks were the work of Islamic extremists and declared that the violence underscored the need to prosecute the “war on terrorism.”

President Barack Obama and European leaders swiftly vowed solidarity with NATO member Norway, whose Labour-Socialist Left-Centre coalition government has 500 troops in Afghanistan and is participating in NATO air strikes in Libya.

The Norwegian police had earlier in the year warned of right-wing anti-Islamic groups seeking provocations. In an unclassified report released in February, Norway’s intelligence police agency (PST) stated: “An increased level of activity among some anti-Islamic groups could lead to increased polarisation and unease, especially during, and in connection with, commemorations and demonstrations.”

Friday’s atrocity occurs under conditions where governments and media outlets across Europe, including the Scandinavian states, have condoned or encouraged anti-Muslim racism and anti-immigrant chauvinism. This appeal to the most reactionary and backward sentiments is aimed at diverting popular opposition to austerity measures and the growth of social inequality.

Israel Lobby Loses fight against anti-Semitism

2011-07-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

(A friend, fellow Montrealer and member of Independent Jewish Voices, Scott Weinstein has sent in the following post. Worth a read.)

By Scott Weinstein, July 11, 2011

Remember the wacko U.S. statement in Vietnam after years of madness: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."?

2011 will mark the year the Israel Lobby destroyed the fight against anti-Semitism in order to save Israel.

Funny friends of the famous Simon Wiesenthal Center who watch too much Don Rinkles, just compared Hitler to Canadians organizing the Gaza aid flotilla challenging Israel’s blockade ("CANADA'S "SEA HITLER" SET TO JOIN GAZA FLOTILLA").

I'm no holocaust scholar, but I'll bet the Wiesenthal experts 5 to 1 that Hitler wasn’t a Canadian human-rights activist committed to non-violence. Neo-Nazis should thank the Israel Lobby for their efforts to make “Mr. Hitler” respectable.

Timed just before Quebec's Just for Laughs Festival this week, the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism released their long delayed report. Despite contrary evidence from their cherry-picked witnesses of university leaders and police chiefs, they claim anti-Semitism is a growing menace in Canada. Especially in universities. Especially by Palestinian human rights organizations.

Even the stalwartly pro-Israel Globe and Mail newspaper thought that was cute.

Jewish Zionist leaders iced a deal merging with the powerful Jew-despising Christian Zionists to create the Mother-of-all Israel Lobbies. These being the Christians that have a plan for us Jews. They pray for the End of Days when Jews return to Israel, slay the Muslims, and then the Rapture wipes out all remaining non-believers in Jesus Christ (i.e. Jews). Imagine the pitch by the Jewish machers selling the merger: "OK, first they give us all of Palestine, then we become their soldiers for Armageddon, like reverse Shabbos goys, and only after do they plan to exterminate us. But we can finagle the last bit. What could possibly go wrong?"

The Israel Lobby is bored with civil rights, civil discourse and even liberal Zionists. This year, a new umbrella agency for Jewish and Israel advocacy snuffed out the Canadian Jewish Congress. It's 24/7 Israel now.

Do you think their anti anti-Semitism shtick is a joke? They’re laughing all the way to the bank. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti Defamation League and the B'nai Brith rake in $millions to ‘fight’ anti-Semitism.

I think they got busted too often embellishing stories of antisemitic incidents. Like the car salesman who hustled my grandfather to buy a new Oldsmobile every five years, the Israel Lobby upgraded the definition to include "the NEW anti-Semitism". Now those of us organizing against the Israeli blockade of Gaza and Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, are dangerous anti-Semites. Somewhere, a clever Zionist is getting a car payment because of my activism.

What will the desperate Israel Lobby think of next? Loyalty oaths to Israel? State sanctions against Jewish organizations supporting Palestinian human rights? That was Israel’s government’s agenda last year. The main difference between North American and Israeli politicians? Israeli politicians are not afraid to criticize Israel.

So the next time someone like Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper affirms his righteous fight against anti-Semitism, appreciate his sense of humor. He’s got a plan.

Mamata B and the Politics of Hon-Hon

2011-06-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

There is a Bengali expression that describes the way Mamata Bannerjee, the new Chief Minister of West Bengal, India, charges down the corridors of her office building (Writer’s) and the various hospitals, information centres, cultural institutes she pays surprise visits to. It is called Hon-Hon. Bengali is a language where physical sounds made by human actions or the sounds made outside in the atmosphere turn into words. Thus Hon-Hon is the sound of air that swirls and turns around sharp corners like waves of compression and expansion, thus creating the acoustic effects of drag and swirl which even a wind tunnel experiment cannot accurately simulate. In Fluid Dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equations are hard to integrate and resolve over a difficult topography. But the impact of her Hon-Hon walk is now becoming pronounced and apparent. Her intent seems to be, to shock and awe. She charges down corridors, her hallmark rubber slippers slapping up the floors and streets of Bengal, while rotund Ministers and pot-bellied security personal trip over each other trying to keep up with her. She cuts through the veritable detritus that surrounds a sycophantic society, desperate and unsure as to what is her next move. She is good at this Hon-Hon walking methodology. It is said to be a way of speed and surprise, about delivering as promised, which the CPIM-ised Bengali bureaucracy had lost touch with. It is the notion of serving the people, serving the customer, meeting promised goals instead of joking about it non-challantly in various adda sessions (tea ‘n gossip while priming their cache of lethal weaponry) in 3 story mansions in Lalgarh surrounded by hemorrhaging tribal peasantry demanding basic constitutional rights. It is like a merry-go round session for a nation that has forgotten how to move and deliver. So far, the Hon-Hon tactic seems to have impressed quite a few people. What if she turns up at a government office at the ungodly hour of 11 AM, when everyone has barely begun to arrive? Or how about a Police Station at 10 AM, where the duty officer is reading Ganashkati, the CPI(M) daily or Sangbad Pratidin, while a retinue of people are waiting in an adjacent room to file their First Information Reports?

Mamata Banerjee has gripped the city like a giant spider in a white sari; hovering over Bengal like an escaped genii. Not a day passes without the TV channels and newspapers, giving their audience a minute by minute description of her daily Hon-Hon patrolling routine. She points, she smiles, she namashkars, she shows irritation, she points again and orders people around to take immediate action on pensions, on crooked pictures in Art galleries and poor waiting rooms in institutes. She has the energy of a hurricane in comparison to the roly-poly cotton balls that masqueraded as working class heroes for 34 years.

She ripped down a 34 year old moronic “left” empire, that had converted the concept of Leftism into a stolid, corrupt, misogynist, posturing, in-effective, hollering conglomeration of Bengali middle class title-seekers, just as the upper caste and Brahmin tax collectors did during the British Permanent Settlement era. Screw the poor, unleash gangster politics, bend over backwards to appease criminal corporations and known ore-snatchers and snatch the land of poor minority peasants (whose emancipation they themselves, thumping their chests, had declared some decades ago as their great Land reform miracle) and finally infeudalizing the entire state apparatus with their gawking yes men and women. The new Talukdars, Rai Bahadurs, Munshis of the last 34 years were the enforcers of the CPI(M), as the upper castes had been during British rule. The British practiced their own colonial form of “rational rule”, mediating between the native “rajahs” and the CPI(M) used their Biker gangs and the completely indoctrinated Police Officers to jerk around the aboriginal people of certain districts of Bengal, who only wanted some basic rights. People talk about Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh, as the only crimes of the CPI (M). The only reason why they lost! Why have people stopped remembering Marichjhapi and the rape, murder and burning of Tapasi Malick?

Now, Mamata Banerjee in spite of all the accusations of erratic behaviour, strange pronouncements and strange political affiliations on her part, does seem to have a game plan. Behind the Hon-Hon run, that she has so well perfected, she has collected some progressive folks, well-known articulate thinkers, planners, experienced economists and philosophers, who wish to “change” things. Who are these people? What is their class outlook? Who do they represent? What is the change they want? No one seems to know. Do they want to bring in genuine sustainable development or another injection of neo-liberalism swathed in bullshit slogans like Ma Mati and Manush ? (The mother, the soil and the Human Being, whatever it implies). Do they want to bring in the same discredited policies of the IMF and the World Bank or do they want to introduce some sort of a social democratic welfare state, with the chains of graft, corruption and bureaucracy, broken and severely contained? Everyone is talking about reviving Bengal. (After all no one can get rid of the inherent corruption of the Indian State, No Baba, No Mama! As the rest of India seems to be so convulsed with.)

Shades of someone we know in the White House? Who shattered the dreams of a lot of his followers within two years of taking office? Mamata has shown some of the same propensities. Promising change, fairness, equity and strangely enough and identically like Barack Hussein, who came on the scene flashing his toothy good humor and ear-to ear rhetoric promising paribartan a la american. Yesterday, interestingly, her government declared that easy tapping of phone lines will no longer be possible. Something Barack flipped and flopped over and could not put together. That’s a small snatch of fresh air, really. She also announced that she is having a hard time finding qualified IAS and IPS officers. No wonder there! She is looking for non-groveling humans. She also declared that any physical attacks on the opposition by her Trinamool henchmen would be handled by an impartial body. Something which the CPIM lied about and twisted facts around and could never commit to do, as recently as a few months ago when the Netai massacre happened.

What is however important about this strident style, is that it may just be waking up the Bangali conservative Leftist out of his confidence-bound stupor of thirty four years. And in the background is a strange mix of personnel, from corrupt old Congressmen from the SS Ray era, former Naxalites, current left of centre anti-globalization politicos, some IMF-leaning structuralists and very simply some naïve hooligan enthusiasts with no ideology whatsoever. This Hon-Hon style, however, seems to be raising the curiosity of even the 40% of the electorate that did not vote for her. But what will the Hon-Hon style really achieve? Now that Mamata has come to power, will she reopen all the issues from the past, so that a proper investigation is done of the methodical manner in which the CPIM infested the body-politique of Bengal? Will she examine how the entire level of education, sponsorship scandals and transfer raj that the CPIM created, be dismantled? Perhaps when all is said and done, this Hon-Hon style is a mere charade, a distraction to wean people away from the real fundamental social change that Bengal really needs.

Badal Sircar and Wall-Free Third Theatre

2011-05-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

In my theatre life, Badal Sircar remained the singlemost influence for free, uninhibited, unsponsored, un-walled theatre... it made me adapt Michil into a North American context as Death of Abbie Hoffman. Very few people in the west knew about him.....and no one I know of, used fluidity and scene to scene transition as imaginatively as him. Not Boal, not Brecht..but Badal... He passed away this week..Respect and Peace....
Here is a link to a letter he wrote some time ago..
http://humanitiesunderground.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/a-letter-from-badal-sircar/

The Next OBL

2011-05-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

If you have been baffled and did not admit to it, try and understand how China has been baffled....they are tied to the monster......in the wake of the the drunkenness of the US economy and its utter failure to regulate its banks and financial institutions and the utter torpor of a fellow named Obama to make good on the notions of 'change' that he engendered.....The Chinese are nervous as hell. But they are constantly studying and changing things quietly. Taking countermeasures.

When a country does not make products for domestic welfare or consumption, (and depends entirely or mostly on export), at some point it will bite. China knows that. And has started switching gears massively. Since 2008 itself, it has decreased its export dependency by 10% points. At the same time China is wedded to the US dollar. So it needs the US to "recover" while China itself must consider alternate measures like trading in domestic currency with neighbours and others. Capital does not solve problems. It is a promissory device. It must be invested in solid projects that have high yield. Low Yield treasury bills are no longer insurance. That is why China wants to ensure that its billions in dollar reserves are invested well, instead of trying to engage in subsidizing the US economy by buying bonds and in turn enabling the US to buy "low cost" goods. That tacit arrangement is not working out well, because the US economy is basically unproductive. So China now wants to buy out brand American corporations, if it is allowed to. If there is a fuss, they will walk away. Buying up brand American companies is not easy, because the Tea party and others get on the JINGO trail immediately.

So, do you want to know who will be the next devil for the West? Well, imagine a nation governed by a Communist Party, already the world's second largest economy, with huge investments all over the world, with fairly advanced defence systems to protect itself and a not-so-bad reputation in Latin America and Africa. Now you need to undermine that country. There is no Ben Laden there! In fact you do not even have a Fidel there! The entire leadership is elusive and unknown and do not go back decades. But they are "Communists." They know the market economy. Sometimes better than the loudmouths in western capitalist institutions. So, watch out you will see a wave of evil deeds from China coming up on the news waves....they sell poison toys, they spy, they sabotage countries' environments,they sell adulterated food, they prop up terrorists, they manufacture lethal weapons and deploy them in outer space...You will soon see more Chinese spies and scientists being deported.... Check this interview below....Chinese terrorist will be found under bridges......Chinese will be found spawning terrorist Venezuelans.....Chinese hand will be discovered in bombings...Dont be surprised. Because, it is not all about Oil/Gas and other such banalilties. It is about geo-political controls, shipping lanes, warm water ports and high mountain airports, satellite stations and other vantage points for the continuing neocon agenda. The Chinese have a policy of not interfering in the affairs of other countries, as they would not want others to interfere in theirs. So, they watch and get baffled by what's happening and quietly take counter measures.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6590

The Meaning of a Conservative Majority In Canada, for Quebec

2011-05-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

In a picture in Le Devoir, this morning, Stephen Harper had a spare tyre spilling over his beltline, as he smiled awkwardly/arrogantly in his usual stage-managed style. Michael Ignatieff looked resigned and melancholic. Jack Layton looked like he was coming out of the dark from backstage, smiling, moving swiftly on his crutch.
A bunch of us writers, painters, filmmakers and musicians from here in Montreal have been exchanging angry notes amongst ourselves. We should have been rejoicing. Instead we are mighty pissed off with Canada. With the greater Toronto area especially. That is the main area that Stephen Harper targetted and focussed attention on and they delivered. They delivered like slobberring right wingers, all over themselves and with enormous glee. Like bums in a sugar shack, they huddled, leaked, overflowed and messed up the Canada that most of us were born into or came to live in. Mr Harper even pretended to understand cricket with them during the World Cup and swallowed hard on samosas, dimsums, bakhlavas, piroggis and kebes which he had never had, and they drooled over him. The constituency with the largest Muslim population of Canada voted for the most anti-Muslim government ever in Canada. So much so that even stalwart Liberals like Dryden, Volpe and Kennedy got wiped out.

For now, the issue is really about being radical humanists. That is the distilled truth. About being radical and being humanist. Forget socialism for now. Forget even about using the word capitalism as an evil-ism to score a few points amongst your own private band and confreres in socialist clubs. Most folks do not understand capitalism or socialism (their economic structures, that is, and their relationship to class),except as a word of abuse, on either side. So let's drop those concepts.

It is all about forthright, no bull-shit ideas about caring for others, sharing this earth. That is what it boils down to. I mean do you want to live in peace and harmony with your fellow citizens and not be run over by poverty, desperation, destitution, marginalization, every block that you walk on rue Ste Catherine, while glassy-chrome-copper towers rise above you like arrogant totem poles? For that you need a humanist approach. Apparently in greater Toronto they can live with that differential. In Montreal and Quebec they cannot.

And then you have to ensure that a handful of rogues do not get away with murder, mayhem, media control, non-constitutional shenanigans, secret arms deals, form cartels for worldwide domination of banks, shipping lanes, energy resources and thereby promote a racist hatred towards those who oppose them. For that you HAVE to fight by whatever means necessary. For that you need the radical approach. By the way, I am quite aware that some folks still use the word "radical" in a pejorative sense. So it comes down to being radical and humanist. That is radical humanism.

It is all about a caring, healthy society, which not only fights the financial deficit, but also the social deficit. It is about not getting bought over by the constantly erected latest "bogeyman" politics, of fearing communism, "islamic" terror and other pumped up nightmares that the western world has thrived on and driven it's citizens to swear by. It is about not being gleeful and pedestrian and cheering with bloodlust on the streets of DC and making that into Canadian culture.

Does Quebec, in Canada, understand it better than others? Not entirely. Quebec has also flip flopped. For example, we voted for the ADQ, the racist underbelly of Quebec nationalism cloaked in the same drunken patriotism that Americans outside the White House engage in, when Ben L's assasination was announced. Quebecers like to listen to straightforward talk from the heart. If you screw up, you admit it. Do not dodge issues. If you are sincere about your beliefs , come across clearly. That is what Jack Layton did on Tout le monde en parle, on Radio Canada. That is what Rene Levesque did.

So, why did Quebec vote for the NDP? Because, basically Quebecers see the Liberals and the Torys as red neck federalists who have a patronizing attitude towards Quebec. So enough is enough, say Quebecers. The NDP comes out swinging as young and hip, playing post-punk, techno jazz in their rallies, all women bands, whereas Torys and Libs are still playing Na-na-na-na etc etc..Because the Torys and Libs are still in a hockey arena, in Prozac college, if you know what I mean... Because Torys and Libs still wear bow ties and tuxes....Because Torys and Libs still sound like "governing" types and NDPers sound like opposition rabble, like working men and women, sometimes ready to hit the streets. Torys and Libs are still being driven around in limos. NDPers are down on walking and subwaying. See? So the Torys and Libs are really off the rails in Quebec. But still surviving in Canada.A few of the NDP kids who got elected, were not even in town, did not even participate in debates, did not even know what the NDP was all about six months ago. But they liked the sincerity and the program of the NDP. So they jumped in with a vague social democratic conscience. Will it work out? Will Quebec really redefine itself, after having dumped ethnic nationalists?

The NDP is going to HAVE TO give a hard run to Canada's pole sitters, the fence sitters, the centrists and the redefiners of Canada. What Ralph Nader could not do, Jack Layton has done. That is the essential truth. But it is an open battlefield. Yes, the question is, are you with them (U.S) or are you with us (meaning US). I hope the NDP themselves realize that they are on the threshold of a shift in the mindset and not just in their party numbers. Because if the NDP plays games and plays it safe and engages in rump politics and do not stand up for the reasons they have been voted in for, the next logical revolt in Quebec will be for separation, for sure. Because Quebecers do want a different society. A paranoid, but different society. It is not a wonder therefore, that Quebec wants to control immigration into the province. Look what happened, they would say, to the Greater Toronto Area. Post-liberalization, small business mindsets who jumped on the "economic stability" bandwagon of Harper and delivered for him. They were being plain, opportunist bastards. Short-sighted. Not thinking about the country and its prerogatives and independence, but bringing along their tribal affiliations, their local-minded parochialism. They hooped and hollered while Harper and Jason Kenney plan to shove them all eventually into a neutered evangelist heaven... And at that point in time, these new Canadians will realize what they voted for.At that point in time, we have to go beyond radicalism and humanism!

Quebecers are duty bound to be left of Church as far as they can go, because they know that there is no going back to the right of the Church. Because the Church was hell...Quebec does not like the Centre. The rest of Canada still bows to the Church and the feudal Queen. Canada did not have its silent revolution, yet. In Quebec, there is no Centre Politics. There is only the Church, which is at the centre. So even in remote areas, where they remember Duplessis, the Socreds, they want a soft social democracy...no church influence. From time to time there are distractions, like some fool insists on wearing the burkha in a bank or in a government office. So that whips Marois and gang into action. It's a nice deflection and folks like ADQ rise and collapse... But in the final analysis, we artists, poets, writers, journalists... we demand freedom...freedom to write, freedom to be respected for writing about ordinary folks and their lives and yes, be paid for that...and make a living out of breaking on the streets, singing, jamming, bombing walls with multicoloured hues and getting paid for bringing life into the souls of people, for making daring documentaries and kick-ass French theatre (sometimess too navel gazing though) and set ourselves aside from plastic and white North America. How come Quebec produces La La La Human Steps, Cirque de Soleil and not Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver or Toronto, which has all the pretensions of being nearly New York? Zippo. Why? Maybe Canada should realize that Quebec is somewhat different, finally, and stiff-handed Harper (he shakes hands with his kids!) should finally give up on Quebec. As much as I love Toronto, more and more, everytime I visit her, there is this uneasiness that is creeping in.

Quebec voted correctly. Canada voted wrong, mostly.

The Ghosts of 1984

2011-03-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

For those who cannot see the rot and lies in the entire governing system in India, in Modi's BJP and Godhra, in Sonia Gandhi's Congress and the 1984 pogroms against Sikhs(and Baranagore Cossipore before) and the Bhattacharya/Basu's CPIM and Marichjhapi/Nandigram/Netai massacres----- there must be some worshipful neo-or proto- nazi state of mind in play ( a large number of Indians have always had an admiration for the likes of Hitler). For in saluting what is touted as the world"largest"democracy, in believing that somehow India will prevail, despite itself, because of its huge faith in the growing mall rat class (.2% of the population) who are distributing amongst themselves the 8% "growth", there must be no conscience left.

None of these 3 major political parties in India reflect an iota of decency, due process, a sense of real compassion for the majority poor of this country, nor for minorities---they laugh and jeer at the poor behind their backs, they kill and rape lower castes everyday, they send their goon para-military after the nation's aboriginal inhabitants, her forests, her rivers, her mountains to extract resources for foreign entities...Is it not ironic that Indians and their expatriate friends have to seek justice in the courts of the United States, whose government is the largest and practically only goon force in the world! And this is very simply because the Indian judicial system has collapsed. It makes "favorable" decisions based on "public perception" , its judges pronounce judgements in favour of companies like Vedanta, because one of the presiding judges "has shares" in the company and so "they must be a good company." And then they commit Dr. Binayak Sen to a life in prison on evidence that even a tin pot dictatorship would blush to carry out. And so we must find "other" ways to glorify this India, some other deflectionary notions, like heritage, like the spirit of non-violence (another myth about the Indian body-politique) or the achievements in cricket perhaps?! And what do leftists and human rightists do? They write columns like this in obscure newsgroups, raving and ranting about definitions. At least the youth of North Africa do not waste time. Please read this piece in Open Magazine
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/the-dead-do-speak

Harper Slaps the Egyptian People-as expected

2011-02-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

As expected, Stephen Harper and his handful of schlerotic political neanderthals (mainly from the western reaches of Canada), maintained a deafening silence thoughout the eighteen days of the Egyptian revolt, except for occassional talk about "stability" and then finally when Mad dog Moooobarick finally moseyed on to Sharm-El Sheikh, he stated it was ok, "if Egypt maintained its Peace Treaties." That's all? Nothing about the heroic sacrifices of the Egyptian youth, workers, women, children and elderly? Does Harper and his pea-brained consorts realize that this is a SIX-Thousand Year Old Civilization he is commenting on? Does Harper and his paranormal, tar-sand intoxicated mendicants realize that there are people out there with dark skins who have intellectual wisdom and capabilities, historical awareness, organizational skills and enormous mental strength that surpasses the narrow mindset of his starchy set?

Hello! peace treaty with who? The Fiji Islands? Tierra Del Fuego? Saturn? Does the Arab world really care anymore for Canada's opinion? Does the whole world, including the United States give two hoots about Canada's foreign policy statements on the Middle East? Do Canadian politicans think that their brains are so enlarged and profoundlly reflective on world affairs, that Canada's opinion counts anywhere? Does Harper and his brand of Canadians think that people from the "underdeveloped" world don't have the chutzpah to organize, overthrow and grind to dust the last vestiges of Arab subservience to the US-Israel axis?

Harper has reduced Canada to a non-player in the world of environmental politics, womens' issues, aboriginal rights and now its cornerstone policy--defend everything about Israel, even if Israel itself has a hard time defending its own actions--is beginning to look comical in the eyes of the Arab world.
Here is a piece from the Globe and Mail, an otherwise staunch defender of Canadian right of center politics. Refreshingly, it draws a vague line in the sand. Between obtuse, obstinate, silly, muddle-headedness and dignified statesman-like politics. Even realpolitik is not understood by this Harper bunch.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/why-did-ottawa-drag-its-feet-on-mubarak/article1904399/

Baba Ram Twitter or Guru Wiki...

2011-01-21T07:26:00.000-08:00

There is a tendency amongst a lot of western liberals to go ape about Wikileaks, beyond and above what are its obvious and spectacular contributions.

Wikileaks is good when it exposes Imperialism and its secretive and militarist execution of global domination. Wikileaks is good when it exposes the real language and racist mindset of western diplomats. Wikileaks is good when it exposes videos that depict the lawlessness of the US and other military in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wikileaks is good when it exposes the fact that the Indian state has used torture routinely in Kashmir and elsewhere. Wikileaks is excellent when it clearly reveals that the Saudis are never to be trusted by the Muslim world.

Wikileaks is also very good because it snatches away the control of mainstream media (and the resultant cultural consensus) and provides "other" information (although there is significant evidence that it also collaborates on what it will not release). Wikileaks also expands on the notion that the industrial working poor are not the only people by definition who are fertile for surplus value extraction. Knowledge workers are at the core of creating the code that allows the gears and cogs of the information industry to turn. Their surplus value extraction is increasingly critical for the military-informational complex. Drones, satellite based warfare, counter-hacking, cyber surveillance would not be happenning if this farm of ants were not at work so industriously. Thus their rebellion against the complex is a good thing. Otherwise why else would a Canadian Conservative Minister call for the assasination of Assange on an open line TV show?

But those who say that Wikileaks and Facebook and Twitter, as social media and information technology are going to bring about revolutionary transformation in despotic areas of the world, be it Tunisia or Iran are actually displaying an old "centre country" colonial attitude towards the "periphery". It is the old notion of "modernity", liberating the backward and the medieval. It is an archaic notion that western democracy and information exchange would be a godsend fora pre-capitalist society. For them, what is a battle tactic, a guerilla weapon, is made to sound like "enlightenment" theory for the underdeveloped. It is like worshipping at the altar of the ultimate transcendental information guru--Baba Ram Twitter or Guru Wiki. As some superficial and official sounding liberal once said (I dont know who, although it has been ascribed to many) ... It is the economy, stupid! It is the plight of people, poverty, hunger, lack of shelter, poor health, disease, lack of justice and personal freedoms that make people self-immolate and rebel. Twitter does not do it. Twitter and facebook and even SMS-ing are like lookout couriers for the street corners and rooftops in the real world of rebellion. They are battle hardware, perhaps. The whistle and bird calls in the jungles that guerillas use. To suggest that Wikileaks is the harbinger of a social movement, the unifying core of a world movement opposed to the politics of globalization etc is perhaps in that colonial or post colonial mode, where khaki clad monkeys from the west tried to tell real monkeys in forests how to whistle and talk english......Well, us monkeys have been twitterring forever. It is our culture. We talk and talk and talk, until we turn blue. That is our problem. And now the new info classes have acquired the same disease. Talk and talk and talk and not do much else. But now, they are claiming they are a movement! Not!

-In deepest appreciation of Martin Niemöller

2010-12-28T05:24:00.001-08:00

-They first came for the Muslims and we said…fuck it, I am not a Moslem

And anyway, they all end up being Pakistanis

Then they came for the Dalits, and we said we are just about all Brahmins or

Roughly thereabouts... We’ve been shafted too long …

-Then they came for the Christians, and we said good for the nation,

Them Christians only convert….

-Then they came hard and fast on the women and the folks who were against the dams,

And we said we are for development, so screw ‘em

-Then they went for the Sikhs

And we said, send them all to UK, Canada and New Zealand

They’ve been gunning down the Nax for forty years or so and we said

The Nax are violent, we are not…we swear by DIR, POTA, MISA, UAPA, FALANA, DHIMKA

Then they came for Sankar Guha Neogy, they bled him to death

We said nothing.

