Month: January 2010

by Professor ALI A. MAZRUI

One major area in which Julius K. Nyerere was a rival to Kwame Nkrumah was the arena of regional integration.

For years Nkrumah had been virtually the unrivalled voice of Pan-Africanism and the symbol of the continent’s quest for greater integration.

On a more modest scale, Nkrumah had even attempted to forge a union between Guinea, Ghana and Mali. But these attempts at unification proved abortive.

Then in 1961 and 1962, it appeared that Nyerere was going to succeed in leading the East African countries to a regional federation.

By June 1963, the three heads of government in East Africa ? Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Milton Obote of Uganda and Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika? felt confident enough to announce plans to form an East African federation before the end of the year.

But earlier in 1960, Nyerere had already stolen the thunder on federalism in Africa by announcing his readiness to delay Tanganyika?s independence until Kenya and Uganda became independent, if that would facilitate the formation of an East African federation.

In June 1963, Kenya was still not independent, but the other two had attained theirs. This time the clarion call was not for Tanzania to delay its independence but for Kenya?s timetable of decolonisation to be speeded up.

Britain was called upon to grant Kenya independence by December 1963 to enable it to federate with the other two sister states.

In this context Nyerere had become a symbol of African unification. Indeed he appeared to stand a greater chance of success in effective inter-territorial integration than Nkrumah had stood in his own West African ventures.

Predictably, Nkrumah?s reaction to the Pan-African developments in Eastern Africa was not polite or subtle.

He propounded a new thesis that sub-regional unification of the kind envisaged by Nyerere and his contemporaries in East Africa was in fact simply ?balkanisation writ large.’ Further, the enterprise was likely to compromise the bigger ambition of a continental African union.

It was a case of the good being the enemy of the best. And East Africans who accepted the minimally good achievement of sub-regional federation would no longer have the incentive to embark on continental union as a more effective bulwark against neo-colonialism and poverty.

Nkrumah pointed out that, by virtue of physical realities his own country, Ghana, could not join an East African federation.

In his view, this illustrated dramatically how discriminatory and divisive Nyerere’s strategy was for the continent of Africa.
Nyerere responded to Nkrumah’s counter-thesis with contempt.

He asserted that to urge Africa to remain in small bits than form bigger entities was ‘an attempt to rationalise absurdity.

He denounced Nkrumah?s attempt to deflate the East African federation movement as petty mischief-making arising from Nkrumah’s sense of frustration in his own failed Pan-African ventures.

But Nyerere was becoming increasingly sensitive to the danger of having his credentials questioned as a result of Nkrumah’s attacks.

So, when in January 1964 he was compelled by circumstances to invite British troops to re-enter his country in order to disarm his own military mutineers, the Mwalimu was so conscious of his vulnerability to critics like Nkrumah that he immediately invited the OAU to Dar es Salaam to hear his explanation for inviting British troops.

So keen was Nyerere to protect his country from the stigma of neo-dependency that he was prepared to risk incurring the displeasure of Kenya and Uganda by going the OAU route alone, rather than compromise his Pan-African credentials.

Nyerere’s unilateral initiative to invite the OAU to Dar es Salaam did in fact irritate the two other East African countries who had been similarly forced to invite British troops to disarm their own mutinous soldiers.

The Citizen for more

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Scanning the Sunday New York Times during the summer of 1990, President George Herbert Walker Bush read how an Idaho rancher had threatened to slit the throat of Forest Service ranger Don Oman, who had decided to reduce the number of cattle grazing on several allotments in the Twin Falls District of the Sawtooth National Forest. Bush ordered a Justice Department investigation. A White House aide called Oman and said the president wanted the ranger to know he wouldn’t tolerate harassment of federal workers.

Five years later times had changed drastically. At the half-way mark of Bill Clinton’s term in office, threats against federal employees working in the rural west had become commonplace. Many Forest Service and BLM workers had to travel in pairs, maintaining constant radio contact with ranger offices. Their families routinely received death threats aimed not just at the workers, but also at their children.

In the face of these rising tensions, President Clinton reacted in a markedly different way than his predecessor. His administration placed a gag order on Forest Service employees talking about their harassment, ordered line officers on the public range to quit complaining and retreated from legal confrontation with violent anti-government vigilantes.

