Libya: bleeding hearts, gushing oil
The French government has done a deal with the National Transitional Council (NTC) to exploit a third of Libya's oil reserves, giving 35% of crude oil to France in exchange for its total and permanent support of the Council.
Italy's ENI oil company has also signed a deal with the NTC to restart its oil production in Libya and reopen a major gas pipeline running from Libya's oil fields under the Mediterranean to Italy.
This tells us much about the priorities and motivations of the imperialist nations who have led the war of intervention in Libya and the NTC. Before the war had ended, Libya's key strategic natural resource was being handed over to foreign capitalist enterprises. Bizarrely one of the first "humanitarian" acts of the West after Gaddafi's overthrow, was to fly plane-loads of money into the country. Keeping the wheels of commerce grinding was obviously more important than providing medical services, housing and food to those suffering from the conflict. Another surreal moment was the photo-opportunity engineered for David Cameron when he briefly visited the country. He was seen being given a rapturous reception by staff at a hospital. Even British journalists wryly pointed out that he would not be likely to get such a reception in his own country.
The Murdochs and the hacking scandal
The phone hacking scandal at the News of the World (NoW) - coming after the banking crisis and the MPs' expenses scandal - has exposed for a brief moment the workings of capitalist democracy: with elected 'representatives' terrified of the rich and powerful, and the police hand-in-glove with ruling-class law-breakers.
At the centre of the scandal is the Chipping Norton set - "the social wing of the Murdoch media empire" - one of the informal power structures that rule Britain.
News Corp corruption - so far
In 2007, Clive Goodman, the NoW's royal reporter, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for hacking Prince Harry's phone at Buckingham Palace. The court accepted the claim by News International (NI) that Mulcaire had been working on his own initiative, and that Goodman was thus a single bad apple at the paper. The police investigation overlooked the crucial evidence of Mulcaire's notebooks, which contained the names of up to 4,000 other hacking victims, including that of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. It was only after numerous civil cases had been taken out against the newspaper by celebrity phone-hack victims that, in January this year, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced it would review police material to "assess if a fresh criminal trial is likely".
Riots: capitalism, alienation and anger
In his classic book The Crowd in History(1) first published in 1964, George Rudé sets out a number of questions which enable us to analyse the significance of a crowd acting in some social, political or economic context.
These are:
- What happened during the event, its origins and its aftermath, i.e. its historical context?
- How large was the crowd, how did it act, who (if any) were its promoters, who composed it and who led it?
- Who were the targets or victims of the crowd's activities?
- What were the aims, motives and ideas underlying the activities?
- How effective were the forces of repression or law and order? What was their degree of loyalty or disaffection?
- What were the consequences of the event and its historical significance?
In setting out these questions Rudé was explicitly creating a framework to judge such events objectively, as social phenomenon, rather than to resort to subjective and prejudiced reactions which have been all too common in responses to the recent riots in England.
Debt "crisis" created by the financiers
A debt crisis is engulfing the Eurozone, and has even briefly touched on the USA... Or, at least, that is what we are told by the ruling class and its media organs.
Greece is close to defaulting on its government debts. Portugal, Ireland and Spain are finding it increasingly difficult to borrow money on the international financial markets. The same markets threatened to downgrade US government bonds from their (usual) triple-A rating (a very very safe investment) to double-A (a very safe investment).
Perhaps the last showed up just how much of the "international debt crisis" is a sham. The US economy is still the strongest in the world, despite the rapidly increasing strength of China. As the Financial Times put it, downgrading US debt from triple-A to double-A would simply mean that double-A becomes the new triple-A - i.e., the yardstick against which all other governments' bonds would be measured.
Chile wakes from its long slumber
Chile has really woken from its long, anaesthetised, "centre-left" induced slumber. Dozens of university faculties and secondary schools have been on strike now for 3 months, often combined with sit-in occupations.
Dateline: 24 August, Santiago, Chile.
The market model of education is being actively rejected by virtually all organisations of students, teachers and parents. On August 4th, the government decreed 'enough was enough' and banned two planned marches in Santiago. The result - chaos, and literally hundreds of tear gas bombs choking the centre of the city. Then, that night, the first of weekly 'cacerolazos', protest banging of pots and pans, heard in working class and middle class neighbourhoods on a massive scale. Since then there have been more massive marches and on one of the few wet days of the year about a hundred thousand marched and also blocked the anarchist minority who usually give the TV images of violent behaviour, which muddy the message.
£9.3 billion bill for London Olympics
The 30th Olympic Games are due to open in London on 27 July 2012. The budget for the London Olympics is £9.3 billion. It has increased fourfold since Britain won the bid in July 2005.
