VersoBooks.com. The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.
The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. The Party of Wall Street ceaselessly wages class war. Opinion / Lead : How little can a person live on? The affidavit that the Planning Commission recently submitted before the Supreme Court stating that a person is to be considered ‘poor' only if his or her monthly spending is below Rs.781 (Rs.26 a day) in the rural areas and Rs.965 (Rs.32 a day) in the urban areas, has exposed how unrealistic ‘poverty lines' are. Some television channels assumed that the figures covered food costs alone and showed how they could not meet minimal nutrition needs at today's prices. These paltry sums, however, are supposed to cover not only food but all non-food essentials, including clothing and footwear, cooking fuel, lighting, transport, education, medical costs and house rent.
The total is divided into Rs.18 and Rs.14 for food and non-food items in towns, and into Rs.16 and Rs.10 in the rural areas, and includes the value of food that farmers produce and consume themselves. Even a child knows that working health cannot be maintained, nor necessities obtained, by spending so little. Anna Hazare and Gandhi. To call Anna Hazare the 21st-century Gandhi, as some have started doing, is pure hyperbole, but many would see a similarity in their methods — in particular, in their resorting to fasts to achieve their objectives.
This, however, is erroneous. Indeed, the fact that so many people consider Anna Hazare’s method to be similar to Gandhiji’s only indicates how little contemporary India remembers or understands Gandhiji. Gandhiji undertook 17 fasts in all, of which three were major fasts-unto-death. All these three had the objective of uniting people against violence, rather than extracting specific concessions from the colonial State. In short, Gandhiji’s fasts-unto-death were never a binary affair, with himself and the colonial State as adversaries, to extract specific concessions. He did not, for instance, go on a fast-unto-death to demand the withdrawal of the salt tax; he launched instead a movement against it. Gandhiji would not have had any of it. In India, Seeking Revolution in a Democracy. In India, Seeking Revolution in a Democracy.
After the Fall. THE RECENT DEFEAT of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala and -especially in West Bengal—where it ruled for 34 uninterrupted years—calls for a detached, dispassionate analysis of the party's place in the history of modern India. In what manner, and to what extent, did politicians committed in theory to the construction of a one-party state reconcile themselves in practice to bourgeois democracy? What were the sources of the CPI(M)'s electoral appeal in Kerala and West Bengal?
How were its policies constrained or enabled by its ideology of Marxism-Leninism? How should this ideology be rethought or reworked in the light of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the manifest attachment of the people of India to multiparty democracy? How might the CPI(M) restore and reinvent itself after these electoral reversals in Kerala and West Bengal? In seeking to answer these questions, I shall start with the analysis of a printed text. The government, naturally, came down hard. UPA-II- Subverting the Secular; Co-opting Corruption | NewsClick. Capitalism is supposed to bring in modernity, which includes a secular polity where “babas” and “swamys”, qua “babas” and “swamys”, have no role.
Many have even defended neo-liberal reforms on the grounds that they hasten capitalist development and hence our march to modernity. The Left has always rejected this position. It has argued that in countries embarking late on capitalist development, the bourgeoisie allies itself with the feudal and semi-feudal elements, and hence, far from dealing the requisite blows against the old order, reaches a modus vivendi with it that impedes the march to modernity; it is only those social forces that seek to transcend capitalism which can also carry the country to modernity. The fact that the government has fallen so low is, paradoxically, not despite its economic “success” but because of it. The economic trajectory being followed is one which necessarily embroils the entire bourgeois political class in “corruption”.
Commoditisation. Moment of Opportunity: President Obama on the Middle East & North Africa. Jesse Lee May 19, 2011 07:29 PM EDT In a major speech at the State Department, President Obama laid out his vision for a new chapter in American diplomacy as calls for reform and democracy spread across the Middle East and North Africa. He made clear that the United States will support people who call for democracy and reform and leaders who implement them, will oppose violence in cracking down on protests and efforts to limit the rights of minorities, and continue to work for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Watch the President's full remarks here. The Making of Anna Hazare. [This piece is based on my extensive field work on Anna Hazare and his movement in Ralegan Sidhi over some years and is also a part of my forthcoming book Green and Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics. MS] The anti-corruption movement, spearheaded by Anna Hazare, and the passage of the Lokpal Bill have generated unprecedented interest amongst a wide spectrum of society about the ideas, politics and organisations of civil society in general, and Anna Hazare in particular.
Hazare’s anti-corruption crusade merits attention not only for its importance in ensuring a corruption-free society, but also due to its multifaceted nature. Hazare’s politics however has to be seen in a larger framework and in a wider historical context. Howsoever laudable the goals of anti-corruption movement in India today, the movement is not beyond the categories of gender, caste, authority, democracy, nationalism and ultra-nationalism. Others reciprocate this language. Like this: Behind 'Rising India' lies the surrender of national dignity | Pankaj Mishra. Food prices become intolerable for the poor. Protests against corruption paralyse the national parliament for weeks on end. Then a series of American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks exposes a brazenly mendacious and venal ruling class; the head of government adored by foreign business people and journalists loses his moral authority, turning into a lame duck. This sounds like Tunisia or Egypt before their uprisings, countries long deprived of representative politics and pillaged by the local agents of neoliberal capitalism.
