by Geoff Olson

I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electric outlets are. – A fourth grader in San Diego, quoted in Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder

IN A Punch cartoon from 1959, two scientists in lab coats stand next to a huge computer, programmed to answer the question, “Is there a God?” One of them holds the computer’s printout response: “There is now.”

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Instead of cartoon monoliths demanding our worship, we found ourselves saddled with millions of little, attention-seeking consumer gadgets. Yet electronic networks also expanded to planetary scales with microwave relays and fibre optics. I guess you could say God moves in mysterious ways.

In his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv recalls his son asking why it was so much more fun when his father was a kid. “You are always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down to the swamp,” his son explained. Louv is wary of overly romanticizing his childhood, but he knew his son was on to something. “Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the age of kid pagers, instant messaging and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact.”

The author rhymes off the dreary health data that condemns the sedentary ways of electronically swaddled kids. This has accompanied the “criminalization of natural play,” through the overenthusiastic efforts to protect our children from any conceivable risks and dangers. Over the past two decades, tree houses, monkey bars and slides have been ripped from playgrounds across North America, for fear these municipal oases would become litigious scourges if little Johnny scraped a knee. And as kids’ playgrounds were childproofed into absurdity, parents coached their kids to distrust strangers and to stay close at hand. The process was compounded by the marketing of video games, filling a void left by the outlaw of natural play.

The lives of middle-class children of western societies are increasingly structured and gadget mediated. “Helicopter parents” monitor their every move, scheduling them like little technocrats with playdates, excessive homework and electronic nannying. I recall an anecdote from a teacher in eastern Canada who assigned her primary school students to write about interacting with nature. A student sidled up to her desk and told her the assignment was too difficult, as she had “never climbed a tree before.”

It’s not that difficult to imagine a possible future where any tree climbing will be done by keyboards or consoles. With every gain in computer processing power, the virtual worlds of videogame shoot-em-ups and social networks like Second Life expand in bandwidth and eye-catching realism. Yet at the same time, pristine wilderness recedes that much further from personal and collective memory, along with kids’ access to its remaining patches.

Swiss architect Max Frisch defined technology as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” By that measure, our culture has a real knack for digital dissociation. But as BC author and education and addictions specialist Ross Laird notes, our species has existed in its present form for at least 40,000 years. Only in a blink of an eye have we been exposed to sedentary ways of life, mediated by technology. “We are animals. Our well-being depends upon bodily movement, expression, and integration,” he writes in a recent paper, Adolescent Addictions: Creative Challenges and Opportunities.
Read More
Read More
(Submitted by a reader)

by Umer A. Chaudhry

The brutal murder of three nationalist leaders of Balochistan and the ensuing crisis has brought the issue of the Baloch national struggle to the forefront once again, only to be met with feigned surprises and arrogant dismissals by a major part of the rest of Pakistan. We in Pakistan — and particularly those of us in Punjab — love to externalize the roots of problems that irritate our sensibility.

Therefore, fingers were immediately pointed at foreign involvements, scarcely any thought given to our own attitude towards one of the largest provinces of our country. The deliberate lack of introspection combined with the respect that wild conspiracy theories continue to enjoy renders it very much necessary to take a dip into the history of Balochistan, for that is where the roots of the question lie.

The roots of Baloch nationalism can be roughly traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century when the region became a victim of foreign aggression from both eastern and western sides during the decline of the Khanate of Kalat. For the expansionist British colonizers, Balochistan was a strategically important region to manage the buffer state of Afghanistan against Russia and maintain communication links with Central Asia and Persia. Starting from 1839, after the assassination of Mir Mehrab Khan in a British regiment’s attack on Kalat leading to the installation of an unpopular Khan, the British made several inroads in the Kalat State. British power was consolidated in Balochistan through a number of treaties, culminating in the treaty of 1876 through which the sovereignty of the Khan of Kalat over the region was brought under the administrative control of the British.