Then they killed a hundred other Maoists, who also fought back and killed quite a few

We said tit for tat to anti-nationals

Now they come for Dr. Binayak Sen and we are mighty speechless

Because it is our speech they took with the British Act from 1870

Now they will come for me and the house will be empty

Except roaches, maggots, fleas and bugs to defend me.

Soli Sorabji about Dr. Binayak Sen's conviction: "We look like the laughing stock of the world"

2010-12-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

Only those who occupy, colonize, stifle and displace need an act to define sedition

Only those who cannot deal with dissent need to define sedition.

Only those who create notions of “national interest” to deflect from their scamster plans need the power of sedition.

Only those who are in a major rush to sell off the nation’s resources need the powers of sedition.

Only those who need a national hysteria to counter a national shame need the instrument of sedition.

Only cowards, recluses, emperors, dynasty huggers and turbaned gnomes, without fig leaves to cover up their diseased crotches, need the power of sedition.

Only those who want to dispense justice hastily and do not have the intelligence to listen out, contend, understand and bear the burden of truth need the claws of sedition

Only, the nervous, the fearful and the spineless who project their insecurities by pretending to be nation-huggers, need sedition like they need a windup toy- to keep up the noise so that they can drown out the signals from the people.

Only the pusillanimous, spineless, lily-livered need the notion of sedition to salve their putrid mental sores-they have no unguent other than to cry sedition

Only the preservers of the status-quo, the myths, and the pursuers of self-promoted trophies about growth need the powers of sedition to preserve their enclaves

Only the .2 percent population who have seen 9 % growth need the powers of sedition.

The British needed the powers of sedition and they handed it down when they left after 200 years.

Making a film is like stepping into a battlefield where the wings of inspirational angels are napalmed

2010-12-21T05:57:00.000-08:00

Here below is an interview with Montreal film-maker Julian Samuel, a painter and writer, as well, who is often seen passing by the well-known eatery Les Enfant Terribles on rue Bernard rambling in disgust, in a Punjabi dialect that only he comprehends. Julian, after all that is said and done, is a rejectionist with an expansive frame of mind. Too bad, this was not published--I think it should be read by those who are bored with Montreal as an art alley of some sorts..

Karolyne Marengo interviews Julian Samuel, August 2005

KM: Why are you - or were you - so interested by Imperialism?

JS: Imperialism is a continuum that deserves exposure in documentaries. Imperialism not only transforms world trade, but also transforms the very way in which one sees the world and relations within it. Historically, this force expropriated cotton grown by bonded labour in India, shipped it to shirt-making factories in Manchester which then sold finished shirts back to India for profits. Imperialism transforms oil from the middle-east into condoms; toothbrushes; DVDs or videotape which is used to archive our collective memories of the war in Vietnam; the Intifada; Britney Spears singing in an airplane powered by refined oil; Martin Luther King speaking in Washington, being killed in Montgomery; Space Shuttles blowing up; the World Trade Towers collapsing. The goal of Christian imperialism, internally, is the same as its foreign policy projections: to convince a chubby, television-addicted population to purchase meaningless glitter made by slaves who ‘earn’ two dollars a day.

KM: How would you define cinema?

JS: Cinema is defined by the direct threat it poses to a conservative understanding of the term “democracy”. Throughout its history, cinema has been subjected to and has tolerated censorship; its transformative potential is so great that the people who fund its production and those who distribute it are inexorably censorial and so controlling that many accusatory human-rights stories are ruthlessly suppressed. Only politically suitable and safe stories make it to the production and distribution stages.

Elia Suleiman’s ‘Divine Intervention,’ a film about Palestine, was subjected to hardcore American censorship: On 20 December 2002, ABC News reported, that: “Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis informed Balsan (producer – my note) that the film was ineligible for consideration in next year's Best Foreign Language Film category because Divine Intervention emerges from a country not formally recognized by the United Nations.

( http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=79485&page=1 ).

KM: What’s your defination of documentary cinema?

JS: Our national definer of the documentary, The National Film Board of Canada, produces meek, inconsequential works and ought not to get public funding. Writers and film-makers have learnt to use the tool of allegory to cut the noose of the censor. Progressive documentaries are defined by their fight against conservatism: We exist because conservatism exists.

Film-makers can now easily made fiction or documentaries with digital cameras and computers. Although small distribution networks for independent documentaries exist, there isn’t large scale distribution for these documentaries. Large-scale distribution or TV is controlled by the same mentally ill, wretched money hungry individuals who inflict cinema.

KM: What is the importance of documentary?

JS: Certain documentaries encourage sceptical thinking. Do you or do you not want deeply antagonistic questions posed in public?

KM: Why do you make documentaries rather fiction?

JS: Fiction requires big political money, therefore it is impossible for minorities living in Quebec to fully tell their stories in cinema. Bien sur, inoffensive, uncle tom works do get produced, but who gives a shit about these?

KM: What inspires you?

JS: Making a film is like stepping into a battlefield where the wings of inspirational angels are napalmed. Documentary film-makers don’t have a patron saint who comes down from St. Joseph’s Oratory to give them inspiration.

KM: What motivates you to make films?

JS: To expose injustice. Noble cause n’est pas?

KM: Which film-makers have inspired you and how?

JS: The works of Canadian film-makers do not, generally, contain any challenging expository international politics. I have not been influenced *whatsoever* by Canadian film-makers except one: Michael Snow. European and Third World cinema are more cogent than Canadian cinema. This is not a vain attempt at snobbery. Canadian cinema, especially Atom Egoyan’s is infinitely inane. Deny Arcand’s films are boring. Pierre Falardeau leftwingism 101 can be goofy and comic - he gets major funding - guess why? Pierre Perrault has made wide ranging kinds work which are well-researched and well-structured: “Un pays sans bon sens!” (1970) is very good.

I have studied and admire the works of Americans such as Emile de Antonio and Fredrick Wiseman. Joan Harvey has made sceptical films. Cuban Santiago Alvarez has made brilliant films with small budgets; Gillo Pontocorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965) is as relevant today as when it was made. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tony Blair bans screenings of this work.

My early influences were James Joyce; American musicians such as Little Walter; Abstract Expressionists; Stan Brakhage; and, bien sur, the Russian classics. I studied the brilliant works of D.W. Griffiths whose films are immensely frightening because the North American racists shown in ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915) are still here in 2005.

Cinema is an international medium and so one’s influences can come from all over (call it a cinematic collectivity if you want to be a cultural studies type). In Quebec, one is punished for not caressing the local heros. Quebec’s ethnic nationalists, like the crackers in ‘The Birth of a Nation’ fear that the WOG WITHIN will make a better work than the whites who live off hereditary privilege. Quebec’s cultural elites thwart les autres.

KM: What is your style and what distinguishes it from the works of other directors?

JS: Canadian documentaries such as The Corporation and Manufacturing Consent are sound-bite works that are comfortable enough for prostitutional TV producers who buy BMWs with our tax contributions. My documentaries are not as popular as these films. Save and Burn is a multi-thematic work which projects arguments without voice-of-god narration; my documentaries don’t spoon-feed the viewers. Noam Chomsky the star of Manufacturing Consent incessantly exposes Israel and its kissing cousin America. Peter Wintonic and Mark Acbar, the directors of Manufacturing Consent, do not include his commentary on Israel.

KM: What is the message you are trying to send with your trilogy: The Raft of the Medusa, Into the European Mirror, and City of the Dead?

JS: I offer hard evidence on the imperial game.

KM: And The Library In Crisis and Save and Burn?

JS: To show that democracy and the fight for it depends on access to books and libraries.

KM: The future of the book and learning pre-occupy you. You have made two films that look at knowledge and democracy. Why such a marked interest in these areas?

JS: Without democracy we will never have single malt scotch. Documentary film-makers offer the opposite of Prozac – that’s our job.

KM: Save and Burn produced a small controversy – what was all this about?

JS: In Save and Burn I’ve proven that Israelis are not only destroying the libraries of Palestinians, but are also stealing their books to enrich their own collections. I remind people that this pillage could not happen without the support of democratic America. Showing this connection is enough to hamper screenings at festivals and academic conferences. However, one ought to keep in mind that parts of religious America are progressive especially when compared to India, the largest caste-ridden democracy in the world.

In Montreal, the Bibliothetque National du Quebec will not show The Library in Crisis and Save and Burn. I do not think, in principal, that this is rejection is race-related. Lise Bissonnette, the head provincial librarian, is not a racist. I am confident that given her august and inflated stature as an local intellectual, she is nimble enough to connect the dots between D W Griffiths and Jacques Parizeau (George Wallace of Quebec) to George Bush’s war on the Arabs. The BNQ has commissioned a documentary on itself, and in the near future, this work will be broadcast. Mirror, mirror on the wall. It cruel and ruthless for Bissonnette to not tell me why The Library in Crisis and Save and Burn are unworthy of a screening at the BNQ. Furthermore, I published a translation of the following letter in La presse, 16 may 2005:

“Lise Bissonnette director of the Grande bibliothèque du Québec promotes her dedication to reflecting the racial diversity of Quebec within her library. However, she and her collegues, Ghislain Roussel, Secrétaire général et directeur des affaires juridiques, in particular are dead silent on following question: Do ‘visible minorities’ have jobs in key positions within the BNQ?

All the commissioned art works in the BNQ are made by white quebecois francophones. Is there an undeclared policy of favoritism? Julian Samuel”

KM: Is it necessary for documentaries to be polemical?

JS: Yes.

KM: What are your current struggles? And which do you consider important?

JS: The struggle for funding is continual. It would be nice to get the same level of funding as French-Canadian directors or white Anglo Canadian directors. I made my documentaries with a budget seven times *smaller* than the average film made at the ONF. And my income is *five times less* than the average professor of cinema at U de M. I live near the poverty line. Would a cradle-to-the-grave corporate welfare job at the CBC or the NFB have encouraged intellectual suicide?

KM: In varying degrees your works look at the Middle East – why this interest?

Does the fact that you are a Montrealer of Pakistani origin determine the themes you develop in your work?

JS: Pakistan does not determine the subjects of my documentaries. I am a Canadian citizen. I don’t normally revert to being a Pakistani national until I enter Pakistani airspace which is where my acquired nationalities - Canadian and British – are temporarily over ridden. Except in my novel Passage to Lahore (De Lahore a Montreal), my works are not connected with where I was born.

KM: Can you distinguish between a good documentary film-maker and a bad one?

JS: Good documentary film-makers find confrontation amusing. Bad documentary film-makers are craven and always find ways to please producers, audiences, journalists.

KM: What is your next documentary or book?

JS: My next documentary is about belief, unbelief and atheism; working title, ‘Against the incantations of false prophets.’ And a novel, working title, ‘Dark Interloper of the Eastern Trade’ – a comedy set in Charles De Gaulle airport. Also, I might make a documentary about mangoes - I an expert on Pakistani mangoes.

KM: What do you try to reveal in your 60 second clip Visible Minorities Hired by the Media ?

JS: This short clip laughs at the ‘visible minorities’ hired by the Canadian state. American Republican senator Jesse Helms must love our Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s documentary which trashes Fidel Castro and Cuba.

Oxford Book Store Kolkata -Launches The Fourth Canvas

2010-11-04T23:10:00.001-07:00

Pics below....

http://picasaweb.google.com/saha.jahar/ReleaseOfBookTitledFourthCanvasByRanaBose?authkey=Gv1sRgCKWcl7zP3N-ysQE

Arlo Guthrie on Hussein Obama, 'cos he says he did not know...Oh yeah?

2010-07-28T10:25:00.001-07:00

Presidential Rag

by Arlo Guthrie

You said you didn't know

that the cats with the bugs were there,

and that you never go along with that kind of stuff nowhere,

but that just isn't the point, man,

that's the wrong, wrong way to go,

if you didn't know about that one, well, then, what else don't you know?

You said that you were lied to,

well, that ain't hard to see,

but you must have been fooled again by your friends across the sea,

and maybe you were fooled again by your people here at home,

because nobody could talk like you,

and not know what's going on!

Nobody elected your family,

and we didn't elect your friends,

no one voted for your advisors,

and nobody wants amends,

*You* are the one we voted for, so *you* must take the blame,

for handing out authority to men who are insane.

You say its all fixed-up now, that you've got new guys on the line,

but you had better remember this while you still got the time:

Mothers still are weeping for their boys that went to war,

fathers still are asking what the whole damned thing is for,

and people still are hungry, and people still are poor,

An honest week of work these days don't feed the kids no more,

schools are still like prisons...

Yes, you will be remembered, be remembered very well,

and if I live a long life, all the stories I could tell,

of men who are in poverty, of sickness and of grief,

hell, yes, you will be remembered,

be remembered very well.

You said you didn't know

that the that the cats with the bugs were there,

That you'd never go along with that kind of stuff nowhere.

But that just isn't the point, man,

That's the wrong, wrong way to go!

You didn't *know* about that one?

Well, then, what else don't you know?

On to the next act of barbarism...why not?

2010-06-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

What use is it if every few months the state of Israel commits another barbaric act and we circulate a gamut of articles about how the Jewish conscience in America or Canada is beginning to have twitches here and there and having minor fits of conscience?

What use is it if the US as a nation and that includes its squabbling mildly liberal press finds obscure reasons to write about upholding balance and even handededness and essentially demonstrating nothing but scorn for those with a ""chaotic and pre-capitalist, "Asiatic" and activist state of mind? ""

What use is it if the entire American nation, if put to the vote would still stand by Israel, never mind what it does? It is not Congress or Senate alone or AIPAC money and lobbying that does it.... For the sake of Vanunu and Rachel Corrie, it is foolish to conclude that Jewish money controls the American mind. In a way that is just inverted racist doggerel. Americans will vote for Israel, not because Jewish money makes them do it. The American mindset (yes I am collectivising majority opinion and not having sympathy for the poor dissenting minority of Americans who care for the rest of the world) embraces formations who use irrational force, who display hatred for non judeo-christian entities, who love to massage the long barrel of gun-culture based rough justice, who love to "pioneer" and settle and occupy and displace. This is the reason why America has also declared India (yesterday) as its strongest partner worldwide at the present time.

What use is it to continuously highlight the fact that Obama's little black balls are tied up in a knot when it comes to Israel, as if in ALL OTHER AREAS he has been such a raging revolutionary? On Homeland Security? On Guantanamo? On Cuba? On Latin America? On snooping on its citizens?

Lets cut to the chase: Americans have a populist/wagon circling/ grapes of wrath/ depression remembering /street justice sense of sympathy for the less fortunate within its own territory. So the so-called änti-wealthy mindset does work at times for the Democrats and all those who take shelter under its wiings. But when it comes to Israel-- it is such a lovable, lone cowboy state, full of essentially white people, with white tastes and white prerogatives in the middle of a sea of AYRABS...which includes the pre-barbaric state of Saudi Arabia...Which is also America's best friend when it comes to its oily needs. So here we go...lets get on with the next act of barbarism by Israel and then lets have another dose of Jews who have been unqualified supporters of the racist state admonish its Sabras for breaking with the "socialist zionism"that they all dreamt about in the 50s... On to the next act of barbarism..!

Searching For Jake Sully In India's Heartland

2010-05-03T11:46:00.001-07:00

By Harsha Walia

03 May, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Building traditional irrigation systems, practicing forest conservation and cooperative farming, and providing educational and medical facilities in the isolated rural forests of India . This could apply to any NGO or charity, but is actually the work of armed Naxalite Maoists. In addition to community development, Naxalites have organized politically to self-govern and have claimed responsibility for numerous killings of government officials, security personnel, and alleged informers. Today, many of the Naxal cadres are Adivasis (tribal indigenous) and 40% are women. Naxalites have been operating since the 1970s in 20 states around the jungles of Central and Eastern India .

Naxalites recently made headlines as Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared them “the most serious internal threat to India's national security” and unleased Operation Green Hunt. Under Green Hunt 250,000 police, armed forces, and counter-insurgency teams have been deployed, while the US provides military intelligence and tactical guidance. The jungles are under a heavy siege: checkpoints, army patrols, helicopter missions, gunfire battles that kill 40 civilians per week . Based on the counterinsurgency model of soft power alongside military might (charity from the barrel of a gun), government-sponsored agencies are setting up rehabilitation camps for the 200,000 already-displaced villagers.

It is easier to fixate on the real and perceived violence inflicted by armed insurgents. As political groups in the Middle East , Pakistan , and Afghanistan are presumed to all be “Islamic jihadis”, the caricature of Naxals as fanatic ideologues is compelling. It behooves us, however, to ask why the Maoist insurgency persists, why Adivasis would choose a life that inevitably leads to confrontation with the world's third largest military, why the depths of the jungles holds a greater promise than the heavenly slogan of economic development.

The neo-liberal model that led to the 9% “India Shining” growth rate could more accurately be described as India 's Doom. The statistics are chilling: although only 9% of the country's population, more than 40% of usurped land for development is Adivasi land; over 60 million displaced from 25 million hectares of land between 1947 and 2004 including by burning of villages, rape, illegal detention, mass murder, and vigilante raids ; approximately 200,000 farmer suicides in the past decade. Home to 52 billionaires and a millionaire population that has grown by 20% in the past five years, India also boasts 230 million people living in hunger, overwhelmingly Adivasis.

The most convenient distraction of India 's Red Scare has been that the beneficiaries of the military occupation of the forests and attendant terra nullius are corporations. The Maoist heartland coincides with the mining heartland. In the words of the Prime Minister: “If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources, the climate for investment would certainly be affected.”

The area has been slated for more than 300 tax-and-labour law free Special Economic Zones. Corporations have signed 650 billion rupees worth of Memorandums of Understanding for resource extraction (imagine this: the value of bauxite ore, just one of the 28 precious minerals, is valued at almost $6 trillion), and infrastructure development such as dams and power plants. A Ministry of Rural Development report has termed it “the biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus ”.

In her most recent essay Arundhati Roy writes “The Maoists are not the only ones who seek to depose the Indian State . It's already been deposed several times by Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism…Almost from the moment India became a sovereign nation, it turned into a colonial power, annexing territory, waging war.”

There is now a complaint against Roy under the Chattisgarh Special Public Security Act. Outrageous but not as gruesome as the arrests, police shootings, and in-custody torture of non-Naxal activists including doctors and journalists. Yet another purpose of Greenhunt emerges: quelling any dissent by brandishing the conveniently exaggerated “Maoist sympathizer” catch-phrase. Like in the other democratic oases US and Israel , Enemies are necessary (and easily drummed-up post 9/11) to justify military crackdowns, corporate looting, and human rights violations.

Still, rural resistance is declaring Jaan denge par jameen nahin denge (We'll give our lives, but never our land) and mobilizations across the country are reaffirming the demand jal, jangal, jameen (water, land, livelihood). A communique from the Kenddungri Panchyat in West Bengal reads: “You distribute a few crumbs amongst us, the poor, and then hang the label “development”. Every 300 out of 1000 adivasi children die before the age of 5. If we call this your silent terrorism would that be wrong? We regard as a new independence our power to stand up united and resist.”

The human rights network Sanhati has drafted a proposal calling for negotiations upon the cessation of police-paramilitary actions and cancellation of development projects. A recently concluded Independent People's Tribunal on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab, and Operation Green Hunt released comprehensive recommendations including: immediate termination of Green Hunt; ending all compulsory acquisition of land and forced displacement; publically releasing details of all memorandums of understanding; and transforming to a sustainable model based on local agrarian economies instead of extractive industries.

This epic battle of a fattened corporate capitalism versus a dying land and its inhabitants, of blood-thirsty robotic paramilitaries versus a contradictory and living rebel force is fit for an Avatar remake. Except Sully may want to add his name to the struggle by staying home and dismantling North American mining and investment interests that are colonizing India's (heart)land and most of the planet.

Harsha Walia is a Vancouver-based activist and writer active in anti-imperialist, migrant justice, feminist struggles. She has been named one of British Columbia 's most influential Indo-Canadians by the corporate daily Vancouver Sun. This article originally appeared in the Georgia Straight Newspaper.

Wild Mark!

2010-04-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

So, my buddy Mark Krupa, Viking Bjorn, put the hammer to the head of evil. A real hammer of Thor, let me emphasize. A piece of carbonaceous rock, weighing around 10 kilos, no less. Thach! Gloop! Gush! For me that is the beginning of the film, not the end. The retribution. The triumph and turnaround of confused, distracted, disoriented, play-acting, make-believe idealism, getting its shit together on a cold winter’s, desolate morning somewhere in Quebec over bad-ass, evil-avatar politics, finally. In the AMC show ( I saw the flick twice) the crowd cheered and winced simultaneously, reflecting the release, the relief and the adulation for righteousness arriving finally. No problem there. The Wild Hunt, an adventuresome, wild and totally enjoyable film has now been reviewed by everyone “and their mothers” as Mark would often say, when referring to lines from my various plays (he has been an integral part of Montreal Serai, ever since he was scouted out by my 7 -8 year old kids, some 18 years ago at the NDG Y, making duck sounds). So, this will not be a film review. (All the reviews have been positive, and some stuck up folks have highlighted the fact repeatedly that it was a low-budget film, so the camera work and editing was not that slick—so what? There are folks winning photography awards with pin-hole Diana cameras. For Thor’s sake! ) And this film, with the signature Quebec ice-storm shots on dry branches, the procession of LARPERS coming through the valley with their torches lit, is quite exquisite and what appeals to me most is the frigging toilet door banging away, ominously and matching sound effects at the end with the roll of newspaper hitting Murtagh’s front door repeatedly. (I got news for you baby, I’ve snuck in from the back) and thwack! I like this film, because it makes me tear into the Murtagh’s of the world. Mysogynist, clannish, racist, fundamentalist, cultist skunks who brood over nothing and use male-force with malevolence.

Wild Hunt must be seen. I have lived through its creation, its ideas, its germination, its floundering at times with budgetary constraints. Alex Franchi, Mark’s Dungeons and Dragons buddy, and director of the film does a suave job,--no nonsense, no excesses and just right. And ALL the actors and actresses, without exception do a remarkably natural acting job, as well. Go see it, if you support independent film by wild people! It’s getting awards and recognitions every week. Here's video peek...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WENre45f13c&feature=player_embedded#

Executing Handcuffed Afghan Kids? or Chopping fingers of 18 month olds in Dantewada

2010-03-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

No Story Here! US Press Sits on Story-Is this a Dantewada story as well?

Executing Handcuffed Afghan Kids?

By DAVE LINDORFF

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03042010.html

When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four Americans who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.

Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected” of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable “collateral damage” of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake--a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.

Sadly, no principled soldier with a conscience like pilot Hugh Thompson tried to save these children. No observer had the guts of a Michael Brernhardt to report what he had seen. No Ron Ridenhour among the other serving US troops in Afghanistan has investigated this atrocity or reported it to Congress. And no American reporter has investigated this war crime the way Seymour Hersh investigated My Lai.

There is a Seymour Hersh for the Kunar massacre, but he’s a Brit. While American reporters like the anonymous journalistic drones who wrote CNN’s December 29 report on the incident (http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/29/afghanistan.deaths/index.html), took the Pentagon’s initial cover story--that the dead were part of a secret bomb-squad--at face value, Jerome Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan working for the Times of London and the Scotsman, talked to other sources--the dead boys’ headmaster, other townspeople, and Afghan government officials--and found out the real truth about a gruesome war crime--the execution of handcuffed children. And while a few news outlets in the US like the New York Times did mention that there were some claims that the dead were children, not bomb-makers, none, including CNN, which had bought and run the Pentagon’s lies unquestioningly, bothered to print the news update when, on Feb. 24, the US military admitted that in fact the dead were innocent students. Nor has any US corporate news organization mentioned that the dead had been handcuffed when they were shot.

Starkey reported the US government’s damning admission. Yet still the US media remain silent as the grave.

Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to execute a captive. Yet in Kunar on December 26, US-led forces, or perhaps US soldiers or contract mercenaries, cold-bloodedly executed eight hand-cuffed prisoners. It is a war crime to kill children under the age of 15, yet in this incident a boy of 11 and a boy of 12 were handcuffed as captured combatants and executed. Two others of the dead were 12 and a third was 15.

I called the Secretary of Defense’s office to ask if any investigation was underway into this crime or if one was planned, and was told I had to send a written request, which I did. To date, I have heard nothing. The Pentagon PR machine pretended to me on the phone that they didn't even know what incident I was talking about, but without their "help" I have learned that what the US military has done--no surprise--is to pass the buck by leaving any investigation to the International Security Assistance Force--a fancy name for the US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s a clever ruse. The ISAF is no more a genuine coalition entity than was George Bush's Iraq War Coalition of the Willing, but this dodge makes legislative investigation of the event impossible, since Congress has no authority to compel testimony from NATO or the ISAF as it would the Pentagon. A source at the Senate Armed Services Committee confirms that the ISAF is investigating, and that the committee has asked for a “briefing”--that means nothing would be under oath--once that investigation is complete, but don’t hold your breath or expect anything dramatic.

I also contacted the press office of the House Armed Services Committee to see if any hearings into this crime have been planned. The answer is no, though the press officer asked me to send her details of the incident (Not a good sign that House members and staff are paying much attention--the killings led to country-wide student demonstrations in Afghanistan, to a formal protest by the office of President Hamid Karzai, and to an investigation by the Afghan government, which concluded that innocent students had been handcuffed and executed, and no doubt contributed to a call by the Afghan government for prosecution and execution of American soldiers who kill Afghan civilians.)

There is still time for people of conscience to stand up in the midst of this imperial adventure that may now appropriately be called Obama’s War in Afghanistan. Plenty of men and women in uniform in Afghanistan know that nine Afghan children were captured and murdered at America’s hands last December in Kunar. There are also probably people who were involved in the planning or carrying out of this criminal operation who are sickened by what happened. But these people are so far holding their tongues, whether out of fear, or out of simply not knowing where to turn (Note: If you have information you may contact me). There are also plenty of reporters in Afghanistan and in Washington who could be investigating this story. They are not. Don’t ask me why. Maybe ask their editors.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-area journalistHis work can be found atwww.thiscantbehappening.net. He can be reached at dlindorff@yahoo.com.

Green Hunt: Silencing tribal voices

2010-01-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

Green Hunt: Silencing tribal voices "The biggest Land Grab since Columbus" Government of India Report.

Posted by Rajeesh on January 7, 2010

The below piece is reposted from Indian Vanguard. The world is oblivious about what is happening in this central swathe of India where, over 20 million Adivasis (aboriginal first nations) live in the forests, mountains, land and rivers. India's new born middle class are quite pissed off that the Memorandums that they had signed with transnational corporations and the likes of the Tatas, Jindals and other "world class"chest thumping monkeymen like the Vedanta/Sterlite group (to exploit the water, the lumber, the diamonds, bauxite, gold, iron ore etc) are stuck, because the Adivasis have taken up arms to defend India's constitution (Schedule 5 of the Indian constitution guarantees that tribal people will have permanent access to their land) . Over 100,000 Indian troops with helicopters, drones and military inteligence from the US and Israeli forces have started an assault on the first citizens of that country. The UN does not know or does not want to know. World Human Rights Bodies do not know. Because India is going to pull the west out of the recession! That is the general understanding everyone has arrived at.
The Indian Paramilitary have started corralling the people into internment camps, pushing them out of their villages and now quietly and silently (the press is not allowed any longer, "for their own safety") sending in these marauding, rapist paramilitary forces in the name of Indian "democracy and law and order."It is not a secret that over 150 out of some 600 members of India's parliament have criminal charges against them. These same fat, bloated, corrupt, inarticulate and boringly assinine creatures who are members of the Congress, BJP, CPI(M) and other similar parties are all ganged up together to finish the Adivasis. Read on !