After the Oklahoma City bombings, the situation across the whole of the West became more tense. “There’s more people now kind of watching their backs,” said Doug Zimmer, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officer. “You pull into a rest stop driving from Spokane to Seattle and you park away from the other vehicles. That kind of thing.”

At public meeting in December 2004, one man told Zimmer he was going back to his truck to get a gun. Another threatened to rope him to his pickup and drag him through town. The situation got so bad that the Washington state Department of Ecology removed state logos from many of its trucks and cars.

In the mountains outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, a rancher by the name of Cliveden Bundy decided to excavate a gravel quarry on public lands. When BLM rangers came out to the site to halt the unauthorized mining, Bundy threatened to “blow [their] fucking heads off.” Bundy wasn’t arrested. Indeed, he continued to mine gravel and threaten BLM officials.

“The BLM and Forest Service managers pushed the Department of Justice to act, but the Clinton administration was loath to respond in an aggressive manner,” said Jeff DeBonis, a former Forest Service worker who founded Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“The most they were willing to do was to belatedly file civil suits,” said Andy Stahl of the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “The problems seemed to lie with top-level managers in the Forest Service and in the office of general counsel of the Department of Agriculture, some of whom were sympathetic with the claims of many of these ranchers and county leaders.”

Even more damaging, while the Clinton administration’s weak civil suits reasserted federal control over the public domain rangelands, everyone knew that Clinton’s own public lands administrators had floated a plan to turn millions of acres of federal land back to the states—a position that only encouraged ranchers and other dissidents to up the ante and increase the tension with federal employees working to enforce environmental regulations on the public estate.

At a community meeting in Billings, Montana in the summer of 1995, the 12-year-old daughter of an Interior Department worker in the West told Clinton that she was frightened. “What can you do to protect my dad?” she asked. Clinton delivered his classic, noncommittal response. “The most important thing we can do to make your father safer is to have everybody in this room, whatever their political party or views, stand up and say it is wrong to condemn people who are out there doing their job and wrong to threaten them.”

The heightened animosity toward the federal government in the West stemmed, in part, from the increasingly powerful property-rights movement, sometimes generically referred to as the “Wise Use” movement, consisting of a commingling of corporations, small businesses and landowners who argued that businesses should be compensated for any reductions in the commercial uses of public lands caused by the enforcement of environmental regulations.

On the further fringe of the property rights fight resides a much smaller but vocal group of people who think that the federal system of public lands (national forests and grasslands, national parks and wildlife refuges and BLM lands) are a constitutional fraud and rightly belong to the states and counties. These people tend to view federal workers who oversee public land policy as trespassers on their property.

All told, the public domain occupies an enormous part of America—up to one-third of the nation—and contains virtually all of the old-growth forest, salmon habitat, wolves, grizzlies and free-flowing rivers. It also harbors most of the unexplored oil and mineral reserves. The property-rights and county supremacy movements have powerful allies among the conservatives in Congress and in western statehouses, who strongly argue for a return of federal powers to states and local governments.

Counterpunch for more

by Adeilton Lima

On the last day of 2009, amid the New Year’s congratulations, a serious fact provoked an avalanche of thoughts on the Brazilian elite’s false morality and its values in their various levels. However, instead of concealing, it revealed the depth of the Brazilian social apartheid and prejudice that maintains it.

And before you accuse me of irony, I’m not slighting here the natural tragedies, the only phenomenon that unites rich and poor in Brazil. I won’t return the aggression to the working class in the same currency.

Journalist Boris Casoy of Bandeirantes TV network, after a New Year’s greeting of two street sweepers in the Jornal da Band during that news show’s opening vignette, not realizing that the audio was open, came up with the following comment: “What piece of shit, two garbage men wishing happiness, from the top of their brooms, garbage men, the lowest on the scale of work…”. This amid laughter of his colleagues.

Boris Casoy is known for questioning the Brazilian social and political attitudes, ending his comments with the phrase “This is a shame!” This catchphrase used by this man fits him very well, taking off his mask and putting him in a delicate position if he decides to ever repeat it.

