Month: October 2009

by Mike Gonzalez – Socialist Worker

The election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela gave hope to millions who want a better world. Mike Gonzalez looks at what has been achieved and where the country is heading.

Every Sunday at 11am, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez welcomes Venezuelans to “Alo Presidente” on the country’s state-run television and radio stations.

Everyone tunes in – some to rail against him, others to find out what political decisions will be made the following week. For most working class Venezuelans, what matters is that Chavez speaks and sounds like them.

But although many people see Chavez as a fighter for ordinary people, his Bolivarian Revolution stands at a crossroads. The old ruling class is intent on stopping fundamental changes. The new bureaucracy that has emerged in the revolution has developed its own interests.

Meanwhile the masses, while backing Chavez overall, are unhappy with the pace of change and the enduring power of the old elite.

Chavez was elected in 1998 on a wave of popular support. He had led a failed coup against the Venezuelan government in February 1992 and was imprisoned – but he won the respect of the poor people living in the shanty towns around the capital Caracas and other cities.

In 1989 they had occupied the capital in a violent protest against harsh new economic measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Caracazo, as it was called, was brutally repressed after three days, but in some ways it was the first act of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Nationalise

Venezuela’s oil reserves are among the world’s largest. Yet for decades, its enormous oil wealth enriched no more than 10 percent of the population. The supposedly nationalised industry benefited the multinational oil companies rather than the national economy.

The new Bolivarian Constitution of 1999 made some changes. It allowed failing elected officials to be recalled. It made education widely available, and established the right to healthcare and land for all Venezuelans. Most importantly of all, it promised to nationalise oil.

The old ruling class was furious – and it fought back. In April 2002 a right wing coup removed Chavez from power. Yet within 48 hours he was back.

VA

Metro explores

1. So much about Bengali men is about food. A significant number of contemporary Bengali men, unlike their forefathers, condemn fish. Excepting ilish, for the men love it too. “I don’t have fish, only ilish,” many men have been heard confessing in a tender moment. Since they love ilish, they will not care if others do so as well. Love makes them blind. The men will have the best peti (belly piece), for they say they are afraid of the kaantas, fishbones. Ilish abounds in them, which makes it a challenge. Women, at some point in their life, learn to tackle the kaantas, but confronting them able-bodied men become bashful and tremble. It pays off. Women are left to work their way through the thick-with-bones gaada pieces and men just sit back and allow the ilish to work on them. Eventually, the women get to liking chewing the bones and they are considered sexy while they are at it — remember the photographer-lover looking at Paroma in the film of the same name?

Anyway, if men won’t have fish, why do they relish the best parts of ilish? You see it rhymes, which is not a coincidence. Ilish is poetry — and Bengali men have exclusive rights over both.

They hog conversations the same way.

2. A similar Powerpoint presentation will explain why the leg piece of the chicken is also reserved for the man at the table. There is an additional reason here. Growing Bengali boys, who keep growing into growing Bengali boys, need more “protein”, which is good for the “brain”. The “brain”, when encased within the head of a boy, is a collective Bengali obsession. Nurtured by his parents, Horlicks and chicken legs, it will be a potent weapon when he grows up: it will be the highest point reached by a man with a steady, decent job, besides being the embodiment of sex appeal. A Bengali man draws women towards him with his “brain”. For these reasons the popular Bengali sayings: Maachher muro khao, brain-er pokkhe bhalo (Have fishhead, it’s good for the brain); TV dekho na, brain-er pokkhe kharap (Don’t watch TV, it’s bad for the brain); Beshi khela dhula brain-er pokkhe kharap (Too much sport is bad for the brain); Amartya Sen maachher maatha kheye boro hoyechhen (Amartya Sen grew up on fishheads). Fishheads being another powerful Bengali obsession.

3. But men actually look down on women for chewing fishbones. Or for eating green chillis on the side with their meals. There’s a suggestion of corruption or perversion about these two things — as if a clean piece of fish is morally superior and liking the bones is an unmentionable proclivity. Or liking a hot green chilli is slightly carnal. As a character in Tagore’s short story Khudhito Pashan, dismissive about women, put it: women love hot chillis, sour tamarind and a stern husband. Though he didn’t specify which was the worst for her.

TTC

(Submitted by reader)

The Nobel Prizes take people from the forefront of their particular fields into the public eye. The intentions are good, a recognition of outstanding merit and achievement, of contribution to humanity. And it is humanity’s nature to be curious about larger-than-life figures and their positions on current affairs, where it is easier to understand — and challenge them — than on their expert turf.