In the same period, the Baloch region suffered intrusion from Iran on the western side under the leadership of Qajar King Nasir-al Din Shah, with a major war fought in Kerman in 1849. With Iranian expansionism in Balochistan on the rise, the British decided to adopt the policy of appeasement towards the Iranians to dissuade them from the Russian influence. In 1871, the British agreed to the Iranian proposal for the division of Balochistan and appointed a Perso-Baloch Boundary Commission with Maj. General Goldsmith as its Chief Commissioner.

The ‘Goldsmith Line’ thus arbitrarily divided the cultural, social, and economic unity of Baloch people while excluding the concerns of the people and government of Balochistan. The sovereignty of the Khanate of Kalat, which was not a part of British India, was seriously compromised, leaving behind a deep sense of injustice, discrimination, and alienation among the Baloch people. Later in 1893, the areas of Outer Seistan and Registan were handed over to Afghanistan by the’Durand Line’, further aggravating the Baloch anger.

The Baloch people have never been passive in accepting the foreign domination, interference, and arbitrary partitions. The end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of resistance through a number of violent revolts and rebellions as well as peaceful protests against the injustice meted out to the Baloch people by the British colonizer and the Iranian kingdom. The concerns of the Baloch were not given any due consideration and, as was typical of the colonial rule, the Baloch resistance was suppressed with a heavy hand.

The next major incident that catalyzed the Baloch national struggle was the forced annexation of British Balochistan and the Khanate of Kalat to Pakistan after the independence and partition of India. The Baloch concerns arose when the referendum in British Balochistan, which was leased to the British by the Kalat State through a treaty, was carried out despite the objections raised by the Khan of Kalat.

Umer A. Chaudhry is a lawyer based in Lahore, Pakistan and a member of the Communist Workers and Peasants Party (CMKP) of Pakistan.

The Baloch Question

Shefali Rekhi shares her thoughts on whether Asian culture inhibits creativity.

ASIAN culture could have something to do with curbing creativity. And it could be why geniuses, born here, flock to the Land of Liberty to prosper.

Gallup CEO Jim Clifton thinks so.
The polling firm chief is the architect of the Gallup World Poll which attempts to comprehend the minds of some 6 billion people around the world through its polls.

Gallup’s World Poll, in 2007, showed that people care most about jobs – this is vastly different from their needs about 25 years ago when it was food, clothes etc.

Their ability to gain one shapes their impressions of the place where they live and where they will go.

In a phone interview from Washington he said some of the stars of innovation and creativity now in the United States may return to Asia.
Among them will be those from the region seeking new challenges, those who give in to the emotional tugs and others who genuinely want to contribute to their homeland.

But the “Superstars” will remain in San Francisco.
And the newer geniuses will head to the Silicon Valley though some perhaps will go to London.

“You can’t afford to fail in Asia,” he said.
Asians don’t forgive. Asians don’t forget.

Is it so? Can innovation, that something special that results from a fusion of ideas and energy and can transform lives not thrive in a region said to be the world’s next success story?

Maybe that’s what the westerners think. Maybe the Asians want to be more effective. It is not clear.

But if history is a guide, creativity has thrived in the region in the past.

Silk was discovered here – quite by accident though. According to Chinese legend it all started with a silkworm cocoon fell into a cup of hot tea meant for Empress Lei Tsu.

As she fished out the cocoon from the teacup she found it unraveling into long, smooth strings. It is not clear what she did with it but Chinese farmers were cultivating silkworms for silk by 3,200 BC.
There was ink, the magnetic compass, the gunpower and arithmetic – Indians gave the world its “zero”.

In the modern era, Japan has given the world Playstation game consoles.

And Singapore, the Sound Blaster card for personal computers, which enables users to manipulate sound.

Perhaps, the pace of new inventions and innovations from this part of the world has slowed in recent times – and this could be behind criticism that the region doesn’t encourage creativity.
At the same time some geniuses of Asian origin have been making waves in the United States.

According to Mr Clifton, of the 1,000 geniuses responsible for America’s several trillion growth as many as 600 could be from this part of the world.

Among them is Jerry Yang, a native of Taiwan, who created Yahoo! have thrived in Asia. Yahoo! is today one of the world’s most frequently visited web sites with over 230 million surfers.
And Sabeer Bhatia, who hails from Punjab, in India, who created Hotmail – the web based email – that was bought over by Microsoft for US $400 million.