But it is India, where in recent days WikiLeaks has highlighted how national democratic institutions are no defence against the rapacity and selfishness of globalised elites. Most of the cables – being published by the Hindu, the country's most respected newspaper in English – offer nothing new to those who haven't drunk the "Rising India" Kool-Aid vended by business people, politicians and their journalist groupies.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope and Turmoil in 2011. David Bromwich, Superpower Bypassed by History. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just made a surprise visit to Afghanistan, and talk about embarrassment, even if in a minor vein: he was met at the tarmac by Afghan War commander General David Petraeus and here, caught on camera , was how they greeted each other: Mister Secretary. Welcome back, sir. Flying a little bigger plane than normal? You going to launch some attacks on Libya or something? (laughing jovially): Yeah, exactly. Think of it as rule by frat boy. Of course, it’s good to know that our leaders have their light side. That table, never photographed as far as I know, must be enormous and in a very public place because just in the last few days, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton , White House Press Secretary Jay Carney , U.S.
In Washington, as in Afghanistan, everything right now could be considered unintended farce, if it weren’t so deadly serious. Throughout the 18 days of upheaval, Washington spoke of the need for an “orderly transition.” But the interlude was not over. Review of EMS' legacy makes Left leaders squirm. TNN Jun 28, 2003, 03.24am IST NEW DELHI: Even as the NCERT undertakes a massive reappraisal of the Left's venerables such as Stalin and Mao, a senior CPM leader from Kerala has set the party circles aflutter by an audacious attempt to knock the desi icon, EMS Namboodiripad, off his high pedestal.
It's not just EMS' role in the Left movement which was x-rayed by state committee member P Govinda Pillai, but also a host of other luminaries gracing the Left pantheon, including the late AK Gopalan, former CPM general secretary, and the present incumbent, Harkishen Singh Surjeet. So embarrassed were the party bosses by his observations, carried in the annual issue of Malayalam journal 'Bhashaposhini,' that they felt constrained to censure him publicly for his utterances about the luminaries so revered by the party cadre.
Mr Pillai, mind you, is not just any other figure. It's his comments about EMS which has the party leaders squirming with discomfiture. The Enigma of Kerala. Kerala (pronounced ker'uh luh) , a state of 29 million people in southern India, is poor--even for India--with a per capita income estimated by various surveys to be between $298 and $350 a year, about one-seventieth the American average. When the American anthropologist Richard Franke surveyed the typical Keralite village of Nadur in the late 1980s, he found that nearly half the 170 families had only cooking utensils, a wooden bench, and a few stools in their homes. No beds--that was the sum of their possessions. Thirty-six percent also had some chairs and cots, and 19 percent owned a table. In five households he discovered cushioned seats. But here is the odd part. The life expectancy for a North American male, with all his chairs and cushions, is 72 years, while the life expectancy for a Keralite male is 70.After the latest in a long series of literacy campaigns, the United Nations in 1991 certified Kerala as 100 percent literate.
Caste did not crumble immediately, however. The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel | FPJ. This essay is available for download in PDF format at the author’s website. There is a widely accepted belief that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 “created” Israel, based upon an understanding that this resolution partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority or legitimacy to the declaration of the existence of the state of Israel.
However, despite its popularity, this belief has no basis in fact, as a review of the resolution’s history and examination of legal principles demonstrates incontrovertibly. On September 3, UNSCOP issued its report to the General Assembly declaring its majority recommendation that Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states. It noted that the population of Palestine at the end of 1946 was estimated to be almost 1,846,000, with 1,203,000 Arabs (65 percent) and 608,000 Jews (33 percent). Tariq Ali: Letter to a Young Muslim. Dear friend Remember when you approached me after the big antiwar meeting in November 2001 (I think it was Glasgow) and asked whether I was a believer? I have not forgotten the shock you registered when I replied "no", or the comment of your friend ("our parents warned us against you"), or the angry questions […] Dear friend Remember when you approached me after the big antiwar meeting in November 2001 (I think it was Glasgow) and asked whether I was a believer?
I have not forgotten the shock you registered when I replied "no", or the comment of your friend ("our parents warned us against you"), or the angry questions which the pair of you then began to hurl at me like darts. All of that made me think, and this is my reply for you and all the others like you who asked similar questions elsewhere in Europe and North America. When we spoke, I told you that my criticism of religion and those who use it for political ends was not a case of being diplomatic in public.
Let me tell you a story. Mahatma Gandhi's views on Environment. In Congo, an Assassination’s Long Shadow. TODAY, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the vast country, nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. This treasure house of natural resources had been a colony of Belgium, which for decades had made no plans for independence. But after clashes with Congolese nationalists, the Belgians hastily arranged the first national election in 1960, and in June of that year King Baudouin arrived to formally give the territory its freedom.
“It is now up to you, gentlemen,” he arrogantly told Congolese dignitaries, “to show that you are worthy of our confidence.” With no experience of self-rule and an empty treasury, his huge country was soon in turmoil. Arts / Books : In Conversation: Speaking to Spivak. As I wait for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her brand new office at New York’s ivy-league Columbia University where she is University Professor in the Humanities — the only woman of colour to be bestowed the University’s highest honour in its 264-year history — I admit I am nervous.
At 68, Spivak is — and has long been — a celebrity academic, dubbed by The New York Times as ‘famously hard-to-understand’. But as she enters — crewcut hair, haversack on shoulder, wearing a sari — her disarming smile puts me at ease…. You travel the world in a sari. Is that a statement of identity? Not really. I wear a sari…I always have worn one….. You were very young when you came to America... Weren’t you uncomfortable about standing out? I’ve always stood out! You’ve spent most of your life in America.... 49 years… How do you see yourself? I don’t really know. What brought you to America....what triggered the move? I was very critical of the university. There are so many languages that you have worked in.... A Nation Consumed By The State. When did student 'radicals' start taking mummy's packed lunch to protest?