Professor Ada E. Yonath, an Israeli professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for deciphering the structure of the ribosomes, the cell’s protein factories. Like most Israelis (and Palestinians), she has opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, again like most, isn’t shy about them.

In one of the post-award interviews, Yonath touched on the prickly subject of Palestinian prisoners. Speaking only a few days after the nation was absorbed in the video of Gilad Shalit and immersed in the harrowing debate over Hamas’ demands for his release, the fresh laureate called for the release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israel — regardless of Shalit, whose captivity pains her. Holding prisoners only increases the other side’s motivation; the extent of terror would diminish if the perpetrators had less motivation to do it, Yonath said. She could be dreaming, she said, but better this dream than holding people.

For some, this was enough to turn her from a source of uniting national pride to a source of controversy.

Ophir Akunis, a legislator from the ruling party Likud, was happy for Yonath’s award, which honored her and the state. “Clearly, she excels in chemistry,” he told Israel Radio, “but she certainly does not excel in a sober view of the conflict in the Middle East. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion, but my problem is with people who won the Nobel Prize in one field or another becoming a political oracle. She did not win the Nobel for diplomatic achievement. And now she will become a pillar of fire for the rapidly fading notion that Israel alone is responsible for the conflict.”

LAT

(Submitted by reader)

As Nigeria marks her 49th independence anniversary today, the gloom of unfulfilled expectations is yet to lift. It is yet another painful reminder of a country’s failure to optimally use its abundant human and natural resources.

Today is also a reminder that it is high time we sat down to truthfully and realistically decide the way forward. This is important because Nigeria will be 50 next year. Fifty years is a milestone in the life of any man or woman. It is the age of super maturity when most hard-working people had attained lofty heights in life. Using this analogy, Nigeria has indeed come of age.

At independence, Nigeria had the potentials of a great nation. The geographical spread of cash crops such as palm produce, cocoa, groundnut and other vital export earnings in different regions of the country led many observers to be optimistic about the country’s economic growth. But after the oil boom in the 1970s, all the efforts at boosting food production were abandoned.

Nigeria became a mono-culture economy whose fortunes only revolved around oil. Oil boom became our doom. This misfortune coupled with the dangerous incursion of the military into politics, and the attendant problems of corruption, greed, and lust for power have robbed Nigeria of its speedy growth.

Therefore beyond the usual independence rhetoric and good wishes, lamentations about our failed dreams and missed opportunities, we need to ask our ourselves today a few fundamental questions: Where are we going? How do we get to our destination? What does the future hold for us and our children?

The right answers to these questions will determine what the future has in stock for the country. Taking refuge in wishful thinking compounds the problems. We have to be truthful to ourselves. We must come to terms with the hometruth that the first development process is to fix primary infrastructure-in education, health, energy, transportation, communication etc – which is key to the development processes.

Barely a week after independence in 1960, Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa declared on the floor of the United Nations that political independence without concomitant economic security is completely inadequate. Painfully, over the years we have seen how the poor economic development of the country has threatened political harmony, peaceful co-existence in the country and increasingly fuelled poverty and crises.

The most painful aspect is that while Nigeria, a country so richly endowed with human and natural resources, is sinking day after day, other less-endowed countries including neighbouring African countries are making giant strides in political and economic development.

Therefore, Nigeria needs urgent redemption. Our founding fathers had hoped for a better post-independent Nigeria. But that hope seems to have been dashed today. Many of the problems which we encountered at independence are still staring us in the face today. The poverty in the land is still pervasive. While the few rich people at the top get richer, majority of the poor at the bottom get poorer. The middle class has virtually disappeared.

Virtually all the sectors of the economy are in a state of coma at the moment. There is a complete darkness in the land. With the collapse of the education sector, Nigerian students are fleeing to even Ghana and other countries in search of good education. The general insecurity of lives in the country today is scary. There is corruption, monumental corruption, in all aspects of our national life.

TDO

By GINGER THOMPSON and RON NIXON

WASHINGTON — First, depose a president. Second, hire a lobbyist.

Edgard Garrido/Reuters

Manuel Zelaya, right, the ousted Honduran president, before a news conference Monday at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

In the months since soldiers ousted the Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, the de facto government and its supporters have resisted demands from the United States that he be restored to power. Arguing that the left-leaning Mr. Zelaya posed a threat to their country’s fragile democracy by trying to extend his time in office illegally, they have made their case in Washington in the customary way: by starting a high-profile lobbying campaign.

The campaign has had the effect of forcing the administration to send mixed signals about its position to the de facto government, which reads them as signs of encouragement. It also has delayed two key State Department appointments in the region.