Operation Green Hunt is finally put into full gear; the Union home minister is asked to stay away from its area of operation; and a Gandhian begins a hunger strike at its centre. What do these recent developments imply?

First, the harsh truth — the Centre’s, and consequently the media’s, near-silence all through the last month on its heavily tom-tommed proposed armed offensive against the Maoists, was no rethink. The war cries had boomeranged; it made more sense to keep quiet, let the protests fizzle out, and go ahead with it. It was foolish anyway, to have thought that the outrage of intellectuals (and a few retired security men) could outweigh the exciting prospect of big business finally moving in on all those riches buried under the Dandakaranya forests. As planned, the moment the Jharkhand elections got over, the offensive began. But why is the Union home minister, the man behind it, being asked to stay away? That too by the governor of the State at its epicentre?

Governor E S L Narasimhan, former IB chief, knows what he is doing. Last month, the home minister met the man instrumental in raising awareness across the country about the situation in Bastar, the heart of the Maoist stronghold. Inspired by Vinoba Bhave, Himanshu Kumar started his Vanwasi Chetna Ashram in Dantewada 17 years ago to work among the adivasis and thereby curb the influence of the Naxalites there. But his mentor’s teachings would not allow him to keep quiet while the adivasis were hunted out of their homes, raped and brutalised by the police in the name of fighting Maoists and paving the way for ‘development’.

In our democracy, the powers-that-be do sometimes talk to troublemakers. So P Chidambaram talked to Himanshu Kumar, and when invited to come to Dantewada and hear what the adivasis had to say in a jan sunwai (public hearing), agreed. On what grounds could he have refused?

But for Himanshu Kumar, this was no formal invitation. Everywhere he spoke, he had pointed out that for the last five years, no minister had come to see the condition of the adivasis. Now that the ruler was coming, he had to make the jan sunwai a success.

That meant persuading the jan to come for it. But they had already started fleeing — the exodus sparked off not just by rumours of a massive influx of armed forces into their region, but also by what they had seen in the first phase of Operation Green Hunt. In that three-day exercise in September, six COBRA jawans had died, but said the forces, so had 50 Maoists. Strangely, only nine bodies were found. The Maoists took away the rest, said the officers.

The adivasis knew who those nine were — no armed radicals, but people like them, attacked while tending to their fields or at home. A 70-year-old’s breasts were cut off; a 25-year-old was tied to a tree and beheaded. This was no exaggeration by human rights activists; the victims’ relatives have petitioned the Supreme Court; the court has sent notice to the Chhattisgarh government.

But for the adivasis, this is old hat. The Supreme Court last year passed many orders — that adivasis dislocated by the government’s anti-Maoist campaign Salwa Judum be rehabilitated and compensated; their FIRs against the police be filed. Their government had ignored these and been voted back to power. It made sense for the adivasis to flee, rather than wait for the next bunch of COBRAs and other poisonous creatures to enter their homes.

But Gandhians don’t give up, obstacles only spur them on. Himanshu Kumar decided on a padyatra through the affected villages. Activists from around the country would tell the adivasis they weren’t alone, record their stories and encourage them to come for the jan sunwai.

Nothing of the sort happened. Talking to a troublemaker was one thing; allowing him to embolden the people quite another. The state made its own preparations. Four days before the padyatra, a newly formed tribal outfit took out a rally calling for Himanshu’s expulsion from the region. But non-tribal leaders addressed it. That day, Himanshu’s right-hand man, Kopa Kunjam, an adivasi in the forefront of rehabilitating his dislocated people, was picked up, charged with a six-month-old murder of a Salwa Judum leader, and sent to jail. Four tribal girls set to depose in court against their alleged rape by Salwa Judum SPOs, were made to sign on blank papers by the accused. Accommodation booked by Himanshu for the padyatris was cancelled, reportedly on the orders of the district collector.

On the day of the padyatra, Himanshu Kumar could not step out. Policemen guarded his home as a morcha led by Z P president Chhabindra Karma (son of Mahindra Karma, the founder of Salwa Judum), marched to his doorstep. At the same time, 39 activists, headed from Raipur to join Kumar, were made to return halfway, their jeeps seized by police and drivers of public buses warned not to carry them. This was for their own security, the police said, for thousands of tribals had gathered to oppose them. ‘We tribals don’t want outsiders poking their nose in Bastar’, said Chhabindra Karma. A strange objection, given the fact that the people behind his father’s Salwa Judum are ‘traders, contractors and miners’, and its first financiers were the Tatas and Essar — outsiders all. These are not allegations made by ‘Naxal supporters’, but by a government committee on ‘agrarian relations and land reforms’. Its report describes the bid to acquire tribal land for mining as the ‘biggest land grab since Columbus… Villages sitting on tons of iron ore are effectively de-peopled (by Salwa Judum) and available for the highest bidder’.

So there are outsiders and outsiders. As long as Himanshu Kumar remained in Bastar, outsiders of one kind would keep getting drawn there. With Operation Green Hunt fully operational, there could be no question of the Gandhian or others like him being allowed inside the forests. So the next development was Himanshu being asked by his landlord, a Z P employee, to vacate his house. And finally, to foreclose all possibilities, Chidambaram was told by the governor to stay away from the ‘jan sunwai’.

Chidambaram got his face-saver. Had Himanshu been a Gandhian of the new school, he would have used it to save face too, knowing all options had closed for him. But he decided to start a hunger strike, to introspect on where he had gone wrong. Perhaps it would inspire the government, the Maoists and the corporates to introspect too, he said. Governments aren’t given to introspection, so events will reach their logical conclusion. The adivasis will see all those legally fighting for them silenced or prevented from meeting them — the latest being Delhi School of Economics professor Nandini Sundar, a petitioner against Salwa Judum. This is exactly what the Maoists have been waiting for

Canada: A Nation governed by Neanderthal thugs ?

2009-12-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

Don't take my word for it. I normally do not reproduce. I write my own rant. But here is the well respected George Monbiot tearing into this country's governance... Sad, pathetic, alarming.. This country needs regime change.

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/30/canada-tar-sands-copenhagen-climate-deal

Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling

The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the greatest obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 1 2009
The Guardian

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works. In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.
It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.
After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.
In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation -- especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries -- could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the wellbeing of the world.

Why? There's a simple answer: Canada is developing the world's second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It's actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be be dug up -- unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation is the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.

Canada hasn't acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government's share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten ?8bn for mining the tar sands.

The purpose of Canada's assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.

> Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over it. Timber firms were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayoquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government's scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.

I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

Chandrayan and Lalgarh—First nations and Satellites

2009-08-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, it’s the same old bitchy lefty rant, again. Talking negative and avoiding the positive. Talking gloom and doom and not gushing all over about the boom and the bloom. Talking about the old poverty and not about the new wealth. Talking about destitution, crime and criminality and not about science, technology, highways, wireless suburbs and cement towers. Familiar speak! It’s the style of the doomsayers, the naysayers, the negative bloggers, and the folks who always see black before they see daylight. Well, I tried. I tried not comparing with China. I tried to understand India’s coming out, so as to speak from the closet of public ownership, central controls and central planning to the febreze-like fragrance of privatization, of the we-can-do-it-also buying out of foreign companies, of having the largest growth of billionaires, of sending rockets into space and nasty nuclear submarines that prowl unseen in the depths of unknown oceans.
Then I see that India has lost all contact this week, with Chandrayan, the Indian moon satellite, launched with major fanfare and drum rolls, only last October, 2008.
New Item today: “Chandrayaan-1 suffered from a star sensor failure and overheating. At 20:00 UTC on 28 August 2009 (29 August 2009, 1:30 AM IST), Chandrayaan stopped sending all its signals. The ground control had lost total contact with the spacecraft and the mission was declared over. Chandrayaan operated for 312 days in Lunar orbit, less than half as long as the intended two-year mission. ” Something shakes me out of this fabulously mesmerizing state of torpor that India Rising! and India Incredible! has sent me out into orbit, for quite a while now. “Industrial development and 9% growth,” the mantra, that even I have repeated to those who have the traditional “old” views about India. The folks who only know Mother Teresa and Calcutta Street dwellers and Bombay slums. Never mind Gunga Din and Sabu. And Ghandi, not Gandhi, in loin clothes, speaking in squeaky tones, as the apostle of peace and non-violence that inspired MLK, Desmond Tutu and a host of others. I have fought against these stereotypes. This is not what India is all about. The India of the old. So I disembark from my orbital spin. The Chandrayan moon probe cost 78 million dollars (very low cost compared to what China and Japan can do, never mind Europe an the US) and was mapping the moon, the world and carrying instruments from several countries, apart from Indian gadgets. How did it fail? How could that be? After all India’s ISRO has been touted as a crown jewel for years! It is embarrassing is it not, for Indian pride? Well, shit happens! Things go wrong. As an engineer, I know about Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, about Reliability and Maintainability, about Life Cycle studies. I know that the Hubble hobbled very soon after launch, but was also recovered. I know of the Challenger disaster and the short cuts and the unapproved procedures that sneak through. And lives are lost. Lives of young engineers, scientists and researchers. Science has setbacks. Engineering has economics to deal with. Failures are the stepping stones….Yeah! right. But that is not what troubles me.
My issue is the 78 million dollars that was not spent on the Adivasis (first nations) of the hamlet of Lalgarh and hundreds of other hamlets in India, who have now waited 62 years, since India’s independence, and still do not have access to drinking water, health facilities, schools, roads, irrigation and subsist on snails, rice and nothing else. This is their reality in the year 2009. They have nothing ! Zero! Zilch! And for 32 years the “left” government of West Bengal have engaged in racism, neglect, corruption, disdainful, arrogant violence against them. The Adivasis of Lalgarh, despite their historic rebellions against British rule, had kept quiet, all these years. But last October, about the time the Chandrayan was launched, they got madder than hell. They rose up and nearly declared a Hul, an insurrection which requires formal approval from their councils and which they take seriously and solemnly and the last time they did it was during the time of the British rulers of India. So, they formed committees, mobilized thousands, armed themselves with bows and arrows and tangis and chased the police, the bestial “left” goons out of town and took over. They reorganized clinics, built roads, set up schools, organized the local people for development activities and made sure that the “babus”of Kolkata (the dhoti-clad, red flag waiving, bureaucratic muckrackers) 200 KM away, stayed put! They dug up the roads leading to Lalgarh, felled trees and blocked the highways and declared themselves as the masters of their destiny. In seven months they did what the “left” goons never even thought about doing. The leaders of these parties built obscene mansions in the middle of the collapsing clay huts of the Adivasis. So now comes June 2009 and the Government of India in collaboration with the “left” government of West Bengal have launched a massive operation against the Adivasis. They have come with 50 companies of anti-guerilla special forces, minesweepers, armoured vehicles, spraying dyes from helicopters, so that the Adivasis can be spotted in the forests through satellite imagery. They have now occupied the main roads, the schools and the police stations. The men and women have left for the hills and the forests, so the Government forces cannot seem to do much about it. In fact the state has declared that after two months of their operations, the entire episode has been declared a failure. Now monsoons are here, so their heavy vehicles are stuck and the Adivasis in the forests have the upper hand. And how much has been spent so far, you ask? Over 1 million dollars has already been spent on the machine-gun toting, ninja-dudded anti-guerrilla forces occupying local town schools (the girls got baton charged for protesting the occupation of their schools) taking over local roads, marching up and down metalled roads, followed by screaming hysteric reporters from India’s new media.
But India has its priorities right, absolutely. There is a Chandrayan II that is in the works. This will include a vehicle that will roam the moon. There is no monsoon there. So the vehicle will not get stuck. And no soldiers with automatics are required, because there are no Adivasis there.
I think there is a link here. A link between satellites, engineers, dyes, advanced technology, bows and arrows, naked first nations peoples wandering in forests, satellites watching over them, development, food, water, clinics, health, education. I think I will think over this further.

If I were a Muslim woman… and if I was Bob Dylan!

2009-08-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

If I were a Muslim woman with a twelve year old child in my home country, Canada, stuck in Kenya while visiting, because the government of the country that I am a citizen of, Canada, subjects me to a DNA test to prove my identity before I can come back home, would I feel constrained? If I was the former President of India and a Muslim and a very well-known nuclear physicist, and I was frisked at an American airport and asked to remove my shoes, how would I feel? (These are common dignities extended to ex-Presidents Clinton and Carter, when they visit New Delhi and they are not told to go shoeless through the metal detector). And if I were a well-known Bollywood actor, with over seventy films in the house, and I was making a film on racial profiling and I was “questioned” for sixty-six minutes at Newark airport, because my name was Muslim, would I begin to feel angry and disconsolate? All of the above incidents occurred in the past few weeks and days and because they were somewhat high profile in nature, they came to our notice.

I do not feel that the Border Security Forces of the United States of America, other European and Canadian Security enforcement agencies and their various functionaries make bureaucratic faux-pas, because they are socially awkward or tactless,or because they are only humans and are prone to errors. I also do not think that it is a credible argument that they have an inherent tendency to bungle at the border due to the rushed circumstances. They never seem to be in a hurry, as I have known from several personal experiences when my flights were a close call. I do not think that they are simply doing their duty and following orders. I do not think that their interceptions are routine and part of due process. I do not think they are particularly culturally unaware and therefore make silly errors. I do not think that their training is inadequate, nor do I think that they are selected from a low IQ pool, because they have failed in other professions.

I do think that they have developed a common consensus, amongst themselves, that they can independently act out a vigilante spirit of retribution and justice, towards those of a particular persuasion, because the general mainstream media is reporting that such folks are causing problems around the world, by having several wives, restricting girls from going to school, murdering their own kids because they have dishonoured their families, passing laws that allow women to be raped by their husbands on demand, carrying out suicide bombings on coalition forces, wherever they are stationed. Such folks deserve some rough treatment! You do not need instructions from higher ups, to rough up such folks. There are things happenning in the Muslim world that are now very accesible to us, because the world media is reporting such events, without an iota of analysis about the nature of the forces that are carrying out such activities to further their clan controls and political objectives. I do think that Muslim activity is being deeply focussed on. I do not think that school shootings, wife beatings, murder sprees, gay killings, killing of doctors who assist in unwanted pregnancies, polygamy in certain communities, is being reported with the same intensity and detail as to the religion of the perpetrators.

I do think that the world vision of Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama, Christopher Hutchens and Norman Podhoretz have begun to crystallize in the Western world’s unwritten code of conduct towards the rest of the world. George Bush did leave behind a legacy. That they are Them and we are Us. The media today is replete with reporting on the behaviour of Muslims, all over the world. Muslims act irrationally and are the reason for so much conflict around the world. This is what the common person sees on CNN, CBC, FOX, ABC, NBC, BBC ---you name it. I will not provide you, in this blog with counter arguments, with news of the daily killings, by the dozens, of unarmed civilians by robot planes in the skies above Pakistan, Afghanistan and other parts of the world, with controllers sitting in bases in California, Nevada and Arizona. There are scores of blogs discussing these issues. Unfortunately, just as much as the world has become blog-savvy, the majority are still dependent on the TV visage of Lou Dobbs and Christian Amanpour for news that compels you to feel severe animosity towards the Muslim world and the ïllegals"of this world. If I were a Muslim man with a beard and travelling the world, visiting relatives, exploring my chances to better my future in this globally accessible world, I would feel mighty constrained and concerned at every border crossing.

If I was a white man, clean shaven, with a short-cropped hair, no tattoos, no piercings and trim fit pants, no hat and a passport that had no stampings with weird writing that had to be read from right to left, and a very creative name like Tom Henry Jones, I would feel better at the border. If I was a woman with a scarf on my head and a name like Suuad Muhamad and I was flying back home from Kenya to Toronto, I would be worried.

Strangely enough, Bob Dylan, last week, walking around a neighbourhood of Newark, was detained and actually taken to a Police station for claiming he was Bob Dylan and not having an ID to prove it. Dylan was simply taking a stroll incognito before a performance at a local show. A young policewoman in her twenties decided to nab him because as we all know Mr Dylan could sometimes sound pretty vagabondish, even at sixty eight. The young police officer refused to believe him. He was gentle, but not particularly persuasive. He went along for the ride and was released after a while and he went back to his concert. No DNA tests were done on him, as per the latest news I have. Perhaps we will get a song out of Mr. Dylan on this incident. He was the one who wrote about the Hurricane! A great song.

Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again? Or Coping with Cops?

2009-07-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

Lets "skip" Henry Louis Gates, famous Harvard Professor who got busted and handcuffed on the footsteps of his house.
Lets also skip the recalcitrant white cop Jim Crow(!)ley, who saw no reason to regret what he had done.
Lets skip Obama's redundant apology about his earlier stupidity remark. (He is such a suave expert at defusing situations. He makes everything look naturally righteous.)
Lets skip talking about Spike Lee also, who had made his famously weasley and emotional remark that Obama could be elected "Only in America."
Lets skip the discussion on profiling, as well.
Lets talk Cops. Black cops, white cops, brown cops, Asian cops, female cops. Big, beefy, muscle-bound, bullet-proofed, designer-shade wearing cops.
These days we are told that when a cop approaches you, you better be well behaved, be docile, be respectful, no matter how wantonly aggressive and intimidatory the cop is. And all your corporate designations,academic credentials can bite the dust. You better put on your nerd glasses, look stupid, flash a brilliant smile and say "ÿessuh! " Right away.

Why? It's the sign of the times!
A whole enigma has been created in North America, in these times about this arm of the law and street judge and I daresay, executioner!. There was a time when cops were careful. They were intimidated, because they knew that they could not always get away with a Mumia or a Huey. Now they dont have to. They draw their guns on kids playing in the park. Then they shoot them, when the kids dont feel they should be insulted and hesitate to spread in North end Montreal. And they are all people of colour. White kids playing in the park just do not get killed the way black kids do in Montreal and Toronto. And I do not think the ratio changes in the US. When cops cannot find anything, they provoke them. Cops are invariably badge wearing vigilantes who are in majority of cases educational wing-nuts or dysfunctional, socially aggressive, naturally muscle-bound bone heads. (Nothing exemplifies the muddle-headedness of Montreal cops when they went on strike recently and chose to wear camouflage outfits as a sign of protest! Who did they think they going into combat against? What message were they sending out to the community that they are supposed to serve? ) Ever seen a cop lately with glasses, slim, respectful, smiling, ready to shake hands first? Never!!They are trained to be non-community oriented, trained to be intimidatory, trained to ask questions based on negative stereotyping and a suspicious mindset. This was more a case of handcuff, arrest and then talk situation. Anybody who has some intellectual acumen, some sense of history and some political affiliation is going to react when a cop acts tough on his own home steps.Several witnesses and community groups have bowed out from the inquest into Fredy Villanueva's death, claiming the investigation has lost all credibility.

"Fredy Villanueva, 18, see picture above from Canadian Press, was shot dead Aug. 9, 2008 in a Montreal North park, while officers were trying to arrest his older brother, Dany. Two other men — Denis Meas, 18, and Jeffrey Sagor Metellus, 20 — were in the park at the time playing dice with the Villanueva brothers and were also shot, but survived their injuries.

Now I do know some cops in Canada. Extraordinary gentlemen. Sensitive about the communities they serve, seeking higher levels of management training, going out of their way to learn more and get familiar with Native Canadian realities, walking the beat to get familiar with the neighborhood. But they remain an absolute exception.

Roverarts.com reviews The Fourth Canvas

2009-07-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

One Story, Four CanvasesBOOKS - The Fourth Canvas, Rana Bose, TSAR Publications
By Ken Monteith
12.07.2009

If you ever wondered how painting and writing might be connected, this book could offer you an answer, as much in the story it tells as in the way it is told. Rana Bose’s The Fourth Canvas reads like a painting observed in stop-time animation. Both the process and the result are fascinating and entertaining.
Diana McLaren meets Pervez Chiragi in an outpatient clinic at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal. She is there for an abortion, he accompanying his wife who will soon die in childbirth. The child, Claude, a Pakistani-Quebecker, will become the centre of this story, but first we need to find out where Diana came from, how she came to be reading a Bengali newspaper in that waiting room that day, and how she will remain a part of Pervez and Claude’s lives.

An artist starts with the background, so we wash back to scenes that might evoke images of a classic Merchant Ivory film, with period costumes in the far-flung reaches of the British Empire. We see Diana’s family and their role in colonial India and her own return to the scene decades later to rediscover her roots. We meet the man she will leave in London, a man who will later seek to cross paths with philosopher and painter Guillermo Sanchez.

Bose whisks the reader to different parts of his canvas, through time and place, to observe in great detail small parts of this story of personal and political intrigue. A flat in London, an aging woman in Cuba, a Mother of the Plaza del Mayo in Argentina refusing to let the disappeared be forgotten. You will at first wonder what these diverse images have to do with one another, and then be surprised as they intertwine in unexpected ways.

The central theme revolves around Sanchez’s theory of empire and Claude, the Montreal academic whose life’s work lies in unravelling the philosopher’s past and the meaning of his oeuvre. His writings stolen or destroyed, the philosopher turns to explaining his theory in the form of a series of paintings. Years later some of these come into Claude’s possession. Add elements of personal intrigue, family histories, and the real-world application of this theory of empire.

In four episodes focused on different characters, Bose plants the clues to his mystery and then reveals their meaning at a pace that doesn’t plod, but doesn’t race either. He gives voice to the characters in a consistently convincing manner. The reader seems to be observing one story from varying perspectives and in lighting conditions that highlight different details.

It is probably a good thing that our enjoyment of the story does not depend on the validity of the central political theory, as it is questionable. To paraphrase that theory, this novel has four episodes of rise, but no episodes of decline. It is the canvas that completes our understanding of the world from Sanchez’s perspective. The reader leaves satisfied that the story will continue, perhaps on another canvas.

Ken Monteith is a recovering (former) lawyer working in the community-based AIDS movement in Montreal. He shares his own stories at http://talktothehump.blogspot.com.

Let Al Jazeera Broadcast to Canada in English

2009-06-06T08:12:00.000-07:00

Al Jazeera is one of the best mainstream Television Networks in the world. Yes! Surprise? Not really...Only if you view it regularly, you will appreciate its content and coverage (and not hear references to it only when some neurosis-bound psychotic goon and former mercenary in the pay of the US, currently in the hills of Pakistan issues taped messages). Canada does everything in its capacity to prevent Al Jazeera from entering Canada. It has extraordinary reportage from the farthest corners of the world. On Human Rights, on Democracy, on Popular Movements, some of the best Interviews, debates and forums on Art , Culture and Human Development. Al Jazzera goes into places and geographies that CNN, BBC, CBC in their claustrophic and eurocentric mentality have never heard off. For over three years I have been watching Al Jazeera while abroad and through Livestation, while in Canada. There are certain lobbies that want to keep Al Jazeera out, because of their own racist anti-Arabist bias.No matter what! That is how the Harper regime has aligned itself. Cheap propaganda is done about them. Al JAzeera is fair and never turns a blind eye to calling a spade a spade.Note that Al Jazzera is run by professional and progressive journalists and well-reknowned broadcasters formerly from CBC, BBC, NBC, researchers from the South Asian subcontinent, Israel, Africa, USA, even Canada and elsewhere and reporters who have had extraordinary experience working in South America, Africa, China, The Middle East. Bringing Al Jazeera into Canada will provide the people of Canada a new perspective on the world, which a majority of Canadians do not have access to. Al Jazeera covers the South, as well, while our current crop of TV networks primarily represent and lobby for the North.Al Jazeera covered Katrina, the Bolivian referendum, the Gaza carnage, Tienanmen, the Indian elections as an example, in far greater detail than any other network.
Dismissing Al Jazeera as "oil money, ben laden mouth piece etc" is shallow and steeped in mediocrity. Al Jazeera continues to provide in depth coverage of Latin American society, European debates, goes deep into the Black belt in USA, covers Australia, Pacifia, Phillipines, Palestine, Somalia, Japan and Korea. Let us benefit from this network, in these days of limited coverage and perspective.

Please forward widely.

Canadians deserve more options.
Support the Al Jazeera English application to broadcast in Canada!

Please take a few moments to contact the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) to explain why you support the Al Jazeera English application to broadcast in Canada. Send your comments by mail, fax or e-mail. Please see instructions below.

Why Al Jazeera English (AJE)?

1) AJE provides news and information not available elsewhere and from parts of the world that go unreported. There is also evidence that it serves as a 'bridge' to understand other cultures.

2) Canadians, as part of the most multicultural country in the world, would particularly appreciate its unique perspective on global issues.

3) Al Jazeera operates within a strict Code of Ethics and adheres to the rigorous regulation of Britain's regulatory authority, Ofcom.

4) Al Jazeera has a reputation for reporting stories no one else does. AJE received international acclaim as the only international English-language news channel which covered both sides of the Gaza-Israeli conflict.

5) AJE's editorial staff is made up of 50 nationalities and brings a truly international treatment of world issues.

6) AJE is widely respected throughout the broadcast industry, and has already won many major journalistic awards.

7) AJE is a distinct channel within the Al Jazeera group - with separate editorial staff, priorities and audience - but it is proud to be part of the Al Jazeera journalistic tradition.

Where does Al Jazeera English (AJE) broadcast?

After only two years on the air, AJE has a huge audience reach that is growing faster than any other international news channel in history. It is available in over 100 countries. Why not in Canada? We all understand the importance of having more media sources in Canada, especially independent and unconsolidated media channels.

Although Al Jazeera English offers its broadcast for free, live, streaming on the internet, Canadians should have the right to view its programming in high definition on television. Please act now and let the CRTC know that we want Al Jazeera in Canada. If the CRTC gives Al Jazeera broadcasting rights it could be available in Canada by satellite and digital distribution by the fall.

Support the campaign NOW by drafting a letter in support of the application and submitting it to the CRTC & ECGL through any of the following options:

http://www.canadiansforaljazeera.ca/crtc-steps.pdf
http://www.cjpme.ca/action_aje_2009_05.shtml
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/al_jazeera

PLEASE ACT NOW: All submissions are due Monday, June 8, 2009.

For more information, please visit the following campaign sites:

WEBSITE: http://www.canadiansforaljazeera.ca/discover.html
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=76766634563
TWITTER: http://twitter.com/canada4aljazera
ACTION ALERT: http://www.cjpme.ca/action_aje_2009_05.shtml

If you have any questions or concerns, please e-mail canadiansforaljazeera@gmail.com.

PLEASED!!!!

