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STARK COUNTY — A story that already has people talking nationwide is certain to get more attention with a billboard that encourages former female inmates to report jail abuse. The billboard along Route 62 near Root Avenue in Stark County [in the State of Ohio, US] was put up as a result of the civil lawsuit brought by Hope Steffey against Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson. Steffey’s clothes were forcibly removed by both male and female deputies and she was left completely naked inside the Stark county jail for six hours. Sheriff Swanson says Steffey was considered suicidal so her clothes had to be removed for her own safety. Steffey has denied she was suicidal. The woman’s lawyers discovered during the lawsuit that at least 128 women between 1999 and 2007 were strip-searched or forced to remove their clothing or placed on suicide watch, homicide watch or “naked detention.” This Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson is like a concentration camp commandant. When asked about the ethics of stripping prisoners – young women, naked in his jail Swanson justified his ‘Abu Ghraib’ style treatment of human beings by stating that he has hundreds of prisoners that are stripped naked in his jail. Swanson thinks the large scale of the crime somehow legitimizes it. Sheriff Swanson should know that many thousands of Jews were also stripped naked in concentration camps and it didn’t make the dehumanizing practice any less of an atrocity. In fact it made it much worse.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Past-News.php/2009/03/15/billboard-encourages-women-to-report-jai

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By DAVID OKWEMBAH

Nearly four tonnes of unrefined gold from Congo is stuck in Nairobi, setting off an international controversy over its ownership and whether it was smuggled into the country.
The gold was en route to Zurich, Switzerland, from Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But the Swiss company, which was to receive the gold, Firstar, pulled out at the last minute saying it had learnt that the cargo belonged to Zimbabwean Vice-President, Mrs Joice Mujuru, investigations by the Nation reveal.
A South African businessman, Dancor Spies, claimed to be the key mover in the transaction denies that it had anything to do with the Zimbabwean. He, however, would not disclose who owns it.
Mr Spies ultimately stopped communicating with the Nation and threatened to go to court if the story is published.
The gold, whose worth is estimated at between Sh4 billion and Sh5 billion, is reported to have been flown in on November 28, last year, from Lubumbashi, an area of the Congo where Zimbabwean officials have influence.
Zimbabwe is among nations which have mineral interests in the Congo and at one time sent an army to prop up the Kinshasa government against rebels.
According to the certificate of origin, a copy of which is certified by Nairobi lawyer Cecil Miller, the quantity of gold in question is 3,700 kilogrammes.
Mrs Mujuru’s daughter, Mrs Nyasha del Campo, a commodities trader based in Spain, told the Nation that she was an intermediary in the transaction.
Kenyan law firm
She claimed that the gold belonged to a friend of Mr Spies in Nairobi. In subsequent e-mails, however, she changed her stance: “I am not the owner of the gold. The owner was represented by a local Kenyan law firm and I was not privy as to know who owns this gold. I was just an intermediary,” she wrote.
Mr Spies said the cargo belonged to a mine in the Katanga Province of the Congo. He claimed to have been unable to get in touch with the owner for three weeks.
“Regrettably, I am not in a position to give you any further detailed and confidential information as I am not the owner of the gold. I was unable to make contact with the owner since 3 weeks ago. I am however still trying,” the South African said.
He, however, was categorical that the gold did not belong to Mrs Mujuru’s daughter, her husband or any of her family members.
The gold saga came to light three weeks ago when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) linked it to Mrs Mujuru and her husband Solomon, the former head of the army under President Mugabe.
Mrs Mujuru and her family are among small elite who have prospered in Zimbabwe as the rest of the country plunges into an ever-deeper economic mire.
According to Swiss gold refinery firm Firstar, the Zimbabwean vice-president was using her daughter, Nyasha, who is married to a Spaniard, Pedro del Campo, to sell the gold.
However, the daughter was unable to pay Sh16 million freight for the 3,700kg of gold to Zurich and is reported to have sought the support of her mother to have the gold airlifted from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA).

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By NICHOLAS WADE

Nature is reputed to be red in tooth and claw, but many arms races across the animal kingdom are characterized by restraint rather than carnage.

