Month: October 2009

Migrante International promotes the rights of migrant workers, exposes anomalies in the government and has been very vocal in its stand against the intensifying labor-export policy of the regime. Through the Migrante Sectoral Party, Migrante promises to provide OFWs the protection that they deserve.

By JANESS ANN J. ELLAO, Bulatlat

MANILA — Many politicians have guised themselves as “pro-overseas Filipino workers,” but with the disturbing number of these migrant workers beheaded and others still on death row, and with more and more of them seeking repatriation because of abuses by their employees, the promises these politicians make ring rather hollow.

“We know the characteristic of a trapo or a traditional politician. They are only there during the election campaign,” said Lian Santos of Migrante International. “Most of the time, the OFWs are only being used by these politician for pogi points.”

OFWs demand change. (Photo by Janess Ann J. Ellao / bulatlat.com)

Migrante chairman Garry Martinez said there is a need for the government to push for laws that would protect and uphold the welfare of the OFWs. And such proposed laws have long been neglected since, as far as the government is concerned, the sending of OFWs abroad is an income-generating project.

Martinez said they have also received a number of feedback from their members urging and suggesting that migrant workers should be represented in Congress, saying they can no longer allow other people to speak for them. “We have to speak for ourselves,” Martinez said.
With this, the staff and members of the Migrante International marched toward the office of the Commission on Elections last week to file for its candidacy for party-list representative in Congress through the Migrante Sectoral Party (MSP).

Bulatlat

photo: by Anjum Naveed, AP
Pakistani film director Omar Ali Khan responds during an interview in Islamabad, Pakistan, Tuesday, June 26, 2007. Khan has added a quirky dimension to the description of Pakistan as a frontline of the war on terror

By Denis D. Gray, Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Omar Ali Khan has added a quirky dimension to the description of Pakistan as a front line of the war on terror — a Hollywood-inspired movie that’s sparking surprising interest at home and abroad.

“We had zero expectations,” says the director of “Zibahkhana,” the country’s first modern-themed horror film which mixes plenty of blood and gore with humor as well as just about every genre cliche and some social commentary about today’s Pakistan.

The film (titled “Hell’s Ground” in English) has already been shown at festivals in Europe and the United States, cheered at sold-out screenings in Pakistan and garnered positive press, including an article in Time magazine.

Pakistan’s first International Zombie flick: Borkaman is coming!!!
Borkaman is coming!!!

At a theater near you:

USAT
via
http://www.zibahkhana.com/

(Submitted by a reader)

Editorial

Oct.01 : As it celebrates the 60th anniversary of the 1949 Communist revolution led by Chairman Mao Zedong today, there is much that the People’s Republic of China can legitimately be proud of. Led by the engine of economic growth, in recent decades its comprehensive national power has grown exponentially. But easily the most striking aspect of the rise of the Chinese system has been the accretion to the capacities of its military establishment, which was among the four “modernisations” underlined by the late Deng Xiaoping, who inspired the dragon’s resurgence in the era after Mao. More than anything else, it is arguably this factor that has provoked considerable latent unease in China’s neighbourhood, causing the subject of keeping a rising China within a stable framework of rules to become a staple of regional and international political concerns. In the event, it is interesting that Beijing should be asking India and Pakistan to seek a resolution of the Kashmir issue through peaceful and friendly consultations, and has even offered to play a “constructive role” in settling the problem. The observation of assistant foreign affairs minister Hu Zhengyue to this effect was made to a group of visiting journalists and does not carry the imprimatur of the highest organs of state. Nevertheless, China watchers are known to track little and big developments, and nuances of wordplay, for that country doesn’t have a settled system of political articulation on account of the system it runs.

The only concession to Indian sensitivities in the Chinese statement is that it refers to the Kashmir question as a “bilateral” issue (between India and Pakistan). It is well known that this country has always discouraged any international solicitousness as regards Kashmir. Pakistan, on the other hand, has chosen the opposite course. It likes the idea of “internationalising” the Kashmir question in the hope that this will help further its claims. Seen in this light, Beijing’s low-key but unexpected activism on Kashmir is certain to please Islamabad but not New Delhi. There is also no little irony in the fact that China sits on a chunk of Kashmir’s territory gifted to it by Pakistan even as it complacently urges its South Asian neighbours to deal with the contention between them through peaceful and friendly consultations. Given this state of affairs, there is discernible presumptuousness on its part to offer to play the role of a disinterested broker.