Would they have been success stories, if they remained in this region? How do you tell?

Read more

An interview with Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program of the International Relations Center
by Stefan Christoff

A protest in Oaxaca in 2006. Photo: Pazkual

One of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s first major foreign visits after being elected to his first minority government in 2006 was to Latin America and the Caribbean. The trip aimed to promote a Canadian foreign policy focused on establishing “new partnerships in the Americas.”

Canada has aggressively pushed to establish trade agreements in the Americas, and in pursuit of this, signed bilateral trade deals with Peru and Colombia in 2009. Concurrent to the push towards more trade pacts in the Americas, Canada has cut the number of nations receiving bilateral aid through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Read More

CounterPunch Diary
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The notion of putting the Bush years on trial has never held allure for President Obama; even less so that of putting Wall Street in the dock. From his lips has always dropped the catechism of uplift and forgiveness, of “moving forward”. He and his advisors had supposed that closing down Guantanamo and issuing a stern denunciation of torture would be sufficient advertisement of the new era; that a few terse reprimands for excessive bonuses for executives would slake the public appetite for retribution on the bankers and tycoons.

On torture, as he approaches the 100-day benchmark, Obama has been forced to change step, in response to public outrage at the chilling stream of memoranda documenting the savageries, and legal justifications for same, ordered and subsequently monitored in minute detail by the Bush high command. Obama’s continuing aversion to any serious calling to account of the sponsors of torture has been evident in his almost daily shifts in position. At the start of this last week he indicated that yes, those okaying the tortures might be legally answerable, that a “Truth Commission” might be the way forward. By Thursday he was backing into that, saying that a commission would “open the door to a protracted, backward-looking discussion” and in the language of his press secretary, “the president determined the concept didn’t seem altogether workable in this case” because of the intense partisan atmosphere built around the issue.

So it’s still not clear whether Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their subordinates will have to endure the soft option of a bipartisan commission of enquiry, or face a special prosecutor, or sit back and watch political momentum flag as the issue devolves into lengthy and possibly closed hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Republicans have not been slow in pointing out, senior Democrats in Congress were certainly complicit in sanctioning torture as early as 2002. They say House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed waterboarding. She says she did not.

As always, former vice president Cheney has usefully raised the stakes. Did the various tortures, the hundreds of waterboarding sessions, the exposure of naked captives to weeks of intense cold in small concrete boxes, actually make America safer? Cheney snarls on television that they did, thus inviting documented ripostes that this is far from clear, and indeed they contributed nothing of advantage to the national interest.

A serious probe into the way Wall Street did business before the crash and during the bailout is even more politically fraught. Bipartisanship has always been the order of the day when it comes to enthusiastic receipt of campaign donations from the financial services industry, by far the most diligent supplier of funds to Democrats and Republicans alike, not omitting Obama himself, whose campaign accounts overflowed with money from Goldman Sachs and the big Wall Street forms.

But with each fresh billion dollar outlay of bailout money there’s been an uptick in public resentment which is why Speaker of the Nancy Pelosi let it be known last week that she proposes to launch Congressional hearings into Wall Street’s malpractices, along the lines of the famous hearings of the Roosevelt era, conducted by the Senate Banking Committee and led by the committee’s chief counsel, Ferdinand Pecora.

The diligent Pecora, formerly an assistant District Attorney from New York, used his committee’s subpoena power to expose the double dealing and chicanery of Wall Street’s most prominent denizens, among them Richard Whitney, Thomas Lamont and J.P. Morgan himself. His hearings set the stage for the regulatory apparatus set up by Roosevelt and the Democrats, ultimately dismembered in the late 1990s in a bipartisan spirit by Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, working in consort with Republican senator Phil Gramm.