Competition among males is often expressed in the form of elaborate weapons made of bone, horn or chitin. The weapons often start off small and then, under the pressure of competition, may evolve to attain gigantic proportions. The Irish elk, now extinct, had antlers with a span of 12 feet. The drawback of this magnificent adornment, though, was that the poor beast had to carry more than 80 pounds of bone on its head.
In a new review of sexual selection, a special form of natural selection that leads to outlandish armament and decoration, Douglas J. Emlen, a biologist at the University of Montana, has assembled ideas on the evolutionary forces that have made animal weapons so diverse.
Sexual selection was Darwin’s solution to a problem posed by the cumbersome weapons sported by many species, and the baroque ornaments developed by others. They seemed positive handicaps in the struggle for survival, and therefore contrary to his theory of natural selection. To account for these extravagances, Darwin proposed that both armaments and ornaments must have been shaped by competition for mates.
In his view, the evolution of the armaments was driven by the struggle between males for females, whereas the ornaments arose from the choice, largely by females, of characteristics they prized in males. Modern biologists have devoted considerable attention to female choice and how it has led to such a riotous profusion of animal high fashion, from the plumage of birds to the colors of butterflies. Less attention has been paid to the equally rich diversity of animal weaponry.
Dr. Emlen said he became interested in animal armament after studying a species of dung beetle in Panama that specialized in monkey scat. He broadened his studies to dung beetles worldwide and noticed a pattern in their weaponry. Dung beetles may have started their highly successful career feeding on dinosaur ordure, and seem then to have diversified to that of mammals. They have two principal strategies. Some, like the scarabs, cut out pieces of dung and roll it away for private consumption. Other species dig under a deposit and draw it into their tunnels.
Dr. Emlen noticed that only the tunneling species of dung beetles had evolved horns, which the males use to protect their tunnels from other males. The beetles that push balls of dung away also fight all the time with other males, but are hornless.
“I became fascinated by animals with strange morphologies that make you wonder how in the world they could possibly have mated,” Dr. Emlen said. After collecting papers on “anything that had funky structures,” he began to see a pattern in who developed weapons and who did not. Whenever there was some resource that could be monopolized and used for reproductive advantage, males would develop weapons to fight off other males.
The cost of developing and carrying the weapon, Dr. Emlen inferred, was outweighed by the greater access to females gained by owning some prized possession like a food source or tunnel where females could lay eggs.
Dr. Emlen noticed a tendency for weapons to start out small, like mere bumps of bone, and then to evolve to more ornate form. The small weapons are actually quite destructive since their only role is to attack other males. But the more baroque weapons, even though they look more fearsome, seem to cause lesser loss of life.
The reason is that the more menacing weapons have often acquired a signaling role. Instead of risking their lives in mortal combat, males can assess each other’s strengths by sizing up a rival’s weapons, and decline combat if they seem outclassed. The ornate weapons also lend themselves to ritualized combat in which males may lock horns and assess each other’s strength without wounding each other.
“The most elaborate weapons rarely inflict real damage to opponents, but these structures are very effective at revealing even subtle differences among males in their size, status or physical condition,” Dr. Emlen writes in the current Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

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By Paul Street

Recently I spoke to an acquaintance who happens to be a psychiatric nurse at a major hospital. She reports an epidemic of distraught people coming and brought into her facility’s emergency room in the wake of mental breakdowns and, often, suicide attempts. She’s seen more of this in recent months than in any previous time in her career.

I asked the obvious question: “is it the economy?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Layoffs. Foreclosures. Bankruptcies. Evictions. Loss of health insurance since that goes out with the job. Divorces resulting from all of the above. They blame themselves.”

They blame themselves.

How tragically horrible but unsurprising. It’s wrong because the United States economy is under the control of a state-capitalist profits system that guarantees no real security to most of its majority working class population. As a prerequisite for being granted the money required to buy basic life necessities (food, clothing, housing, health care and more), that majority is compelled to rent out its labor power to a relatively small class of employers. But employers don’t hire and retain people unless it is profitable to do so. The right to rent one’s self out is contingent upon exploitation – on the existence of an employer-friendly gap between what the worker gets paid and how much the boss[es] can get above that payment. When there’s no profit to be made off workers, employees are sent packing. Beneath occasional nice severance gestures, it’s “See ya. Good luck, punk.”

As it happens, capitalism itself chronically makes it impossible for bosses to employee people profitably. Competition, technological displacement, capital flight (typically from higher to lower-wage zones of the world economic system), excess capacity, the collapse and closing of markets, periodic downturns in the “business cycle,” credit crises, the bursting of speculative asset bubbles, – all of these and other and interrelated factors make it inevitable that vast swaths of the workforce (or proletariat if you will) are periodically evicted from the workforce through no fault of their own. In big economic meltdowns like the current Great Recession (sparked by a collapse of artificially inflated real estate values and the deregulated hyper-financialization and systemic excess of capital lacking profitable productive investment outlets), the number of hardworking wage- and salary-earners who are turned into hapless job-seekers and discouraged unemployed (and suicides) is truly horrific. The profit system’s ever-present “reserve army of labor” (Karl Marx’s useful term) expands to absurd levels. Thousands show up when a fire department announces a handful of openings. Hundreds of unemployed (including people with advanced graduate degrees) apply when a local school district advertises a janitorial position. Millions of human beings are rendered officially redundant practically (it seems) overnight.

It is not their fault. This is how capitalism “works,” and it’s nothing new. As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained in 1848, the profits system: “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal tires that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in the place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom – Free Trade.” Along the way, Marx and Engels observed, that system and its many and diverse government agents created (through enclosure, expropriation, and labor-exploiting economies of scale that independent artisans could not match) a property-less working class majority whose members “live only so long as they find work and who find work only as long as their labor increases capital.” Working class people must “sell themselves piecemeal.” They (well, their labor power) “are a commodity like any other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market,” including recurrent “commercial crises” that help “make their livelihoods more and more insecure.”
The current unemployment epidemic, with its vast under-reported collateral damage, is consistent with the deeper story of “life” (and death) under the historically specific form of political economy called capitalism. It has nothing to do with the personal adequacy of those who are being pushed out of the workplace [1].