Costing at least $400,000 so far, according to lobbying registration records, the campaign has involved law firms and public relations agencies with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator John McCain, a leading Republican voice on foreign affairs.

It has also drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and ’90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war. Two decades later, those former officials — including Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and Daniel W. Fisk — view Honduras as the principal battleground in a proxy fight with Cuba and Venezuela, which they characterize as threats to stability in the region in language similar to that once used to describe the designs of the Soviet Union.

“The current battle for political control of Honduras is not only about that small nation,” Mr. Reich testified in July before Congress. “What happens in Honduras may one day be seen as either the high-water mark of Hugo Chávez’s attempt to undermine democracy in this hemisphere or as a green light to the spread of Chavista authoritarianism,” he said, referring to the Venezuelan president.

NYT

The world could start to run out of oil in the next ten years, sparking soaring energy prices and a rush for even more polluting fossil fuels, an influential new study by the UK Energy Research Council has warned.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent

Oil supplies could start running out before 2020, according to a new study Photo: Getty Images

The exact date of “peak oil” – when the amount of oil being pumped out of the ground every day reaches its highest point before beginning an inexorable decline – has been hotly debated for decades. Environmentalists have tended to warn oil could run out at any moment, while oil companies insist there are plently more oil fields yet to be discovered.

The most recent estimation from the International Energy Agency, that advises Governments around the world, said conventional oil would not peak until after 2030.

However an authoriative new study from the Government-funded UK Energy Research Council called this prediction “at best optimistic and at worst implausible”. The peer-reviewed research looked at 500 studies from around the world and took into account the difficulty of accessing new oil fields as well as growing demand. It predicted oil will begin running out before 2030 and there is a “significant risk” peak oil will be reached before 2020.

“In our view, forecasts which delay a peak in conventional oil production until after 2030 are at best optimistic and at worst implausible. And given the world’s overwhelming dependence on oil and the time required to develop alternatives, 2030 isn’t far away,” said the report’s lead author Steve Sorrell. “The concern is that rising oil prices will encourage the rapid development of carbon-intensive alternatives which will make it difficult or impossible to prevent dangerous climate change.”

TCU

by Solange Brand

Today many of the “sacrificed generation” of the Cultural Revolution run China, as the transitional generation who have followed the heirs of the Long March. They may shape the China of the future or manage its economy or be creative. Some may just be paying the heavy price of the “decade of chaos”.

The Cultural Revolution is hardly mentioned now in “Communist” China. It is officially closed, and China has turned towards the future, to the pleasures of development and consumption. As always when people are both the perpetrators and the victims of tragic events, memories are not individually transmitted, or only poorly.

It is not easy to live with the bitterness of betrayed ideals, of being manipulated and cheated, while still remembering that imposed churning between urban and rural. It is difficult to find a balance between the freedom of the time when everything seemed possible, and the young travelled China on free trains, lived independently of their parents and teachers, and yet faced family tragedy, violence and suicide. There remains a recall of the friendships and solidarity the young form every generation, but also guilt about teachers, neighbours or family members.

At the Dashanzi International Art Festival, Beijing 2006: an older woman explains a little history

MDip

Pinaki Bhattacharya, Senior defence correspondent

The fortnight had been tumultuous. A series of stories by an Indian news agency about Chinese military intrusions into what is claimed to be Indian territory inflamed the news circles. Soon the television news channels began yelping with a threat from China, magnified hundredfold. Official denials from New Delhi fell on ears, long programmed to ignore anything that challenged the make-believe, with expected results.

The situation led to a stinging rebuke to the Indian media by the China Daily in Beijing. But the situation had an inexorable dynamic of its own. If the Indian Minister for External Affairs described the boundary with China as most ‘peaceful’ and ‘incident free,’ a leading national daily front-paged a story that two Indian border policemen had been injured in gun battles with the Chinese on the eastern frontier.

All the stories quoted unnamed sources, which meant no one was ready to publicly own up to the sensational headlines. If it did seem that there was a design in this drumming up of war hysteria, the journalists who covered the government agencies dealing with national security (including this writer) were at a loss to find the hidden hands.

For, the official government spokespersons were foaming in their mouths repeating interminably the standard line: that these reported intrusions were normal. They held the Line of Actual Control drawn after the 1962 war was a geographical abstraction at many places, thus enabling both countries to claim same territory as their own. As a result an aggressive border patrol in those areas could be called an intrusion by either country.

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs went a step further. Not only did they dub the borders with China most ‘peaceful,’ but they reminded the country that the two countries have pledged to maintain peace and tranquility on all the border areas, including those that are contested.

