April 29, 2014

Rwanda Twenty Years Later -

Rwanda: Between Memory Work and the Desire to Live

http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/ (about the source: L'Humanité (pronounced: [lymaniˈte], French for "Humanity&quot , formerly the daily newspaper linked to the French Communist Party (PCF), was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, a leader of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). The paper is now independent, although it maintains close links to the PCF.)

Translated Tuesday 29 April 2014, by Henry Crapo

Rwanda is learning how to live with its ghosts. The nation commemorates the 20th anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsi. The French authorities are absent, fleeing their responsibilities.

Rwanda is rising from the terrible ordeal of the genocide. In two decades, reconstruction has changed the face of this landlocked country in the heart of the Great Lakes. The youth dreams of a country in which hatred between the communities and "ethnocentric" divisions, inherited from colonialism, will be banished.

Rwanda, by 
Special Envoy

The ochre waters of the Nyabarongo river tear away at the sumptuous green landscape dominated by the hills of Kigali. This river, one of the sources of the Nile, still carries the history of atrocities committed during the genocide of Tutsis started April 7, 1994 by Hutu extremists in the aftermath of the attack against the airplane of President Juvenal Habyarimana. This is the bridge spanning the river, a few kilometers east of the capital, from which were thrown mutilated bodies or heads of victims of the racist outburst. By their instructions to throw the bodies into the water, the ideologues of genocide meant to convey the message to "Send the Tutsi back to Abyssinia," the land that the sorcerer’s apprentices of the colonial era and of the racist regime had invented as the Tutsi land of origin.

Twenty years after the "Apocalypse", as most survivors call it, Rwanda wants to offer, despite the ghosts of the past, the face of a new country in which the ’ethnocentric’ distinctions and ideas of hatred and division would be banished. Like so many warnings, the stigmata of the last genocide of the twentieth century are everywhere. At the heart of this memory work undertaken by the country, the genocide memorial in Kigali reflects the many years of hate-mongering that led to the worst. A word chanted during the visit, which slaps as the symbol of a business-like extermination, methodically planned: ’Inyenzis!’ cockroaches in the Kinyarwanda language. In this way the theorists of ’Hutu Power’ referred to Tutsi. We remember here that moment when ’the world backed away’, the passivity of the international community, the complicity of France, which armed the genocidal regime, trained killers, and covered their escape. Outside, among the rose gardens, the vast gray mass of graves barring the hill reminds us of the scale of the massacres: 268,000 victims in Kigali, nearly a million across the country. The Tutsi, many children, but also Hutu Democrats opposed to unbridled hatred. "Periods of commemoration always revive injuries. All survivors retain psychological sequelae. In fact, the entire Rwandan society is affected: the survivors, witnesses, children of executioners. Even those who were born after the genocide are still traumatized because of family stories or what remains unspoken. We live with the weight of this story and all its consequences. This is very heavy", says Naphtal Ahishakiye of the association Ibuka, which brings together the associations of genocide survivors.

Economic success

From this terrible ordeal, however, the Rwanda is rising. In two decades, the reconstruction is adorned with insolent success. This small landlocked country in the heart of the African Great Lakes shows a growth rate of 8% on average over the past ten years. Momentum barely hampered by the suspension of financial aid decided by donor countries after the publication of the report by experts of the UN accusing Kigali of supporting the rebellion of M23 in the eastern neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

These economic successes, combined with a resolute fight against corruption, have helped to change the lives of people with unprecedented investments in the areas of health, education, and infrastructure. Birthplace of Kigali, Nyarungenge Hill, bristles with towers and gleaming buildings that give the Rwandan capital of false air of Johannesburg. The new class of consumers presses upon Union Trade Center, the commercial center with shops, supermarket and trendy café ...

Much more here: http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article2465

April 29, 2014

From sexism to social reaction: contradictions within capitalism

From sexism to social reaction: contradictions within capitalism
Monday, April 28, 2014

On March 27, the IPEA (Institute of Applied Economic Research), a Brazilian public foundation, released a survey on “social tolerance and violence against women” that provoked massive outrage – especially across social movements. According to the survey, almost two-thirds of respondents (65 per cent) believe that provocative clothing and certain behavior justify rape and violence against women.