2009-05-17T05:06:00.000-07:00

1. That the people of India demonstrated that they are basically tolerant and want to live in peace with all communities and do not believe in murdering their Muslim brothers and sisters and other minorities as a national blame-game ethos.
2.They will listen, keep quiet, but go and vote with their conscience against extreme right wing incantations. You cannot buy the Indian voters with money and promises alone. They believe in a political philosophy. That of peace, for health and minimum prosperity for their families in their immediate surroundings. In the Bengal famine, the plaintive cry was "ma, ektu phan dao". Ma, please can I have some starch. Today, in a 6% growth economy, the cry is for a handfull of grains every day for the family, schools nearby, perhaps a cell phone to contact the brother who is away to earn in the city...and that would be enough. Indians do not want to indulge in excesses. Only the middle class do. Unfortunately they are nearing 280 million perhaps, by all accounts. And their needs are shrill. Someone needs to tame them..
3. The people of West Bengal do not feel that voting against the CPIM is a right wing vote. This must be respected and not dismissed as an "anti-left shift". It is a vote against goon politics and the Trinamool Congress gained so much, because the CPIM of Karat (both upstarts should resign as demanded by the former Speaker and Party colleague Somnath Chatterji), Yechury, Biman Bose, Konar and others are nothing but corrupt-bureaucratic-opportunist,flamboyant hucksters whose nose should be rubbed to the ground. In reality the vote of the people of Bengal was a vote of the Left Opposition.
4. Engaging in poll violence (Maoists) is a reactionary tactic. It demonstrates the lack of respect for people in general and a fancy for jungle-romanticism rather than popular mass resistance.
5. What I fear is that the Congress may have actually mastered what development by trickle-down- effect, is all about, from the perspective of the ruling classes. A practical mix of using reserves to generate more reserves and hoping that eventually this will ease poverty a little bit at a time. The people of India do not explode and paralyse the economy as in other countries. The Congress know that and so they will trudge along and the the leaders of the Left are so non-innovative that they do not know how to mobilize the public mood against imperial powers like the US.
6. So, instead you have the whiny, independent, left-NGOs dissipating and dividing the resistance with single issue heroics.
7. Watch out for the self-confidence of the Indian middle classes. When Shashi Tharoor wins with 100,000 votes--never having run before--it demonstrates a certain change, and his politics is BAD. These folks are demonstrative about their cosmopolitan savvy and nothing else.
8. Perhaps there should be a party of progressive independent women in India. Arundhuti, Shiva, Sarabhai and others. I do not think they would become turncoats.

Respect for Boal

2009-05-14T19:16:00.001-07:00

Augusto Ball died sometime last week in Rio. It was hardly reported in the mainstream press. Here was a man who took the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and transformed it into the Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal went beyond Brecht, when it came to political theatre. He crashed through walls, stages, barriers, obstacles, political opposition and intervened with bare hands, feet and the free will where bullets, batons and tear gas threatened to intervene.

There was a time when my theatre days meant combining the street, the sounds of people, the noise of social turmoil and breaking through stagey concepts and fixed audience seats and wading through audiences and making participation an electric moment and not a forced Aquarian love-in. Boal taught me those special out-of-the-stage experiences. Respect!

"You outlived the bastards"---Bruce Springstein

2009-05-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

Take the time and watch this. Will bring a lump! Save it and send it around, these videos, so others can see it as well...This stuff needs to be handed down....we are lost and drowned in a barrage of "mytake,your take--and assorted net feeds"--this is plain history.....

May 3 was Pete Seeger's 90th birthday, and the occasion
of a tribute and benefit for the Clearwater at Madison
Square Garden that featured dozens of performers (Bruce
Springsteen, Joan Baez, Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco,
Bernice Johnson Reagon, Billy Bragg, Ruby Dee, Steve
Earle, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Dar Williams, Michael
Franti, Bela Fleck, Tim Robbins, Dave Matthews, Rufus
Wainwright, John Mellencamp, Ben Harper, Ritchie Havens
and many more). The place was packed, and god knows how
many more will see much of the event on TV, DVD and the
Internet.

So here is the incomparable Pete, who famously wanted
to take an ax to the power cord when Bob Dylan first
performed with an electric guitar, being broadcast to
the world using all the technologies that humans have
yet devised. And yes, here were performers using lots
of electric guitars and speakers, as well as pipes,
drums, violins, banjos, and a capella voices. There
could be no more fitting tribute to a man whose music
and life have been so devoted to reflecting the
aspirations and struggles and power and contradictions
of the people, of our country and around the world. As
Walt Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

And at the center of the musical storm was the folk
singer and activist who contains and inspires
multitudes, with his simple banjo and the motto, "This
machine surrounds hatred and forces it to surrender."

Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! devoted the May 4 show
to the MSG event, adding many reflections of the
artists about Pete and his influence. Here it is on
YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dpb_vFknhA

Part 1. Bruce Springsteen's wry, moving, bitter-sweet
prose-poem tribute, and footage of This Land Is Your
Land from the Obama inauguration concert.

9:40

Part 2. Backstage: Pete, Joan Baez, Bernice Johnson
Reagon (Sweet Honey and the Rock).

10:04

Part 3. Backstage: Tom Morello (Rage Against the
Machine), Steve Earle, and more Pete, remembering
singing Waist Deep in the Big Muddy on the Smothers
Brothers, plus his Smothers Brothers historic
performance.

9:58

Part 4. Steve Earle, Ani Defranco, Dar Williams, Billy
Bragg (how Pete urged him to update the
Internationale).

10:10

Part 5. More Billy Bragg, Michael Franti, Tim Robbins
(mc of 90th birthday). Finally, Pete reiterates his
leitmotif: 'Little things lead to bigger things.'

5:57

To purchase the DN! episode, go to

This country needs regime change!

2009-04-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

The smug neo-liberalism of the Harper regime continues unabated!
CBC continues to get shafted in favour of Canwest etc. Have they not heard that there are at least some minimalist winds of change blowing to the south of our border? It seems these Tories are still from a pre-historic fish on the cave walls era. They do not move!

Here below is a letter from the Avaaz crew!

Dear friends across Canada,

In the last several days, an amazing 125,000 of us have come together to Save the CBC and Radio-Canada from damaging budget cuts. Our petition was delivered on Friday by Canadian celebrity Wendy Crewson and MPs from all 3 opposition parties to Parliament, while planes overhead flew large banners in English and French. Here's a picture of the petition delivery and press briefing at the House of Commons:

Our spectacular petition delivery drew reporters and TV cameras from all the major networks, but while major media like La Presse in Quebec ran the story, we had to wonder why editors at all the other corporate media outlets (and CBC competitors) didn't.

In a bid to break into the corporate media, on Saturday Avaaz volunteers passed out 2500 Save the CBC buttons to celebrities attending the Genie Awards, and encouraged a few of them, including Crewson, to speak out on stage for the cause. It worked! Some major newspapers mentioned the Save the CBC campaign for the first time (see below).

Next week opposition politicians will deliver our petition to Prime Minister Harper when Parliament returns to session, so let's still keep building our numbers by forwarding this email and asking people to sign up at this link:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_cbc

This tremendous response from Canadians is the beginning of the restoration of the CBC as a strong public service institution in our country. But there's a long way to go -- as feared, the Harper government is considering plans to bailout big media corporations like CanWest and CTV, while insisting on starving the CBC of funds. This is a terrible abuse of taxpayer money to support political friends and partisan media while strangling the independent public broadcaster.

Our members of parliament are all back in their constituency offices right now, and available to listen to us. If you know the name of your MP, click below to find their phone number and give them a call politely asking them to stand up for Canada's public broadcasters.

http://www.avaaz.org/canada_mp_phone_numbers

Or to send a message to your MP, use this action tool at the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting website:

http://www.friends.ca/yourMP

For a long time, the CBC has been forced to rely on advertizing for an increasing percentage of its revenue, making it carry American rather than Canadian shows, and focus on commercial rather than cultural content. This is part of a long term strategy to eventually privatize and sell off the CBC. But this aggressive strategy is now backfiring, and we are seeing a movement of Canadians come together to restore and protect the long term health of this national treasure. Let's keep up the pressure.

With hope and determination,

Ricken, Lisa-Marie, Laryn and the Avaaz Canada team

PS - here's the La Presse story (in French) that covered the petition delivery:
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/arts/television-et-radio/200904/05/01-843669-115-000-signatures-pour-radio-canada.php And here's a Globe and Mail story about the Crewson and the CBC at the Genies:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090406.AGENIES06ART1629/TPStory/?query=crewson ----------------------------

2009-03-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

The Man behind the Mutt
Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is your usual run of the mill blathering right wing knob head with a typical middle of the road Canadian Tory pedigree upbringing. No refinement here. No sense of history and furthermore a limited knowledge of Canada’s past political bearings.
Socially conservative, hooked to a pedestrian and servile admiration for a capsizing concept known as the “free market” and consumed by a typical faith-based hangover from the Mulroney-Harris era, Kenney does not have the chutzpah or the intellect to carry out a sustained intelligent campaign for typical conservative values, as a Joe Clark would.
Kenney is your average impulsive, mediocre dupe with a limited knowledge about the diversity of the people of the world and limited understanding of world history, nationalism, colonization, resistance and wars of liberation. BUT! Behind him is someone else-- a sharp little neocon twit with a fast rising David Frum mouth and clear cut US neocon DNA stream. This person, who is a shadow behind him is the real Kenney. This person, this ground hog and political skunk, who has been quietly working away, fulfilling his own personalized political career, does not flash his cards too often and not too openly. He appears once in a while, when the soil is warm. This is a person trained in the Goebbels school of propaganda warfare and a well-heeled Neocon with an American Enterprise Institute pedigree. His personal animosity towards Muslims in general and Arabs in particular(despite being an Ismaili) has been the driving force behind his rampant neoconservative tirades. This is a fellow who openly defended George Bush’s failing policies till his last day in office, spewing out open contempt for the Geneva Convention statutes against torture in a prominent article in the National Review. This man is a DC-trained lawyer and a management member of the right wing Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD). Do you wish to know who are the founders and philanthropic backers of the FDD? Well here they are:-Charles Krauthammer (failed doom-school philosopher and neocon fatherhead) , Eric Cantor (Republican Chairman of the Committee to Counter Terrorism), Richard Perle (we know this goon) , Steven Pomerantz (Former Director of the FBI), James Woolsey (former director of the CIA) Sen James Lieberman , Steve Forbes and Newt Gingrich and a whole host of supporters of AIPAC. No other DC right wing think tank has such a plethora of committed militarist war mongers and religious obscurantists and apologists for the American Empire. Velshi, who is a relative of the CNN Velshi, is rolling out the usual anti-Arabism that is often rampant in segments of his community and cocktailing it with his neocon pro-Israeli desperado blues. This is a man who trashed Kofi Annan in an unsubstantiated fashion as a crook, because of his questioning of US unilateralism and went on to question if Banki Moon could also turn out to be crook, as well. Irrespective of the failures of Annan and the future hazards faced by Moon, the fact is that they have shown some resistance to be being swept aside by the US-Israeli war machine. So here is the real Rasputin… It is a tragedy that Canada is ruled now by Bush cronies who have slipped and straggled across the border and are regrouping here.
Alykhan Velshi...Check this out "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alykhan_Velshi"

Gypsy Bandit- short story

2009-01-21T08:30:00.000-08:00

There was no tension. There was no electricity. She was as serene and as composed a night-bandit could be, as she strolled though the backyard and into the house through the patio door. The moon, poised over a chimney two houses down, lit her up like she was framed on stage facing an unreceptive audience that censured her every move. Her nearly translucent skirt swirled in an arc as she swung the door open, with no effort to be noiseless. Minutes before, she had watched furtively, as the boy in the house left raucously with his friends, after playing video games on the large LED screen. She smiled to herself as she entered the house. She felt quite comfortable and confident, as she made this satisfying home invasion.
She had a silky scarf wrapped around her head, a cotton blouse that fitted snugly around her neck and a long floral skirt that swirled on its own around her ankles from the weight of the little beads that had been sowed on to the hem. The light from the yellow moon cut through a half-open venetian blind above the sink and splashed on to the floor with matching flamboyance. Through the diaphanous skirt, her nimble and muscular legs could be seen flipping over each other like those of a burglar with a ballerina gene. She stopped around the kitchen table and picked up a handful of grapes that had been left behind in a bowl. The red juice from the seedless grape dripped from her lips onto the white linoleum floor. A mop stood on the corner, next to the fridge, ready to be used, she knew. She could, if she cared to, wipe all traces of this intrusion. But she could ignore it as well. Though the television had been switched off, it remained warm and static chatter projected out of it in a one hundred and eighty degree sweep.
She had walked in, as they had walked out. This place was known to her inside out, as she had entered and left several times now. She looked in carefully at the room adjacent to the living room. It was the room with the books in neatly assigned shelves. The pale wooden furniture and the red Persian rug thrown over the main couch was a poor choice, no doubt. It was all very ordinary. There was a bored, disenchanted housewife quality to the interior layout that she found quite distasteful. If she had her way she would change things around. She would create more space, get some low level furniture in darker hues, change the coffee table and throw some dark cushions over a corner rug. She looked around carefully. There was no one there. She made sure. She popped another grape in her mouth. A table lamp was on and the shade, a faded crimson, was tilted to the side. She went to the lamp and steadied the shade and made it symmetric to the floor. A stream of dust trickled down to the hand-sown doily placed below it. Then she turned the light off and looked at the shelf that held all the books along one wall. She pulled out a LED flash light from her pocket and started looking at the books on the shelves. The blue from the flash light was intense but focussed and showed up the fine cobweb that stretched from one of the books to the corner of the shelf. Somebody had not been cleaning up, that was for sure. While she was not interested in any specific book, she could be distracted, while looking through the titles. Time was on her hands. She always looked at the titles, over and over. She knew her way around, as if she had lived here all along. That is the way she felt every time she came here through the kitchen door.
The neighbour’s porch had its lights on in a watchful manner. The chair on the porch was not rocking gently, as she had timorously expected it to. She looked at it again. It looked back at her in a sideways glance, as if it had been watching her all along. The arms of the chair had embossed leather work done on them. They resembled the arms of a noble biker, with tattoos, silver bracelets and an air of experience and confidence, sitting there and watching over the neighbourhood. She stared at the chair intently for a while and then looked away and lit her LED lamp again.
She did not remember the shelf she had left it on. She moved a book that was bound in red and gold and had no title. She reached behind it, there was nothing there. She picked the book next to it and still there was nothing behind it. She went through several books, one after the other. One of them was a collection of stories by Victor Hugo. Another was a similarly bound copy of Jules Verne’s classics. The grapes in her mouth felt as if they needed to be burst open ever so gently with her sharp white teeth. The storm door in the kitchen was latched open and was creaking against the stop.
The sound of the static on the TV had died down by now. She removed a few more books. She could not find what she was looking for. It was the seventeenth of April, 1984, a calendar announced on the wall. Exactly to the date, sixteen years ago.
In the shadow of the lobby a grandfather clock stood gauntly making a faint ticking sound. She looked away from it and looked back at the rocking chair in the porch across. It remained steady, immobile, watching her intensely. She took some more books down, some Joseph Conrad, some Jane Austen, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet lay flat on its side, having been read recently perhaps. She was beginning to wonder if her memory had been ravaged that much. Was she who she thought she was? It was exactly sixteen years ago, she remembered again.
She remembered clearly the night, the incident, the shelf on which she had left it and yet there seemed no trace of it now. It was safely hidden away—behind the fifth book on the fourth shelf, from the left hand side. Or, was it the fourth book on the fifth shelf? She paused for a second, her lips pursed. She looked out at the neighbour’s porch again. The rocking chair remained stolid, immobile in anticipation. Then she took out the fifth and sixth books, a series of Ayn Rand novels that had been used as college text, dog-eared and forgotten, except to groom an entire generation with that special brand of righteousness that makes one feel that only the chosen ones can survive and be saved. She remembered the courses and the teacher, a certain Prof. Levin who insisted that Anthem and Fountainhead were supreme efforts in upholding the towering strength of the human spirit to remain free. Nothing beyond that.
It was just then, that she noticed that there was someone walking around in the lawn quietly. She looked back, turned around and clearly saw it was a cop with a flashlight. And her hand scraped against the last book on the fourth shelf and it fell down on the floor with a thud.
“A heavy book no doubt, ” said the sergeant with contemptuous cool, focussing the flashlight first on her face and then her form entirely from top to bottom.
“I am sorry, what are you doing here?” she demanded unfazed.
The sergeant was some what taken a back. “And do you live here?”
“Of course I do! What a question!” she shot back.
“I..I was not sure,” he said. “I was passing by and saw the back door open. I had to check. I used to live in this neighbourhood, several years ago,” he added.
“Ah! Did you? And what makes you think you can barge in to my house, at 2 am, through the kitchen door?” she demanded fiercely, as she noticed he had already started wilting and looking a bit confused.
“I grew up in that house next door. There!” And he pointed to the porch next door. “That was years ago. And there was a lady who lived in this house and would sleep walk. And now, when I was driving around, I noticed your form, moving around like a shadow first outside in the yard and then inside and I was reminded. I used to sit on that porch there and watched her then. And she would be searching all night for things she could not find. And in the morning she would fall asleep. ” As he said this, the rocking chair started nodding in the breeze. Its graceful arms relaxed and shining in the moonlight. “I never found out about her. I left for the Police Academy, always wandering what happened to that lady. Now, I am posted back here after sixteen years. I could not resist. Are you not that same lady?”
“Nope! I am not that lady. But I remember, a man walked into my kitchen one evening, wanting to borrow the moonlight I stood on and I said it was not available unless he gave me something in return and the man said yes, and gave me this bracelet that was on his arm and here it is still there after sixteen years. Are you that man? It was exactly sixteen years ago, today.”
“It is. Is it not? Sixteen years ago, today.” And it was then that the boy walked in through the front door and stormed into the kitchen.
“Mum! Yuh still up? Whach you doin’ in the kitchen? Why is the dude here? Have you been walking around again? Oh! Officer! Whaz happenin’ ?”
“Jamie, say hi to the officer! He is your….. ” and the words froze inside her. And she rushed to the door, as the Officer put his hat back on. The chair in the porch was nodding away vigorously as the moon swept through the lawn and climbed up the white clabber board along the chimney wall. The Gypsy thief was seen running across the lawn with the bracelet firmly held in her wrist and her skirt billowing in the night. The heavy book lay on the ground.
“Mum! Come back inside. It’s late.” The boy said that without conviction, as the Officer turned his flashlight off, looked at the buy furtively and then walked towards his patrol car.
In the distance, she bounded over neighbour’s yards, over stiles and into the rolling hillocks in the distance.

I feel like writing a book called The New India is Shit!

2008-12-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

So much bravado, so much arrogance, so much "we are like that only" style of dismissiveness for others and adulation for self, while stewing in dis-hygiene, incapacitating poverty, rabid communal hatred, upstart warmongering by the filthily richy-rich sons and daughters of the nouveau riche, candle-light superficiality, sucking up to the hyperbolic crank-up on “India’s 9-11”, ranking segregation between men and women, caste and class, a new–found dysfunctional sense of priority towards infrastructure building (concrete and steel highways and high-rise bravado and vedic spas instead of emphasis on irrigation, rural roadways, healthcare), airports that boast "like singapore" hoardings while slums next door abound with rats that themselves shrivel away in disgust and panic, dirty diesel power for polluting mega-complexes instead of green energy for the poor for their pumps and for their childrens' schooling and a corporate class that fucks around with buzzwords instead of making the workplace neat, clean, innovative and quality workmanship oriented. We are ready for “international acquisitions” they say, while they still run the books in double, domestically, with cash transactions galore and zero corporate governance culture. Not that international companies and banking institutions have anything to be proud of when it comes to ethics and fair play given the record of the Worldcom, Junk bond resellers, Enron, Tyco variety to the Lehman, Bear Stearns ilk, but at least the bravado that goes along with India Rising and wanting to acquire “phoren” should have some erudite, ethical and dignified bearings, that is truly evocative of India’s claims to classiness?

So, then you flick on the tube. There are the zillion and one pelvic-thrust channels where horrendously un-sexy males and females throw themselves at each other with crude coital dance moves speeded-up by studio edits to camouflage alu-baigun bodymass-uncool and mass-hysteria-bound choreography. What does it do for the masses? It simply unleashes the repressed sexuality of the crude and balls-scratching, gutka-chewing bystander variety and then attacks ensue on women, followed by the acid-throwing, bride-burning, lumpen criminality, and further followed up by police cover-ups, bribes and “encounter killings” as a continuing saga of the shitty culture that has evolved in India since “liberalization.” Even the left and their darlings are not immune to such publicity seeking, gas-filled bravado in their magazines. The mainstream newspapers and media, you ask? What a horrendous litany of copy-cat journalism and repetitious official-speak churned out CNN-style with machine-gun sound accompaniment, to peddle the same ultra-nationalist claptrap. There is not a single Public Service Radio or TV forum where issues are discussed with fairness, dignity, seriousness and detailed data. Even the much projected and liberated face of NDTVs Barkha Dutt now engages in shallow all-over-the-place Christiane Amanpour- style hoity-toity icon-hugging journalism, lately. Her record on both Kargil and now the shrill jingoism from Mumbai really cuts a swathe of pathetic journalism never seen before. My generation stood dignified against war-mongering in 1962, questioned journalists when they strayed away from the truth, fought against backlashes against minority communities. Now there is very little public protest from this new upstart, horrendously spoilt, a-historical twerpy generation who hold candles in one hand and ask for Pakistan to be carpet-bombed.

Bureaucracy streamlining, facilities improvement, you ask? A little here and there, of course. The airport clearances work a little better. But a jealousy-bound inquisitiveness, scrolling through all pages (despite a long queue of people waiting behind) , asking silly geographical questions about every country visited if Arabic writing is seen on the passport, calling in an equally uninformed and untrained boss to verify mundane visa date issues that are abundantly clear, only to exercise some cranky authority. All this because culturally and infrastructurally, India has not progressed beyond the feudal stranglehold that has ruled her from the zamindari times. The culture that nurtures lack of respect for others, for propriety, for service to customers, for encouraging some semblance of order in a public place or in a public process. Chaos, bedlam, hoodlum behaviour thrives because it is the newly rich and the urban brats who promote such irreverent behaviour. Not the folks who come from the villages and rural towns. Only the city half-breeds that need this riotous process to fulfil their craving for commodity products and upscale services.
Let’s consider some services. Hospital gadgetry in private institutions and 3G technology make Indians vociferously proud, whereas the lack of land lines, broadband cable, new electrical cabling and town hospitals are not questioned and after sixty years of independence and innumerable constitutional guarantees, the sick of India lie dying, and bleeding on the floors of hospital emergency corridors. Education you say? It is a massacre for the poor and the lower and middle classes. There is no hope in hell for them to receive any semblance of a decent education, while private schools and colleges boast of Eton, UK, Australian and other board equivalences, so your child “can go global from day one.” What a slap in the face for the rest! You go to buy a data card for your wireless access and now with the Mumbai carnage you need to have an Indian address, which means an Indian document like a passport, voter card, electric bill and if you are a traveller from abroad and don’t have any of the above, they ask you to get the name of any local friend or relative to own it for you! So where is the trace on the traceability and where is the accessibility you want to create for tourists and travellers from abroad? Everything has a dodgy way out and a dodgy excuse to bypass the rules that have been instituted to ensure due process. When you go to swipe your credit card for a purchase, the modem device, hangs up on you saying- No dial tone. In a bored and irreverent voice, the sales clerk’s first reaction is “Give another card.” A second card does the same. A closer examination reveals that the telephone line from the swiper to the terminal box has been chewed up on the walls or the connectors dislodged by baby roaches living inside the box. “ It’s your card, ” he insists, until, I open the terminal and clean up the box and it works. Then the reply is, “But it was working yesterday.” Ah! So these are these intolerable NRI bastards now, you say! Always asking for NRI services. Go back to your NRI heavens! But you Resident Indians are still advertising slaving shit like “housing suitable for NRIs”, when we cannot make houses for Indians! Of course NRIs as they have been known for years are a despicable lot. Arrogant airs, a few acquired nuances from a few years abroad, which they want to heap on unsuspecting clerks at every opportunity till they either feel totally guilt-ridden and miserable or disproportionately defensive till no resolution is possible. But NRIs are part of India. Because it is the wealth and style of the NRIs, their needs, their nuances that you promote on Bollywood, on CNN-IBN, NDTV , in the Times of India and on The Telegraph in your style sections, in your culture cruises and in your aping pictorials on fashion and peddling of commodity trash. It is you, who have promoted a quest for NRI culture and then you are gasping at the indefatigable demands of the sullen NRI folks! When non-resident Canadians come back to Canada, they are not categorized and slotted and jerked around, because systems and services do exist in Canada which are somewhat acceptable and better than the services they get in the countries they live in (including Europe and of course the United States is a disaster when it comes to health services). So why don’t Resident middle-class Indians, that extraordinarily ambitious, mindlessly suffering and pathetically jingoistic mass which is so keen to take on the world, not exercise some quiet goals to really become world class in services, as the Chinese have done? The same Chinese who sixty years ago were in far worse shape than us Indians at the time of liberation.

The price of food, of staples has become forbidding. India’s agricultural crop warehouses are few and not properly designed. There is inadequate cold storage facilities. It is a rat’s paradise. Potatoes, rice get thrown out every year in large proportions. Yet, the emphasis on infrastructure building has no allowance for storing food for the poor. The poor and the rural folks who are still the backbone of India’s GDP do not eat well. Their lands have been usurped to build cars or converted to make breakfast cereals for the NRI-loving middle class. Who can afford the Spencers, the Reliance and other grocery chains? For sure not 90% of India’s population. So, what is this liberalization shit all about? So farmers can kill themselves in droves? So, hapless peasants can come to the towns and cities and build shanties on pavements and “disfigure” and decimate the beautification dreams of the Rotary and Lions Club types? Out of 640, 000 villages in India, seventeen percent have 60% of its wealth. In the villages there are no developed food distribution centres. Even the well to do in the villages have no access to shops. And we are building concrete super-highways, some even eight lanes with automated toll booths and flying over these villages and providing access to SEZs and other industrial hubs. Already the SEZ extravaganza seems to have dulled its shine. Because it was all shine and incorrect infrastructure anyway for growth and development.

Bengal and Kerala are the only states that allow cow slaughter. What a piece of minority consciousness, because the governments are “communist” ! A friend, an engineer who has often been asked to be consulted on the process engineering involved, says it is such a dastardly unhealthy quagmire that he cannot believe it. Blood, guts, sliced and chopped with no hygiene, no clean-ups, while crows pick away on the meat as it travels down a processor. No controls! Scanty solid waste management and despite millions spent from World Bank funds, nothing really was done and it turned out the funds were all spirited away into political coffers. And there are more illegal slaughter houses than the official ones. They slaughter and clean up before 9 am and disappear. And the arrangements are all worked out with the police and the inspectors. Even the cows that are slaughtered are not young cows, but the old and possibly diseased. And India is supposedly turning a corner. When you record all this, Resident Indians curl up in anger and deflect all issues and defend the motherland like only they have the right to do so.

Books are now being written about why India should turn the tables on the Nehru era “socialism.” About what a disaster centralized planning and nationalized critical sectors have been for India. About how it has kept India shackled and incapable of going global and how now the cult forces around the-world-is-flat ideology have shown up India for what it is truly capable of! Once again the copy cat intellectualism, lauding of a few NRI corporate heroes and heroines, speaking tours for a few Harvard and Chicago NRI professors, quoting profusely from the Boston Consulting Group and Mckinsey etc to make a case for why India is better than China, because China, even with its better developed infrastructure is hamstrung by its polity, while India with its non-existent infrastructure is “democratic” and therefore ready for more FDI. An exercise is being carried out to make a case for a understanding the “plurality in India’s diversity.” India’s brilliant capabilities, technological strength will be unleashed soon for the world to make use of. Just be patient with our lumbering and corrupt ways. Nobody mentions that all the IITs and the IIMs, whose graduates have been in heavy demand for the past several decades and who are often the bright stars that have turned around many of these upstart companies, were all the products of the “Nehruvian thinking ” that were part and parcel of the “planning” (discredited dirty word) that went into this country’s growth after the British left it in a virtual bureaucratic never-land. I never thought I would have to defend Nehru, but what else is there to do with all these Harvard-inspired gurus floating around giving lectures on how India should loosen up more and lie down and spread its arse more to be waylaid.