Read More

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon

It’s hardly a surprise any more when politicians redefine their campaign promises out of existence or break them outright. To the astonishment of nobody paying close attention to the trajectory of the Obama presidency the White House quietly admitted yesterday that it had no intention of opening up the wildly unpopular NAFTA, or North American Free Trade Agreement for revision or renegotiation.
Lying is an art practiced by all humans from about the time we master speaking in complete sentences. Hence the smarter we are and the more important the stakes, the more ways there are to lie. For a really clever fellow with lots more bright people on his payroll and an absent-minded press ready to help, the possibilities are endless.
Back in 2003, when Glen Ford and this reporter, then at Black Commentator, interrogated Obama, then a candidate for the US Senate from Illinois he told us he favored “significant renegotiation” at a minimum.

“I think that the current NAFTA regime lacks the worker and environmental protections that are necessary for the long-term prosperity of both America and its trading partners. I would therefore favor, at minimum, a significant renegotiation of NAFTA and the terms of the President’s fast track authority. ”

But that was only when he was questioned directly, and only when he was in a Democratic primary and needed the progressive vote in his home state. The magic of the Obama brand is that since then, the senator, and now the president has rarely been put on the spot in front of his supposed base at a time when he needed their votes more than they needed him.

Keenly aware of massive public disapproval of NAFTA, Obama has, since coming to Washington as a senator in 2004, and in his 2008 presidential campaign, tread a deceptive and hypocritical line, refusing to denounce the investor rights agreement with his own lips, but giving his supporters the impression that he opposes it.
“Bad trade deals like NAFTA hit Ohio harder than most states
Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA”
said one of his campaign mailers in the 2008 Ohio primary.
“Of the two candidates left in the race only Barack Obama has been a consistentl opponent of NAFTA and other bad trade deals…”
says another.

Locked in a death struggle with his Siamese twin Hillary Clinton, Obama had to invent points of differences between himself and his last opponent, even if they were false. Striving mightily to create the impression that he opposed NAFTA in states where it might help him, he denounced Hillary Clinton for supporting it. A equally hypocritical big business Democrat to the core, Hillary tried to put the same move on Obama, but with less success.

In a country where the press actually called candidates and officials to account, neither candidate could have gotten away with this. But this is not that country, and we don’t have that press.

What NAFTA Is.
NAFTA and all the other so-called “free trade agreements” are in fact investor rights agreements. They make businesses operated by international investors substantially immune to local laws and regulations on health, safety, wages, hours, labor rights, antipollution, financial and other practices. They establish secretive extrajudicial courts with no appeal where corporations appoint the judges who can decide in favor of them.

Read More

By Hari Sharma

Dear friends:

We request SANSAD members and friends to join in the May Day Rally, on Friday, May 1.

With some notable exceptions, May Day is honored all around the world as a day of celebration of the struggles and achievements of the working class and their allies. The origins go back to 1886 in Chicago where a general strike took place demanding an eight-hour working day. Police shot down and killed four workers at the McCormick harvesting Machine Co. plant. This led to the famous rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago. A police riot ensued, and many people were killed.

In 1889, at the founding meeting of the Second International (of socialist and labour parties) held in Paris, May 1 was declared as International Worker’s Day, to honour the martyrs of the Haymarket police firings.

Millions of workers and their allies take part in the May Day celebration, all around the world, year after year – to assert their determination and to expess international solidarity of the working people.

The “notable exceptions” are the USA and Canada. Neither the ruling classes nor their trade unions wanted anything to do with international solidarity. They announced their own Labour Days in the month of September. In the USA, May 1 was first declared, in 1921, as “Americanization Day”. In 1958 US Congress passed a law and president Eisenhower proclaimed May 1, 1959 as the first official observance of “Loyalty Day”. Since then every president has issued a proclamation, declaring again and again May 1 as the official Loyalty Day.

While the workers around the world declare their fundamental antagonism against the capitalists – by rallying, singing, shouting slogans and reasserting their right to struggle, the workers in North America are supposed to express their “loyalty” to their bosses.

A May Day celeberation in Vancouver, this coming Friday, is a part of the movement to reclaim the struggling heritage of the workers of the world. See if you can join it.

People before profiteering: expose the roots of the capitalist economic crisis, demand solutions for the working-class!

Announcement

MAY DAY RALLY AND MARCH 2009
In Vancouver
Friday, May 1, 2009
5:00 pm
Start at Vancouver Art Gallery, end at Victory Square

The May Day Organizing Committee invites you to attend:

People before profiteering: expose the roots of the capitalist economic crisis, demand solutions for the working-class!