His outrage will have no moral basis to justify it. The offense directed against the two workers and by extension against a professional category reflects the hypocrisy of our elite and part of the Brazilian press sectors. Those two employees were doing nothing more than from the top of their humility wishing everyone a happy new year and better days.

However, the same TV that gives them this platform, stabs them in the back with such discrimination and lack of respect. A case for immediate dismissal had the TV station a different stance and not the one that shows it condoning such prejudice.

On the other hand, Boris Casoy’s “Freudian slip,” a euphemism used to reduce the severity of his rudeness, only reflected what we see all the time in Brazil’s television shows: vulgarity, promotion of violence and prejudice disguised in politically correct rhetoric, which stages a false inclusion, where we still see, in the negative sense, the traditional social, sexual and racial differences, which are reinforced by the soap operas, live TV shows, pseudo children’s programs and newscasts.

It’s a TV that does not educate, that does not think, that does not help the country grow intellectually and critically, preferring to sweep their prejudice under the carpet with their crystal brooms. Does apologizing, as the reporter did the next day, erase the seriousness of such aggression?

No, it only reinforces the hypocrisy of this elite’s sector and is no different from the washed excuses of the political class who invents mensalões (monthly bribes), panettone schemes, who diverts public funds, frauds electronic billboards, takes little children in their arms, cries, apologizes etc.. and then washes their hands just like a stupid Pilate.

This type of professional shames the whole working class (let’s exempt good journalists obviously) and saddens a whole society, as it reveals the true and discriminatory thoughts of some of the so-called “opinion makers.” However, paradoxically, this TV we have is nothing more than a mirror of the Brazilian society and its most despicable values.

Brazzil for more

Human-rights violations in 2009 are “numerous and varied and no sector of society is exempted,” belying the Arroyo government’s claim that steps have been taken to improve the Philippine government’s human-rights record, according to Karapatan. And with Oplan Bantay Laya 2’s deadline in 2010 fast approaching, more abuses are certain to occur, it said.

by MARYA SALAMAT

MANILA — Human rights took a beating from the Arroyo regime in 2009, a period that saw the continuation of violations of basic rights that began to worsen ever since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo came to power in 2001.

In its annual report on the human-rights situation in the Philippines between 2001 to 2009, Karapatan not only called attention to the myth of democracy in the Philippines — it also pointed to the myth of Philippine sovereignty, the myth of the rule of law under Arroyo and the myth of the existence of a government that is supposedly for the people.

Examining the Ampatuan massacre for example, except for the large number of victims extrajudicially killed all in one day, what happened in Maguindanao last November 23 had been happening all over the Philippines for nine years now. Under Arroyo’s undeclared martial law , the Ampatuan massacre was actually a “carnage waiting to happen,” Karapatan said in its report.

As with the other human-rights atrocities recorded in the country, the Ampatuan massacre is directly traceable to the Arroyo government’s “blueprint for terror and impunity” called Oplan Bantay Laya (OBL). A national policy that “unleashes state terrorism on the people,” the Arroyo government’s OBL shrouded the entire country under an undeclared martial law from 2002 up to now, Karapatan said.

Under the Arroyo government’s undeclared martial law, human-rights atrocities continuously occurred, victimizing thousands of Filipinos particularly those who are critical of Arroyo’s “ neoliberal policies favoring big business and foreign capital” and of her government’s corruption, said Marie Hilao-Enriquez, chairperson of Karapatan.

Bulatlat for more

by ADAM KIRSCH

A new book explores the rich history of Turkey’s Dönme, Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam in the 1600s

Jews of Salonika repent for following Sabbatai Zevi/CREDIT; Jewish Encyclopedia via Wkipedia

Most readers interested in Jewish history know something about the conversos, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries. In recent decades, historians have come to see their story not just as a tragic or heroic one—an affair of Jews forced to give up their faith, or contriving to remain faithful in secret—but as an important episode in the evolution of the modern world. Yirmiyahu Yovel argued last year in The Other Within: The Marranos that these “New Christians” were the first large group in European history to be effectively post-religious—free to define the world and its meaning for themselves, instead of accepting the definitions of rabbinic Judaism or medieval Catholicism. That Spinoza and Montaigne, those skeptical modern minds, were both descendants of conversos, and that New Christians played a major role in the economy of the New World, is seen as evidence that these Jewish converts helped to invent the secular world we live in.