HP

By The Brussels Tribunal, CC

MADRID: Today the Spanish Senate, acting to confirm a decision already taken under pressure from powerful governments accused of grave crimes, will limit Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction. Yesterday, ahead of the change of law, a legal case was filed at the Audiencia Nacional against four United States presidents and four United Kingdom prime ministers for commissioning, condoning and/or perpetuating multiple war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Iraq.

This case, naming George H W Bush, William J Clinton, George W Bush, Barack H Obama, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Anthony Blair and Gordon Brown, is brought by Iraqis and others who stand in solidarity with the Iraqi people and in defence of their rights and international law.

Iraq: 19 years of intended destruction
The intended destruction — or genocide — of Iraq as a state and nation has been ongoing for 19 years, combining the imposition of the most draconian sanctions regime ever designed and that led to 1.5 million Iraqi deaths, including 500,000 children, with a war of aggression that led to the violent deaths of over one million more.

Destroying Iraq included the purposeful targeting of its water and sanitation system, attacking the health of the civilian population. Since 1990, thousands of tons of depleted uranium have been dropped on Iraq, leading in some places to a 600 per cent rise in cancer and leukaemia cases, especially among children. In both the first Gulf War and “Shock and Awe” in 2003, an air campaign that openly threatened “total destruction”, waves of disproportionate bombing made no distinction between military and civilian targets, with schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, shelters, residential areas, and historical sites all destroyed.

Destroying Iraq included promoting, funding and organizing sectarian and ethnic groups bent on dividing Iraq into three or more sectarian or ethnic entities, backed by armed militias that would terrorize the Iraqi people. Since 2003, some 4.7 million Iraqis — one fifth of the population — have been forcibly displaced. Under occupation, kidnappings, killings, extortion and mutilation became endemic, targeting men, women and even children and the elderly.

Destroying Iraq included purposefully dismantling the state by refusing to stop or stem or by instigating mass looting, and by engaging in ideological persecution, entailing “manhunting”, extrajudicial assassinations, mass imprisonment and torture, of Baathists, the entire educated class of the state apparatus, religious and linguistic minorities and Arab Sunnis, resulting in the total collapse of all public services and other economic functions and promoting civil strife and systematic corruption.

In parallel, Iraq’s rich heritage and unique cultural and archaeological patrimony has been wantonly destroyed.

In order to render Iraq dependent on US and UK strategic designs, successive US and UK governments have attempted to partition Iraq and to establish by military force a pro-occupation Iraqi government and political system. They have promoted and engaged in the massive plunder of Iraqi natural resources, attempting to privatize this property and wealth of the Iraqi nation.
Humanity at stake
This is but the barest summary of the horrors Iraq has endured, based on lies that nobody but cowed governments and complicit media believed. In 2003, millions worldwide were mobilized in opposition to US/UK plans. In going ahead, the US and UK launched an illegal war of aggression. Accountability has not been established.

The persons named in this case have each played a key role in Iraq’s intended destruction. They instigated, supported, condoned, rationalized, executed and/or perpetuated or excused this destruction based on lies and narrow strategic and economic interests, and against the will of their own people. Allowing those responsible to escape accountability means such actions could be repeated elsewhere.

It is imperative now to establish accountability for US and UK war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Iraq because:

Every Iraqi victim deserves justice.

Everyone responsible should be accountable.

CCO

By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 9 (IPS) – The prospect of a four-degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures in 50 years is alarming – but not alarmist, climate scientists now believe.

Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.

“Two degrees C is already gone as a target,” said Chris West of the University of Oxford’s UK Climate Impacts Programme.

“Four degrees C is definitely possible…This is the biggest challenge in our history,” West told participants at the “4 Degrees and Beyond, International Climate Science Conference” at the University of Oxford last week.

A four-degree C overall increase means a world where temperatures will be two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees and more in others, making them uninhabitable.

It is a world with a one- to two-metre sea level rise by 2100, leaving hundreds of millions homeless. This will head to 12 metres in the coming centuries as the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets melt, according to papers presented at the conference in Oxford.

Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070.

“Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it’s completely useless,” John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the conference.

Schellnhuber recently briefed U.S. officials from the Barack Obama administration, but he says they chided him that his findings were “not grounded in political reality” and that “the [U.S.] Senate will never agree to this”.

He had told them that the U.S. must reduce its emissions from its current 20 tonnes of carbon per person average to zero tonnes per person by 2020 to have an even chance of stabilising the climate around two degrees C.

China’s emissions must peak by 2020 and then go to zero by 2035 based on the current science, he added.

“Policymakers who agreed to a two-degree C goal at the G20 summit easily fool themselves about what emission cuts are needed,” Schellnhuber said.

IPS