Sadly, there is little space for acknowledging these harsh historical and institutional realities in the dominant U.S. political and media culture. A political candidate or party who honestly takes up these critical questions has no chance of receiving the big money sponsorship and corporate media favor required to become “viable” in the American “dollar democracy” – the “best democracy that money can [and did] buy.” As Herbert Schiller noted 36 years ago in his neglected study The Mind Managers (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1973), the state-capitalist “elite” enlists its powerful, means of mass communication to keep any such understanding at bay. It seeks to engender endemic popular “passivity” and “mental torpor” with “lethal” and “intentionally devitalized” cultural content designed “not to arouse but to lessen concern about [harsh] social and economic realities” (like structurally generated mass unemployment) in a society divided between (i)”haves,” “winners,” and “order-givers” and (ii) “have-nots,” “losers,” and “order-receivers.” (Schiller 1973, pp. 1-31) You can learn from that media today about (supposedly) isolated examples of morally bad capitalist behavior – Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and the recently ugly AIG executive and trader bonuses, for example – but not about the deep assault that capitalism (once aptly described by Marx as the de facto “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”) routinely against a decent and democratic existence. Especially during periods of graphic capitalist failure and excess like the present, you can see and hear occasional pseudo-progressive hints of Charles Dickens-like moralizing against plutocratic overindulgence. Serious discussion of the profit system’s deadly impact on ordinary peoples’ security (and on democracy, social justice, international harmony, and ecological sustainability) is forbidden in the corporate masters’ communications and culture complex.

Sober structural critique of the existing system of class rule is unthinkable there for reasons that are not mysterious. The main media institutions are owned and operated by giant profit-based state-capitalist super-conglomerates like General Electric (owner and part owner of NBC, A&E, American Movie Classics, Biography Channel, Bravo, CNBC, Court TV, History Channel, MSG Network, MSNBC, National Geographic Worldwide and more), Time Warner (owner of film and music production companies, theme parks, sports teams, magazines, websites and book publishers as well as Turner Broadcasting), Walt Disney (ABC, Disney Channel/Network, Lifetime Network, ESPN, Classic Sports, E! and more), Viacom (CBS, Paramount, Blockbuster, theme parks, music publishing, book publishing, Nickelodeon, MTV, TNN, and more), the News Corporation (FOX Channel, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, 20th Century Fox, London Times, TV Guide, the LA Dodgers, many stadiums, five New York sports teams, FOX Family Channel and more). Predictably enough, the news, entertainment, and self-help productions of these giant communications and culture empires reflexively and routinely isolate “individual” problems like poverty, joblessness, and military “post-traumatic stress” from their taproots in the historical and social-structural context of the profits system and that system’s imperial and military-industrial component. They harp instead on peoples’ supposed “personal responsibility” for their place in the world – a major theme on Dr. Phil, Biggest Loser, Deal or No Deal, Dr. Laura, and Judge Judy (the last is unsparing in her contempt for those who dare to be unemployed) and in such fine journalistic productions as “Self” Magazine (yet to be balanced on newsstands by a journal titled “Other”).

And they do so with no small impact. Modern corporate communications gives capitalist masters a capacity to shape mass perceptions (and even feelings) in ways that pre-television anti-capitalist sages like Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Rosa Luxembourg, and Antonio Gramsci, Trotsky (saved from the television era by a Stalinist ice-pick) could never have imagined in their wildest dreams (or nightmares). As Herbert Schiller noted, “a national communications pageant is orchestrated by the surrogates of the state-capitalist economy…The flow of information in a complex society is a source of unparalleled power” (Schiller 1973, pp.6-7).

Along with the intimately related absence of a serious anti-capitalist or even mildly social-democratic Left in the United States, the ubiquity of passivity-inducing, consent-manufacturing, victim-blaming, life-fragmenting, and inequality-justifying messages in the dominant media-politics culture makes it less than surprising that masses of freshly discarded Americans blame themselves for the fate that capital has imposed on them. As Sigmund Freud observed (in one of his rare useful formulations), psychological depression is anger turned inward. Dominant state-capitalist ideological, cultural, and ideological institutions function to turn blame away from those who deserve it – the top 1 percent that owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth and larger shares of the nation’s politicians and media messages – and on to various deflective and inappropriate targets, including ourselves, who have been told again and again, in countless different ways, in a diversity of mediums, that our personal worth is a reflection of our exchange value – the measure of our utility to capital.

If you are looking for a reason (there are many) to work for the re-building and expansion of a Left in the U.S., please consider that anti-capitalism is among other things suicide prevention. In the meantime, let us remind increasingly frayed and torn fellow Americans that the Americans most worthy of suicidal feelings these days are at the top, not the bottom of society. As millions more lose their means of livelihood and the human community drifts yet closer to final material and social run under the yoke of capital, a final comment from Marx and Engels in 1848 seems as true as ever 161 years later: “The bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law…Society can no longer live under the bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.” Society itself, in fact, will commit suicide by not transcending the profits system and its parasitic masters [2] – a topic for a future commentary.