The reaction was instantaneous: individuals and groups of activists united in anger against the strong machismo and violence against women illustrated by the survey results.

However, it not true that all of these respondents are rapists or defend rape. What is most shocking is that the majority of the respondents who answered affirmatively were women. What does this research, and these alarming statistics, tell us?

The root of women’s oppression

We cannot begin to analyze or understand people’s behavior in isolation from the socio-economic system in which we live: capitalism. The oppression of women is linked to the development of capitalism.

Women first lost their power to take decisions in society thousands of years ago, when primitive accumulation began and out of which developed class society. Once there was a division of labor in accumulating a surplus and then a surplus to control, women were subjected to men and effectively lost their power to make decisions, their right to choose, and their freedom. The material basis of patriarchy was reinforced through inheritance laws, which imposed monogamy on women to ensure children were of genuine lineage.

Much more here: http://www.workerspower.net/from-sexism-to-social-reaction-contradictions-within-capitalism

April 28, 2014

The Collapse of Obama’s Diplomacy

One of the websites I rely on for alternative points of view is http://www.watchingamerica.com/News/. Some are pro-USA, some more critical.

The Collapse of Obama’s Diplomacy

By Eric Leser

The American administration has given up the role that the United States has traditionally played in world affairs for the last 70 years. The extent of the consequences is yet to be seen, even if they are already felt from Kiev to the China Seas.

Translated By Simon Wood

17 April 2014

Edited by Brent Landon

Is diplomacy made up of good intentions and great speeches? No. And one doesn't have to read Sun Tzu, Thucydides or Machiavelli to know this. We have been reminded once again of the disaster that is the foreign policy of the Obama administration.

Obama has, however, delivered some nice speeches. In July 2008, having just assumed office, in front of an ecstatic crowd of 100,000 people in Berlin who came to acclaim him, he promised “to rebuild the world.”* In June 2009 in Cairo, the president of the United States announced a “new beginning” in the relations between America and the Arab-Muslim world and offered a “greeting of peace.” In September 2009, this time in front of the United Nations General Assembly, he affirmed, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” And a few days later, Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Less than five years later, these good intentions lie in the dungeons of history, swept aside by setbacks, concessions, humiliations and forgotten promises. The instances of weakness make a long list for an America that remains the biggest economic and military power in the world. We had almost forgotten ...

Much more here: http://watchingamerica.com/News/237344/the-collapse-of-obamas-diplomacy/

April 28, 2014

What is going on with Mondragón?

Mondragón and the System Problem
Friday, 01 November 2013 09:04 By Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M Hanna, Truthout | Op-Ed

As America moves more deeply into its growing systemic crisis, it is becoming increasingly important for activists and theorists to distinguish clearly between important projects and "institutional elements," on the one hand, and systemic change and systemic design, on the other. The recent economic failure of one of the most important units of the Mondragón cooperatives offers an opportunity to clarify the issue and begin to think more clearly about our own strategy in the United States.

Mondragón Corporation is an extraordinary 80,000-person grouping of worker-owned cooperatives based in Spain's Basque region that is teaching the world how to move the ideas of worker-ownership and cooperation into high gear and large scale. The first Mondragón cooperatives date from the mid-1950s, and the overall effort has evolved over the years into a federation of 110 cooperatives, 147 subsidiary companies, eight foundations and a benefit society with total assets of 35.8 billion euros and total revenues of 14 billion euros.

Each year, it also teaches some 10,000 students in its education centers and has roughly 2,000 researchers working at 15 research centers, the University of Mondragón, and within its industrial cooperatives. It also actively educates its workers about cooperatives' principles, with around 3,000 people a year participating in its Cooperative Training program and 400 in its Leadership and Team Work program.

Mondragón has been justly cited as a leading example of what can be done through cooperative organization. It has evolved a highly participatory decision-making structure, and a top-to-bottom compensation structure in a highly advanced economic institution that challenges economic practices throughout the corporate capitalist world: In the vast majority of its cooperatives, the ratio of compensation between top executives and the lowest-paid members is between three to one and six to one; in a few of the larger cooperatives it can be as high as around nine to one. Comparable private corporations often operate with top-to-median compensation ratios of 250 to one or 300 to one or higher.

