| [Though PM Bhattarai and UCPN(M) have been remarkably clear on the path they consider politic, a number of their supporters, and others, have held on to hopes that they would not bring to a conclusion the disarming of the PLA. But now, it appears that actions are speaking loud and clear. — Frontlines ed.] |
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KATHMANDU, Sept 1 : In a new development on the peace process, the UCPN (Maoist) has agreed to hand over the keys of the weapons containers to the arms monitors deployed by the Special Committee at the 28 combatant cantonments. The Maoists agreed to hand over the keys in the very first meeting of the Special Committee under the leadership of newly appointed Prime Minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai, held at Baneshwar on Wednesday evening. “The meeting decided that the keys to the weapons containers and the command of all the cantonments should come under the arms monitors,” said JP Gupta, who is a member of the Special Committee. The decision is expected to give a fresh push to the peace process that has remained stagnant since June after the parties failed to resolve the differences over modality of integration and rehabilitation. Continue reading |
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Homeland Security systematizing-federalizing the police repression of BART protests
August 30, 2011
By Ali Winston
Justice Department, Homeland Security personnel present at #OpBART protests
- Officers from a Department of Homeland Security Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response unit in the Civic Center BART station on August 29, 2011. photo by Geoff King
Amongst the dozens of riot gear-clad San Francisco and BART police officers that have packed Downtown San Francisco streets during the OpBART protests for the past three Mondays, you may have spotted some officers wearing khaki slacks and bulletproof vests, a far cry from the heavy duty helmets and body armor worn by officers from other agencies.
Those lightly-clad officers were part of a Department of Homeland Security Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) unit, an anti-terror unit charged with protecting transportation infrastructure from potential acts of terrorism. VIPR units are run by the Transportation Security Administration. According to the TSA’s website, VIPR teams are terrorism deterrents that “a random, announced, high-visibility surge into a transit agency, in addition to enhancing agency resources during special events.” VIPR teams have been deployed more than 50 times since the program began in 2005, and regularly patrol New York’s Metro North and Long Island Railroad commuter systems. Continue reading
Libya: Better Not Be Black
[The pro-US/EU interventionist media has routinely failed to provide news coverage to the widespread attacks on African migrants and black residents and citizens of Libya, other than to characterize, falsely, that all such black Africans have been mercenary soldiers for the fallen Gaddafi regime. The history of sub-Saharan migration to Libya–and by way of north Africa, to Europe–has not been told in non-xenophobic or non-racist terms, nor have the imperialist efforts to foster divisions and antagonisms between Africans and the Arab world been exposed. Genuine revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces must challenge such xenophobia and manufactured antagonisms. — Frontlines ed.]
The New Libya
by PATRICK COCKBURN, Counterpunch
Tripoli, August 30, 2011–Yassin Bahr, a tall thin Senegalese in torn blue jeans, volubly denies that he was ever a mercenary or fought for Muammar Gaddafi.
Speaking in quick nervous sentences, Mr Bahr tries to convince a suspicious local militia leader in charge of the police station in the Faraj district of Tripoli, that he is a building worker who has been arrested simply because of his color. “I liked Gaddafi, but I never fought for him,” Mr Bahr says, adding that he had worked in Libya for three years laying tiles.
But the Libyan rebels are hostile to black Africans in general. One of the militiamen, who have been in control of the police station since the police fled, said simply: “Libyan people don’t like people with dark skins, though some of them may be innocent.” Continue reading
China migrants facing barriers in cities
[This article in the New York Times studies how China “manages population flows” as they put it in typical bourgeois-speak terms. — Frontlines ed.]
Chinese migrant workers
August 31, 2011
by Andrew Jacobs, in the New York Times
Xie Zhenqing spent 12 years transforming a collection of ramshackle houses into Red Star, a privately run, low-cost school for 1,400 children of migrants from poor rural areas. It took just a few hours this month for a government-dispatched demolition crew to turn the place into a jagged pile of bricks.
“What the government did to us is unconscionable,” Xie, Red Star’s principal, said angrily as parents of her students scrambled to find other arrangements before the start of the new school year on Thursday. “I’ll never work for a migrant school again.”
Red Star is one of 30 technically illegal private schools in Beijing that have been torn down or closed in recent weeks in an official campaign billed as a war against unsafe and unhygienic school buildings. In all, more than 30,000 students have lost their classrooms this summer. Advocates for the migrants warn that many of the capital’s 130 other unlicensed schools could be next. Continue reading
Indian students on the disorienting focus of the Hazare ‘anti-corruption’ drive
[The recent ‘anti-corruption’ campaign in India led by the self-proclaimed Gandhian Anna Hazare has received enormous attention from media in India and internationally. Simultaneously it has received substantial criticism from those who have noted its funding by major NGOs and corporate groups, and how, in its focus on government corruption, it has become an argument for reduction or dismantling of basic programs in favor of privatisation/corporatisation. By turning a blind eye to the criminal appropriation by the largest capitalists of public resources, and attacking social government spending, it bears the same marks as the rightist and fascist “austerity” moves in Western Europe and those championed by the so-called “Tea Party” initiative (championed by Fox News and popularized by other bourgeois media) by corporate interests in the US. The Democratic Student Union in India has turned a spotlight on the features of this anti-corruption campaign. — Frontlines ed.]