Paul Street (paulsrtreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many essays, reviews, speeches, and book, including Empire and Inequality: American and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987). Street will speak on “Change and Continuity: An Assessment of Obama’s Early Administration” on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 7pm, Paul Engle Center, 1600 4th Av SE Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

NOTES

1. With unduly disastrous consequences in a militantly “market”-oriented (actually state-capitalist) society like the U.S. – one that grants trillions of dollars worth of government assistance to the giant incorporated Wall Street institutions who precipitated the current crisis as it boasts the weakest social welfare state (unique among modern industrial “democracies” in its failure to guarantee health care to all of its citizens) in the industrialized world.

2. For some dark and deeply informed reflections, please see Herve Kempf, How the Rich Are Destorying the Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2007).

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21 March 2009
The World Socialist Web Site has received further letters in response to the March 9 statement “Oppose LTTE campaign of threats and violence against SEP supporters in Europe!” We urge our readers and supporters to send protest letters demanding the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) immediately cease its attempts to suppress political debate within the Tamil community and end all threats against Socialist Equality Party members and supporters. (Previous correspondence can be viewed here.)
Comité de coordination tamoul en France,
Tamil Confederation—Germany and
The British Tamils Forum
Dear Sir,
I condemn the violence and threats by supporters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against Socialist Equality Party (SEP) members and supporters while they were carrying out legitimate political work. I am aware that LTTE supporters made these anti-democratic acts on February 4 in London, Berlin and Paris and February 7 in Stuttgart while SEP members were distributing leaflets in anti-war demonstrations. LTTE must instruct its supporters and members to cease these acts.
I have experienced the SEP’s struggle for about two decades. It is defending the democratic rights of the Tamil masses against the attacks by the Sri Lankan government and racist thugs as part of SEP’s fight for socialism.
The Central Bank of Sri Lanka is a test case. Members of the SEP and its forerunner, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) in the Central Bank have consistently explained the disastrous consequences of anti-Tamil discrimination and the war of the Sinhala ruling class to the working class. This party has consistently demanded an end to the war and the withdrawal of Sri Lankan forces from the north and east as part of its struggle to unite Sinhala and Tamil workers against the capitalist classes of both camps.
The LTTE is against such a unity. In January 1996, the LTTE carried out a major bomb attack on the Central Bank, killing 91 and injuring more than one thousand. Many of the victims were employees of the bank. This attack played into the hands of the Colombo government and Sinhala communal groups seeking to sow hatred against Tamils and justify the war.
Sinhala chauvinists are branding those who oppose the war and discrimination against Tamils as Sinhala Tigers or Sinhala LTTE members. Leading SEP member and president of the Central Bank Employees Union, M.G. Kiribanda and supporters of the party were attacked as Sinhala Tigers by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna in 2007. Now the SEP members and supporters are attacked by the LTTE’s supporters because this party opposes the LTTE’s separatist capitalist perspective.
There must be complete democratic freedom to oppose and discuss alternative perspectives of the working class against Sri Lanka’s capitalist class and its government. Similarly, the LTTE should not attack the democratic rights of its political opponents, including those who criticise the LTTE’s separatist politics and advance a socialist alternative.
Premasiri Palpage
General Secretary of the Central Bank Employees Union
Sri Lanka
***
Comité de coordination tamoul en France,
Tamil Confederation— Germany and
The British Tamils Forum
I am writing from Annefield Estate at Hatton in the central hills of Sri Lanka. I must register my vehement condemnation and outrage over attacks on the members and supporters of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Paris, Berlin and London by LTTE supporters. I heard today yet another similar attack on SEP members took place on Sunday in Toronto, Canada.
SEP members and supporters were attacked because they were distributing leaflets to participants of the demonstrations against the Sri Lankan military’s anti-Tamil war. The leaflets called for the unity of Sinhala and Tamil workers to end the war and fight for socialist policies.
I can understand why the LTTE and its supporters are deadly hostile to the SEP’s policies. The LTTE has not urged the support of plantation workers, or any other section of the working class in the south, or the world working class, at any time against the war in the north and east and the repression against Tamils.
The LTTE is seeking the support of the Indian capitalist government and urging the support of the US and European powers. The LTTE is representing the Tamil bourgeoisie and fighting for a capitalist statelet. These powers now actually support the war. They are concerned only about their strategic interests. The establishment of a capitalist statelet with the help of the major powers, as the LTTE demands, will definitely be a trap for the Tamil workers and poor.
The SEP’s perspective is the socialist unity of the working class and the fight for a Sri Lanka-Eelam Socialist Republic as part of a socialist South Asia and international socialism. The SEP urges workers to oppose the war and demand the withdrawal of troops from the north and east. This is essential for the unity of the Sinhala and Tamil-speaking working class.
In February I contested the Central Provincial Council election from Nuwara Eliya District as an SEP candidate. Now I am contesting in the Colombo district in the Western Provincial Council elections. We are explaining this perspective to the working people and youth.
In 1948 the then government of the United National Party (UNP) abolished the citizenship rights of plantation workers. Later on, various governments declared they had restored the citizenship rights of these workers. But still Tamil-speaking plantation workers are treated as second class citizens in this country. During the last provincial elections, tens of thousands of workers did not receive voting rights. The reason given was that they did not have national identity cards.
The working class, including those in the plantations, is facing the brunt of the war. After the war started in 1983, hundreds of plantation youth were arrested as LTTE suspects without any evidence. I was arrested along with 22 others by the police in March 1995 and kept in various prisons for 18 months.
