Saturday, December 18, 2010

Plum brandy and Gauloise

is the foundation of the modern republic.
Vive la republique!

Friday, December 3, 2010

Class

I have finally arrived in a class-less society.
Capitalist but classless.

I like the idea of waiting tables
and throwing out my own trash.
Inventing an algorithm
driving my own car through
the streets with no name.

The sense of oppression I felt in South Asia
is gone.
Boom.
Kaputt.
It's a place where people cook their own meals
and wash their own clothes.
How lovely.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Life is Beautiful

Weekend with Bolsheviks, Frida and Anne Frank.

And some black coffee.

Life is beautiful.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Haiti: Part Deux

I am always amazed at the good old Guardian, the bastion of the British Left, which never ceases to open my eyes and shake me out of my bourgoise complacency.

Here is what I read this morning, though I knew the general gist of Haiti's colonial past and the Marisposas in neighboring Dominican Republic. I just had to reproduce these parts, they say it all. It's a familiar story..from Iraq to Vietnam. "Colonize" and then "aid".

Quote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight
(From: Our role in Haiti's plight, by Peter Hallward)

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.

Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered. Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses.

The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the ­distribution of international "aid".

The same storms that killed so many in Haiti in 2008, hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop ­trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.

unqoute.
still figuring that one out..

Friday, January 8, 2010

My songs..

petrovski: "1. ...Nach Gro�wardein (Hermann Rosenzweig / Anton Groiss) - New Budapest Orpheum Society"

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