Although it has been criticized for violating its cooperative principles through somewhat "imperial" control of some of its foreign operations, for its use of non-cooperative labor, and for a less-than-active concern with environmental problems, in recent years Mondragón has begun to address deficiencies in these areas ...

Much more here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19704-mondragon-and-the-system-problem

April 22, 2014

Celebrating Lenin's 144th birthday --

Lenin's Popularity Highest in Years on Revolutionary's 144th Birthday

The Moscow Times
Apr. 22 2014 16:33
Last edited 16:33

Support for the legacy of Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin is on the rise, a poll published on the eve of the 144th anniversary of his birth showed.

Asked what they thought about Lenin's contribution to Russian history, 38 percent of Russians said his influence had been "mostly positive."

The survey, conducted by the independent Levada Center pollster and published Monday, showed a steady increase in Lenin's popularity since 2006, when only 29 percent rated his influence as mostly positive.

The figure had risen to 36 percent by 2012 ... more here: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/lenins-popularity-highest-in-years-on-revolutionarys-144th-birthday/498708.html

April 22, 2014

Happy Earth Day -

Toward Cyborg Socialism
Issue 13: Alive in the Sunshine
Editorial
by Alyssa Battistoni

The failure of the American left to engage more substantially on environmental issues at home has real consequences for the expansion of neoliberalism worldwide

The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. It was also Lenin’s hundredth birthday. The coincidence was not intentional.

In fact, part of the point of Earth Day was to distance the nascent environmentalist movement from New Left critiques of consumer society, suburban development, and nuclear waste. In an attempt to avoid charges of “watermelon” politics — green on the outside, red on the inside — the message of the early environmental movement, as one Greenpeace slogan explicitly stated, was “I’m not a Red, I’m a Green.” As environmentalism went mainstream, green nonprofits grew rich and powerful on corporate donations and adopted conciliatory strategies aimed at greening the world one brand name at a time.

These days, environmentalism can rival the Left’s big-tent eclecticism: rugged wilderness fantasies, New Age mysticism, and middle-class romanticism exist side-by-side with indigenous anti-nuclear protests, campaigns against urban smog, back-to-the-land agrarian nostalgia, and entrepreneurial green tech. But lately, militant environmentalism is staging a comeback — as are state crackdowns. And even the most mainstream varieties of environmentalism are inching leftward. Climate change in particular has radicalizing potential, as more and more people are beginning to question the prevailing economic system’s destructive effect on the environment. But mainstream environmental groups aren’t going to offer a coherent critique of capitalism’s ecological consequences or do the work of theorizing alternatives.

It’s ridiculous that we still bracket climate change and water supplies as specifically “environmental” issues: the questions at hand are ones of political economy and collective action ...

Much more here -- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/toward-cyborg-socialism/

April 20, 2014

The Eggs that led to Revolution -

The ever more ornate eggs came to be a symbol of a ruler hopelessly out of touch ...



Faberge eggs become symbols of power in new Russia
By Stephen Smith BBC
June 19, 2013

In the annals of human folly, it is doubtful if blood and cash have ever been splashed over anything quite so fabulous and frivolous as Faberge eggs.

The story of these diamond-festooned treasures, the glorified Easter eggs of the Russian tsars, is one of imperial might, revolution and assassination.
15th anniversary Faberge egg The exquisite jewelled eggs were annual Easter gifts to family members from the Russian tsar

It is also the story of the ambition and incalculable riches of the new rulers of Russia and the oligarchs.

The jeweller and entrepreneur Carl Faberge fashioned his eponymous eggs from gems and precious metals in his St Petersburg workshop.

The first one was presented by Tsar Alexander III to his wife, the Empress Maria Fedorovna, at Easter in 1885, an annual tradition which his son Nicholas II followed with eggs for his mother and wife each Easter Sunday.

Of the approximately 50 eggs made for the imperial family between 1885 and 1916, 42 have survive ...

More here -- http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-22956394

April 17, 2014

Safe passage brother Gabriel García Márquez -

Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87

By JONATHAN KANDELLAPRIL 17, 2014

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0



Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fidel Castro: A controversial friendship
By AFP | 18 Apr, 2014, 03.58AM IST

HAVANA: Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez met Fidel Castro after the Cuban leader grabbed power in the 1959 revolution -- the beginning of a decades-long and controversial friendship.