The police were forced to release 18 of us because of the vigorous campaign of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the forerunner of the SEP, with the support of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The RCL exposed the criminal war in the north and east, the plight of plantation workers and the arbitrary arrest of youth. We were inspired and decided to join the party because we saw a viable perspective.
Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) leader Thondaman and Upcountry Peoples Front (UPF) leader P. Chandrasekaran were in the cabinet of the capitalist government. They or their trade unions did nothing to release us. Instead they supported taking us into custody.
If we have learned at least one lesson since so-called independence in Sri Lanka, it is that the defence of the democratic rights of Tamil people and plantation workers cannot be achieved under the capitalist order and under any capitalist party, Sinhala, Tamil or Muslim. The LTTE shows no alternative to Tamil people but a blind alley and disaster. Democratic rights can be achieved only in the struggle for socialism.
I demand that the LTTE and its supportive organisations in Europe and elsewhere in the world stop all kinds of attempts to suppress political discussion among Tamil people and stop the violence and intimidation against SEP members.
T. Savarimuttu
Sri Lanka
***
Comité de coordination tamoul en France,
It is with deep regret that I have been reading about the seemingly orchestrated interference with the rights of free speech and political advocacy of supporters of oppressed Tamils. The descriptions of claims (accompanied by violent instances of physical repression) that only the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are entitled to take up the cause of Tamil emancipation smacks of arrogance and illogical sectarianism, at best, and ugly intolerance, at worst.
I urge all LTTE supporters to be inclusionary, as opposed to exclusionary, in furthering the worthy goals of liberty and respect for all in Sri Lanka and of the universality of freedom of speech, especially if it is controversial.
H.J. Glasbeek
Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar
York University, Toronto
***
To the LTTE,
Threats and physical attacks by supporters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against Socialist Equality Party (SEP) members and supporters distributing SEP literature during last month’s Tamil diaspora demonstrations in Paris, London, Berlin, Stuttgart and Toronto in Canada deserve the condemnation of all right thinking people.
The SEP drew the ire of the LTTE because it offered an alternative to the latter’s bankrupt line of currying favour with the imperialist powers. Instead the SEP called for the mobilisation of the international working class to demand the unconditional withdrawal of Sri Lankan military forces from the North and the East of the island.
The LTTE’s perspective is the creation of a separate statelet in the North and the Eastern portion of Sri Lanka to serve the interests of the Tamil capitalist class. It hopes to create such a state through the mediation of the major powers internationally. Such a state will be a capitalist state for the working class, no less than the state run by the Colombo capitalists. The LTTE is organically hostile to the working class and cannot allow democratic freedoms so essential to defend the rights of the working class.
The major powers have nothing but their own global interest in taking sides in this civil war. Against the attempts to whip up racial, ethnic and religious communalism, the SEP fights to unite the working class internationally. It fights for the establishment of a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam as part of a United Socialist Republics of South Asia. Its perspective of international socialist revolution alone is the road out of racial discrimination and repression everywhere.
This perspective lines up its adherents with millions of workers the world over who are now coming forward against the burdens of the world crisis of capitalism. The separatist perspective of the LTTE, which runs after the capitalist oppressors of the same millions, isolates the Tamil oppressed minority from the international working class.
The current LTTE attack on the democratic rights of the SEP is not episodic. In 1998 the LTTE arrested and detained four SEP cadres in the Wanni for more than 50 days, physically assaulting them.
The LTTE disenfranchised the Tamil people forcibly in the 2005 presidential election and prevented the SEP from holding an election meeting in Jaffna city with a death threat.
Before that, in 2003 an LTTE thug stabbed SEP member N. Kodeswaran with a spike at Kayts Island near Jaffna. Several weeks before this incident, Semmanan, the then LTTE political head for the islands off Jaffna, openly threatened SEP members in the leadership of the Kayts fishermen’s union after they refused to provide funds for the LTTE.
The LTTE fears that the SEP’s internationalist socialist perspective will penetrate the Tamil diaspora, which is overwhelmingly working class. While calling all those who uphold democratic rights to condemn the LTTE attack, I urge workers, intellectuals and especially youth to join the SEP and the International Committee of Fourth International to liberate humanity from exploitation and oppression.
Sincerely yours,
T. Ram
Socialist Equality Party
Jaffna Branch, Sri Lanka
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By Toru Fujioka

March 18 (Bloomberg) — When Yumiko Iwate’s pay was cut last year, she and her female colleagues all agreed there was only one thing to do: find a husband.
“I want to get married soon, hopefully by the end of this year,” said Iwate, a 36-year-old employee at a mail-order retailer in Tokyo. “The recession made me realize I’m not going to make as much money as I expected, and I’d be more stable financially if I had double income to fall back on.”
Women the Japanese call “marriage-hunters” are looking to tie the knot as companies from Toyota Motor Corp. to Sony Corp. fire thousands of workers and the nation heads for its biggest annual economic contraction since 1945. Marriages surged to a five-year high of 731,000 in 2008 as wages stagnated and the unemployment rate rose for the first time in six years.
“Financial concerns are a major reason for the increase in marriage-hunting,” said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. “Women are motivated more than ever to find a financially sound partner.”
The trend marks a reversal for women who put careers over families after Japan implemented equal labor rights 23 years ago. The number of marriages in the following decade slid 4.5 percent to an annual average of 746,000 compared with the decade before. Despite equal rights, women still make 43 percent less than men, giving them more reason to seek a partner during recessions.