Mumbai Blood

2008-12-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

Mumbai Blood.

Dec 1, 2008

Sometime ago
When left the Brits, to go home,
They left behind some towers
Some palaces, some domed houses
To become hotels of 5-star lore.
Now the press and TV
And the repeat-diseased media
Have discovered the word iconic!
Iconic, like the Plaza hotel in New York!
People who go there are the
People that matter or care.
So the Taj and Trident got the coverage
While the peasants and workers, so bucolic,
Who built Mumbai lay bleeding and bloody
On the railway platform
Which got no coverage.
Bucolic, not Iconic!
And some silly clods in black ninja duds
Rope down from an old copter
After the fact,
And play to the camera
While 10 boys with nasty eyes
Do what they had to do
Wade ashore
Mow down the gentle folks of
Of Mumbai, bloody Mumbai.

Now Obama-nation needs something
They need the peace in the Asia nation,
So he can clobber the Taliban,
The same Taliban they nurtured
Coddled and played footsy with
When the Soviets roared and rumbled.

Mumbai bloody Mumbai
Where Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians
Have lived together with Hindus,
Rich, poor, builder, shopper, sailor and tradesman
Before the children of midnight were born
In 1947 dawn!

Mumbai, Bloodied Mumbai!

Spike Lee says "Only in America..!!"

2008-11-06T05:34:00.000-08:00

"Only in America...?

Last night I saw Spike Lee slide into the CNN camera zone, wearing the hip-hoppest possible shades, and declare with his mouse-like glibness and mock authenticity that Barack's triumph was possible, "only In America!!!..."

I guess the gushy-mushy, wishy-washy season is here again after several months of relentless, near hysteric tension provided by the gutter vibes from the McCain side and the spuriously clean, rock and roll show from the Obama side. And I love rock and roll!

Then there was the CNN wall-to-wall "best political team's" nerve-racking war-like intensity. So enthralled was we, the people, with the I-phone like magic board of the CNN, the swivelling and zooming camera and the swishy boom-box missile strike sounds that accompanied every few words of wisdom, that we thought we were gearing up for an inevitable civil strife. My sister in DC called up to say that some vile night riders were stealing her precious Obama signs and so she was coddling them and bringing them home every night and putting them out next morning again, dutifully. The line had been drawn. You were with us or with them! Intense, man!

But Lee! Muh main hip dude and black intellect who asked us all to Get on the Bus ! And even made a film about Malcolm--let me ask you a question.. Did you not hear of Evo Morales? Leader of the Aymara Amerindian people, a cane field worker at the age of six, lived and grew up in an adobe hut 6X6 square , and got 54% of his country's vote (with an 85% turnout) to become the President of his country, Bolivia, despite a rigorous and hostile campaign by your America? And he is holding fast, despite all the threats of subversion and the nasty attitudes from the rich and America-deprived folks in his country. Did any famous hippity filmmakers of Bolivia say "Only in Bolivia!" ?

Spike, my man! Bolivia has a mix of 55% Amerindian ethnicities (who have traditionally never united together for a cause), with 15% whites and 30% mestizos. Morales has won repeated affirmations of his Democratic Socialist movement since his first victory. He did not hide behind generalities like Change and Reform. He made no bones about using the S word!

My question to you, Mister Lee, is "Was America ready for a Black woman president? Was America ready for a Native American?" I don't think so! Never mind the mysogyny that spilled out when Hillary tried getting elected, irrespective of her half-brilliant notions, compared to Barack...America was not ready for a woman. Never mind Black women. And never mind a Navajo or a Sioux.

Barack was a perfect candidate. Half Black. Half white. Even though everyone insists he is the first African-American President. Whatever happened to his mama? Huh? Suddenly, she don't count? When it comes to his upbringing, his white grandmother gets all the kudos. But when it comes to his identity, he is Black, outright?

Remember the old polarization in US society'? Between the die-hard right wing-nuts and the isolated , disparate left wingers, there was the foggy-bottom variety called the "liberals" composed of Pelosi-Kennedy Democrats, Independents and some Republicans, who gave a rat's arse for the poor of America. America has changed for sure. Whats' changed is the diversity. There is now a huge and semi-well-to do middle class buffer zone, which is intensely inter-racial and diversified and loving consumer life madly (just like in many other parts of the world). They are children of the soixante-huitards. More Asians, more Hispanics, more people of mixed race, all kind of good-hearts, out of liberal colleges and into the post-web business milieu, doing so much better. Better than the 100 million Americans who are officially classified as poor. Notice Barack never talked about the poor ! Of course he knows about them. But his agenda was pre-set and pre-calculated. He was going to mobilize the millions of the new "middle-class"" children of the old liberals, children of first generation immigrants, succesful post X, Y, Z gen-ers who love nebulous stuff like CHANGE, HOPE and Yes, We can! And of course are righteously disgusted by the neocon thugs of the past eight years and where it has taken America.
Spike, my man! I want to talk to you about another Michelle...not Obama. Michelle Bachelet of Chile, President !. Also from a Socialist background. A woman. Did Michelle say "Only in Chile!"? Did any of Chile's famous filmmakers utter the same? No!When you say "Only in America", you spit on the rest of the world's people and their intelligent ability to select their own leaders, independent of race, colour or creed.

Here is a list of Fifty-seven WOMEN who were elected democratically ( with much larger voter participation than in the US) when Barack Hussein Obama was but a toddler. Read on! Dude! Did the hippity hop filmmakers of these 57 countries (including dour old Canada) say "önly in our country!!" ?? I dont think so. America has done well, this election. America has hopefully pulled out of these last 8 years of neo-con hell (definitely not out of the Reagonomic immiserisation of the poor.) So, here is the list for you. I think it is time, y'áll stopped, pondered and thought twice, before you put down the other nations of the world, so easily.

CountryPrime Minister or President
Argentina President Maria Estella "Isabel" Martínez Cartas de Perón 1974-76
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner 2007-present
BangladeshPrime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia 1991-1996, 2001-2006
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed 1996-2001
Bolivia President Lidia Gueiler Tejada 1979-1980
BulgariaPrime Minister Reneta Indjova 1994 -1995
BurundiPrime Minister Sylvie Kinigi 1993-1994
Canada Prime Minister Kim Campbell 1993
Central African Rep.Prime Minister Elizabeth Domitien 1975-1976
ChilePresident Michelle Bachelet Jeria 2006-present
Dominica Prime Minister Mary Eugenia Charles 1980-1995
Finland President Tarja Halonen 2000-present
Prime Minister Anneli Tuulikki Jäätteenmäki 2003
France Prime Minister Edith Cresson 1991-1992
GermanyChancellor Angela Merkel 2005-present
Guyana President Janet Jagan 1997-1999
HaitiPrime Minister Claudette Werleigh 1995-1996
President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot 1990-1991
Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis 2008-present
Iceland President Vigdis Finnbogadóttir 1980-1996
India Prime Minister Indira Gandhi 1966-1977, 1980-1984
President Pratibha Devisingh Patil 2007-present
Indonesia President Megawati Sukarnoputri 2001-2004
Ireland President Mary Robinson 1990-1997
President Mary McAleese 1997-present
Israel Prime Minister Golda Meir 1969-1974
JamaicaPrime Minister Portia Miller Simpson 2006-2007
Latvia President Vaira Vike-Freiberga 1999-2007
LiberiaInterim President Ruth Sando Perry 1996-1997
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 2006-present
Lithuania Prime Minister Kazimicra Prunskiene 1990-1991
Malta President Agatha Barbara 1982-1987
MoldovaPrime Minister Zinaida Grecianii 2008-present
MozambiquePrime Minister Luísa Dias Diogo 2004-present
New Zealand Prime Minister Jenny Shipley 1997-1999
Prime Minister Helen Elizabeth Clark 1999-present
Nicaragua President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro 1990-1997
Norway Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland 1981, 1986-89, 1990-96
Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto 1988-1990, 1993-1996
Panama President Mireya Elisa Moscoso Rodríguez 1999-2004
Peru Prime Minister Beatriz Merino Lucero 2003
Philippines President Maria Corazon Aquino 1986-1992
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo 2001-present
Poland Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka 1992-1993
Portugal Prime Minister Maria de Lurdes Pintasilgo 1979-1980
Rwanda Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana 1993-1994
Sao Tome & Principe Prime Minister Maria das Neves Ceita Baptista de Sousa 2002-04
Prime Minister Maria do Carmo Silveira 2005-2006
Senegal Prime Minister Mame Madior Boye 2001-2002
South KoreaPrime Minister Han Myeong-sook 2006-2007
Sri Lanka Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike 1960-65, 1970-77, 1994-00
President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga 1994-2005
SwitzerlandPresident Ruth Dreifuss 1999
President Micheline Calmy-Rey 2007
Turkey Prime Minister Tansu Çiller 1993-1996
UkrainePrime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko 2005, 2007-present
United KingdomPrime Minister Margaret Thatcher 1979-1990
Yugoslavia Prime Minister Milka Planinc 1982-1986

Turtle on a Post

2008-10-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

A Turtle on a Post

I got this from an American friend.

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher whose
hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a
conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah
Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President .
The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.'
Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.
The old rancher said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you
come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post
turtle.'
The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued
to explain. 'You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't
belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and
you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.

Humour is great, but what a lot of people do not realize is that it is time for America to be serious about issues...and the feckless US media should stop making talking points about Palin's wardrobe (now that is a fantasy, is it not!) while the whole world is waiting for America to change (and I am not talking about the change that Obamaites talk about). America has caused so much grief all around the world with wars of aggression ...(170 unauthorized invasions of various countries since the first one in the Phillipines in the early part of the previous century) and the American electorate is not talking about the 1.5 million civilians who have died in Iraq FOR NOTHING... or rather because of a completely false and planted intelligence set-up. NO one cares if others die in this world... Americans consider the world only started making tallies of who did what first only from 9/11 on, when terrorists hit American soil for the first time... the same terrorists (almost all 19 of them were Saudis who had legitimate visas for the US and did not sneak in through Canada) whose boss was financed, nurtured, mollycoddled and Red-Bulled-up to beat up on the Soviets in Afghanistan... the same medieval Saudi Kingdom with whom the entire American ruling class (and not just the Bushes) hob-nob, flirt, sleep and make business with, till today.

More than 40% Americans for sure will vote for Palin and McCain. It is not because they are "gullible" or "simple-minded" people. That is simplistic, by itself. Such a large number of Americans are not your usual and rejectable "rednecks." That would also be a simplistic conclusion, as well. In fact, the majority of Americans who will vote for the Republicans are , in general, decent, honest,folks, who do put in a lot of thinking before they cast their ballots. They are not trailer park rednecks and tobacco-chewing cowhands. What the "left"Liberals in the Democratic camp (because there are a majority of Right NeoLiberals in the Dems, who are simply a flip side of the Republicans ) do not as yet comprehend or will never get down to understanding, is that the whole American ethos of unilateralist supremacy in all matters of the world ("we are stronger, we are better, we know better, we dont need the world, the world needs us and should follow us and not emulate us, we are above the law, we are fixers") starts all the way from 1492. Not because of the Soviet Union. Not because of China. Not because of Stalin. Not because of Ay-Rabs and Eye-ranians. It started, when Columbus landed. From then on, the notion of "frontiersman" "pioneer" "settler" has emerged as euphemisms for a Biblical belief in the superiority of the chosen people, Judeo-Christians. They are chosen. They save. The rest are not chosen. They ought to be saved. And the rest who were quietly farming and irrigating their lands in the plains and had quaint spiritual ethnicities like Seminole, Choctaw, Mohawk, Navajo, Iroquois, Cherokee were immediately called "savages" and herded into concentration camps. 12 milion First Nations (or Native Americans as Americans call them) were killed off by small-pox, STD, plain starvation tactics, massacres and deprivation. No one talks about this holocaust anymore. These were Asian brothers and sisters who were murdered and annihilated. They were converted from farmers to herdsmen first, (There were no horses in North America, until the white man arrived and yet bare-chested, war-hooping "Indians" with deadly tomahawks and Winchesters are what we are told confronted the "pioneers" when they first landed) and then were pushed out of their lands. Yet we never hear of Indians as farmers! That would be too quaint ! They were savage herdsmen right from the start. Then the savages had to be "saved". "Saving" is a special attribute that only Europeans know how to practice. AS Kipling had said,

Take up the White Man's burden -
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride

But saving was not on the cards for the Natives. They were simply made to disappear. And then you needed folks to work on the farms, the plantations where the tobacco, cotton needed to be grown. So you imported slaves from Africa. And then in the early part of the 20th century, the Americans, as their economy thrived, got their first chance to practice overseas expansion. Extend the white man's burden. Phillipines was the first adventure. So the US defeated the Spanish in the Phillipines and started their new imperial legacy. Most Americans do not like to know all this. Most of them do not know their own history. Most Americans do not like to know that Empire has anything to do with them. That was a British thing.
The American Literacy society has found a total of 21-23 percent - or 40-44 million - of the 191 million American adults (defined as age 16 or older) at Level 1, the lowest literacy level. Although many Level 1 adults could perform many tasks involving simple texts and documents, all adults scoring at Level 1 were counted. All these people believe what the church says, what the Pastor says, the Headmaster says, the local Police Chief says, what the local Republican and Democrat Congressmen and Senators say, what CNN and CBS says. They believe in the sacrosanct nature of the US media and its so-called unbiased reporting. The problem is that US media does not even begin to cover the skin of the teeth of truth, as it happens all over the world.

For all this time, the world could not do anything with US might and power. Because the world was powerless. The US was a mighty tiger. Not a paper tiger. A tiger with a nasty bite. The world kept its distance and nodded, just to keep the peace and the loans coming and the economic cajoling followed from the IMF and the WB. Turns out both these institutions have CEOS who are now under indictment for the crassest of social and moral ineptitude. Nepotism and asking for sexual favours from subordinates. Its the neocons, then, who made the most unpredicatble blunder. No one expected in their wildest Socialist paroxysms that this is what would happen. The necons really did what can be called a major F-up for their own kind. They brought America to its knees. The American economy has been trashed and America needs to borrow from the world to survive. It is said that the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is about 3.1:1. By contrast, when
Brazil's debt-to-GDP ratio went up to 0.51:1 it received a stern rebuke
from the IMF.
Eric Margolis from Toronto says "An empire built on debt, is an empire built on sand.
The US government now owes a staggering $10 trillion. American consumers
owe $14 trillion. Welcome to the United States of debt. Twenty-four
trillion dollars is a gargantuan sum, even for the mighty US economy. It
is now clear that America's once lauded `prosperity' was built on runaway
debt rather than productivity or innovation.
At the end of the 19th Century, the dying, debt-ridden Ottoman Empire
became known as `the sick man of Europe.' Under the Bush administration,
the United States has become the Sick Man of North America." Now the American establishment, including Obama and McCain, want to have concerted action to save the "world economy." I'm sorry dudes! The world don't need saving. The world will survive, after lurching around a little bit, despite the fact that the ol' Britannia still determines the Bank to Bank Libor rates. Even the Euro which has is not indexed to any real measure or reserve is also in doldrums. Perhaps, we will soon have a new world currency that will be called a WORLDO, or GLOBO, controlled from Shanghai, Mumbai, Rio and Caracas? A true revival of the Bandung non-aligned world of the fifties!

Something that went nearly unnoticed was that Pakistan's new headman Asif Zardari went begging to China, cap in hand. Now the United States has been propping up the Pakistani army at 1.2 billion dollars per annum. The Pakistani chief did not go to DC, as has been the tradition for the past several decades. Instead he went to China, who has 19 trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves.

There is something not right about the "red hordes of Mao" bankrolling the United States. Something has gone awry somewhere and Sarah Palin, sitting like a turtle on a fence post has no clue about what to do and how to get off the post.

The super sidelined Canadian Elections and Questions to ask!

2008-10-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

Questions to be raised at the nearly Secretive and Unknown-to-the-world Canadian Elections, 2008.

As stubbornly un-recalcitrant and morbidly pleasant Canadians, we must as a minimum ask the political leaders of all stripes, during these highly understated and sidelined elections, the following questions. One does not have to be an economist, a member of a radical political organization, a heavily grant-subsidized NGO activist, a hooded chain-strapping proto-punk walker, a card-carrying trailer-park shit-disturber or a miserably defunded theatre activist, to ask these questions, when they knock on your door. You just need and ought to be a wee bit fed up and pissed off with all the posturing and hypocritical newspeak and grim-spin that is peddled interminably by the handful who control the tube and put out the completely monopolized newspaper network bandwidth:
1) What regulatory mechanisms are in place in Canada already, to control banks and other lending agencies to prevent predatory credit being extended to entice poor people who do not earn enough to buy the houses, that they may like and then lose them down the road? And if they do not exist, what do the leaders' platforms say specifically what they would do on this issue, when elected, as far as lending mechanisms go?
2) What formal rules and regulations are in place to stop speculative and insidious up-market evaluation of homes and other assets? What are the rules in place now? Not guidelines. In other words, while the so called free market allows prices to be determined in general "by supply and demand" and also the availability of credit (and therefore the relationship with prime rates) what mechanisms are there to evaluate the worth of a house? In industry there are certain prevalent understandings in Canada, that a certain percentage above Earnings before Interest Payments, Depreciation, Taxes etc are a reliable indicator of the "value" of an enterprise. What are the guidelines for house value (other than the supply and demand aspect)?
3) Why is Canada not embarking on a strategic and drastic program to introduce a major economic switch over to green technology in infrastructure, power, housing, roads, transportation, factory heating/cooling, packaging, refuse disposal, clean environmental practices like some European countries have chosen to and make a remarkable and immediate shift away from fossil-based technology? Almost all of these European countries have a balanced budget, have a steady GDP and not as serious an unemployment or inflationary situation.
4) Why is the so-called refined, balanced and forward thinking nation of Canada continuing to be beholden to a lying, bullying, deceptive, religious fundamentalist, neo-con supported oil lobby whose political premises are meager, shortsighted and confined to a world outlook that does not go beyond the oily window panes of greasy spoon bars in oil patches, where pot bellied, beer swallowing, red meat hogging, cowboy-talking investment bandits and other ogres inhabit? Why is Canada not adopting a dignified distance from the policies of the United States in foreign policy, on the environment, in economic policy and banking?
5) What is Canada doing about reinforcing its enormously envied public health care system and not diverting more funds into it to stop the long queues outside hospitals and to enable immediate availability of family doctors on demand? Why are some parties, even discussing the possibilities of privatizing any aspect of the health care system? Why are recently arrived immigrant doctors and long time citizens, as well, with MDs from their own countries, who have significant academic and practical training, driving taxis in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver? Because they don't "speak Canadian"?
6) What business does Canada have in Afghanistan? It is not a UN mission. It is a NATO mission supported by a handful of nations, bulk of whom are beholden to a faltering empire known as the United States. Afghanistan has NEVER been subjugated. Not by Mongols. Not by Greeks. Not by Persians. Not by the British or the Soviet Union. These are fierce, proud mountain people, who love their country and do not want foreigners to occupy their land. The Taliban and their primitive supporters will eventually be taken care of by the Afghan people themselves. They will themselves throw out all invaders and occupiers including the foreign fundamentalists and terrorists who live in the caves there. But as long as westerners play frontiersmen and pioneers in the hills and mountains of Afghanistan, the Taliban will unite everyone as nationalists always have, whether in Algeria or Vietnam. The latest reports from European Commanders and American Generals are even saying that "Afghanistan is lost." What has Canada got to do with Afghanistan? With nearly a hundred young soldiers dead, what has Canada proven to itself, other than pathetic attempts by some wannabeamerican Generals in the Canadian army about "routing out scumbags in the hills" of Afghanistan? Why is Canada not leaving NOW from Afghanistan? Canada is not playing its traditional peacekeeping role there.
7) What is Canada doing to protect itself from being 80% dependent on the US for trade? How long will this absolutely neo-colonial relationship, that simultaneously dictates border security paranoia, intelligence sharing and kowtowing to US jingoistic patriotism continue? Even the American people are waking up to this reality and will be throwing out much of the 8 years of the Bush doctrine and its coup d'etat regime. When are we Canadians going to learn the words No! Not in our lifetime! Not here! Instead of clinging on to pusillanimous and lily-livered expressions like "We are different", "Yes, but.." "We are in their shadows.." "We shall overcome …only tomorrow"
8) Why are the leaders not clear, honest about the Middle East, Oil, and the rights of the people of Palestine? Why are Canadians so brainwashed, bleached and anal about continuously swallowing the equation that Arab=Oil+Terrorist=anti-semitic= hellwillbreakloose if we speak anything negative about Israeli extreme right settler policies? In Israel nearly sixty percent of the population want to settle with the Palestinians now. And in North America, there is a transplanted blind belligerence and ignorance that has triumphed, which majority of progressive Israelis see as ugly and ridiculous. The cheer leaders in the bleachers are more aggresive than those in the trenches.
Ask your leaders when they knock on your doors. Be armed with questions. Add your own. But ask these questions and let them respond and not slither away with the prepared hog shit that they come armed to distribute.

The Fourth Canvas....released in October 2008

2008-06-22T19:30:00.001-07:00

FICTION
ISBN: 9781894770477
Paper $20.95; 208 pages
Pub Date: October 15, 2008

In the early 1970s a reclusive artist and philosopher disappears in Paris after completing a fantastic series of canvases that trace the rise and fall of empires. Eventually his bloated body is dragged from the Seine. The knowledge and insight die with him. Years later, Claude Chiragi, a graduate student in Montreal receives a mysterious painting and senses the relevance of the theory embedded in the artwork. His curiosity is instantly aroused, and he launches a global search for clues that will help him understand the message and unravel the mystery of the artist’s fate. Embedded in the paintings are tell-tale historical clues, mysteriously coded, that predict imperial entropy in the future—from economic collapse and cultural decadence to a coup d’etat against civil society. Kidnappings, killings, undercover conspiracy and a trek into ancestral roots, lend to this novel its quality of intellectual mystery and gripping suspense.

The Fourth Canvas is an intellectual thriller, an ambitious novel of ideas full of juicy characters. Rana Bose tackles the enigma at the heart of all great thinkers and doers.
— Marianne Ackerman
PREORDER THIS BOOK:

Amazon can us
Barnes & Noble us Chapters.Indigo can
Independent can us

Interview on Fourth Canvas

2008-06-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

An Interview with Rana Bose on the publishing of his second novel Fourth Canvas, TSAR publications

http://www.tsarbooks.com/RanaInterview.htm#Top

FICTION
ISBN: 9781894770477
Paper $20.95; 208 pages
Pub Date: October 15, 2008

Fourth Canvas is an intellectual thriller, an ambitious novel of ideas full of juicy characters. Rana Bose tackles the enigma at the heart of all great thinkers and doers.
— MARIANNE ACKERMAN
PREORDER THIS BOOK:

Amazon CAN US
Barnes & Noble US Chapters.Indigo CAN
Independent CAN US

What made you write this novel?

I was absorbed by a series of large canvases, at an extended care centre in the east end of Montreal, where my mother was staying for a few years. The place was full of canvases. Landscapes, cityscapes etc from old Europe perhaps. I would be sitting in the hallways or lobby of this place with her and I would study them in details. Because they were done in great detail! They had no relationship with each other. One of them had a plaza with buildings in it…along two large streets. The others were city scenes from Europe, perhaps a few hundred years old. Kind of random scenes but while staring at them I sensed a certain magical connection between the cobblestones, some of the faces, their expressions, almost like the faces were trapped in the canvases and wanted to walk over and talk to the characters in the other canvases.

The atmosphere at the centre was extremely peaceful…Kind of fondled a sense of calm. I have always liked Breughel, Goya and a few others who did similar work, but with people’s faces as prominent centrepieces and structures like barns, carts with wheels, people moving along a large landscape. Each face had details. Each body muscle showed some emotion—fear, suspicion, jealousy, elation, pain, anguish, tension, paranoia, happiness all reflected in the detailed faces. Like they were fleeing a plague or reacting to an injustice or in Goya’s case simply turning an edict upside down by a snarky expression. I hit upon the idea of a triptych…like three canvases that would reflect the same story unfolding in stages. I advanced the idea to four canvases. There is probably no word for it. Perhaps quadripartite?

I also have my ideas about the current post -9/11 world we live. The notion of an American empire in decline is very much on my mind and the minds of everyone else. I strongly feel that the US as a domineering power is slowly on the wane. Even though in terms of innovation, science, technology etc, it still holds sway, the cultural and intellectual decline of the US has reached peak (!) or pitiful proportions. The level of intellectual debate in the US has descended into a cesspool. The way CNN/Fox and their prettied up men and women newscasters, display a shallow earnestness and discuss world hunger without even skimming the surface of what’s happening show that superficiality has reached epidemic proportions. The Emperor has his pants off and is telling the masses to eat cake… It’s really scary and pathetic. I believe that all Empires from Babylon and Hapsburg to the Gupta, Mongol, Roman, Greek and British empires, all went through economic expansion, colonial plunder, over extension of its armies, then disaffiliation, decadence and absolute and reckless decision making leading to decline. The US is in decline, although it will always be a superpower with economic clout. So, I used these concepts to come up with a story line about a reclusive philosopher/painter, living in a bohemian enclave in Paris, who embeds his thoughts on the rise and fall of empires into four large serialized canvases, which represent two stages of rise and two stages of decline of empires. His works however are lost, stolen and auctioned off indiscriminately and their sequence and serialization is disturbed and his body is found floating in the Seine. A murder has happened. A murder of ideas and the solution lies in the clues embedded in the paintings. And I have brought in scenarios in Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, France, England, and India. The main protagonist is a Montreal graduate student of Quebecoise-Pakistani origins. He goes on a hunt to recover and bring together the paintings. His girl friend is from Argentina. There are also several other characters from different nationalities and it reflects the pot-pourri of people who come together to solve the magic behind these disappeared paintings. When the main protagonist finally discovers the last canvas, he also discovers the need to re-discover some thing as basic as the concept of ideas, ideals triumphing over spontaneity and so-called common sense. In other words there has to be a sense of utopia. About a society that is better than that which we inhabit now…and without empires. So, I am naively insistent, I suppose, about a better world.

Why would people want to read a novel like this? It is not young adult, horror, crime, sci-fi, chick lit? It sounds too serious.

Well, I think its time for some changes…in reading habits and sensitivities. People have to get deep and not be in a chat room intellect mode. Dangerous and ominous things are happening in the world. Never mind the environment, which everyone pays lip service to, but there is an assault on civic society, fundamental rights, freedom of speech and the right to move around and the current food crisis is a perfect example of how the after effects of free trade, globalization, seed-cloning, heavy use of chemical fertilizers is beginning to show up. Its not just crop failure, but this wilful push towards corn-ethanol that has played a major role.. War is a way out of this debt-and-deficit-financing. And this generation seems skipping over the debates and only enjoying or drowning themselves in the phobic and terror aspect since 9/11. But having said that, the novel is an adventure novel that criss-crosses many countries, even goes back and forth several decades. It does not have steamy sex scenes, some yes…sorry!...or gruesome CSI-style forensic foreplay but there is a sensuous, passionate and magical tour to the kernel, the source of the novel—that is an ideas revolution.

