Category: Uncategorized

by Serge Halimi

To deal with the legacy he inherited from his predecessors, Barack Obama has rejected several of their ideas. True, the new US president has been in no hurry to withdraw US forces from Iraq and he has committed more troops to the murderous, hopeless deadlock in Afghanistan. On the home front, his policy vis-à-vis the automobile industry, the banks and the pay-packets of top executives shows no sign of breaking with the diehard neo-liberalism which allows the public to share company losses but not their profits.

Even so, Obama is no doubt the most progressive the US system can produce in the current climate – so much so that decisions taken by the powers that be in Washington are sometimes more acceptable than those coming from Paris, Brussels, Moscow, Beijing – or Tehran. If the White House holds its ground and powerful lobbies in Congress are kept under tight control, the United States may shortly have legislation in place to protect trade union rights and deal with the cost of health care for the 46 million Americans who have no insurance cover. That would be no mean achievement.

It can be argued that Obama is, after all, a Democrat. But that is to ignore 40 years of history. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, took office in 1969, and both the Democratic presidents who succeeded him waged most of their battles against the progressive ideas of their own party. So both effectively paved the way for the conservative Republicans who succeeded them (Ronald Reagan and George W Bush). Carter set the deregulation ball rolling, pursued an ultra-monetarist policy and revived the cold war on the pretext of defending human rights. Things were even worse under Clinton: tougher penal sanctions were introduced, the death penalty extended country-wide, federal aid for the poor abolished and military operations undertaken – without any UN mandate – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Kosovo. Obama’s first steps must also be measured against these precedents.

True, there were no real surprises in the content of his Cairo speech on 4 June: Bush had already accepted the idea of a Palestinian state and all the incumbents of the White House since Carter had called for a stop to Israeli settlements – with the results we see now. But Obama’s tone was new. Speaking of US relations with the peoples of the Middle East, he said “the cycle of suspicion and discord must end” and he was careful to avoid the word “terrorist”, which his predecessor had used so freely. Obama even acknowledged that: “Hamas does have support among some Palestinians”. Finally, by suggesting the Palestinians should follow the example of the (non-violent) struggles of the Afro-Americans, he implicitly identified Israeli colonialism with the “humiliation of segregation” once suffered by black people in America.

Monde Diplo for more

Adjustment, Recovery and Fragility in East Asia
Edited By: Jayati Ghosh & C.P. Chandrasekhar

Hardbound, Tulika, August 2009, pp. viii + 316

List price: Rs 650.00 / $ 35.00
Book Club Members price: Rs 487.50 / $ 26.25

After Crisis for more

The global financial crisis that exploded around September 2008 was just one more in a series of crises that have affected more than sixty
countries in the era of financial liberalization.

Of course the latest crisis is particularly significant in a number of ways: it originated in the core of capitalism, in the United States; it
has spread dramatically across the world, even to countries that earlier seemed to be relatively secure; it calls into question many of the mainstream economic dogmas that have dominated economic policy-making for more than two decades.

Yet, in some other ways, the current crisis is not very different from those that have preceded it in the recent past.

July 2007 marked the completion of a decade since the onset of financial crisis in several East and Southeast Asian countries. The crisis of 1997 focused attention on the dangers associated with a
world dominated by fluid finance. It brought home the fact that financial liberalization can result in crises even in so-called ‘miracle economies’.

Prior to the crisis, the pace and pattern of growth in many countries in that region were challenging the dominance of the original capitalist powers over the global economy. The 1997 crisis set back that process, and even after a decade many of these countries have not been able to recover their pre-crisis dynamism.

In hindsight, it is clear that currency and financial crises have devastating effects on the real economy. The ensuing liquidity crunch and wave of bankruptcies result in severe deflation, with attendant consequences for employment and the standard of living. The adoption, post-crisis, of conventional IMF stabilization strategies tends to worsen the situation: governments continue to adopt very restrictive macroeconomic policies and restrain public expenditure even in crucial social sectors. Finally, asset-price deflation and
devaluation pave the way for foreign capital inflows that finance a transfer of ownership of assets from domestic to foreign investors, thereby enabling a conquest by international capital of important domestic assets and resources.