‘As Good as Men’
“I know women before my generation worked so hard and pursued their careers so they could prove they’re just as good as men,” said Reiko Kubo, 25, who bought a good-luck charm at Tokyo Daijingu shrine. “They didn’t have to depend on men and that’s cool, but it’s not the path I want to follow.”
Tokyo Daijingu has come to be known as the marriage-hunters’ shrine, and the number of visitors has risen about 20 percent in the past year, said priest Yoshiyuki Karamatsu. For 5,000 yen, he will conduct a ritual to ward off bad spirits; the purification ceremony includes drinking sacred sake.
Recessions have encouraged the Japanese to wed before. Marriages rose when an asset-price bubble burst in the late 1980s and again after the technology crash in 2001. Analysts say the trend is gaining traction because the current slump is expected to spur record-high unemployment.
Economists at Dai-Ichi Life Research and JPMorgan Chase & Co. expect the jobless rate this year to surpass the postwar peak of 5.5 percent in 2003. Unemployment in January was 4.1 percent. Wages have slumped for three months, and the economy contracted an annualized 12.1 percent last quarter, the biggest drop since 1974.

Civil Weddings
Marriages are also increasing in other countries as recessions spread around the world. The number of civil weddings in London’s Westminster Register Office, the city’s most popular, rose 8.5 percent to 1,684 between April 2008 and February 2009 compared with a year earlier, according to Alison Cathcart, the superintendent registrar. “We certainly feel a lot busier,” she said.
Japan’s husband hunters are pursuing relationships the way they might search for jobs: They interview at agencies — dating agencies, in this case. They attend networking parties or just let friends know they are ready for commitment.
Iwate started her quest in December by writing New Year’s cards to 170 acquaintances from junior high school classmates to fellow dancers at salsa lessons, asking for help finding an eligible bachelor. Her five co-workers are in on the hunt, introducing each other to potential partners and putting sticky notes on the most useful pages of the “Complete Guide to Marriage Hunting” from “an an” magazine, a weekly publication for women in their 20s and 30s.

‘Looks Shouldn’t Matter’
The issue included articles telling readers that, while it’s acceptable to choose a husband by occupation, “looks shouldn’t matter because they’re not essential to leading a married life. You need to consider men you normally wouldn’t date.”
It listed character traits by job type: “Traders tend to be adventurous and forward-looking; pharmacists conservative and stable; sushi chefs patient and creative.”
It also cautioned against playing hard to get: Being coy “is strictly forbidden; men want to seriously date women who act natural.”
Business is booming at Green, a marriage-hunting bar in Tokyo’s nightlife district of Roppongi. Men pay 11,340 yen ($115) per visit to have waiters set them up with women, who get in free. The bar is booked solid on weekends, and membership is up 26 percent this year, according to owner Yuta Honda.

Dating Agencies
Interest in O-Net, Japan’s largest dating agency, is also rising. The number of people requesting applications jumped 10 percent in the past year, according to spokesman Toshiaki Kato. Shares of Watabe Wedding Corp., a wedding-planning agency, are up 55 percent since September, while the broader Topix index has slumped 30 percent.
Marriage hunting has even attracted the attention of policy makers, who have been trying for years to increase Japan’s birthrate. Women give birth to only 1.34 children on average in their lifetimes, government data for 2007 show, well below the 2.07 required for a stable population.
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By Huma Yusuf

Last Sunday, as the Long March heated up and tear-gas shells and stones littered the entrance to the Lahore High Court, news broke of Mukhtar Mai’s marriage to Nasir Abbas Gabol, a police constable who was assigned to protect her. The news unleashed a media firestorm that says more about international perceptions of Pakistan and the fallacy of objective journalism than it does about Mai’s matrimonial circumstances.
Many quirks about the way Mai’s wedding was reported are worth noting. Local and international papers alike continue to identify Mai as a ‘gang-rape victim’ even while celebrating her successes as a women’s rights activist who fought her rapists in court and established the first girls’ school in Meerwala as well as several women’s centres. The Urdu-language press in Pakistan emphasized the fact that Mai had married a police constable in headlines and photo captions. Given the tainted reputations of low-level police officers in this country, dwelling on his profession can be read as a way to suggest that rape victims get what they deserve.
Meanwhile, the international press largely twisted coverage of Mai’s marriage to make it seem like the ultimate good news story. Indeed, as civilian-police clashes erupted in Lahore, Mai’s news made for the perfect ‘happy ending’ narrative that no one at that time thought the Long March would deliver. Juxtaposed with the ‘failed state’ doom and gloom being prompted by the showdown between the government and protestors, Mai’s wedding delivered foreign desk editors the positivity needed to balance their coverage of Pakistan. As a result, the internet is now brimming with reports of Mai’s nuptials that are contradictory and confused.
The New York Times tried to keep things upbeat by describing Mai as a stigma-shattering crusader who had become a giggling bundle of joy on the occasion of her wedding. This is the first quote from her in the story:
“He says he madly fell in love with me,” Ms. Mukhtar said with a big laugh when asked what finally persuaded her to say yes.