China’s own record of settling problems that are a carryover from history is far from satisfactory. The Vietnamese know this to their cost in the case of the Paracel and Spratly Islands in Vietnam’s Eastern Sea and Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Taiwan remains disputed territory. On the border marking Tibet’s contiguity with India, Beijing moved troops in 1962. Xinjiang in China’s northwest is not tranquil either, and is a region with a past that China seeks to dispute. A record such as this is hardly conducive to the offer of good offices to other countries. China should celebrate the anniversary of its revolution with gusto, but its advice to others, if it is not to provoke hilarity, should be grounded in realism.

AA

By B. R. Gowani

What was expected?

An average wedding night:
A terrified being,
Dressed in bridal clothes
Pushed into a room

Bridegroom enters
Locks the room
Command: “Undress!”
Command carried out timidly

Clockwork Orange:
“In-out, in out”
Unaware and untaught

Bride bleeds profusely
Man relieved
Proud and happy
Wife was untouched
Goes to sleep

The mutilated virgin
Now virgin no more
Spends night crying
Confused and alone

[The above incident did not take place.]

Instead what happened was the following:

Shock and Awe

Wedding night
Uninhibited bride
Walks into the room
Along with bridegroom

She is helped in shedding
Eve’s fig-leaf
She helps groom in discarding
Adam’s fig-leaf

The process begins
Bride’s ecstasy is equal
Groom is a bit uncomfortable
Seeing her pleasure

Then the gates are opened
Enters paradise
Natural blood gushes forth
Man is bloody happy

He thinks:
She is mod but intact

Few days later
Truth is revealed
It was fake Chinese blood
Not real Allah’s created blood
The paradise he entered had
other visitors too
He is mad
He feels humiliated

But now…

Egyptian men rescued

Abdul Mouti Bayoumi
A scholar at Al Azhar University
Declares death for importers
Of Chinese blood

So now every Egyptian groom’s bride
Will be as Elizabeth I!*

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

*Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1633) played a role in emphasizing the concept of “Virgin Queen.” In 1559, a year after ascending the throne, she told the parliament: “This shall be for me sufficient that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.”

By Magdi Abdelhadi

“Pre-marital sex carries a strong social stigma in many Arab societies”

A leading Egyptian scholar has demanded that people caught importing a female virginity-faking device into the country should face the death penalty.

Abdul Mouti Bayoumi said supplying the item was akin to spreading vice in society, a crime punishable by death in Islamic Sharia law.
The device is said to release liquid imitating blood, allowing a female to feign virginity on her wedding night.

There is a stigma about pre-marital sex in conservative Arab societies.

The contraption is seen as a cheap and simple alternative to hymen repair surgery, which is carried out in secret by some clinics in the Middle East.

It is produced in China and has already become available in other parts of the Arab world.

The device is reported to be on sale in Syria for $15.

Professor Bayoumi, a scholar at the prestigious al-Azhar University, said it undermined the moral deterrent of fornication, which he described as a crime and one of the cardinal sins in Islam

Members of parliament in Egypt have also called for banning import of the item.

BBC
(Submitted by reader)

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

The generous, expansive public option on the lips of Congressional progressives, which would be open to all and compete to lower insurance prices is largely imaginary, while the president’s stingy, divisive and means-tested version is all too real. But what about the third version of the public option? What is the Congressional Progressive Caucus doing to promote it, and to allow states to pursue single payer on their own?

Some highly profitable and job creating industries simply can’t be reformed. Slavery and child labor cannot not be made humane and reasonable, not with kind and solicitous masters or school and limited hours for the kids. Both these practices were eventually cast aside. Allowing souless, greedy private insurance corporations to collect a toll for standing between patients and doctors may be next.