This book delineates the alternative trajectories of post-crisis development in different economies, the lessons they offer and the implications they have for alternative policies. It is important to
take stock of these processes because it is becoming evident that the international financial system has still not evolved effective ways of preventing such crises among emerging economies and of reducing their damaging effects. This book therefore has a wider focus than the East Asian ‘crisis economies’ alone: it tries to situate post-crisis developments in a broader analysis of the recent political economy of international capitalism, in particular, the role of mobile finance.

It also offers comparative perspectives on post-crisis restructuring in other developing countries that have experienced crisis; as well as
on the experience of other Asian countries that were affected by, but did not experience the financial crisis. While the essays in this book
were originally written in 2007, they remain extraordinarily relevant to the present times, not least because they anticipate the processes that led to the global financial meltdown in 2008. Many of them predict the severe impact the current global crisis is having on both financial variables and the real economy, in developing countries in particular.

Jayati Ghosh and C.P. Chandrasekhar are both Professors at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

The Anti-Empire Report
August 4th, 2009

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org

If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA’s hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don’t know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it’s an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.1

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don’t qualify as “assassinations”, for somehow killing “terrorists” from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.
But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media’s practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence)2; the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to, and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 19663, referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.4

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries5
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world6

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

“The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.”7

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.
The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when it’s killed tens of thousands of simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving … utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life’s savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It’s not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same “causes” for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world’s oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: “I want everyone to know,” he said during an interview in November. “They died for us.”8

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we’ll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she’s a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he’s as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don’t enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, would not agree with her. “At the constitutional level where we work,” he said, “ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.”9

By Sotomayor’s own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she’s a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the “War on Terror”? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. “The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group,” the Washington Post reported. “On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue.”10 No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people’s legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.
It didn’t have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: “Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.”

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his “Stop NATO” mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world’s only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station’s transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO’s bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the “Stop NATO” mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] yahoo.com. Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you’ll receive is often considerable. You’ll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages.

Notes
1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009 ?
2. Fabian Escalante, “Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro” (Ocean Press, 2006) ?
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32?
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23 ?
5. Ibid., chapter 18 ?
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions ?
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com ?
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009 ?
9. William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (1980), p.8 ?
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007 ?
–
William Blum is the author of:

• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with “add” in the subject line. I’d like your name and city in the message, but that’s optional. I ask for your city only in case I’ll be speaking in your area.

(Or put “remove” in the subject line to do the opposite.)

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I’d appreciate it if the website were mentioned.

YELLOWGURL POEM AUG09

by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

i know the bump on your nose won’t go away,
that fine knot of hooked bone, a snag against
the skyline, like a pebble beneath the foot

i know your descriptions are incomplete.
the flashing of fists and alley and brick,
your ability to wriggle from the grasp of
piston-pounding, jack-hammering bodies —

boys who’ve traded life for steel, the cool
barrel of guns against their pelvises, weights
thrown onto the living room couch

i know your fires are understated, your passions,
your victories, the violence you have stripped of
color and hue, no words attach to these memories,
they are light and free to move – they don’t scare you.

your eyes take on different casts of fullness:
one moment opaque and the next crackling
like sun on the hudson, the glint of the
unspoken lighting up your entire face
with all that you have overcome

Kelly Tsai’s website is http://www.yellowgurl.com/

By GARETH PORTER

The strategy of the major U.S. and British military offensive in Afghanistan’s Helmand province aimed at wresting it from the Taliban is based on bringing back Afghan army and police to maintain permanent control of the population, so the foreign forces can move on to another insurgent stronghold.

But that strategy poses an acute problem: The police in the province, who are linked to the local warlord, have committed systematic abuses against the population, including the abduction and rape of pre-teen boys, according to village elders who met with British officers.

Anger over those police abuses runs so high that the elders in Babaji just north of Laskgar Gah warned the British that they would support the Taliban to get rid of them if the national police were allowed to return to the area, according to a Jul. 12 report by Reuters correspondent Peter Graff.

Associated Press reporters Jason Straziuso and David Guttenfelder, who accompanied U.S. troops in Northern Helmand, reported Jul. 13 that villagers in Aynak were equally angry about police depredations. Within hours of the arrival of U.S. troops in the village, they wrote, bands of villagers began complaining the local police force was “a bigger problem than the Taliban”.