But the cracks appear to those who keep reading, only to discover that Mai did not marry Gabol for love, but rather to save his first wife from the fate of a divorcee.

Four months ago, he tried to kill himself by taking sleeping pills. “The morning after he attempted suicide, his wife and parents met my parents but I still refused,” Ms. Mukhtar said.
Mr. Gabol then threatened to divorce his first wife, Shumaila.
Ms. Shumaila, along with Mr. Gabol’s parents and sisters, tried to talk Ms. Mukhtar into marrying him, taking on the status of second wife. In Pakistan, a man can legally have up to four wives.
It was her concern about Ms. Shumaila, Ms. Mukhtar said, that moved her to relent.
“I am a woman and can understand the pain and difficulties faced by another woman,” Ms. Mukhtar said. “She is a good woman.”

Although the run-up to Mai’s marriage is more grim than glamorous – she had vowed never to marry, but relented when Gabol attempted to commit suicide and then threatened to divorce his first wife – the British daily, The Independent, spun it as another one of her admirable victories.

By marrying, she has defeated another stigma for rape victims in Pakistani society. Ms Mai, named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year in 2005, met Mr Gabol in 2002 when he was posted to the police station in her village after the rape. His parents approached her 18 months ago with the offer of marriage but she declined. Having threatened to kill himself, the officer said he’d divorce his first wife if she did not agree. Eventually, his first wife’s family met Ms Mai and persuaded her to accede to his request.

For their part, Pakistani bloggers were grateful for the distraction from depressing Long March news and took it upon themselves to shower Mai with blessings and felicitations. Changing Up Pakistan (CHUP), for example, recasts Gabol – who should be maligned for mistreating his first wife by threatening her with divorce – as “lovestruck” and reframes the marriage as Mai’s attempt to crush female oppression.

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By Rafia Zakaria

Marriages are routinely and unapologetically arranged to solidify business interests, land disputes and old vendettas. The woman, then, with the maligning spectre of divorce hanging over her, is left to endure whatever abuse her husband or in-laws may heap on her

Recently, Mukhtar Mai’s married Nasir Abbas Gabol in her low-key hometown of Meerwala. The publicity and the debate generated by the event, however, resonated across the globe, garnering attention from international newspapers and television channels.

Yet, unlike the coverage of the brutal events and awe-inspiring heroism that initially catapulted Mukhtar Mai into the public eye, many of the stories published in the Western media betrayed the confusion of attempts to process the somewhat unlikely union.

Indeed, Mukhtar’s marriage presents a conundrum even to Pakistani feminists. Should the fact that Mukhtar chose to get married after having vowed never to do so be celebrated or condemned? How should one evaluate the fact that she was to be a second wife? Even further, is the act of marrying a man who threatens to kill himself and destroy his own family if she refused him an act of resistance or coercion? Should the fact that she set the conditions for the marriage be touted as an example for other women? Finally, was there possibly a romantic spin to be put on the story, where a constable entrusted with guarding his charge falls in love with her and ultimately marries her despite the social stigmas attached to her?

A cornucopia of questions thus surrounds this very Pakistani marriage while raising issues that rarely make their way into public discourse regarding the nature of marital relationships.

Let us first consider the most controversial of the facts, that Mukhtar is Constable Gabol’s second wife. Many narratives of victimhood and religious piety surround polygamous unions in Pakistani society. Religious scholars routinely skirt around the contextual reality that the Quranic revelation that allowed polygamy was revealed when the entire Muslim community numbered 770 and many of the men had been massacred in the Battle of Uhud. Accosted with the imprimatur of religious sanctity, polygamy is presented not as a provisional allowance made under specific circumstances but rather as an entitlement, any abridgement of which is an attack on the rights of a Muslim man.

Religious discussions aside, however, Mukhtar’s acquiescence shows the complexity of polygamous unions from both a socio-cultural and personal perspective. In her statement following the solemnisation of the nikah, Mukhtar clearly stated that her decision to marry was heavily influenced by the fact that she was saving three marriages. The seemingly unstable constable had threatened not only to divorce his previous wife, but this would have led to the ensuing divorce of Gabol’s own sisters that were married to his wife’s relatives.

Thrust however unceremoniously into the midst of these marital dramas and having the futures of three other women riding on her decision, it is little surprise that Mukhtar did ultimately agree to marry Abbas Gabol. A woman who had committed her life to saving women thus did, not what would ultimately have made the boldest feminist statement and demand that he relinquish his wife and substantiate the equality of man and woman. Instead she did what she could to save who she could, given the status quo.