The president’s health care plan is designed to preserve the parasitic private insurance industry a little while longer. In this context, the public option is a cruel and cynical hoax, an excuse not to abolish the role of private insurance death panels and toll collectors in the nation’s health care system.

Nobody can read the president’s mind, but he did promise to construct health care legislation in an open and transparent manner, even “on C-SPAN.” Instead, Obama handed off the drafting of health care legislation to five House and three Senate committees. The most generous view is that he did this to give legislators a stake in the bills, and because there is this thing called the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Another view is that the embedded influence of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine were easier to conceal when spread out over several committees, where the lobbyists are themselves former congressmen, senators and their top staffers, and many current members and staff look forward to the same career paths. These are the men and women who wrote what is and will be the president’s health insurance reform legislation. The result has been a half dozen versions of a thousand-plus page bill, chock full, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi points out, of deliberately obscure references to other legislation. Nobody can authoritatively claim to have read, much less understand all of it. And that’s just the way insurance companies and the president like it. HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All Act, which does provide universal coverage at reasonable cost, comes in at under thirty pages.

To begin with, there are no less than three versions of the public option. The first is an imaginary public option first conceived by Political Science grad student Jacob Hatcher in 2001. It was to postpone the death of private insurance companies by forcing them to compete with a publicly funded insurer open to all comers which would drive their prices downward. This imaginary public option has never been written into law, and is not under consideration in Congress this year. It lives pretty much in the minds of the public and the lips of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, MoveOn.Org and many others. It’s in the mouth of Howard Dean, who says it will be just like Medicare, only available to everybody. To distinguish it from the President Obama’s version, it is usually called “the robust public option.”

The second version of the public option is not imaginary, it is all too real. President Obama explicitly outlined its contours in his health care address earlier this month. Unlike the expansive and inclusive imaginary public option championed by MoveOn.Org, the president’s public option will be stingy, means-tested, socially divisive, actuarially unsound and doomed to failure, unless its objective is simply to discredit the word “public” in the term “public option.” The president has said it will be limited to 5% of the nation’s population, those Americans too poor to afford the cheapest insurance available on his regulated “insurance exchanges” which won’t be fully implemented anyway till 2013.

Hence those making more than a very small wage will be ineligible for the president’s version of the public option, and those who currently get insurance from their employers, no matter how skimpy the coverage, how high the co-pays and deductibles, will also not qualify. Those who receive relatively good (or maybe not so good) coverage from their employers will pay a special tax to support both the public option and the subsidies the government will pay to enable others not quite poor enough for the public option to fulfill their legal obligation to buy shoddy insurance from private vendors.

BAR

by Serge Halimi

A Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton abolished a welfare programme in 1996 under the (largely fallacious) pretext that it bred fraud, waste and abuse. Thirteen years on, the reforms that Barack Obama is proposing will not fundamentally change the United States’ abysmal healthcare system because those who profit from it have been able to buy protection from the lawmakers. The welfare programme ditched in 1996 absorbed about 1% of the US budget; today’s well-ensconced private insurance companies swallow most of the 17% of the budget set aside for healthcare.

Paradoxically, the US president is one of the most spirited prosecutors of the system he has chosen to retain. Day after day he recounts how “we are held hostage by health insurance companies that deny coverage, or drop coverage, or charge fees that people can’t afford for care they desperately need… We have a healthcare system that too often works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people” (1).

Obama’s project initially set out with two important objectives. It proposed compulsory health cover for the 46 million Americans outside the system while funding the poorest amongst them. It also suggested the creation of a public insurance system with less prohibitive tariffs than private companies (2), which commit huge resources to finding legal loopholes (“pre-existing conditions”) allowing them not to pay out when their insured clients fall ill.

What is it that so alarms the right? Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, claims that “any government plan will benefit from taxpayer subsidies and be able to operate at a financial loss, competing unfairly in the marketplace until private plans are driven out of business” (3). Other more telling tales of distress might have concerned him, particularly in Louisiana, one of the poorest US states.