The brutality of the Afghan police toward the civilian population in Helmand was no surprise to Ambassador Ron Neumann, who was the U.S. envoy in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Such abuses, including rape of pre-teen boys, “are part of the larger problem of repression and oppression” in Afghanistan, Neumann told us.

Neumann said the problem of police abuses against the population can be traced back to the creation of the national police after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001. The Afghan police were not created afresh by U.S. and NATO force, Neumann recalls but were “constituted from the forces that were then fighting the Taliban”.

Counterpunch for more

By Julio Nakamurakare

It’s not like the story hasn’t been told before — neither the surface storyline, nor the more profound layers of meaning lying underneath. Indeed, the predicament of death row inmates, as seen, perceived and almost felt from prisoner, the executioner, or a third party involved in the horrendous scheme of social revenge, has been the subject of countless retellings, some with an unexpected twist and cancellation suspense in thriller mode, some with humaine concerns as in the Sean Penn-Susan Sarandon winner Dead Man Walking (1995).

On the local front, I cannot help mentioning Liliana Paolinelli’s little-seen, experimental gem Por sus propios ojos (Proper Eyes, 2008), which has a film student working on her graduation thesis approach a prisoner from a different perspective: through the eyes of the women (mothers, wives, girlfriends, lovers, sisters, daughters) who every Sunday go through the painful ritual of strip-down search before passing through the gates of hell to see, for a little while, never enough, their incarcerated men.

Sunday morning women, I’d call them, waking up at the break of dawn to fix themselves a maté before packing food, toiletries, cigarettes and other items their men will need during the interminably long week, before another Sunday arrives. For them, it’s life, albeith with longer intervals between each brief reunion. Some hold hopes of deliverance, others accept, not without a modicum of defiance and relentless faith, the fact that an impenetrable wall stands between them and their incarcerated men.

Korean director Kim Ki-Duk’s Soom (Breath) works in a similar way, exploring as it does a mesmerizing — though, in the end, quite sympathetic — situation. Breath is an engaging exploration of love and loneliness from the two sides of the divide: behind bars — actual prison bars, that is — and the other side, with no visible impedimenta but otherwise as maddening and alienating as waiting for an inexorable end slow in coming.

Breath is an intelligent amalgam of vengeance deviously turning into amour fou , as a desperate housewife cannot help but becoming infatuated with a death-row inmate.Housewife Yeon (played by Park Ji-ah) finds out that her husband has been keeping a secret so well for years that she only tardily realizes that he’s been cheating on her. Infidelity, however, is not everything there is in the marital game, because Yeon equates infidelity with betrayal, and this she cannot forgive.

What Kim Ki-Duk brings to this scenario is, for some, a rather predictable twist — Yeon, learning through the media about prisoner Jang Jin, seeks revenge by striking a relationship with him Jan Jing. Kim Ki-Duk’s story, up to this point, does not deviate from the usual narrative: Yeon poses as an ex-girlfriend of Jan Jing’s, and both find mutual comfort in each other. Kim Ki-Duk’s film, like Bernardo Bertolucci’s morally , unjustly maligned Last Tango in Paris, is not about pathological characters giving leeway to their darkest side, to their long-repressed perversion: it’s all about human bonding, the human need to transcend through love, regardless of its manifestation.

What’s visually striking in Breath is the unbelievable lengths Yeon will go to spice up each visit according to seasons, adding fabulous colours, music and songs through the end of a narration only comparable to Tsai Ming-Lian’s The Hole / The Last Dance (1998), in which the dramatic action in a dump of social housing project blooms into song and dance extravaganzas impeccably choreographed and, to conservative viewers, unneeded, uncalled for and even absurd digressions. But comparisons abound, starting with opera, in which the narrative is told through vocal means and orchestral music when this is never feasible, not in the rea, palpable world at least.

Buenos Aires Herald for more

Submitted by Margaret Kimberley on Mon, 07/27/2009 – 23:10

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The damage inflicted on Black America since the economic meltdown is absolutely unprecedented in modern times – but African Americans have yet to “develop an agenda and make the requisite demands” of power. In New York City, Black unemployment is “more than four times as high as white joblessness. “The trajectory for black America goes ever downward, even as the presence of a black man in the White House gives the mirage-like appearance of success for all.”

“Obama downplayed the singularity of the black experience.”