Much less is known, however, about a later, smaller, but perhaps even more intriguing group of Jewish converts, who emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century. They were followers of the arch-heretic Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself the Messiah and set about abolishing major Jewish laws and customs. Despite, or because of, the blasphemous nature of his innovations—for instance, he declared that Tisha B’Av, the greatest day of mourning in the Jewish calendar, would henceforth be a day of celebration—Zevi attracted a large following across the Jewish world. But in 1666, Zevi was arrested by the Ottoman authorities and given the choice of converting to Islam or being executed. When he chose to convert, he left thousands of disillusioned believers behind him. Glückel of Hameln, the author of a famous autobiography, compared the experience to being pregnant for nine months, and then, instead of giving birth, only breaking wind.

But a small group of Sephardic Jews, many of them descended from conversos, did not think that Zevi’s apostasy invalidated his mission. On the contrary, they decided to follow him by converting to Islam themselves, while continuing to believe in their messiah and follow his commandments. This group, totaling about 300 families, became known in Turkish as Dönme, “converts,” though they referred to themselves in Hebrew as Ma’aminim, “believers.” By the 1680s, the Dönme had congregated in Salonika, the cosmopolitan and majority-Jewish city in Ottoman Greece. For the next 250 years, they would lead an independent communal life—intermarrying, doing business together, maintaining their own shrines, and handing down their secret traditions.

In The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, Marc David Baer has produced the first scholarly study of this group. That it is a scholarly work, limited in its scope and sticking closely to written archives, is something that Baer insists on, and with good reason. For while the Spanish conversos are now seen as an interesting historical phenomenon, and it is even rather fashionable to claim converso ancestry, Turkey is still a part of the world where the anti-Semitic imagination runs wild.

And because the Dönme played an outsize role at key moments in modern Turkish history, the myth of their secret Jewish power has itself become powerful. As Baer writes in his introduction, there have recently been bestselling books in Turkey claiming that everyone from the current prime minister, the religious Muslim Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of modern secular Turkey, are secretly Jewish. “Ghost Jews haunt the Turkish popular imagination,” as Baer puts it.

This makes it a delicate matter to write about the Dönme. In fact, Baer says, most of the descendants of Dönme whom he interviewed for the book asked him not to use their names. “Although many believe conspiracy theories about the Dönme,” Baer writes, “very few know the real character and history of the group.” His book, perhaps deliberately, will not raise the profile of the Dönme very much. Not only is it an academic book, published by Stanford University Press, but Baer says very little about the origin of the Dönme, or about their religious beliefs and practices—matters that many Jewish readers would be curious about.

In fact, he emphasizes that the Dönme, unlike the conversos, do not really merit the title “crypto-Jews.” They were not Jews who pretended to be Muslims, but a sect of their own, whose beliefs and practices were actually further from Judaism than from Islam. Because they were originally followers of Sabbatai Zevi, mainstream Sephardic Jews wanted nothing to do with them. Baer quotes one rabbinical opinion from 1765, declaring that “there is no difference between them and the Gentiles at all, transgressing against all that is written in the Torah, certainly taken for Gentiles in every matter.” The Dönme followed the Muslim calendar and prayed in mosques, though they dissented privately in some ways. For instance, while they fasted during the daytime on Ramadan, like all Muslims, they deliberately broke the fast a few minutes early, thus signaling their independence.

For the most part, however, Baer has little to say about Dönme origins and religious beliefs. He focuses instead on the Dönme in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and on institutions like schools and businesses that are officially documented. When some exotic feature of Dönme practice does come into view—for instance, the allegation that they celebrated a certain holiday with orgies—Baer is quick to note that such sexual sins are always imputed to religious schismatics, in the Muslim world as in the Christian world. (The word “buggery,” for instance, derives from the medieval Christian heretics known as Cathars, who were from Bulgaria.)