American politics is so poisoned by money flowing from industrial and financial lobbies that the only proposals ensured a smooth ride through Congress are those that cut taxes. Banks, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry have almost nothing to fear. Max Baucus, the Democrat chairman of the Senate finance committee, whose approval is needed for reforms to be adopted, is also the lawmaker who receives the most money from private hospitals, insurance companies and doctors. However, his largest donors are hardly worried about the problems of Montana, the small rural state he represents, since 90% of their contributions come from elsewhere in the country, in a perfectly legal and accountable way. Will anyone be surprised to hear that Baucus opposes a complete overhaul of the current medical system?

MDip

By Michael T. Klare

The debate rages over whether we have already reached the point of peak world oil output or will not do so until at least the next decade. There can, however, be little doubt of one thing: we are moving from an era in which oil was the world’s principal energy source to one in which petroleum alternatives — especially renewable supplies derived from the sun, wind, and waves — will provide an ever larger share of our total supply. But buckle your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride under Xtreme conditions.

It would, of course, be ideal if the shift from dwindling oil to its climate-friendly successors were to happen smoothly via a mammoth, well-coordinated, interlaced system of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and other renewable energy installations. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to occur. Instead, we will surely first pass through an era characterized by excessive reliance on oil’s final, least attractive reserves along with coal, heavily polluting “unconventional” hydrocarbons like Canadian oil sands, and other unappealing fuel choices.

There can be no question that Barack Obama and many members of Congress would like to accelerate a shift from oil dependency to non-polluting alternatives. As the president said in January, “We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is free from our [oil] dependence and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work.” Indeed, the $787 billion economic stimulus package he signed in February provided $11 billion to modernize the nation’s electrical grid, $14 billion in tax incentives to businesses to invest in renewable energy, $6 billion to states for energy efficiency initiatives, and billions more directed to research on renewable sources of energy. More of the same can be expected if a sweeping climate bill is passed by Congress. The version of the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, for example, mandates that 20% of U.S. electrical production be supplied by renewable energy by 2020.

But here’s the bad news: even if all these initiatives were to pass, and more like them many times over, it would still take decades for this country to substantially reduce its dependence on oil and other non-renewable, polluting fuels. So great is our demand for energy, and so well-entrenched the existing systems for delivering the fuels we consume, that (barring a staggering surprise) we will remain for years to come in a no-man’s-land between the Petroleum Age and an age that will see the great flowering of renewable energy. Think of this interim period as — to give it a label — the Era of Xtreme Energy, and in just about every sense imaginable from pricing to climate change, it is bound to be an ugly time.

TD

A rarity in the mideast, the political show spares no one – but even President Mahmoud Abbas is chuckling.

By Joshua Mitnick / Correspondent

At a recent Ramallah shoot, writer-actor Imad Farajeen (l.) parodied Hamas’s requirement that female lawyers wear hijab in court as producer Sami al-Jabber (r.) looked on, Joshua Mitnick

Ramallah, West Bank – On “Saturday Night Live,” which has long parodied politicians ranging from Jimmy Carter to Sarah Palin, these characters would be well within bounds: An Islamist judge who is a latent homosexual. A negotiator who emerges from peace talks stripped to his boxers. A president who worries about his Israeli-issued checkpoint pass.

But this is Palestinian state TV.

Premièring during the holy month of Ramadan, the first-ever Palestinian political satire show turns national leaders and military strongmen into absurd protagonists on its nightly broadcasts, winning a growing viewership.

A rarity across the Middle East, the comedic production known as “Watan a la Wattar” marks a seminal experiment in self-mockery and free speech in a society torn by internal politics and hemmed in by Israel’s military occupation.

“Through comedy you can reach the heart of the audience more quickly,” says actor Manal Awad during a break in filming at an upscale Ramallah loft studio. “The Palestinian people deserve to laugh because we have enough drama. If you make people laugh at difficult topics, you force them to look at things with a different point of view.”

Palestinian introspection
The show also holds potential to spark meaningful debate at a time when an easing of hostilities with Israel is allowing for greater introspection among Palestinians.

CSM