Black Americans and their ever growing list of problems are not on anyone’s agenda. They are not on the presidential agenda, or the congressional agenda. Even the Congressional Black Caucus leadership takes a hands off approach to their constituents’ dire situation. Unless African Americans develop an agenda and make the requisite demands, economic prospects will continue to decline.

The news for black people is rarely positive, and the recession without end has only exacerbated an already terrible condition.

According to the New York City Comptroller, black unemployment in that city is more than four times as high as white unemployment, a rate of 14.7% for blacks and 3.7% for whites. Black unemployment rose more than 9 percentage points in the past year, a 167% increase.When referring to unemployment statistics it must be remembered that the jobless no longer receiving benefits are not included in these numbers. To add insult to injury, no one in a position of power to change the situation will admit that racism is the cause of the disparity.

The New York Times will report the numbers, but manages to find economists and other experts who shrug their shoulders and express shock that the disparity continues to worsen. The reason for the unemployment free fall is apparently a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

“Black unemployment rose more than 9 percentage points in the past year, a 167% increase.”

The “r” word, racism, is like black people, off the table and prohibited from being discussed. Recessions give employers an opportunity to rid themselves of unwanted employees, and black and unwanted seem to be synonymous. The preference of many whites to be surrounded by more white faces is easier to justify when layoffs take place. Lo and behold, the cuts come at the bottom of the organizational chart, where the black faces are located, and not at the top, where a paler hue is the norm.

Black Agenda Report for more

By Eric A. Powel

In 1819, Cherokee silversmith George Gist—better known as Sequoyah—completed work on the Cherokee syllabary, a written script in which each character represents a syllable. By 1825, most Cherokee had adopted the system and Sequoyah was hailed as a folk hero for inventing the first Native American system of writing in North America. Now University of Cincinnati archaeologist Kenneth Tankersley has discovered that Cherokee characters engraved alongside petroglyphs in a southeastern Kentucky cave are the earliest known examples of Sequoyah’s syllabary, dating back to 1818, or perhaps even earlier.

Tankersley, a member of the Cherokee Nation and Piqua Shawnee tribes, found the characters in a cave sacred to Native Americans as the burial place of Red Bird, a prominent Cherokee chief who was tomahawked to death in 1796 by two white men in a fur trading dispute. Red Bird was known to have created some of the petroglyphs in the cave, which include abstract ancient symbols as well as glyphs representing bears, bats, deer, and birds.

Sequoyah had relatives who lived near the cave and he taught the syllabary to Cherokee boys studying at a local school called the Choctaw Academy. “It’s likely that Sequoyah would have visited the cave at some point to pay respects to Red Bird,” says Tankersley. “We also know that he visited caves for inspiration while he was working on his syllabary, and that he incorporated rock-art motifs into the system.”

The earliest writing in the system developed by the Cherokee known as Sequoyah has been found in a Kentucky cave. (Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C./Art Resource)

Archaelogy for more

ANUPAMA KATAKAM in Ahmedabad

The July 7 hooch tragedy has drawn attention to Gujarat’s worst-kept secret: that alcohol is freely available in the State.

PHOTOGRAPHS: JANAK PATEL

More than 150 people died after drinking spurious liquor in Ahmedabad in July. Here, one of the victims in hospital on July 7.

ON July 7, Gujarat woke up to witness its worst ever hooch tragedy. During the course of the previous night and in the early hours of that morning, hundreds of men and women had been rushed to two government hospitals in Ahmedabad, with complaints of loss of eyesight, vomiting and unbearable pain in the stomach. In spite of the doctors’ best efforts, not many of them survived.

During the week, more than 159 people died after drinking spurious alcohol supplied by one of the many bootleggers who operate in Ahmedabad. Approximately 230 people are still in hospital.

“We do get cases of alcohol poisoning, but I have never seen such large numbers or anything like this before. They were dropping like flies. We just did not have enough time to treat them as the substance was so potent and lethal,” said a doctor who was at the scene but prefers not to be named.

The tragedy that unfolded in Ahmedabad has again brought into focus the debate on prohibition. Does banning alcohol really benefit people? It is Gujarat’s worst-kept secret that any type of alcohol – “country” or “English” – is freely available. Would it not be safer to legalise the process and reduce the likelihood of these terrible incidents? Or does the ban work as some form of deterrent and hence help in reducing ugly incidents that occur under the influence of alcohol?

Front line for more