In Baer’s hands, the story of the Dönme becomes, instead, a rather familiar modern morality play—a story of strangeness annihilated by the pressure of sameness. For centuries, the Dönme lived their communal life in Salonika without interference from the Ottoman Empire, which accepted them as Muslims and did not inquire too closely into their private convictions. That began to change in the late 19th century, as the corrupt and cosmopolitan empire started to turn into a modern national state. The Dönme, who were prominent in the tobacco and textile industries, were initially strong supporters of political reform. Baer discusses the pro-reform articles in Dönme newspapers and literary magazines and notes that Dönme schools in Salonika were some of the most progressive in the Empire. (Ataturk attended one of those schools, though the evidence seems to prove that he was not a Dönme himself.)

Most important, several Dönme were leading members of the Committee for Union and Progress, the revolutionary party known as the Young Turks, who in 1908 forced the Sultan to grant a constitution. The Dönme, like Jews and Freemasons, sympathized with the CUP’s scientific, reformist program, though Baer emphasizes that the CUP was not a Dönme party—any more than the Russian Bolsheviks, though they included many Jews, were a Jewish party. Even so, some prominent Young Turks were Dönme, including the editor of the Party’s newspaper and the finance minister in the new CUP government.

This newfound prominence came just as the old Dönme community in Salonika was uprooted. In 1912, the city was conquered by Greece, which changed the name to Thessaloniki and set about expelling the Muslim population. The Dönme were forced to abandon their shrines and homes, and most of them resettled in Istanbul. Now in the public eye as never before, they were the subject of a number of muckraking newspaper articles and books, which Baer examines. In 1919, one anonymous publication accused them of being inbred to the point of biological degeneracy: “Muslims who give their daughters in marriage to those among whom tuberculosis and neuralgia/neural disorders are widespread are committing murder,” the writer warned. At the same time, the Dönme were said to be “always occupied with commerce. Because they do not consider others to be human, they consider it among the laws and praiseworthy qualities of their religion to cheat other nations with various intrigues and schemes.”

Tablet for more
via 3 Quarks Daily

by Kent Paterson

El Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral (CEREAL)

For more than four years, Margarita Estrada assembled and tested computers at a Foxconn factory in the central Mexican city of Guadalajara. Preparing 120 CPUs an hour for shipping was a “stressful” job, the young woman says. Part of Estrada’s duties involved training the large numbers of new workers. Despite dire employment opportunities in Mexico, many new employees never return after a day or two. “People didn’t last,” Estrada recalls. In her stint at the Taiwanese-owned plant, Estrada’s wages went up from slightly more than $8 to about $10 a day, plus hard-to-attain production bonuses, the former worker says.

Yet even after years at Foxconn, Estrada never became a formal employee of the electronics industry giant. Instead, Spyga, a temporary employment agency, employed her and most of her co-workers on the shop floor. “There were few people working directly for Foxconn, about five of them.” Estrada says. “That’s all.”

In 2007, Estrada was laid off and offered $300 in severance pay. Suspecting the amount fell below Mexican legal standards, she knocked on the doors of Cereal, a Jesuit-founded labor advocacy and watchdog group. After some back and forth with two sets of employers, she eventually walked away with nearly $2,000 in severance pay.

In Guadalajara and the Mexican electronics industry in general, Foxconn’s employment set-up is the norm. Nearly 70 temporary employment agencies operate in Guadalajara alone, says Jorge Barajas, Cereal’s local coordinator, and seven pages of the bulging Guadalajara phone book are filled with the private firms.

According to the veteran labor activist, temporary job agencies in Guadalajara boomed when the local electronics industry expanded in the mid-1990s. Transnational companies including Manpower and Adecco now dominate the electronics industry labor market.

A 2007 Cereal study found that approximately 60 percent of the 400,000 workers in Mexico’s electronics industry work for temporary agencies, with some companies employing as much as 90 percent of their workforce through sub-contractors.

In 2008 and 2009, more than 4,000 workers turned to Cereal for help, and 95 percent of inquiries in Guadalajara involved the temp firms, Barajas says.

“Though fewer in number, [foreign-owned companies] are the ones that accumulate the majority of workers’ complaints,” says Barajas.

Common complaints include inadequate severance pay, skimping on benefits, low pay, and the seemingly never-ending temporary contracts that go from month-to-month or even fifteen days stretches.