New venues are being built on a site near Stratford in East London. They include the Velodrome, the Olympic Stadium, the International Broadcast Centre and Main Press Centre, the Athletes' Village, the Basketball Arena and Handball Arena.
Outside the Olympic Park but nearby will be the Lea Valley White Water Centre and enhanced rowing facilities at Eton Dorney. Sailing facilities will be at Weymouth and Portland on the English south coast. 'Welcome to the Olympic Park', a February 2011 publication on the website of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), says: "After the Games, a new sustainable community will be integrated with the area surrounding the Olympic Park, with local people benefiting from a new park, new homes and world-class sporting facilities". According to the ODA, the Water Polo Arena and the Basketball Arena are to be dismantled and relocated elsewhere. The other sports facilities are to be mainly kept and made available for 'community and elite' use, except for the Olympic Stadium, which, on a rental basis, may become West Ham United's new football ground.
New London Olympics 12,000 seat basketball arena
1980 Moscow Olympics' success
On July 19th, 1980, the Olympic Games opened in Moscow. These Games, in the Soviet Union, were the first to be staged in a socialist country.
In 1975, when the organising committee was formed, its head, Ignati Novikov, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, said: "We wish in no way to eclipse the efforts of our predecessors - the hosts of former Olympics by gigantic construction work on sports centres. Our main objective is rationality. We have adopted a policy of making the maximum use for the Olympics of the available sports buildings and other facilities. Only what is essential and what can be used after the Games is being built". The preparations for the 1980 Olympics coincided with the tenth five-year national economic plan. 17,700 million roubles were invested in the development of Moscow during the plan.
The USA's wall of paranoia and profit
The construction of a wall is both a defensive and offensive act. Walls define what is 'inside' and 'outside'; 'mine' and 'yours' - the physical and symbolic embodiment of division.
These dividing lines are manifest in a multitude of scales, materials and strengths according to the nature of what is required to be protected, the level of perceived threat and the local geographical conditions and resources. Whether it be the waist high fence demarcating a suburban garden or the fortifications of medieval walled cities, the act of building a wall is a conscious and deliberate action to physically demarcate one's territory through choice or necessity. Walls also have the ability to transcend their often benign composition to become emotionally and politically charged devices. This is no more true than in border walls, walls built to express a barrier based on opposing nations, ethnicities, religions or politics.
Arthur Goldreich and the ANC's secret HQ
Arthur Goldreich, born 1929, died 25 May 2011.
When I met Arthur in May 1963 he appeared to be a well off, handsome, strongly built man in his thirties with a certain self confident swagger.
Arthur liked to wear jodhpurs and riding boots with a well fitting tweed jacket and open weave riding gloves with leather palms and fingers, all colour coordinated in shades of brown and tan. He drove what was then a seemingly exotic Citroen DS19 car with an avant garde shape.
He was a designer for one of the large department chain stores. He was also a prize winning artist and dressed the part. He had designed and constructed the sets of the hit South African musical King Kong. That was in itself an indicator of his character for it was a theatre piece with story, music and lyrics written by black South Africans about black South Africans at a time of ever deepening apartheid repression.
KW Kgositsile: South Africa's Poet Laureate
The speech by South Africa's Minister of Arts and Culture, Mr Z Pallo Jordan, at the inauguration of KW Kgositsile as Poet Laureate, Bloemfontein, December 2006.
The poet whom we are honouring tonight is among a generation of African writers, poets and scholars who came into their own in exile. Though he regularly boasts about his age, we consider each other contemporaries. Our generation had the good fortune to have experienced our adolescence during a decade when the crisis of colonialism in Africa and Asia was fast maturing. In both our own country and in the rest of the colonised world the oppressed peoples were asserting themselves through mass struggles of an unprecedented scale. In a number of instances these culminated in wars of liberation in Malaya, in Vietnam, in Kenya and in Algeria. South Africa was no exception to this trend.
Changes that cannot be wished away
Keorapetse Willie Kgositsile (KWK) was in Britain for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. During his visit, Brian Filling (BF), Honorary Consul for South Africa in Scotland, met him and the following is a distillation of their conversations.
BF: Could you describe your introduction to literature and politics and what has influenced you?
KWK: I grew up with a love for reading and playing around with language. My reading habits were grounded in the Setswana classics at an early age. Though I did not think of myself as an aspiring writer I used to scribble quite a bit to entertain myself and some of my friends.
At high school a group of us keen to gobble up the word on any printed page used to read and discuss all kinds of stuff we could lay our hands on. Then at some point we came across a copy of "Black Boy", Richard Wright's autobiography.