* Gather at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Robson Street side, between Hornby and Howe) at 5:00 p.m.
* March at 5:30 p.m. to Victory Square (corner of Cambie and East Hastings)

Also featuring EVENING CULTURAL CABARET AND BOOK LAUNCH:
* Rhizome Café (317 East Broadway, near Kingsway) at 7 p.m. The cabaret will feature cultural performances and the launch of a new graphic novel about the history of May Day.

As the impact of the global financial and economic crisis continues to hit workers around the world, it is timely that we commemorate and celebrate International Workers’ Day in the spirit of international solidarity and to foster genuine solidarity amongst all workers, whether they be migrant, immigrant, undocumented, indigenous, or Canadian workers, and all exploited and oppressed sectors in Canadian society.

Advance workers rights in the workplace and in our communities!

End anti-worker attacks on wages, benefits, and security!
An injury to one is an injury to all!

Workers unite to defend the rights of migrant and immigrant workers and to strengthen international solidarity!

For more information, please contact the May Day Organizing Committee c/o
Grassroots Women at 604-682-4451 or the Organizing Centre for Economic and Social Justice at 604-215-2775.

We also welcome endorsements of the May 1 event by organizations.
Please contact us at the numbers above if you wish to endorse our event.

by Michael Parenti

After the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe, capitalism was paraded as the indomitable system that brings prosperity and democracy, the system that would prevail unto the end of history.

The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.

Plutocracy vs. Democracy
Let us consider democracy first. In the United States we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, “capitalist democracies.” In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.

The Constitution itself was fashioned by affluent gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to repeatedly warn of the baneful and dangerous leveling effects of democracy. The document they cobbled together was far from democratic, being shackled with checks, vetoes, and requirements for artificial super majorities, a system designed to blunt the impact of popular demands.

In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.

Today conservative forces continue to reject more equitable electoral features such as proportional representation, instant runoff, and publicly funded campaigns. They continue to create barriers to voting, be it through overly severe registration requirements, voter roll purges, inadequate polling accommodations, and electronic voting machines that consistently “malfunction” to the benefit of the more conservative candidates.

At times ruling interests have suppressed radical publications and public protests, resorting to police raids, arrests, and jailings—applied most recently with full force against demonstrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.

About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state–with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses. From this, Debs concluded that capitalism was not just an economic system but an entire social order, one that rigged the rules of democracy to favor the moneybags.
Read more

Millions of people jobless. Billions of dollars in bailouts. Trillions of dollars in debt. And yet, for the first time in years, more Americans than not say their country is on the right track.

In a sign that Barack Obama has inspired hopes for a brighter future in the first 100 days of his presidency, an Associated Press-GfK poll shows that 48 percent of Americans believe the United States is headed in the right direction – compared with 44 percent who disagree.

The “right direction” number is up 8 points since February and a remarkable 31 points since October, the month before Obama’s election.

Intensely worried about their personal finances and medical expenses, Americans nonetheless appear realistic about the time Obama might need to turn things around, according to the AP-GfK poll. It shows, as Obama approaches his 100th day in office next Wednesday, most people consider their new president to be a strong, ethical and empathetic leader who is working to change Washington.
Read More

CNN-IBN

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has ordered a probe into the alleged role of Gujarat Chief minister Narendra Modi in the 2002 Gujarat riots.
The apex court has asked the Raghavan Committee to probe Modi’s role and submit its report in the next three months time.

SC has also asked the committee to probe the roles of a cabinet minister in the Modi government, three MLAs, three VHP activists and several IAS and IPS officers as well.

The decision came on a plea filed by the wife of slain ex-MP, Ehsan Jaffri and social activist Teesta Setalvad.

“It’s a huge victory because this is an indication of what we have been saying for almost six years now. We have been asking for an investigation and not presuming people are guilty like the opposite side does. The police had used Modi’s political clout to delay the probe, now the Supreme Court has renewed faith in the justice system by saying at least investigate it,” Teesta Setalvad told CNN-IBN.

Read more

(Submitted by Mukul Dube)