Who are some of the writers who have influenced you?

Honestly speaking I am not an avid reader. I love theatre and while I have not done any for quite a while and especially since I wrote my first novel, Recovering Rude, I have done less reading and more brooding, I would say! There was a time when I would read theatre books more than I read novels…However I love the works of John Le Carre, and I like the styles of Paul Auster, Ian McEwen for a variety of reasons. I like novels where the story moves, chapter by chapter, if not page by page. I like things to be visual and dramatic. And yet pensive and reflective of the times we live in. So, I also like very much Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag and their reflections and Nadine Gordimer. Because they inspire me. They believed in ideas shaping the world. In terms of essays and poetry I have loved Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Baraka and the whole beat gang, because they were so intense, conflictual and thinking people. I love poetry with a beat. A thump to it. And I do perform my poems often in Montreal.

You are of Indian origins and do you get any inspiration from the Indian subcontinent, in terms of literature?

Very little really, as far as literature goes. Indians who write in English have been putting out award winners. I think it’s past the stage of exotica. But there is still a lot of delving in exile angst. I have lived nearly 35 years in North America, mostly in Montreal, but a little in the US. And of course I have travelled the world and lived in Kolkata and elsewhere in India. So I have run into literary samplers from all over the world. But, as I said as long as the people from the subcontinent continue to write quaint growing-up stories and generational and cultural-conflict bound stories, or Tom-meets-Krishna stories, I will not be excited. Indians are spread out all over the world and they should write about the world. Not about themselves. They should deal with issues and not just incidents. I must state though that whatever I have read of Sarat Chandra and a little bit of Rabindranath Tagore, I can say that these two giants were so far ahead of their time in writing about social conditions with such deftness and subtlety, that they easily tower well above Chekov, Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Bellow and all the current greats from the Indian subcontinent. Maybe Anita Desai and Amitava Ghosh are writers in that towering genre. I like them a lot.

You are an engineer and former senior management executive in a large Canadian company. What made you get into writing novels?

The two are not exclusive. I was writing plays at night and rehearsing on the weekends. I live a multipolar existence. But more importantly, once I crossed forty five, I decided I would not spend the rest of my life working sixty hours a week, trying to hammer sense into others and make sense of a world where salary earning had become an end by itself and the work environment does not really produce socially conscious friendships. It’s all outside, amongst artists, poet friends, pub crawlers, writers, filmmakers who have a deeper sense of the world. I love engineering, but mostly I love the businesslike logicality inherent to engineering. I love to think and help strategically, at a high end. Artists and creative workers need a little of that. Madness is good for the soul, but precision is necessary for productivity while creating conscious art. So, it’s kind of cool to have been an engineer who is mad about a lot of things… One of the things I have mastered is writing while I am flying on trips. The whole plane is sleeping and I am typing away. I write, whenever I am travelling and during breaks. I do not have the good habit of writing everyday. I wish I did.

Do you have other novels in the works?

Yes, I do. But it’s at a very rudimentary stage. I also have the idea for a two-person play… Lot of short stories are in the works..

You have published two Novels without an agent? How was that possible?

Well, I did have an agent for my first novel. She was pretty well-known and she tried very hard for me. But it did not pan out. The publishers themselves like my works and chose to publish them. I would like an agent, yes. I respect what they do. Because they are very practical about what will sell. But they could be too clinical and exclusionary. Meaning heartless and prone to using the delete key too much. And I still understand it. I belong to a writer’s group and the experiences of all of them seem to be to get rid of everything that is an appendage to the core idea. Like Hemingway, roll the carpet out clearly and without fuss. So maybe I will learn finally. But one needs to be edited… It’s an enormous technique.

Tell us something about The Fourth Canvas

It’s a novel that I have broken up into four episodes. Kind of jives with the idea of four stages of the rise and fall of Empire. But there are also four key characters and I have followed their evolution while homing in on the final discovery of the Fourth Canvas, the final painting that will solve the four part essay on canvas. Bringing the canvases together assumes a magical element. There is enormous detailed coding done on the paintings and the main protagonist, Claude, the McGill graduate student not only decodes what is in the paintings, one by one… but towards the end, goes through a series of very sad happenings in his own life….but what is key is that he gets to the source of the ideas, he cracks the code and in turn changes his own life radically. He is able to grasp that in the final analysis, what counts is praxis. Involvement, and not theoretical muckraking. His friend Clara, who comes from an Argentinean background, is fiercely independent and carries her own ghosts.. She is also able to break out of the torpor that holds them down to an otherwise bleak Montreal existence and she also finds her bearings and Latin roots in an extraordinary way. Claude’s father is a Sufi poet in exile. He is clumsy and wonderful, but very accommodating and his life also turns many corners and revolves around the finding of the Empire paintings. It is an adventure story. It is tense because there are certain sub textual prodding and manoeuvring going on between some key characters. . But is a novel about ideas. Ideas and Idealism triumphing over incidents and single issues. The Fourth Canvas really takes you back to 11/9, the fall of the Berlin wall. With the fall of the wall (a good thing), there was also an insidious decline in the value of belief systems, of wholesome interconnected ideas, even utopia as a vision. Dystopia has taken over since then, the so-called notion of common sense and reactive ideology. Tit for tat. Us and Them. It is now time to discuss it. That is what Fourth Canvas does. The reader gets to travel to Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, India, Cuba, England and France…and of course the streets of Montreal.

Namesake and Volver

2008-05-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

Namesake and Volver,
June 9th, 2007 over the Atlantic
and subsequent updates

Slowly the skin gets depoliticized
mottled and flaky.
The throat parches over
Beleaguered, crotchety and shaky .
The shoulders cringe
Blue veins, snake rivers
Crawl, where muscles
Once showed off

Slowly, the voices,
of mothers and fathers get closer
To a whisper.
Behind curtains,
Conversations drift
and voices lift.
Slowly, the hope
That inclusion will happen, disappears.
Neglect will not be forever, fades.

Slowly she departs
Skips town,
Smiling brightly
Through the window.
Slowly he says “right”
Raising his head
In an indulgent tone,
The intelligence
Of coffee, spewing, brewing from
a fair trade zone.

Slowly the years amble, stroll and roam
Crissing and crossing
We sit like bored cats
Pawing homeless flies
Waiting
To pounce on
Mice men
Who meander in
From an alley
That sold you
The next gen.
With no warranty.

Slowly, the poubelle cans of contention
Distraction, competition and dereliction
Roll, scatter,
In the alley
Where grown-ups
Once grew
with attrition,
Chewing the fish-bones
Of a millionaire
Who made his money
By imitation
leaving the alley
On a Wens’day morning like that was his innovation.

Slowly valour, surprise
Victory and elation rise.
And then collapse on a beachhead.
Breaking thru’
The first forty years
Of émigré madness,
Many trapeze acts
Many deaths,
Of circus acts with life,
Of crisis before the peace
Of peace without control
Of empire by benevolent madness
Of morons winning
And vermin turning slowly,
In a soil
That is pronouncedly hospitable,
Slowly, the majority vote like idiots
And let idiots rule the majority
Slowly they make films like Namesake
Of Mothers left behind
As Fathers reminisce
And quietly perish
in rented places.
The caress of loved ones
Are submarine gestures
Inert to malignant thoughts and secrets
The bend in the road
Is but a dystopic dream
In a church basement
Where the waters rise
As the dykes give up early.
Slowly they make films
like Volver
About coming back
Over and over
Of returning
With haunting eyes
Grace without tears
About slumped bodies
And dumped souls
Spinning darkly
In a cavernous
Veloute.

And slowly I want to volver
Return.
I want to Return
slowly.

Slowly I want to change the names of the spaces
That I sought to change and volver/return the
owners
to their names.

2008-03-27T15:23:00.001-07:00

THWACK!
Rana Bose
I have been following and watching a lot of cricket lately. This is a game that’s always been associated with slow moving, quaint colonial traits. White trousers, bowler-like hats, tea breaks, scant continuous excitement on the field, except for an occasional quick run between the two stumps in the centre, as pigeons and crows strut around, carefree, in the outfield. The play proceeds languorously and could go on for four days and end in a draw. And once in a while there is a well-rehearsed and contained applause rising from the audience, when there is a crafty googly or a yorker bowled by a cunning bowler or a curt square cut dispatched to the boundary by a deft batsman.
But, now it’s all changed. Because, whacko entrepreneurs from the third world have taken over with a sacrilegious zeal. The players now don the most colorful, bright uniforms, there is loud bollywood rock pounding out at well-timed intervals, floodlit games are on late into the night like in baseball games, cheer-leaders breaking with laser lights and fog machines on the sidelines, large TV screens, ball-by ball annotations everywhere, and there are at least three variants of the game. There is the one day-er with 50 overs and then there is the 20/20, where each side plays 20 overs only and then there is the old Test Match variant. The rules are different and very swift. Cameras, electronic eyes on the wickets themselves, a fully computerized third umpire and a total run fest. Sixes are happening almost every few minutes and even the strokes have changed. And there are no draws. Even if you tie, you must play a sudden death 6 ball in the 20/20 variant.
And this is where I picked up the sound “THWACK”. It is the sound of the ball hitting the wickets at 140kph. A microphone and a camera placed inside the wicket transmit the sound resoundingly and graphically to TV screens all over the world. Thwack is the sound of being bowled out, being bedeviled, being beaten and leaving the game, going back to the pavilion. Innings finished. Yes it is the sound of the “end”. Of course, the old game of test cricket is still being played with white drills and it goes on for 4 days these days. And of course there is still an audience.
But the game has changed and it has signaled also the end of the old empire and as well, the new, for the purposes of this issue. The Anglo-American extended empire, despite its best apologists and defenders is not a winning proposition any longer. The English speaking world of America and UK, has ruled the world with their inventions, their industry, their soldiers, their tanks, their bases and their hunger for energy resources. When England packed its bags and left India and Africa, the pretenders to the next empire had already set themselves on a different course to become the next Emperors. American exceptionalism, the right to be judged separately, differently, to be seen above the law and be judged only by their own definitions of “freedom and independence” created an aura of “different-ness” from the old staid Empire. America thrived and still does, on its exceptional scientific achievements, enormous adventurous spirit, pioneering entrepreneurial zeal and a sure-fire pride in its own self-esteem. But “thwack” remains the point of departure, the alarm sound, if you will, that signals the critical point in time, when all the “others” have become more competitive, America’s economy is in shambles, its military adventures abroad make it a totally discredited force and most of all the present regime in power has discredited America and its people in the worst way possible, even worse than at the time of Vietnam. It is time to go. Back to the pavilion. In this issue of Serai, we have collected a series of well discoursed articles, reviews and essays on the decline of the American Empire, economically and culturally. Some say, it was never an Empire. Some say, but it is only the regime and not the people. America remains a powerhouse in technology and the business world. Americans remain the friendliest and most assertive people in the world. But Empire has its own effects and Americans have become narcissist, self-absorbed, deniers of abuse and provincial in outlook. And worst of all American people have lost the energy to change their evil regime that has been in power. And it will not make a difference if Obama or Hillary replaces George. Herein below is a series of quotations from various well-known Americans and others that may set the tone for this issue of Serai.
"I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." - Mark Twain, New York Herald, Oct. 15, 1900.
Writer /activist Arundhuti Roy, says- "Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war:" China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), Vietnam (1961-73), the Belgian Congo (1964), Laos (1964-73), Peru (1965), Cambodia (1969-70), Nicaragua (the 1980s), El Salvador (the 1980s), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99, 2003-07), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999), and Afghanistan (2001-07). From this, one can see that the years 1947-49, 1955-57, 1974-79, 1990 and 2000 were the only peaceful ones. Furthermore, one can count 73% of the years, from World War II's end until 1989, the U.S. was militarily intervening somewhere. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 (not counting conflicts like Colombia where governing elites request help against rebellious subpopulations) the U.S. was actively militarily intervening in a foreign country at least 88% of the years into 2007.”
The excessive influence and unified interests of the US business-military elite make it imperative that the United States establish a military presence in areas of strategic interest. This is not any longer an issue of debate. Americans believe that their patriotic interests are in congruence with the interests of their business-military elite. You do not need a social democratic bleeding heart to point this out to you.
Smedley Butler, a retired general in the United States Marine Corps, took this view when he said that his job had been to be a "muscle man for big business." And you do not need a Bolshevik to tell you that. He goes on to state "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." - Simultaneously as the highest ranking and most decorated Marine (including two Medals of Honor ) Major General Smedley Butler also ran as a GOP primary candidate for Senate in 1935.
Then there are a new brand of “empire loyalists” who readily acknowledge that the US has been an Empire. From Wikipedia –“British historian Niall Ferguson, a professor at Harvard University, argues that the United States is an empire, but believes that this is a good thing. Ferguson has drawn parallels between the British Empire and the imperial role of the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, though he describes the United States' political and social structures as more like those of the Roman Empire than of the British. Ferguson argues that all these empires have had both positive and negative aspects, but that the positive aspects of the US Empire will, if it learns from history and its mistakes greatly outweigh its negative aspects. “
Edward Said, the departed Palestinian philosopher, writer, who taught at Columbia University--"So influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of the United States culture, politics and history. But the connection between imperial politics and culture in North America, and in particular in the United States, is astonishingly direct."
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" - Woodrow Wilson, September 11, 1919, St. Louis
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." – President Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, Jan. 17, 1961.
So, without a doubt, America’s plan for an imperial dominance has been well constructed and well intellectualized since the beginning of the previous century. And after the Second World War and the emergence of America as an economic powerhouse, the needs of expansion have been supplemented by a remarkable acceleration of military presence in areas of strategic interest. However, by a wizardly application of textile brilliance, read spin, the media and America’s spokespersons have carefully obliterated the usage of Empire and imperial attributes when analyzing American interventionism.
Now, there are those who believe that the US will collapse very soon. This is folly. The US remains one of the most industrially advanced, basic-research oriented economies in the world. It also has the world’s best technical universities as well as some of the best social science institutions in the world. Not a year passes by without US citizens being awarded Nobel Prizes in the sciences. It is US patents, standards and innovations, for the most part, that initiate fundamental industrial development elsewhere. Of course Russians and Japanese are good in Chemistry and Metallurgy and a host of nations like France, Germany are also good in special technical disciplines. But, all said and done, the engines of American success, since the great depression have been fuelled by the construction and highway building boom, which fuelled the steel, cement, fabrication sectors, which in turn fuelled the power, automotive industries. American engineering skills and engineering research have remained the hallmarks of industrial development. America climbed out of the great depression by essentially “constructing” its way out. The technology and benefits from that boom are no longer protectable. Everyone can have it and any other economy can quadruple their growth rates by following the “infrastructural construction” mode of development. The issue then was that no one had the money before. And the world was living out of closets. Everyone stayed in their national closets and envied each other. Now economies and cultures are becoming transnational, whether we accept it or not. And no one is servile to anyone, as far as technology and acquisitions go. No one has an altar where the high priest calls the shots and decides who can get in. Countries and governments need less and less of IMF benevolence. Alternative banking institutions are also being set up. So America’s traditional groin-hold on developing nations by the loan pathway is also less. Meanwhile America has also chosen to farm out its manufacturing base to Asian and other nations.
The “Collapse” of the “Empire” will essentially be an economic and cultural collapse. Unlike the retreat the British had to literally make from foreign shores. Those who think that the US will be “defeated” in Iraq are sorely mistaken. If the Democrats get elected they will simply find ways and means to extend American bases in Iraq. Because very simply, if America does not control Iraqi oil, then petrodollars, which is already an anachronistic term, will become petro-euros. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He says “Hubris and arrogance are too ensconced in Washington for policymakers to be aware of the economic policy trap in which they have placed the US economy. If the subprime mortgage meltdown is half as bad as predicted, low US interest rates will be required in order to contain the crisis. But if the dollar’s plight is half as bad as predicted, high US interest rates will be required if foreigners are to continue to hold dollars and to finance US budget and trade deficits. Which will Washington sacrifice, the domestic financial system and over-extended homeowners or its ability to finance deficits? The answer seems obvious. Everything will be sacrificed in order to protect Washington’s ability to borrow abroad. Without the ability to borrow abroad, Washington cannot conduct its wars of aggression, and Americans cannot continue to consume $800 billion dollars more each year than the economy produces.”
This then is the stark reality of the US economy. It is facing imminent dissipation. China, Japan and the Middle East countries have held dollar reserves, because they earned interest out of it. The US dollar has lost 60% of its value during the reign of George Bush. Who will want to peg themselves to the US dollar? Who will want to hold reserves in US dollars? Who will want to buy US bonds with low gains?Paul Craig Roberts goes on to say” Superpower America is a ship of fools in denial of their plight. While offshoring kills American economic prospects, “free market economists” sing its praises. While war imposes enormous costs on a bankrupt country, neoconservatives call for more war, and Republicans and Democrats appropriate war funds which can only be obtained by borrowing abroad. “ Culturally? What is happening to America? Americans, as they like to call themselves, to the chagrin of the rest of the inhabitants of the continent who do not appreciate the highjacking of the name they share in common, are refusing to accept the fact that the changes surreptitiously introduced and abetted by an accepting media can permanently damage the very cultural ethos they are so proud of.
Despite widespread opposition to the war in Iraq, resolutions in city councils and boroughs, Americans are getting comfortable with widespread snooping on their personal lives, their telephone records, their health data, their job records, their travel records and every day goes by with furtive resolutions and acts passed innocuously that give the neocons the right to arrest and detain without warrant, to bug lines and to force internet server companies to divulge on demand. For the first time the President of the US can declare martial law with relative ease after the passing of the 2007 Defense Authorization Act. The mainstream media, as well as the not-so-mainstream media are all sold out to a policy of limited engagement, as far as depicting the Iraq war and its apologists. One can sink into Lou Dobbs style daily ultranationalist, xenophobic rants about “outsourcing” and “illegals.” Or, one can give up and accept the coup d’etat that has happened. America has become a Pakistan. Coups go on, one after the other and then comes an intimidating, lulling period following which everyone scrambles to protect, patriotize and put the seal of approval on what is essentially a neocon overthrow of the American constitution.

Desert Wanderings and Multicultish Illusions

2007-10-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

So much has been said and documented about multiculturalism that any further attempts, for or against it, at this point in time, would perhaps add only a few drops of bilious pedantry to an already jaundiced debate. I am sitting in a Second Cup in a Dubai mall, a stretch away from my hometown of Montreal, and writing this essay. I am here for a while, on an assignment, and finding it awfully difficult to compare and recall images of Quebec and Canadian multiculturalism, while being surrounded by this sea of casual and easy-going diversity floating by me in this part of the world.
I had offered a few informal insights into why this debate was still compelling, but needed some fresh air. One of my colleagues in the Serai editorial board immediately suggested that I do my duty and write it all up. So, here I am, writing some notes and also watching a one–day cricket blitz between India and England at Lords, on the screen. I notice that the England team has at least four people out of eleven, of South Asian ancestry. Curiously enough, one is a Sikh spin bowler, another is a Muslim batsman, one is a Hindu all rounder and the last one—you guessed right-- is a Christian swing bowler. And every time, they get an Indian out or whip a ball over the boundary, hordes of white, Caribbean and Asian English folks jump up and down and cheer like hell. And on the other hand, when players from the Indian side hit a sixer, there are hordes of people, as well, wrapped in the Indian flag or face painted with the Indian tri-colour that scream and sway from side to side and break into the popular Bollywood hit, Chak de India. My mind immediately scrolls back to the curious possibility that some day four Indians will play in the Canadian baseball team or hockey for the Montreal Canadiens at the Bell Centre. Not! Indians can neither skate (in fact they are vociferously blunt on issues that do not even concern them) nor are they good at chewing wads of tobacco. Are sports a unifier of a multicultural population? Can sports secularize? Do audiences come together in the genteel sport of cricket, easier than in soccer? After all there are hardly any cricket hoodlums! Something to ponder over.
But! Whazzup with this Inglan, anyway?
I say. I am reminded of a recent ad on TV. An Indian steel magnate, steps out of a limousine and looks up at a building in front of him, in London. It says “East India Company.” He lifts his stick up and says “They ran us for two hundred years. Maybe I will buy this company.” Some cross-over happening here. Not sure what went historically askew. England is still the land where Enoch Powel, once declared that "rivers of blood" would flow if more immigration was allowed.
Meanwhile, all around me, here in Dubai, are Russians, Japanese, Chinese, Indians , Pakistanis, Nepalese, Philippinos, French, undecipherable Canadians, very visible Americans, Palestinians, British, North Africans and a sizable chunk of Arabs, men and women in their flowing costumes. There are Sikhs, there are Moslems, and there are lots of Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, Shias, Ismaelis and Sunnis. Pathans, Pushtus, Kazakhs, Armenians, Lebanese, Turks, Greeks and Italians walk by continuously. They are not necessarily tourists. There are even occasional South Americans and I know they are not from nearby Spain. Most of them have made this their home. Maybe temporarily.
The place is full of pubs, jazz lounges, jock bars, discos, cabarets, extravagant sports clubs and comedy clubs. People of every nationality are walking in and out of them. In the Mall, there are men in shorts and women in belly-flaunting miniskirts and then there are women fully borkha’ed or in Gilbabs and men in classy long Jelabas. This place is so multicultural, at least in its imagery, it makes the word irrelevant. The languages spoken in this café are so diverse that it would make India, a country of twenty two official languages and over two hundred dialects, smart in surprise. All signs are bilingual. Arabic and English in equal size. The local population is only 30%. Yes, the locals are worried. But then, this is not a particularly enfranchised state. A benevolent but feudally inspired, family-run nation-state practices modern statocracy by combining the most advanced forms of finance capitalism and adventurous asset management; they run an explosive bourse that preys on every single other bourse in the world, they encourage an iconoclastic real estate building boom (“tallest, highest, biggest, only” are all in Dubai) with a leisure lifestyle, comparable to none, combined with rigid rules of control over all affairs of the nation. It is nowhere near being whatever the world would finally settle on, as a definition of a democratic state. But, when you walk the streets and you hang out anywhere, you do not feel stared at, scrutinized and subjected to the censure of other people’s mores. The same Dutch people, who are now reconsidering their liberal welfare state back home and their history of being very accepting of immigration in the past, are here co-mingling with Arabs and Indians like it is the most natural thing to do.
Perhaps some local people do feel scandalized or stupefied, at times by the behavior of others. But, then the Brits and the Irish do not act unruly outside the pubs. Americans are definitely not as loud as they are on airplanes, on the way here. Russians are busy on the beaches, minding their business as they burn their new-found millions and as well their protuberant mid-riffs. Murders, muggings, bank heists and drug runs are virtually unknown. It’s awfully boring and unexciting, sometimes. Fox news has no sleaze to dispense here. And there are about ten sports channels on cable, never mind the satellite channels. Some invisible constraint makes people stay away from crime. And the newspapers (extraordinarily well-produced, world wise and informative-even carrying articles by Chomsky and Klein) freely report on every emotion, possible. Some months ago there was a color spread on the Nepalese Maoists, as if their movement had reached the poster imagery of the Cuban revolution. But there is no paranoia-bound bopping on the head of other communities for not falling in line with the host community’s mores. Nobody is paranoid about going disparaitre. There are a lot of folks here making artsy films. Some with borderline risqué topicality. But they do not have the fears that enveloped Lise Payette and Monique Simard, some years ago. There is a concocted multicultural calm here.
Whazzup with this Dubai? I say. A confident state (or nation), though, does not worry about disappearing.
There is no choice whether to be or not to be. Multicultural, that is, as a society. Monocultural homogeneity, the secret desire of all die-hard assimilationists and later day “integrationists” is but a fantastic pipe dream in the world we live in. As if to reinforce and bolster the already entrenched views of a certain silent milieu, people of colour are also moving around all over the world, much more than ever before and also multiplying faster too. Yes, as the Canadian comedian (of Indian origins), Russell Peters says, “Watch out! The world is gonna turn brown. ‘Cos we are increasing so fast, that we are gonna hump you, wherever you are! We are brown and we are expanding.” Very simply put, however, the number of non-white people (the major multi-cult of multiculturalism) spreading out all over the world and inter-marrying and cohabiting with others is just way in excess of the number of white, western folks who are adventurous enough to move around and check out the rest of the world. (Some silly folks may debate this in Hyderabad, by saying that there are now American style suburbs popping up everywhere, where white folks, in Gap Bermudas, are happily employed in Indian companies and watching their Indian gardeners mowing their lawns, as they would be watching their Mexican “illegals” doing the same in Virginia. But that is a miniscule nothing, if you ask me.) The world is still not flat, Mr. Friedman. People are simply getting more mobile and proving their worth in any society, if allowed to. That has nothing to do with “opportunity” and the “market place.” The centre of power has not shifted. The field is not level. It has only been disturbed in a few places where JM Keynes once put a lot of reliance on. It does however have to do with two things. Finding adventurous and cheaper ways to live life for the ever expanding middle classes (which is our capitalist cultural upbringing anyway) and traveling and hanging around anywhere is now made much easier and economical for the same milieu. And when people move, barriers do come down. When people do not want to move, then a fortress mentality serves the local press very well. When people are not “allowed” to move, the world becomes a less tolerant space. Brown people are moving around. White folks are moving less.
When movement is restricted by a national psychosis (in the US, the mythos of patriotism means any feelings against US global policy constitutes an act of terrorism and un-patriotic activity) and fear of the unknown or a camouflaged xenophobia is converted into an issue of heritage preservation, then the society itself suffers. Majority of people in Canada and Quebec are not paranoid or xenophobic. But the majority of people do have a corner in their minds that says that Canada and Quebec’s basic definition must not change. That basic definition is the notion of the two “Founding Fathers.” This is a flawed concept. It is a concoction that is only possible by massacring the heritage of the First Nations. Now, this has all been said. So what is new then?
In Quebec, where I have now lived for over thirty years, there is a plethora of tail holders of the old regime who still see this mobility as dangerous. If not in an explicit sense, at least by convoluted expressions couched in the verbiage of “loss of national identity”, “national culture” and “loss of democratic values.” Wait a minute! Did I say democratic values? Yes, that is the latest trend in ‘fugee bashing. And it’s coming from the “left.” There is some pessimism coming on board that fears that ethnic diversity weakens the redistribution of wealth. Multiculturalism has always been a way of stage managing cultural diversity by focusing on superficial aspects of cultural identity rather than structural inequalities related to de facto cultural dominance and institutional racism. In the European theatre, post-multicultural society is reportedly suffering some strains. The discussion has been raised that the welfare state is under attack because of immigrant mores. Traditional lefties tend to regroup amongst themselves rather than really familiarize themselves as to why certain communities stick to themselves, when surrounded. There is supposedly an “erosion of trust” when societies become racially diverse as a result of immigration and the ethos of the western welfare state is undermined. Wealth redistribution suffers. It has repeatedly been proven, however, even in Canadian surveys, that racially diverse neighborhoods are more trusting of their neighbours. And new immigration has always assisted the welfare state more than a monocultural ethos did.
Judy Rebick, the former publisher of Rabble, during a visit to the recent Quebec Social Forum, enthusiastically noted that “Quebec had already become another country.” She, however, lamented as well---“The most visible absence, however, was from what the Quebecois call the cultural communities. The diversity of Montreal was not at all reflected with the exception of a strong participation from the Latin American community. On the other hand, almost one third of participants came from outside the Montreal area, showing that the Left is strong around the province.”Well, Latin Americans are a Latin language speaking, predominantly Catholic people. There is close proximity here with Quebec. What Ms. Rebick possibly overlooks is that for a hundred years Indians and Chinese came over and settled in Canada, as working progressive people. They spoke English. That is why the NDP and even the Liberals have such a large contingent of people of Indian, Chinese and Caribbean heritage. I am not suggesting that these are necessarily progressive conglomerations, but at least people from these countries did celebrate their presence in Canada by also engaging in progressive politics. How could they have done the same in Quebec, when their religious practices are equated to hocus-pocus and their language is treated as mumbo-jumbo? Their language root differentials become a barrier and familiarization becomes a very difficult process. Alas, also, Asians and others are just a tad bit darker than Latin Americans.
Quebec has always played with difference. Even with words. What is Multicultural in Canada, becomes Intercultural in Quebec. What is visible minority in Canada becomes Cultural community in Quebec. Of course there is distinction in all this. When the debate over multiculturalism was becoming stale, Quebec realized that a pluralist society could very well welcome immigrants. But not everyone was comfortable with the idea. So, language was used again as a protectionist barrier, not to protect the language, but simply to put another barrier in favor of the assimilationist philosophy. These musings are no invocation to turn the clock back as far as the language laws go. The same leftists from outside Montreal who are so keen about opposing the American empire are not so keen about making Quebec a friendlier place for non-Catholic people of color. Language is a ruse. It is simply not an issue any longer. If you live in Quebec, you must operate in French. But to use that as an excuse to extrapolate and set up social mores is nothing but a refined extension of what Pat Buchanan had to say about multiculturalism- “an across-the-board assault on our Anglo-American heritage.”
In the final analysis, people must wander around. Travel, if they can. Even in their own province. Indians and Pakistanis are friendlier to each other in Montreal and Dubai, then they are in their own countries. The “cult” of the “multi” must pass on to the secular and diversified imagery is, but, just that. Images and not the real thing. Whether in Dubai or in Montreal.
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Monkland Invasion!