Meager Wages

Three hours from Guadalajara, the city of Aguascalientes hosts plants run by Flextronics and Sensata, formerly Texas Instruments. A Sensata worker, who declined to be identified for fear of losing her job, echoed similar complaints. Before the economic crash, making the leap from a temp to a permanent job with Sensata required months of perfect attendance and near-spotless performance, she maintains. Most workers are single mothers, divorcées and widows juggling domestic responsibilities and trying to raise families on low factory wages.

After almost a decade at the plant, she pulls in less than $50 for a 45-hour week. “For all we do, it is not a fair salary,” she contends.

Aureliano Rosa, who has five years’ experience in the Guadalajara high-tech industry, recounts a similar tale. The agencies, he says, under-compensate workers’ skills and unnecessarily skim off wages and benefits such as Christmas bonuses that would be higher if the workers were employed directly by the companies.

Workers barely “survive,” Rosa said. “If I were married with a family, there would be no way to survive on those wages.” Before he was let go from his latest job earlier this year, he earned about $70 per week for job responsibilities that included helping design computer work stations.

Struggling under poor conditions

Nationwide, other problems documented by Cereal include sexual harassment, chemical exposures, accidents, union suppression and undignified treatment, such requiring U.S. high school-like passes for bathroom breaks. A Cereal investigation found Manpower and other employers routinely asked prospective employees about pregnancies, sexual histories, tattoos and union affiliations. In many cases, new hires could expect medical exams and drug tests, according to the labor rights group.

CorpWatch for more

by Aaron Hillis

If Francis Ford Coppola’s gentle dramedy Jack and last year’s oddball melodrama The Curious Case of Benjamin Button were two circles in a Venn diagram, the premature-aging film hiding in the overlap would be director R. Balki’s Paa—possibly the strangest Bollywood blockbuster yet. The opening credits are simultaneously read to the camera as they’re displayed, cheekily “introducing” 67-year-old screen legend Amitabh Bachchan as Auro, a precocious 13-year-old who suffers from progeria. Unrecognizable under prosthetics that accentuate the symptoms of this rare disease (a bulbous forehead, alopecia, malformed teeth), Bachchan’s stunt performance is especially hard to take seriously as Auro’s tragic life and appearance are undercut with crowd-pleasing laughs and carefree songs. The story isn’t so much about illness as it is familial estrangement: Raised by a single mom (Vidya Balan) after her college beau suggested an abortion, neither Auro nor his pop—a Member of Parliament whom he befriends after winning an artistic prize in a televised school event—knows that they’re related. One more factoid will leave behind all but the B’wood diehards and stoned fans of gonzo cinema: Auro’s dad is played by Abhishek Bachchan, Amitabh’s real-life son. WTF?

Village Voice

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here In Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I. compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through an these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants — for example, to remove the stores humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes bad been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves : “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic with with-drawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-oat we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boatel as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

MLK for more

by Javed Naqvi

Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan claim to have secular credentials, and that makes it dangerous when they speak approvingly of someone as questionable as Modi. –Photo by Reuters

It’s easy to fuse the real-life characters of cinema icons with the roles they have played over the years. So when those heroes with whom we have laughed and cried and lived and died display their banal, often bigoted feet of clay it’s hard to mask one’s shock.

We celebrated Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur and also the fact that the film won 11 Academy Awards. We applauded the feat as though it had somehow won us an impossible A plus in an intractable school subject.

Heston’s role as Moses in The Ten Commandments made many of us take sides with the good against evil, unruffled by the debatable faith he subtly propagated. (Burt Lancaster, a self-described atheist, claimed that he turned down the role of Judah Ben-Hur because he “didn’t like the violent morals in the story” and because he did not want to promote Christianity. But this was too fine a point for the gullible moviegoers to quibble over.)

Or take our own Amitabh Bachchan. His deep baritone voice as Babu Moshoi in Anand announced the beginning of a dramatically new era in Indian cinema. All through the 70s he played the Angry Young Man, the poor man who fought the system with his bare fists. He played a Haji Mastan-like role in the runaway hit Deewar with a 786 amulet that lured his Muslim fans, including hordes of fawning women, to the movie halls. He played a Muslim coolie in a film who led a strike against a corrupt minister (in the final confrontation on the minister’s lawn the minister uses a trishul for a weapon and Bachchan a Hammer and Sickle!) The love affair with his fans has lasted for decades. When Amitabh Bachchan fell ill with myasthenia gravis millions of people in India as well as neighbouring countries prayed for his recovery.