It is this status quo that merits the most attention in the discussion surrounding Mukhtar’s marriage. It forces one to consider whether the most pragmatic approach to female survival in a male-dominated society is figuring out a way to save those that you can or choose to make grand statements of resistance.

Perceived in this way, Mukhtar’s decision is an avowal of the realities of feudal Pakistan where women cannot live alone without male protectors and where marriage is a calculation in survival than an exercise in romance. In Mukhtar’s case, the situation was even more egregious, given the fact that the man wanting to marry her was none other than the person entrusted by the government to be her protector.

In a patriarchal system where unprotected women are fair game for all manner of abuse, the petulance and immature threats of Constable Gabol were bolstered as entitlements. By preying on Mukhtar’s compassion and the reality that three women would be abandoned and stigmatised if she did not relent, Mukhtar relented and Constable Gabol succeeded in his aim.

The interpretation of circumstances presented is but an interpretation substantiated only by the few facts available in the public domain. Yet despite its speculative dimensions, the dynamics of Mukhtar Mai’s marriage is representative of many unions that take place within Pakistan. Women who have faced divorce or any other form of social stigma are left in the uncomfortable position of choosing to live as unwanted and often maligned guests in their fathers’ or brothers’ homes or acquiesce to being second wives.

In other cases, marriages are routinely and unapologetically arranged to solidify business interests, land disputes and old vendettas. The woman, then, with the maligning spectre of divorce hanging over her, is left to endure whatever abuse her husband or in-laws may heap on her in an effort to salvage her marriage and avoid bringing shame on her family.

With the arrival of children, the seal of dependency is complete and many women are left forever dependent on the man whose identity legitimates their existence in the world.

Mukhtar Mai came into the spotlight to demand justice against the perpetrators who committed a horrific crime against her. Her position in the limelight, given her poverty and the unwillingness of many to acknowledge the existence of such brutality in our society, raised a public outcry. Her marriage, in this larger sense, is representative of similar realities that are also worthy of discussion.

Will it ever be possible for Pakistani women to live independently without a male protector? Will Pakistani marriages ever be more than arrangements that are made for men and by men? If these questions are deemed worthy of introspection and public debate in Pakistan, then Mukhtar Mai may have saved a lot more than just three marriages.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

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Exactly what can we car drivers do to help save the environment and preserve a most important resource?
Today marks another United Nations World Day for Water or simply, World Water Day.

I am not writing to ask you to help the 1.1 billion people around the world living without a reliable water source, nor the 2.4 billion without adequate sanitation.
I am trying to tell you why a car (yes, that includes mine and yours) is a leading contributor to water shortages, contamination and, worst of all, poisoning.
CAR WASH
You’ve read it all before, about how a hose-down car wash wastes anywhere from 200 to 500 litres of filtered and treated water.
Even using a high-pressure water spray (like at your local car wash) it would still waste some 60 to 150 litres.
The more often you wash your car, the more water you waste that could be put to more productive use like washing your clothes, gardening or cooking.
I recently asked a car wash operator in Bangkok how often his customers visit, and he told me that most of the regular customers turn up once a week or more, often during the rainy season.
Now, if I use a median figure of 105 litre per wash – that’s 5,406 litres or about 5.4 cubic metres or tonnes of water a year for one car!
If all 8.8 million cars and pick-ups in Thailand did the same, that would be more than 48 billion litres, or 48 million tonnes of water – that’s the same as all the people living in Phuket and Phetchaburi provinces use at home in one year!
By contrast, a survey found drivers in the UK wash their cars on average only seven times per year.
If you live where tap water always flows, try visiting a drought-hit area anywhere this hot season and stay there for a week and you’ll appreciate what a blessing it is to have running tap water.
If a clean car is a must for your image and self-esteem, can you please scale down the water usage to a bucket or two of water and wipe the car with a wet cloth instead?
It would only use four to 10 litres of water – a saving of 90%.
Another concern about car washes is that the detergent and grime that’s washed away with the water will eventually affect the environment.
You can see for yourself – at any car wash in Thailand – how the water is disposed of. It is simply discharged into a public drain, which goes straight into a khlongs or rivers and ends up in the Gulf of Thailand.
…

DRINKING WATER
Bottled water needs up to six times as much water to produce as is in the bottle – so, for example, a 0.5 litre bottle needs as much as three litres of water.
That’s an awful waste.
So, I tried a little experimenting at home and found that it takes no more than 1.5 litres of tap water to thoroughly wash a 0.5 litre plastic bottle.
After topping it up with home-filtered water, this bottle used up two litres of water in total.
Therefore, I could actually be saving one litre of water for every 0.5 litres of drinking water if I prepare myself.
I drink, on average, 2.5 litres of water inside my car every week – that’s 130 litres a year.
This means if I were to use my own bottle I could be saving 260 litres of water per year – more than enough to fill a bath or clean my car with a bucket every week for the whole year.
Moreover, I would not be throwing away between 217 and 260 empty plastic bottles a year – amounting to 6.5kg of almost completely unrecyclable PET plastic.
The only issue is having to thoroughly clean your bottle, especially the mouth-piece, every day or two to prevent germs from accumulating and giving you tummy trouble.

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