2007-06-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

Normally, I stay away from getting too involved with local issues. I am not being conceited about "community" issues, as such. On the contrary local issues are often the microcosm of the larger "neighborhood." The community is invariably linked to the metropolis. And the culture of the metropolis is invariably linked to tendencies the mainstream world tends to embrace in terms of "globalization", "clashes of civilizations" "the flatness of the world" and other assorted cliches that run their rounds and then falter and cower in the face of the harsher realities that face the world. The Montreal Gazette's columnist, John Griffin (generally a reliable critic of the movie scene) has unbounded imagination in suggesting that the stretch of Sherbrooke Street, in Montreal, between, lets say the Decarie Express way and the west end of NDG, is going to smoothly transcend into a Plateau-like cool-funk place to be. It will simply not happen. Despite a scattering of "artiste" types prowling around and making initial forays into the neighborhood, and despite the presence of a handful of unique shops and even some bakeries, the fundamental character of the Plateau is different. It remains a place of congruence for a proto-boho set, poets, performers and late night loungers and laid back, street-walking, alternative-life seekers, and it cannot be copy-catted by that dull and unwelcoming segment on Sherbrooke. Having lived in NDG for over 25 years and having lounged around in the Mile–end and Plateau districts for the same period, I prefer to see them literally" a mountain apart" in character. And it should stay that way. Because NDG (or Deeg) as a younger crew like to refer to it, should be the community-spirited, liberal, progressive and multi-dimensional residential space it has always been. This is where kids grew-up, going to a few well-known schools, hung out and still do, post- college days and still keep their Deeg roots. The Plateau does not have that growing-up-together feel for its younger residents and that is OK. NDG has its own distinct character. With the occasional stretches of alternative shops and a scattering of good restaurants and boutiques, it remains a neighborhood place to grow up in. Just as the Pointe Claire Village should stay in its West Island closet, NDG should remain what it is and not aspire to mimic the Plateau.

This stretch of Sherbrooke,as extolled by Mr. Griffin, remains an essentially unhip, highway-like, un-neighborly strip. And will remain so, until the pavements are taken over by more of a coffee and bagels, soup and sandwiches clientele and there are more low-end clothes shops and boutiques like in Mont-Royal and a lot more happening lounges, where performance and even film-events start happening. And that will not happen. The Fringe Festival will never happen on that stretch, because it is just not fringy.

On the other hand look what happened to the Monkland beat! A perfect village-like, cool, laid-back walk-around strip, with friendly neighbors and low pollution and neighborhood cobblers, cafes, bakeries, pattiseries and even great taverns, it has become a sports-car showing-off, SUV-flaunting, mindless, kow-towing haven for out-of-NDG hordes. Because Westmount, Hampstead and the Cote-St-Luc area lack a Village-like street and atmosphere, tribes of SUV-riding, large-sunglass wearing, hair-streaked, continuously-on-cell phone type, essentially house-bound noveau-riche indolent housewife graduates from the Trash School of Driving took over the Monkland beat from 9am onwards. Driving around furiously, ingesting furious rounds of caffeine, taking sharp-corners, going through yellow lights and generally always parking illegally and hollering at each other while crossing streets, these aliens have destroyed that stretch of Monkland. Let Monkland be, let Sherbrooke grow steadily and long live the Plateau!

Be Warned...

2007-01-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

Ehud Olmert went to China to get extraordinary approval (general non-challance or look-the other-way style of diplomacy) for a possible low-dose pre-emptive bunker-buster strike by Israel on Iranian Nuclear facilities. The last time Israel did it in Iraq, it panned out well. So they want to repeat it again, perhaps. They do not wish to reveal the details and it will probably never be revealed. Neither Israel nor China have anything close to de-classification of official secrets. So it will remain a secret. Israel knows somehow that getting China on board may help at this stage. As long as the oil and gas will still flow, China is OK with the arrangement. No wonder, Olmert was extraordinarily surprised by the warm understanding he got from the Chinese. China knows that Iran has signed the non-proliferation treaty, something which India refuses to sign and has exploded nuclear devices any time it chose to. Iran on the other hand has demonstrated a certain consistency, constantly stressing on it's right to develop Nuclear power. Iran has also categorically stated that it is not pursuing a weapons program. Iran may have ambitions but has no capability to build a bomb immediately. But it does have the technology to do so. Iran also has a tendency to mouth off nonsense through some of its crazed leaders. It needs to be controlled. Peace in the Middle East can only happen if all the countries of the region face each other and get involved. And that means Syria, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority as a minimum.The United States has lost all credibility worldwide, never mind in the Middle East. It is pointless to try and negotiate and pressurize the mad man in the White House. It is better to negotiate and soften the USA's favourite hound-dog, Israel. Israel has more credibility, in Chinese eyes, to turn things around in the Middle East. Israel has the potential to back down. The United States will remain belligerant, hegemonistic and psychosis-bound. It is well known that the CIA has lost out to the Pentagon in terms of Counter Intelligence. Once again Condoleeza and Bush will try and use Israel and this time it will not be a ground war, which they can never win (as you saw in the case of the Hezbollah) but it will be a horrible event. Bush is going to end the next two years in a state of utter psychosis, cornered and alone (and even abandoned by his neocon henchmen) and leave the world in an apocalyptic mess. The Chinese, as usual, are combining their confucian philosophy with nationalist power politics, which they can explain away as their expertise in differentiating between nation to nation and state to state and people to people politics. Be warned....

What Maher Arar Hesitates to Ask....

2006-12-14T14:04:00.000-08:00

News Item: “OTTAWA, December 12, 2006 - Arar Commission recommends a new review agency for the RCMP’s national security activities, and a new review process for five other agencies.”

Well! Are we not all gratified? Are we not all happy that the truth is out? Are we not feeling good that Canada is such a functioning democracy? We have Justices and judicial systems that are upright, straight shooters, tell-it-all, tell it like-it-is, types. The Commission has proved that Canadian cops (it does not matter which branch, which underhanded, undeclared, super-secret, un-named as yet, agency they belong to) did dish out fabricated, mendacious, two-timing, concocted, lying, fictive nonsense in a slavish and slovenly manner to their counterparts south of the border ? It was not a mistake-in-a-hurry? It was no cultural confusion. It was a deliberate cultural attack. But, we are just such gung-happy, self-congratulating Canducks. We flap our wings in delight. The Honorable Justice Dennis R. O’Connor has done the right thing! He has not stood us up! He has delivered justice and made important recommendations. Which, for sure, will be weaseled out of, by the Harper-Day doctrinal Canadian neocons, who were duly and appropriately put in power by the same wing-flapping Canadian masses, just about a year ago? We are going to now rest in peace, having assured ourselves that the system works, there is justice after all! Unlike Watertown, where the lying bureaucrats got exposed (actually they went to jail, and Judge O’Connor was the one who handled that Commission as well), this time the two-timing rattlesnakes will probably remain unnamed and sheltered while the RCMP boss Zaccardeli took the hit, (even though he obviously acted very clumsily and in haste, doing double takes while he played with the facts).

The question that needs to be asked now is WHO and in WHAT state of mind, decided to fabricate this data? What is the cultural make-up of the hicks who sat down in front of their desks and decided that a weirdly named dude like Maher (not Michael, not Melvyn, not Morty, not Morgan) does not deserve an iota of sympathetic investigation as to his background, his legacy, who he is and what he does as a Canadian citizen. Here is a man named Maher who had flown back and forth between Boston and Montreal several times before this un-named lazy-ass, racist, bigoted rat decided he was just simply going to dispatch the dude via-his hill-Billy red neck compadres to the south to a Syrian torture chamber. And all the time this unnamed rat knew non-challantly well, that he was dispatching this Muslim-sounding, non-white, non Judeo Christian, possibly-bearded, useless, non-real-Canadian to meet his destiny. By a flick of the pen, by a jab on the keyboard and accompanied with a boastful belly laugh, he threw this “useless troublemaker” into hellfire. Because he felt like it. Job done for the day. Another niggah dispatched! That’s what he thought..

Now, wait a minute does the RCMP and CSIS not have sensitivity training? Don’t they have diversity exposure? Do they not know about “other” cultures? Are they not taught that Jacob and Yacub (MS Word 2003 recognizes Jacob, not Yacub) or Samuel and Ishmael and Maher Arar and Bill Maher (www.billmaher.com) are all legitimate human names? What’s with the guy? Was he drunk? Reclining on his chair, feet on the desk, playing Nintendo Patriot games? What was his state of mind? Who is he? Why does he feel that he can concoct such a story and please his American masters? Why does he feel no compunction to verify some facts, some reliable info, before he dishes out this political pornography? What gives him so much confidence that his country Canada will hide him away? Let him flee justice, while pretending he is on National Security detail? And who is going to follow-up and find this rat that did this to Maher? Will Stockwell do it? Why is Stockwell Day launching another commission on another three people who were similarly dispatched and tortured with lying propaganda? Why another Commission? Just to prove that the system works, after the funeral? Why don’t the cops, for once, stand up and behave like humans and tell us who did it and why he did it and not cover –up for his brother/sister who did this near murderous act?

Maher Arar is a decent man. He asks decent questions. He does not get angry. His face shows pain and dignity. He is like an apostle. Well, buddy Maher! it is time you asked the question “Whodunit?” Get a bit unfriendly, my friend! Because, all of us here, ordinary Canadians who have no aspirations beyond making a living in a country we thought was “different” and tolerant and more open to ideas and peoples from other corners of the world, would really like to know who is that rat who has been trained to sniff up our coloured posteriors, report on us and make up fables about us?
We want the name of that lazy, backboneless pretend jackass who is hiding behind some ones apron.

Canada's cocoon-like Toe-jam licker

2006-11-22T04:20:00.000-08:00

(Harper dressed up and looked like a bloated cocoon in Vietnamese national clothes and got shafted around by China's Hu Jintao and also made a most assinine stunt in trying to talk to North Korea (no credibility, no legacy, so other APEC leaders thought it was amusing, if not outright buffonery),the Monica L. look-alike Environment Minister Rona A. made embarrasing statements on Kyoto, in Nairobi, and got roundly condemned, and finally Canada continued to blatantly support Israeli criminality and appropriately, at home, undid and dismantled the recently concluded agreements (by the previous Liberals) with the First Nations. Billions were poured into the already failing Afghan adventure, while 87 communities in First Nations territories cannot get drinking water for years and live under apartheid arrangements. Meanwhile, China continued to display comparatively mature and dignified positions worldwide, strengthening its worldwide strategic goals, reinforcing its ties to Africa and developing new ones with Latin America. Unfortunately, despite himself Trudeau had a dash and charm about him...Harper is like a manicured manequin in comparison! What a downfall for Canada'a image. From a partially independent and somewhat "European neutrality and multipolar" affiliation, Canada has chosen to become a toe-jam licker of the "Elephant" to the south)

India, China can strengthen strategic cooperation:

New Delhi, Nov 21: Sounding distinctly upbeat, Chinese President Hu Jintao said Tuesday he looked forward to further developing the "strategic cooperation" between his country and India. "I look forward to strengthening friendship, increasing mutual trust and expanding cooperation during my visit," he said in a brief statement after being accorded a ceremonial welcome in the forecourt of the Presidential palace Rashtrapati Bhavan. "I look forward to deep discussions on strengthening our bilateral relations," he said, speaking through an interpreter. Hu, the first Chinese President to visit India in 10 years, arrived here Monday on a four-day visit. An 18-gun salute boomed out as Hu`s cavalcade drove into Rashtrapati Bhavan escorted by mounted riders of the President`s Bodyguard. President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were on hand to greet the visiting dignitary. He then advanced to a canopied dais to take the salute presented by an inter-services guard of honour. The Indian and Chinese national anthems were played and Hu then inspected the honour guard.Recalling that Sino-Indian "friendship dates back to centuries", he said he took "great pleasure" in noting the "tremendous success in development" this country had achieved. "Twenty-two years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting India. It gives me great pleasure to return to a great country like India at the invitation of President Kalam," Hu said."I convey to the people of India the best wishes of the Chinese people. India is a great country and Indians are a great people," he added. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Home Minister Shivraj Patil, Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal, who is Hu`s minister-in-waiting, National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan and the Indian Navy chief, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, were among those present on the occasion. More than the ceremony, what the large number of Chinese delegation members and those in the media contingent will perhaps remember more is the grandeur of the setting. With the forecourt forming the perfect backdrop, the President`s Bodyguard stood out in their blue and gold turbans, red tunics, white breeches and black, knee-length booths, holding lances from which fluttered blue and white pennants. Not surprisingly, many of the visiting Chinese spend considerable time in photographing each other from a variety of angles, with the imposing dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan and the President`s Bodyguard being the favourites. Security beefed up ahead of Hu`s visit to AgraElaborate security arrangements have been put in place here ahead of Hu Jintao`s visit tomorrow, with the police taking special measures to ensure no protests march during the programme. Special security forces have been called in from Lucknow to take oversee the security arrangements even as the local administration is taking precautionary measures to ensure no demonstrations are held during Hu`s visit.

The Great White Hunters Bwana Dick and Don

2006-11-01T14:05:00.000-08:00

Some history perhaps?
There was the time when it was widely believed that the sun could not possibly set on the British Empire. A fourth of the world was occupied by them with supreme confidence and a self-perception of manifest destiny. However, as time passed by, and inexplicably for the likes of some colonialist ogres like Churchill or Disraeli before him, the sun did start setting and Queen Victoria’s dominion started unraveling, dismantling and scattering its entrails in all directions. Half-clothed natives started running amuck all over the pristine empire and handle-bar mustached, parasol wielding men and women of England scurried back to their clubs, licking their wounds, huffing and hawing about ingratitude. Even the fabled bowling greens and playing fields went into depression. The ships’ tattered flags fluttered in the wrong direction and the sails were looking more like the patchwork quilt on old brigs that plied the Malacca straits a century ago, instead of the cocky Union Jack.
But they had a plan. A plan at a long term strategic level. They deftly left behind a series of contrived and divisive messes from Suez, Palestine and Africa to India and Pakistan, to be manipulated for years to come. Being somewhat refined colonialists, they knew they had to leave. The retreat was obvious. The great White Hunter Male, however, had to find new ways to hunt, dominate and rule. They also had a handover plan.
The Great White Hunter
Now, all along this rise and fall, literature reinforced these adventures of the Great White Hunting Male by way of Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs and eventually as the Empire faded and decolonization became an inescapable reality, the United States with its “Revolutionary War” legacy, took on the responsibilities of the Empire and the cloak of the Hunter, by other means. And of course, dutifully there were literary geniuses from the rabidly right wing, like Ayn Rand, the avowedly fascistic Ezra Pound, the ponderous Joseph Conrad to even the inspirational and troubled Hemingway who followed the enigma of the New Great White Hunter. The Hunter was being set up now, not to seek gold, spice, adventure, money, resources, and romance but an agenda to corner the energy, minerals and raw material sources for the impending growth of cities, highways, autos, ships and steel and to create the ethos of the modern civilized liberator as opposed to the conqueror. And to enable all this, was an accompanying projection of freedom, justice and enterprise that was deeply rooted in the settlement philosophy of “winning the West.” Crafting tales of daring adventure of the blond-mained, blue eyed, hairless hunting hero in unknown and inhospitable lands, it became the basis for justifying the new imperial culture. So there was the mythologizing of Daniel Boone, Davie Crockett, Kit Carson and the murderous Custer.
The Sun also Sets !
From Crown and Country, the transition was made to Romance and Adventure and then on to Science Fiction and Inter-Stellar domination. Imperialist adventure spread its wings, but always with the White Hunter as its source of inspiration. From Fu Manchu and Gunga Din to Tarzan and Indiana Jones and on to Star Trek, the racial stereotyping and the winning ways of the the “Hunter” were combined. From the Khyber to The King Solomon Mines, the Great White Hunter stereotype looked and searched for lost wealth and then transcended into being the deliverer of civilization and justice and is today confronting the bearded terrorist everyday on Fox, CNN and Hollywood.
Rider Haggard is the acknowledged master of Imperialist Adventure, with Allan Quartermain as the archetypal cool and righteous White Hunter. Next there is Arthur Conan Doyle (Lost World), once again seeking adventure in inhospitable terrain trying to resolve the problem of the “savages.” Then comes Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Tarzan series. And horror of horrors! This great White Hunter, dressed like a savage, talked like a chimpanzee and then delivered righteous justice like he was operating right out of Piccadilly Circus.
The Great White Hunter displayed extraordinary determination, extreme courage, was very capable with fire-arms and also influenced indigenous people to follow him around like the piper of Hamelin. Thus he came to symbolize not only the burden he carried, but the cultural dominance of the great West that he considered must triumph over the rest of the world.

Bwana Dick and Bwana Don
Now when Bwana Dick Cheney shoots a fellow hunter during a quail hunt, he is not exactly following in the footsteps of the mythical and manly Great White Hunter.He is being a fumbling fool. And when Bwana Don Rumsfeld asks the press to back-off, when he is caught lying, fabricating and bull-shitting his way through the US occupation of Iraq (“banditry” as exactly and appropriately described by Nobel prize winning playwright Harold Pinter), he is not upholding Ayn Rand’s hero either. He is behaving like an arrogant, spoilt, indiscreet, distemperate hoodlum. But they both believe in the tradition of the Great White Hunter as a superior being. The justice provided by the White Hunter is superior to the justice provided by the suicide-crazy, unpredictable Arab street-fighter, or tribal warriors in Africa, or indigenous peasants of Oaxaca, Peru or Bolivia and peasant guerillas in Nepal. White Hunter justice is a natural force. It is beyond discussion and debate. That is the way it has always been.

From Low intensity to total domination
There was a time when the United States preferred “low-intensity” conflict, by using surrogate forces. From the time of John Foster Dulles’ United Fruit Company to the Noriega-Somoza-Contra period, the US delivered the justice of the White Hunter through covert and sometimes not so covert means. Through assasinations, CIA-plots and even landing Marines at the invitation of unknown thugs. There was some feigned hesitation to make massive invasions, despite Vietnam, and attempts to exercise some restraint in terms of direct intervention. At least there was an attempt at funnelling people around like Oliver North to engage in subversive Iran-Contra type affairs, carry out underhanded arms for thugs deals, even try out folks like Chalabi or Karzai etc to stage manage affairs in certain countries. Since Iraq and the recent experiences in the Middle East, this has changed. The Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal and their “absolute dominance” mentors like Rove, Perle, Krauthammer have now gone beyond the Great White Hunter framework. Massive deployment of force, by air, land and sea is now the standing strategy, whether it suceeds or not. Even a pre-emptive Nuclear strike on Iran has been considered feasible. The Great White Hunters no longer feel any necessity to even pay heed to the Geneva convention (never mind the United Nations), there is no remorse about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the half-million civilian deaths that have occurred in Iraq.. The chain of command to carry out atrocities goes directly to them and yet they cannot be prosecuted or impeached.Their impunity is unassailable. They do not need any further discussions, Kyoto is a non-starter (despite all the recent revelations from the Stern inquiry), the International Criminal Court is a joke for them. The world is for them to capture and rule over They smile, smirk, joke, sneer while Bush postures, swaggers and fakes cowboy mannerisms in front of them.

Desperately seeking 9/11 targets

Desperately seeking targets to retaliate in the wake of 9/11, the Great White Hunters went looking around and creating “state sponsors” of terrorism and lumped Hezbollah, Hamas and others in one lot with Syria, Iran and North Korea. None of these entities ever had anything to do with September 11. None of these entities threatened America in any way, except by extreme extrapolation of the great American paranoia of perceived terror.
To quote Harold Pinter, extensively-“ The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.”
Making the British Empire look like a swell in the current , the United States now occupies 702 military installations in 132 countries in a tornado like deluge of power. The modern Great White Hunter has perfected many political concepts as an ideological necessity for this extraordinary international presence. Expansion and occupation and the delivery of White Hunter justice is based on a discrete political philosophy. It has less to do with spices, gold , cotton and/or even oil and energy resources. It has to do with a fundamental belief in the superiority of the Judeo-Christian ethos of “us” being superior to “them.” Of our God being greater than their God. Of the White Hunter being a natural deliverer of justice.
Over the decades, imagined threats, branding nationalists as terrorists or communists, branding any resistance as anti-democratic and then combining it with a nearly unquenchable thirst to dominate the world has become the new phiolosophy of the Great White Hunter. International law or even the semblance of justice has become a cropper and when its handful of allies (Israel being the most notable enforcer –aside from the stoolie parrot/poodle Blair) gets a bloodied nose from nationalist resistance in Lebanon or Basra, “global terror” and the rights of the “American people” and “civilization” are immediately and craftily engaged and invoked to carry out a sophisticated campaign of disinformation.
Do Bwana Dick and Bwana Don really think that the people of the world outside the United States are really scurrying around without any heads above their shoulders, waiting for justice to arrive from the Bible belt via the Great White Hunter? They possibly do. In their cloistered, semi-secretive, psycho-religious cult following that has Rush Liimbaugh, Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter as leading cheerleaders, they do believe in the the Great White Hunter ethos. They do believe that deliverance will come from them, they do believe that a “crusade” is inevitable and the might of the Great White Hunter must prevail.

Art for Subversion

2006-10-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

Night crawls in and Banksy and his urban warriors sweep through town…or maybe a distant village. They appear in Los Angeles, in Disneyland, in the Museum of Modern Art, in a display of ancient Chinese Art and on the ugly apartheid wall erected by Israel.
In all his works, Banksy, the nearly nameless, faceless subversive artist pops up surreptitiously with his works in the midst of well-known works. Almost innocuous, for a while at least. Sometimes he takes Warhol’s commercial pop and changes the well-known famous Campbell soup works into the Tesco logo. He puts up “illicit” paintings guerilla-style, like Monet’s Lily Pond, but with a shopping trolley reflected in the pond. He transforms Rodin’s Thinker into a Drinker and places a traffic cone on the head. Inside the hallowed halls of famous Museums, his nearly authentic but smartly decoyed works suddenly appear and sometimes they survive for several hours, until a bored security guard or museum official wakes up in utter turmoil. He is referred to as the Art Terrorist . In Los Angeles, now, there is an exhibit on, that has a live elephant, painted over in a wall-paper design and housed in a building which has the same wall-paper on the walls.
Combining graffiti, stencil art and cartoon drawings, Banksy once reportedly said "Art should have your pulse racing, your palms clammy with nerves and the excitement of creating something truly original in a dangerous environment."
They say he has a real name. It is Robert Banks and he is from Bristol. His life remain sketchy and obviously nothing that the establishment would feel proud about. But he maintains the tradition. The tradition of Art as subversion, witnessed during the Vietnam War and later on in New York’s walls in the ‘80s.
A Banksy painting on Israel's security barrier
He handles Aids in Africa with a large mural-like painting “Sweeping it Under the Rug” on a London wall. Several weekends ago, he smuggled an inflated doll, dressed as Guantanamo Bay prisoner and hung it up in Disneyland, California.
And last year he did his classic best. He stenciled fake holes on the Palestine side of the wall, with children digging holes and looking out into the other side.
Unlike Basquiat and Satchi, he does not care to sell his works. He operates as a true subversive. He undermines the mainstream
Cinema, Theatre and Art as subversion is conceived as a project to highlight new artists (and their works) who engage in agit-prop in the world of cinema, artworks (including performance) to express not only their angst but also launch a subtle fusillade against hypocrisy and injustice. Now we are not talking about Andy Warhol or even pop-alternativism/abstractionism, but works that actually contribute towards raising debates and social consciousness on specific issues. In this issue, we have presented lead articles on cinema as subversive art, essays on the notion of subversive theatre, presentation of art works that continue to question and subvert mainstream “home truths.”
Needless to say, the internet has become a potent weapon to subvert the subversion of the right. Progressives have no access to the TV-media. There are some limited channels for radio news distribution. They are dwindling fast. Mainstream theatre has been usurped. Imagine Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep co-opting Brecht’s Mother Courage in Central Park, NY. They are even doing it for “free.” Brecht himself was co-opted ages ago. So, the only way subversives can assert themselves, create new blood is through guerrilla mechanisms and in our millions and growing blogs, our websites, our home-video sites. Let’s do that more and more and knock down the puerile theatre of Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Cooper.