When he romanced the dusky Rekha a new generation of movie fans vicariously cheered the alleged off-screen romance. He briefly became an MP. When he declared one day that politics was not for him, they accepted his decision like some committed members from a Shakespearean crowd scene in Julius Caesar:

“Me thinks he is right. Me thinks there is reason in his saying.”

We had accepted Heston too as an iconic hero. Recently the award-winning filmmaker and peace activist Michael Moore produced a no-holds-barred documentary about the gun-lobby in America and juxtaposed it with a culture of mindless violence it spawned, at home and abroad. Charlton Heston, we were dismayed to discover, was an avowed campaigner for rightwing Republicans, who celebrated the prowess with guns as a great American right to bear arms.

Michael Moore shot off an angry letter to the movie idol cum gun-runner. He said: “When you showed up in Denver to hold your pro-gun rally just days after the massacre at nearby Columbine High School, the nation was shocked at your incredible insensitivity to those who had just lost loved ones.

“When you came to Flint to hold another rally in the months after a 6-year old boy shot a 6-year old girl at a nearby elementary school, the community was stunned by your desire to rub its face in its grief.

“But your announcement that you are on your way to Tucson today, just 48 hours after a student at the University of Arizona shot and killed three professors and then himself, to hold ANOTHER big pro-gun celebration – this time to get out the vote for the NRA (National Rifle Association)-backed Republican running for Congress – well, sir, I have to ask you: Have you no shame?”

Of course Charlton Heston is dead and can’t argue back, but perhaps Amitabh Bachchan can tell us why a tax reprieve for his film is enough to make him paint a rosy picture of one of the most controversial, sectarian and ruthless politicians of our times?

In terms of the number of people who have seen his films, not just in India but right across the world, Amitabh Bachchan is probably a bigger phenomenon than Heston ever was. As was the case with other matinee idols, past and present, his screen persona is laced with political statement.

That people of Bachchan’s mega popularity can also get into a spot of bother is not surprising. But it did make people sit up when he declaimed his love for a political fixer, saying he would not hesitate to polish the politician’s shoes for some kindness that he had shown the actor. Something more shocking was to come. Bachchan joined the select list of business captains and showbiz idols to shower praise on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, of all the reasons for exempting the actor’s latest movie from entertainment tax.

Bachchan’s exultation is contained in his blog, which he wrote from his hotel room in Ahmedabad:

“Naked emotions, devoid of any hindrances presented and expressed as nature designed them for humans, or as many believe God the Almighty may have, have a release that remains unmatched in our recorded or unrecorded history. It somnambulates, drives us in an exhausted drain of energy to slumber. But it invigorates. Invigorates to carry function and obligation with some responsibility.”

“My condition may have been similar, but obligation must never be ignored. An emotion of gratitude and consent by a dignitary that holds office, can become overwhelming. I find myself in such state. Mr Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, in his hospitality and generous demeanour, has through process registered that our film Paa shall be granted tax exemption, the paper work provided falling into place.”

“He lives simply and with mere basic needs and most unlike the head of a state. He speaks with affection on development and progress. He is welcoming to fresh ideas and ideals. His oft repeated phrase of him being a CM, a common man, is not misunderstood. He does and acts as he speaks. He talks of raising the level of awareness for his state through tourism and I volunteer to participate in any activity that would help promote that. Did you know or were you aware that the largest number of heritage sites in the country are in Gujarat? … The rann – a massive and wide expanse of miles of white soil, that glows like it was imbedded with millions of diamonds in the night, separating our borders with our neighbours Pakistan.”

Narendra Modi is still being investigated for his role in the 2002 Gujarat massacre in which more than a thousand Muslims were killed and more than a hundred thousand driven from their homes. But India’s icons seem to be happy to elide, if not clean forget about that horrible episode.