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Voice of the Revolutionary Youths
Manufacturing Dissent, Making Mahatmas: Manu, Market, Media And The Anti-Corruption Sham
By Democratic Students’ Union (DSU)
3o Agust, 2011
Source : Countercurrents.org
All historical struggles, whether they occur in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of the struggles of social classes – Engels
When two events occur in the same space and time, more often than not, there is a correlation between the two: On the one hand the Indian Army, paramilitary and police forces — acting so plainly and clearly on behalf of the Indian ruling classes and multinational corporations—which continue to mount a war on the people of central and eastern India in order to facilitate a naked appropriation of the region’s resources is given marching orders to fight the most dispossessed yet resilient masses. Then there are 80% of the country’s population forced to eke out a living on a mere Rs.20 per day and over half of the children suffer from the permanent malnourishment because of the genocidal famine conditions their families have been placed under; land acquisition of a mammoth scale affects millions of people whose sole means of livelihood is being alienated from them; thousands of small peasants are forced to find ‘escape’ from an endemic agrarian crisis by committing suicide; over 2700 bodies of Kashmiris murdered by the Indian army once again reveals a Kashmir under occupation by India and the crushing of its struggle for national liberation—to name but a few instances revealing the brutal and systemic exploitation, oppression and occupation. And people are waging resilient struggles in many
Anna Hazare's campaign wrapped itself in Gandhian imagery
parts of the country against the ruling classes. On the other hand a base, distasteful drama is unfolding in front of us—the drama of an ‘anti-corruption drive’, which is supposed to serve India a ‘second independence’. Needless to say, although this latter ‘struggle’ seldom refers to the first set of struggles, events and phenomena, there is so simple a connection between the two that the silence over the relation between the two sets is nothing but deliberate.
The ‘Second freedom struggle’ is nothing but an attempt of the ruling classes to consolidate themselves: The Indian ruling classes today face an immense crisis, and are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain the mask of ‘world’s largest democracy’. Given the onslaught on the people and their livelihood—through the acquisition of resources such as land, forests and other means of livelihood; the steep price rise of basic commodities; the privatisation of health, transport, water, electricity and education — the state faces the resistance of militant peoples’ movements. And everywhere, the state is responding to this discontent and resistance with brute force. In addition to this central crisis, the ruling classes were reeling under the exposure of a series of scams such as 2G, Commonwealth Games, Adarsh Housing, etc. involving unimaginable amounts of money. It is precisely these circumstances that have given rise to an ‘anti-corruption drive’ led by the so-called civil society and made it possible for the corporate media to project a reactionary like Anna Hazare as a hero in the eyes of the urban middle classes. Sweeping under the carpet more urgent structural issues affecting the vast majority of people and their very survival, ‘Team Anna’ has projected corruption as the central issue plaguing Indian society. Continue reading
Federal Bureau of Instigation
August 30, 2011
Entrapment as Government Policy–The FBI Goes Rogue
by LAWRENCE DAVIDSON
Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other? Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer? It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don’t believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson’s expose entitled “The Informants” published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.
Aaronson looked at over 500 terrorism related cases taken up by the FBI and found that over half of them involved the Bureau’s stable of 15,000 informants. Many of these are ex-felons and con men who are often paid well if their efforts result in an arrest and conviction. So what, you might say. Using informants to obtain information about criminal activity is an old and legitimate tactic. Yes, however, that approach to information gathering is not exactly how the FBI uses all of its informants. Indeed, the Bureau has a program, misnamed “prevention” which encourages its agents to get creative in the use of informants. How creative? Well, if they can’t find any terrorist activity going on, they have their informants instigate some. Where are they doing this? Mainly in our country’s Muslim communities. Continue reading
United Nations Libya plans ‘revealed in report’
[In the Libyan “transition” from Gaddafi to new power relations, this report on the UN’s transition plan may indicate how the US/EU/NATO forces may direct–(and camoflage, if the history of the US-controlled UN-MINUSTAH force occupation of Haiti is applied to Libya)–their role in the reconstruction. And while major countries throughout the imperialist system are apparently approving the plan as it takes shape, there are also reports of Libyan opposition to it. It deserves close attention by all friends of the Libyan people. — Frontlines ed.]
Video: Leaked UN report outlines plan for Libya
AlJazeeraEnglish on Aug 29, 2011
A leaked document apparently detailing United Nations preparations for its role in post-Gaddafi Libya reveals plans for the world body to deploy military observers and police officers to the North African country.
The document was obtained and published by Inner City Press, the UN watchdog website.
Al Jazeera spoke to Matthew Russell Lee, a journalist who runs the Inner City Press.