2006-08-01T18:38:00.000-07:00

Cindy Sheehan and Hugo Chávez.

www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071706F.shtml

!
Me, Hugo and George

By Cindy Sheehan Monday 17 July 2006
When I was growing up in Bellflower, California, I never, as a child with a good imagination, could have ever imagined that my life would take the peculiar turn that it has. I could not have foreseen giving birth to a child who would eventually be wrongfully and devastatingly killed in war or that I would be meeting with world leaders or be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Along with the vice president of Spain, foreign minister of Ireland, attorney general of Australia and countless parliamentarians from all over the globe, one of the world leaders that I have met and spent a good amount of time with on my journey is President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Due to the propaganda media and the ignorance of many of my fellow Americans, I have been heavily criticized for my visit. I would like to remind my neighbors all over the country that we do have diplomatic relations with Venezuela and we are not at war with that country.
On a recent appearance that I made on MSNBC's "Hardball," which was being guest-hosted by Norah O' Donnell, she introduced me as someone who has been photographed with "dictator" Hugo Chavez. After the introduction and in a very short subsequent break, I looked at her and said: "You know, President Chavez is not a dictator. He has been democratically elected to his office 8 times."
To which she replied: "We had a big discussion about that and we decided that he ruled like a dictator." That statement really shocked, yet irritated me, because I can't believe that MSNBC and Norah O'Donnell would perpetuate the myth that President Chavez is a dictator and mislead and misinform their viewers, because contrary to facts, they "decided that he ruled like a dictator."
"Then you should call George Bush a dictator," I said, right before we were given the signal that the interview was beginning.
During the segment, which Norah called an interview and I would like to better term as an "attack," (I gave her a hug after the attack: it seemed like she really needed one) we got on the subject of Hugo Chavez, and I ended up admitting that I would rather have him as a leader than George Bush. Since this truthful admission, which comes from experience and research, my life has been threatened several times and the hate mail to the GSFP web site has increased dramatically.
There are many brilliant pieces written from a more scholarly point of view defending the administration of President Chavez and trying to educate our corporate-owned, media-misled citizenry about the politics, economics and civil society of Venezuela. Most recently and notably, an article by Jeff Cohen entitled "Go to Venezuela, You Idiot." So, instead of writing a scholarly piece, I would like to make some personal observations about the regimes of George Bush and Hugo Chavez.
First of all and most importantly and as far as I can recall, Hugo has not invaded any countries in baseless wars of aggression justified by lies. George has. As a matter of fact, instead of using "Cowboy Diplomacy" and "Bring 'em on" rhetoric, President Chavez has skillfully used his country's resources as a diplomatic tool to make friends and coerce good behavior from other countries. George uses our children in the Armed Forces to strong-arm his way into other countries, making enemies for the USA and leaving death and destruction wherever he goes.
Secondly, Hugo is an effective orator who can lecture on any topic for hours (believe me!). He is smart, personable, has a great sense of humor, and takes the time to get to know people on a human level. (He never called me "Mom" once the entire time I was with him - unlike George). I was with him three times in Venezuela and each time he gave lengthy speeches about American (North and South) history, never using a single note - tying our histories together with the present in very meaningful ways. On the other hand, George Bush can barely speak when he is reading from a teleprompter and looks like a deer caught in headlights when he has to speak off the cuff or answer a question that he hasn't been well prepared for. He thinks that people want to put food on their families and if he doesn't know a word, he can just make one up.
When Ms. O' Donnell called President Chavez a dictator, I bet she didn't even know that our CIA orchestrated a coup attempt against President Chavez in 2002 and in the last electoral referendum that Chavez agreed to submit to in 2004, he was re-confirmed as president with 60 percent of the vote, which was certified by an international election commission headed by "left-wing nutcase" Jimmy Carter. George Bush attained his office by two heavily tainted elections that should more rightly be called coups. From stealing two elections and saying and acting like you have a mandate to destroy the world; to circumventing Congress at every turn with "signing statements" and just not telling them things; to wiretapping Americans without proper warrants; to reading our emails and looking at bank records without warrants; to illegally detaining people and torturing them; to insisting on staying a course in Iraq that is killing nearly more innocent people per month than were killed in our country on 9/11; to authorizing the leak of covert agents' names; to selling our democracy to the highest bidders, such as the likes of Jack Abramoff; to appointing avowed UN hater John Bolton to the UN in a recess appointment because he knew that a normal confirmation process would fail; to allowing the neo-cons to take over our foreign policy to the detriment of our nation; to etc., etc. - I ask Norah O' Donnell and MSNBC, who is the dictator here? George or Hugo?
The media is far freer in Venezuela than it is here in the US. Station after station is hostile to the Chavez government, even openly calling for his overthrow at times. Our corporate-owned media are either very ill-informed about world affairs or current events, thereby keeping us ill-informed, or they are complicit propaganda tools of this administration. Heaven forbid that one of the outlets, such as the New York Times, should truthfully report that BushCo did something illegal; then the outlet will be accused of doing something wrong! Conversely, we have cheerleaders in the same outlet such as Judith Miller who conspired with Scooter Libby to out CIA agent Valerie Plame. I would love to see a segment where MSNBC show hosts are brought together to discuss such subjects as the high-jacking of our democracy and/or George's lies and war of terror on the world, instead of me.
One of the reasons that President Chavez is demonized and threatened by BushCo is that he has forced American companies in his country to pay their fair share of taxes and do business properly in Venezuela. Hugo is resisting the corporate colonialism that has characterized US forced relations with South America since the USA has been a country. And one thing that we all know, or should know: BushCo is especially beholden and subservient to the corporations.
Hugo Chavez also wants to finally realize Simon de Bolivar's vision of a united South America that together can be stronger, to live more peacefully with the US and stand in solidarity against the constant meddling of all of our regimes in their affairs. North Americans should know about the despicable history of US interference in South America before they throw stones at people who want to have fully autonomous countries with control over their own natural resources.
Hugo is also doing something that George would never think of doing: he is taking from the rich to help the poor. Literacy is currently almost 100% in Venezuela, and social programs in health and education have dramatically improved since he took office, and while the poverty rate is still high, vast improvements have been made. George is a reverse Robin Hood and even steals from our grandchildren's future to further enrich the already obscenely rich of the present. I would rather live under a president like Hugo who tries to improve living conditions in his country than someone like George who is demolishing our social structures and making the poor poorer.
I will readily admit that I did say that I would rather have President Chavez than President Bush, but I didn't say that I would rather live in Venezuela. I am an American, and I love my country which I believe is on a distinctly disordered course right now. I also believe that my country can do better, and I am willing to fight to realize a vision for America where the rich share with the poor and we achieve 100% literacy and schools, day care centers, parks and clinics are built instead of prisons and the already bloated military industrial war complex.
While the world seems to be coming apart at the seams, it is also important for our mainstream, corporate-owned media to get their facts straight and report the news truthfully and with integrity instead of being tools for war and greed. Thousands of people are dying while the media are carrying out vendettas for Karl Rove.
Yes, I would rather have President Chavez than George Bush. But truthfully, I would rather have countless numbers of people as my president than George Bush. George Bush is an out of control criminal who needs to be impeached for his lies, removed from office for his transgressions, and imprisoned for his crimes against humanity.
George should never have been president in the first place, and he has been president of my country for far too long already.
--------
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan, who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother's Child and Dear President Bush. She is currently on Day 12 of the Troops Home Fast.
Come to Camp Casey in August to hold George accountable and stand up for peace!

17 Boys and Jimmy....

2006-07-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: July 20th, 2006. Last month, in a spectaculary theatrical and well-orchestrated press briefing, the Canadian government and its security apparatus, announced amidst much fanfare and near exhuberance that "terrorism" had finally come to Canada. Words like "home-grown, Canadian born" were used to describe the 17 who were busted in Toronto. front page , of course everywhere. Five of them were minors and they were all brought to court in leg chains and of course the entire US media went haywire, stating that Canada had finally woken up. So, here I was, listening to Jimmy Hendrix on headphones and surfing when the news flashed across, and within a few hours it had been raised to the level of terror alerts. I felt someting was fishy here. No doubt some of the people who had been busted, may have expressed some intent to do something nasty, spectacular and horrendously stupid/assinine and terroristic at some point. But nevertheless, no evidence was produced, except some boots, some shoes, a wireless cell phone, a bag of fake fertilizer etc. Nearly a month later, it has now been revealed that some of these boys are quietly being bailed out and sent home. The Canadian press of course dutifully reports it in the back pages only. And now, it is revealed that it was a massive sting operation, involving a stoolie in the Islamic community, who was working for CSIS for a long time grooming the 17 along this path.

17 Boys and Jimmy…
© Rana Bose

2006-06-15

Deadhead, boring,
like a broomstick standing
on the corner,
dull-down Canada
done it again..
12 men, 5 boys in shackles and chains
3 tons of foxey Ammonium
Ad nauseum..

The Jacks are out of the boxes
The clowns have hit the town
A Toxic blast, ‘bout to happen!
Got us all wired and wound.

And the wind whispers Mary!

Truth be told! Says the Post refrain.
PM to be beheaded say the Mail..
There must be some way outta here..
Too much confusion
Says Jimmy, in the clouds
Deep blue yonder...

Barbeque prongs, camo suits
Doc martens, a wireless phone
Blank verse, few props,
CSIS and their shadowmen,
Mountie barnburners in dress shorts
Theydunit, no doubt at all!
Or, ‘bout to do it,
no doubt at all!
In the cold distance
Grave diggers stomp
Dark shadows, barbed wire,
And along the watchtower
The wind begins to howl!

Unmatched theatre, rooftop-snipers,
Night-vision goggles in daytime raid
Grim faces, Terror Alert!
Condohead-leeza says it all,
Wow! Canada, you impress!
Terror colour levels, torture flights
For sure you gotto have
Very soon next!

No reason to be excited!
Says Jimmy, don’t be down…
Because I will keep on coming
again and again…

Canada done it again
“Us Too, Me too, We too” are under attack
Fear! Foreigners! Psycho-xeno fuck up
Hijab, burqa, Ali Zarqawi
Plucked out neat,
but Ben!
Ben is still
Hidin in the hills
Releasing radio threats,
Canada is next!

And Jimmy says,
There are many amongst us
Who think life is but a joke.

From escort flights and training cops,
Peace keeping and friendly chats
Canada done it again,
We now in hot pursuit
In Khyber Pass, where Alexander,
Kipling and Breznev failed to pass.

“Our way of Life”
Our children, our values
Says Stephen the stiff
Dip shit arse hole p.m
Jet black eye-do made in studio.
Jack in the box!
Gecko-smile, Coconut hair-do
With head tilted south..
And I’m gonna gun yu down, says Joe
Tired of this messing ‘round..

Me to, us too, we too
Till we all become them too.
Them is what we want to be,
Different colours, of course!
Them is what we want to be.

“Home-grown, Canadian-born”
Load the deck with pious disclaimer
“Not guilty till proven”
Purr the liberal shits
But repeat ad infinitum
of jihadists gen!
Wrecking the nation.
White collar tory grime
Waving plastic finger at me

Mark my words, watch my lips,
Year from now,
mistrial, release
Is what it will be
Like the 24 before
Listen to this baby!
We gonna be stone free!

BUT!
More guns, more ships,
Border cross IDs it will also be.

Canada done it again!
Psycho nervo-callisthenics
On display.
The Nation needs to display its penis,
the hard way…. Eh!

Not a question of Islam
Not a question of terror
Al-this and Al-That
Never mind
If you been through school
In T.O. or Quebec
Day in, Day out,
The Pressure don’t drop,
brown skin girls, and dark skin boys,
fend off rude shit
Day in and Out.

Canada done it again!
White collar man
come drink my wine
I will integrate, like the CBC say,
I will follow the Great Ass of Britain
The great mama queen
The great Blair puppy-dog motherland
Where “home grown” used to be weed
Now reserved for dis-integrated
Rag-heads
with black beards long
guilty with the multicult dream

And the wind cries Mary
In the outskirts of T.O and
Repen-my- tigny
I can hear Jimmy..
fade away,

Hey Ishmael,
Where you going with that gun in your hand?

How Stupidly Non-Political India’s Urban Meritorious Brats have Become!

2006-05-25T10:16:00.000-07:00

So they have made their point. They are smart, super smart and they want in! They want a reservation for merit! For careers, fairness, motherhood values and the future of their motherland, they want the reservations to be for intelligence and drive, they say. They can ace the MCATS, GREs, GMAT and top all the exams and prove to the world what a mean academic world-class bunch they are. They are driven by insane levels of distinction-chasing hysteria. Suddenly MERIT has become such a meritorious word. Its antonym (MEANS) has become a “filthy” word. Doctors have shown their high IQ levels by getting holds of Jharus (brooms) for the first time in their lives and doing some street theatre, by brooming streets en masse! Some of the other medicos decided they would polish the shoes of passers by. Well, hello? What are you really trying to say? That brooming the streets and removing the dead and cleaning the sewers are for people who will not be doing MCATS? That MCATS kids should be left alone and allowed the reserved space in society to keep-on MCAT-ing, while the jharuwallas and bhistiwallas continue to look after the streets below? Or, are you saying that there are jobs best done by certain strata of society and doctors and smart-ass meritorious people conversely need to don and dwell in the septicized lab-coat world? Hip-ly dressed, sky-rise kids, have suddenly appeared in the streets with cocky slogans and urban jive to rock the rafters and block the streets, even in fabled Kolkata where gheraos, bundhs and sit-ins once used to be done by the jhuggi-jhopri living proletariat from the now closed down jute-mills and engineering shops. Deeply ingrained scorn for 5,000 years of despicable treatment of so-called outcastes, backward castes, scheduled castes and other not -so- forward people has been attempted to be camouflaged by proto-intelligent rancour about the government playing politics with the vote bank. Of course that is true! Of course, the Congress and its cronies with all its internal bickering will use every opportunity to endear itself to various communities through such tactics. Of course certain Ministers will try to outwit others or manipulate their standings with the High Command through pre-emptive announcements. Of course, the world needs more of this high-jinx heart- bleeding at the expense of the poor and the illiterate! Look what equal opportunity did for the United States! It produced morons like Condo Rice and Uncle Tom Colin Powell.

All the glossy weekly publications are immediately dishing out edition after edition of articles about Harijans and Dalits who have become millionaires, with hard work! How their children do not even care to seek reservations quotas for entrance to colleges. Because their daddies and mummies have given them the choice primary and secondary education they desperately needed to gather those meritorious points, stupid! What a sad reflection on the intellectual acumen of both of our journalists and the de-intellectualized brats who are engaging their audience in a crafty performance act known as “we are the oppressed!”

Yes! That is the issue. If the government could guarantee that every dalit household in India would have free and unrestrained access to primary education in the best schools from day one, then there would be no need for reservation. And that will not happen, my friends under this system. So the various political parties will play around with numbers, ask for seats to be increased and as usual the CPIM will come up their classic compromise class analysis by asserting that the dis-enfranchised proletariat amongst the Dalits must get priority. Nice! Well, do we know what to do with the rest? Should they continue to be denied primary education and continue to polish the shoes of passers-by as their brand equity?

Last week I had the opportunity to chat with two young graduating engineers in a South Indian city (not Chennai and not Bangalore). Needless to say, a lot of people would agree that reservations have not caused any havoc there. So I found out that the father of one of the kids was a rickshaw driver. The other one’s parents were both share croppers. They were both quite dark complexioned. Their marks were a little above average. They were keen to land good engineering jobs. When I asked them why their marks in mathematics was not that high, they were reticent and answered that they had a hard time concentrating, while doing other chores. Also, their high schools in the village were not that great. In comes another student, well-groomed hair, fair skinned and very urbane and talkative. Outstanding marks in mathematics. Well, he had attended a convent school and his father was a Manager in a well-know local bank. Do you get the picture?

DJ Walk On and drain showers!

2006-04-14T05:27:00.001-07:00

05:35 a.m and I stepped out into the gritty Kolkata air. Cinema Paradiso, the main theme from Hayden and Metheny, filtered into my ears through my Ipod--an essential contraption, given to me by the thoughtful person who cares for my every well-being. It has now become a major extention to my anatomy to effect a sound shield and isolator when I so desire. I am wearing a light pair of casual slacks, a t-shirt bought in New York, which is a reproduction of an old Stalinist poster that says not to listen to rumors, and my Rockport shoes, (originally given to my son who never glanced at it more than once). It feels good over the rocky and curved tar that Kolkata roads (this particular stretch named after my father) impress on the ambitious morning walker. I had put the Ipod on a shuffle mode and Ronny Jordan came on next, as I approached Ballygunge Phari. DJ Krush with the Jackal— provoctive and edgy hip-hop that makes you automatically feel like you have a Ph.D in street strut. Like a stallion on cruise control, I stomp ahead with the stereophonic ambience banging my head in different directions, all at the same time. Nobody is watching, so I smile and walk past the early morning tea sellers, getting ready washing their aluminum dekchis with more vigor than necessary.
So I strut past the newly constructed public urinals, near the old Swinhoe Street, now renamed after a former councilor and the freshly washed place cannot camouflage the pissy odour emanating from it. A young homeless woman walks out. Timely switch to the music. Natty Dread She Want and Big Youth steps on it and Lord ! She wants a yong natty dread, no ol’man! I am past the Gariahat Tram Depot and the sun has broken through the smog and appeared over the buildings over the old Mandevilla Gardens. A lone sweeper is sweeping the drains along the road, while an old man sleeps in the bus stop. Further down and I am near the Gariahat crossing and rows of people are sleeping in neat rows right from the Hindusthan Road crossing right up to the corner with Rash Behari Avenue. Most of them are still trying desperately to shield off the sun and the clamor from the newspaper trucks that have started arriving. A young street woman lies with her right breast completely exposed, while at least fifteen other men and women lie right next to her in a tight pack. Its 5:50 and Joshua Redman comes on with Hide and Seek from the Freedom in the Groove album. I cross under the Gariahat flyover and head briskly towards the Rabindro Sarobar lakes. Another street man has just woken up. He is washing his legs in some drain water that is flowing out of a high rise where the security guard has rolled up his pants and is dutifully washing the highly protected drive way. I notice the streetman’s legs. They are bruised and chancred. His hair is knotted up completely and whatever is on his back as far coverings go, does not cover much of his modesty. Nearby under an old banyan tree, I notice he spent the night on a plastic sheet. With absolute precision Miles comes on with Walkin’. Yes, it is him even though he is not on the horn. Someone with lightning fingers is tickling the reeds and it feels like a sewer rat is scurrying all over the piano. I can sense Miles walking around on the stage, back to the audience, occasionally emitting screeching notes from his trumpet. Add-ons.

I cross over the front of the Ramkrishna Mission after the Gol Park and Miles has now emerged playing the lead tune finally with his usual blast-away blues style. I cross over to the south side of Southern Avenue and start seeing the first walkers, swinging by vigorously, some elderly folks jamming loudly with sweaty glasses slipping down their noses under another banyan tree. A pot-bellied jogger, all sweaty and looking devastated and breathless has stopped to negotiate with a dab seller. He has a Hitler mustache. I bend under a road block bar and reach the lakes. It’s Ramsey Lewis by now with Nancy Wilson, One True Thing.

What an incredible change of pace and setting now greets me. The Lakes are now in full view. A paved walkway and benches under trees. Nice little, well maintained parks, have been erected and I accidentally find the area where I used to come in the early mornings some forty years ago to practice track. There is a club house there. Members only. I was in the high school sprint team and also the lead hop step and jumper. That open stretch, where I tried hard to sprint in short bursts, all by myself had now become a well maintained park. My sweat had by now really begun to pour, as I watched young men and women walking by or running by in various stages of morning exercises. Elderly people were doing stretching exercises. A young father was helping his slightly disabled son to do some exercises. A group of young women were doing what seemed like Tai Chi. Another group of women were sitting squat on one of the benches and doing what seemed like Pranayama Yoga, is it? You close one nostril, breathe in and exhale from the other. Then you sit squat and make these sudden and jolting exhausts through your mouth which make your whole body shudder. Suddenly I notice in the distance a flotilla of row boats skimming the surface of the water and speeding up the curve around the artificial island in the lakes. There are about fifteen boats and the scullers are working away. Boys and girls, working at it smartly, calling out commands. Sweating, with peaked caps shielding their faces. Another young woman jogs by, dressed over modestly. Joshua Redman on now, again. I like Joshua and James Carter. Young lions. They have a strut to their music. I sit under a tree for a long time. It’s pleasant and nearly unforgettable. I do not want to leave, but I know I need to go back. On my way back I see more young and old doing exercises. Kolkata has changed. Has it? I remember, there was a time forty years ago, I was one of the only joggers at this time in the morning. Sometimes my school buddies joined me, if they were from South Calcutta. We would be preparing for the Inter-School Sports Meets. There are more joggers now. More walkers. More people doing Tai-Chi and free hand exercises. Yoga-ists everywhere. Health is a concern.

I walk back. The young disabled, totally blackened man with chancres and sores who was washing his feet, before, has now laid him self flat down on the drain and closed his eyes. The torrent of water coming from the washing of the driveway in the high rise is now flowing over him. He has a smile on his face. His matted hair is glistening in the sun. Kolkata has changed?

2006-04-13T06:02:00.000-07:00

Democracy From Below
Rana Bose
12 April, 2006

Something is happening in this post-Cold War era of struggles for social justice. There is a spectre once again haunting the world, when it comes to popular movements. It is the spectre of movements rooted in pragmatic thinking (as opposed to hidebound theory), enjoying significant popular support and more importantly aligned internationally with a global enthusiasm to counter the will and strong arm tactics of a failing empire known as the United States. These movements are firmly rooted in their people and at the same time they have an astounding maturity that combines the local and indigenous element with the global condition. They have a plan for the immediate and a plan for the future. They want to achieve what is achievable, today, taking the people along with them, make the necessary compromises and they have in certain cases the resources to fight the onslaught of finance and military muscle arranged against them, with their own resources. The depression in the left-wing camp after the demise of the erstwhile Soviet Union has been put aside. It is a period of recovery. Whereas the media-savvy Chiapas-style movement combined a certain contemporariness with indigenous mass involvement in an era of combating “globalization”, the current condition is best described by two developments of a different nature. Nepal and Venezuela represent this new development and have basically drawn a “line in the terrain of the whole world” so as to speak. The Maoists in Nepal have proven repeatedly that while they can operate with impunity in the jungles and mountains and have virtually surrounded all the major centers (and can even knock out military helicopters from the skies) they can also come out of their hideouts and give interviews to the BBC and many other mainstream media and eloquently present themselves as having consistently asked for a constituent assembly and a multi-party system. Their demand for Nepal to come out of an archaic monarchist-feudal era run by palace buffoons and military thugs, rings true. They have also successfully aligned themselves with mainstream opposition parties to form a classic United Front against backward elements and toadies.
Theirs is a genuine armed struggle whose end goal is to end the armed struggle. They have clearly advanced in forming a parallel society in the countryside and are already running it and defending it. The fabled Royal Nepalese Army can do very little except to confine themselves to city centers and launch occasional forays and cause civilian casualties. The Maoists also admit to their mistakes openly, do not have illusions of marching into Katmandu at the head of a column of tanks and also do not expect a communist regime to emerge out of such a feudal developmental stage that Nepal is in.
The Maoists in Nepal also know that the Indian government (and its so-called Left wing allies) would not like to see a successful Maoist movement in Nepal and its impact on Indian Maoists. They also know what the nearly hysterical rants of the US Ambassador to Nepal amount to and they also know what the totally misguided policies of the government of China amount to. They see their struggle for basic democracy as defending the rights of the poorest sections of the Nepalese people who form the majority of Nepal’s poverty–ridden population, while walking a very tight corridor of international intrigue and intrusion. They know how to negotiate. They know how to call a cease-fire and also go on the offensive. They know how to stick to their promises and they also expose the buffoon king every day, without much effort. Their maturity should be a lesson for those who in India have thumped their chests for nearly forty years announcing that liberation was imminent for the Indian peasantry. Their call for a democratic constitution born out of a constituent assembly-- no one should doubt.Several continents away another story is emerging. Out of Latin America a spate of alliances and changes have started happening with Venezuela leading the foray with their Bolivarian revolution asserting the right of nations to develop their economies independent of the diktat of the policies of the US-led IMF and World Bank. Latin American nations are forming their own alliances regionally and no amount of demonizing and Hugo-bashing can detract from the fact that Venezuela is significantly more democratic and an open society, then the Latin America that the United States would like to see. In Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, and even in Uruguay, Brazil and Chile one can see a growing assertion of people and indigenous movements to come out of the centuries old stranglehold of US policies operating through tin-pot dictatorships and fascistic military putschists of the old era. The Monroe doctrine has been pitched and cannot be revived. Even the Sandinistas may soon be back in power. In Latin America, there is one important element to be recognized. For once, oil wealth is being turned into a resource to provide health, education, housing and food for the poor. In fact Venezuela even controls one of the largest oil companies operating in the US (Citgo) and has effectively offered discount gasoline to the poorer sections of the US population and it is actually a functional operation in many southern states, even though the United States hates to admit it. The dilemma with pre-democratic (feudal Nepal) and “post-democratic”( post-feudal Venezuela and Latin America) is that both palace thugs and modern capitalists require the trappings of “democracy” to go about palace intrigue and capital accumulation. A subservient social class that can maintain this set-up for the kings and the Pinochets of the world have now been virtually made to run in both Nepal and Venezuela.
Methods of popular self-government (village people’s committees) and barrio assemblies have been developed to run civic society more and more. What has radicalized both Nepalese society and Venezuelan society is the “decommissioning” of these “middle-forces” (the petit-bourgeoisie representatives) and their “democratic” institutions. These institutions relied on the legacy of “aid” “loans” and the attendant dependence and corruption to completely paralyze these economies. This has all come to a head. In Nepal, by the assertion of the Maoists through their ten-year consistent armed self-defense and widespread popularization of their struggles and in Venezuela by the brash but thoughtful assertion of Hugo Chavez to tear up old arrangements where Venezuela’s oil billions went to a handful of wealthy families and instead use that wealth to fight poverty. Democracy from below is replacing democracy from above. The world is witnessing, in Nepal and Venezuela, a phenomena that is rare. Two different types of popular and pragmatic uprisings in a post-doctrinal era.

2006-04-13T05:02:00.000-07:00

Listening to Dylan Dubai, Feb ‘06

Today’s been busy
Busy with a million
Black Bedouin lovers
swarming in the sand
In and out,
Behind dry walls
listening to Dylan
under hijab headphones
nodding gently
black gowns shuffling,
ravishing the winds
smiling under the veil,
Where do you come from,
Where do you go?
Sad and lonesome day
My long time darling!
I have sisters
With roses in their hair,
Long haired women,
Who play the banjo,
With brothers
who died in the war
What do you have?

What do you boogie to?
Do you have civil wars?
Chunky guitar, speedy riffs
Under the shade ?
Do you have lover’s sighs?
When do you paint the town?

I’m moving slow
Like Dylan says
To the strain of a Hammond,
somewhere,
following my nose.
Rules are all washed out
As I drive on a cornice road
Whispering in your ears,
Telling the sea
Hang me if you can,
I’m listening to Dylan
On 12th and Vine
Having thoughts about you.
While you sway in the palm grove,
Headphones and all
pebbles in the sand,
Must I leave you alone?

2006-04-13T04:44:00.000-07:00

Cosmology of Beat July 30, 2005

In the cosmology of beat
There are cars and roads
And curling smoke
Rising from black and grey,
Still-shots,
of village voices,
Standing slouched
On Wooster,
Mumbling Sanskrit slokas,
As Imamu Amiri Baraka,
the former Leroi Jones,
Pensive, in a loft up there,
Leans against a piano
That weeps and faints,
As he begins to recite,
The tale of his baptism,
in a toilet bowl.

In the cosmology of beat,
There are black steel stairs below
And there is the twist,
At the end of the martini,
Which sulks,
At the bottom
Of the glassy pit, empty
Where the mind sits
Armed only
With a swizzle stick
Swirling the dust
From the Buddhist tantra
That make the cosmos
Sound like physics
Gone to shit.

In the cosmology of beat
There is hope,
That the hum and the swirl,
And the chance that
A sound will emerge
and bulbs will sway
And faces will turn,
In corridors
Where whispers and chants
Once did reverberate.