Or consider the response of India’s current acting rage Shahrukh Khan to a question about Narendra Modi. “I don’t know him personally…I have no opinion…,” he had declared. “Personally they have never been unkind to me.” Personally, again.

When Modi was refused a US visa the editor of a national daily said of him, “He may be a mass murderer, but he’s our mass murderer.”

There are a number of popular film actors who are members of Modi’s rightwing party and there can hardly be any quarrel with their political beliefs. After all it is their business to pursue the kind of worldview they deem fit for themselves and for their idea of nationhood.

Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan claim to have secular credentials, and that makes it dangerous when they speak approvingly of someone as questionable as Modi. Only last week, the Press Trust of India carried a report saying Bachchan was planning to join a campaign to usher peace between India and Pakistan.

Dawn for more

by Martha Rosenberg

Like Wall Street firms bestowing bonuses weeks after government bailouts, Premarin and Prempro maker Wyeth, recently merged with Pfizer, is unbowed.

Months after a Sen. Charles Grassley-led investigation into its ghostwriting and the unretracted falsified science it planted in medical journals–1,500 documents are found on UCSF’s Drug Industry Document Archive detail the con–the hormone giant is behind new articles in the Journal of Women’s Health and Menopause.

And even after the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) found in 2002 that hormone therapy (HT) increases breast cancer by 26 per cent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 per cent and doubles the risk of blood clots and dementia, Wyeth still thinks it’s a neat idea.

Women “who are reluctant to take combination hormone therapies because of the publicity after WHI,” writes Michelle P Warren, MD in the journal Menopause (Volume 16, Number 6) as if cancer were a PR problem, might find “improvement in their quality-of-life scores, including that for sleep” by adding another Wyeth drug, bazedoxifene which just happens to be up for FDA approval. The selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM), says the Wyeth speaker and “advisory board member” according to the journal, would replace the “bad guy” progestin which is causing all the problems in hormone therapy. And replace revenues.

In fact bazedoxifene is such a potential pipeline saver. JoAnn V. Pinkerton, MD, also a Wyeth advisory board member according to Medscape, wrote three articles about it this fall and is “teaching” a Continuing Medical Education (CME) course on it called Controversies in Menopausal Hormone Therapy: Evaluating the Evidence with other pharma-funded doctors on Medscape.

CMEs, required by state boards for doctors to keep their licenses, are often undisguised drug company commercials and also being probed by Sen. Grassley. A CME on Medscape funded by a vaccine maker promises participants on completion of the “educational activity” they will be able to “specify the currently recommended age” for the vaccine. Gentlemen–start prescribing! An osteoporosis CME offered by the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine unabashedly tells participates to “lobby your legislators” to restore reimbursement for bone density testing, a lucrative drug company racket.

Wyeth’s ghostwriting firm DesignWrite introduced seven “corporate-sponsored” CMEs on postmenopausal hormone therapy in 2004–two years after WHI was discredited–in addition to establishing the $12 million Council on Hormone Education at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health which closed in 2008.

Though the 20 million women who quit hormone therapy since 2002 and pulled down breast cancer rates in the process, didn’t do so because it “wasn’t cost effective” (or because of the “publicity” as Warren says) a Wyeth-funded article in the Journal of Women’s Health (Volume 18, Number 10) discovers that hormone therapy is cost effective.

The article compares the financial and quality of life costs of breast cancer, heart attack, stroke and blood clots linked to HT with the hip, vertebral and wrist fractures and colon cancer HT might prevent and finds hormone therapy is cost effective–at least for Wyeth. “Some of the data used in the model were based on assumptions that introduce uncertainty to the results,” the text admits, perhaps referring to the fact that when colon cancer is found in women on HT, it tends to be more advanced. And HT’s osteoporosis benefits require long term use, which is discouraged.

But the cleverest hormone therapy spin is the emerging proposition that a therapy that causes breast cancer and also makes mammograms harder to read, it is now known, is somehow good.

In a Menopause editorial (Volume 16, Number 6) about a breast density study which included women unwilling to discontinue hormone therapy for one to two months to improve readability of their mammograms, we’re told in an ebullient aside “They might have intuitively made the right decision, albeit appearing unwise!” (Exclamation mark the editorials.)

Counterpunch for more