Garcia Marquez, who died in Mexico City on Thursday aged 87, had arrived in the Caribbean island as a journalist to cover Castro's band of bearded guerrillas who ousted right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959.

They quickly became friends, bringing together two of Latin Ame ..

Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/et-cetera/gabriel-garcia-marquez-and-fidel-castro-a-controversial-friendship/articleshow/33876425.cms

April 16, 2014

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

The more things change the more they stay the same ... when you read these paragraphs it will remind you of things you currently hear in the MSM - they are repeating the same lame excuses they always have:


Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938:
Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage

By Jonathan Grossman

When he felt the time was ripe,
President Roosevelt asked
Secretary of Labor Perkins,
'What happened to that
nice unconstitutional bill
you had tucked away?'

On Saturday, June 25, 1938, to avoid pocket vetoes 9 days after Congress had adjourned, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed 121 bills. Among these bills was a landmark law in the Nation's social and economic development -- Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). Against a history of judicial opposition, the depression-born FLSA had survived, not unscathed, more than a year of Congressional altercation. In its final form, the act applied to industries whose combined employment represented only about one-fifth of the labor force. In these industries, it banned oppressive child labor and set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, and the maximum workweek at 44 hours.

Forty years later, a distinguished news commentator asked incredulously: "My God! 25 cents an hour! Why all the fuss?" President Roosevelt expressed a similar sentiment in a "fireside chat" the night before the signing. He warned: "Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, ...tell you...that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry." In light of the social legislation of 1978, Americans today may be astonished that a law with such moderate standards could have been thought so revolutionary.

Courting disaster

The Supreme Court had been one of the major obstacles to wage-hour and child-labor laws. Among notable cases is the 1918 case of Hammer v. Dagenhart in which the Court by one vote held unconstitutional a Federal child-labor law. Similarly in Adkins v. Children's Hospital in 1923, the Court by a narrow margin voided the District of Columbia law that set minimum wages for women. During the 1930's, the Court's action on social legislation was even more devastating ...

Much more here: http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/flsa1938.htm

April 16, 2014

Minnesota marches forward while Oklahoma falls back -

At a time when many states and cities are working passing minimum wage increases, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) has gone in the opposite direction and signed a law banning cities from passing higher wages. The bill also bans them from enacting paid sick days or vacation requirements.

The law will stymie the efforts of activists in Oklahoma City, where a labor federation has led the push on a petition to raise the city’s minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. The state’s current minimum has been set at the federal level of $7.25. In 2012, 64,000 workers in the state earned $7.25 an hour or less, making up 7.2 percent of all hourly workers, a larger share than the 4.7 percent figure for the country as a whole.

Fallin said she signed the bill out of the worry that higher local minimum wages “would drive businesses to other communities and states, and would raise prices for consumers.” She also argued that “most minimum wage workers are young, single people working part-time or entry level jobs” and that “many are high school or college students living with their parents in middle-class families.” She warned that increasing the minimum wage “would require businesses to fire many of those part-time workers” and harm job creation ...

More here: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/04/15/3426716/oklahoma-ban-minimum-wage-paid-sick-leave/

And the Minnesota story:

Minnesota makes history with largest minimum wage hike

Article by: BAIRD HELGESON , Star Tribune
Updated: April 14, 2014 - 10:18 PM

The bill, signed into law Monday, will raise the base wage from $6.15 to $9.50 an hour and give raises to more than 325,000 Minnesotans.

Gov. Mark Dayton signed into law the largest minimum wage increase in state history Monday, giving raises to more than 325,000 Minnesotans and making good on a signature Democratic pledge during an election year.

The move to a $9.50 base hourly wage catapults the state from one of the lowest minimum wages to one of the highest once it is fully phased in by 2016. The state’s base wage will be tied to inflation starting in 2018, ensuring the buying power of the state’s lowest-paid workers keeps better pace with the cost of living.

“Minnesotans who work full time should be able to earn enough money to lift their families out of poverty, and through hard work and additional training, achieve the middle-class American dream,” the DFL governor said, surrounded by legislators, workers and labor leaders at a ceremonial bill-signing in the State Capitol rotunda. “These are people, good Minnesotans all over the state, who just want to work and get paid something that is fair.”

More here: http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/255265041.html