Monday, September 18, 2006

When Is Sorry Not Sorry

When you don't apologise for what you said but for the reacton to what you said.

Pope 'deeply sorry' at backlash on comments

And we are still waiting for him to apologize for his attacks on secular, humanist, pluralistic, democratic society. And for all the martyrs the Catholic Church created who fought for this society.Because the Vatican has never apologized for its attack on rationalism or science. Nor has it ceased to attack reason and science.

Remember Giordano Bruno died for you.

"The universe comprises all being in a totality; for nothing that exists is outside or beyond infinite being, as the latter has no outside or beyond." Giordano Bruno, On the Cause, Principle, and Unity (fifth dialogue).

Giordano Bruno can, without much doubt, be referred to as the martyr of Freethought.

Giordano Bruno: The Forgotten Philosopher
For six years, between 1593 and 1600 he lay in a Papal prison. Was he forgotten, tortured? Whatever historical records there are never have been published by those authorities who have them. In the year 1600 a German scholar Schoppius happened to be in Rome and wrote about Bruno, who was interrogated several times by the Holy Office and convicted by the chief theologians. At one time he obtained forty days to consider his position; by and by he promised to recant, then renewed his "follies." Then he got another forty days for deliberation but did nothing but baffle the pope and the Inquisition. After two years in the custody of the Inquisitor he was taken on February ninth to the palace of the Grand Inquisitor to hear his sentence on bended knee, before the expert assessors and the Governor of the City.

Bruno answered the sentence of death by fire with the threatening: "Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it." He was given eight more clays to see whether he would repent. But it was no use. He was taken to the stake and as he was dying a crucifix was presented to him, but he pushed it away with fierce scorn.

Giordano Bruno and the Infinite Universe

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Giordano Bruno the Nolan was an excommunicated Dominican friar who had developed an art, science and philosophy which was a Hermetic interpretation of Copernicus and Lucretius. Francis A. Yates, a primary interpreter of Bruno for our age, has written of him, The lunatic, the lover, and the poet were never all of imagination so compact as in Giordano Bruno. His life and stand against the mediocrity of papal hierarchy and monastic privilege of his times is the essence of the artist/rebel/poet which we are so familiar with now.






Also See:

Pope

Catholic Church

Abortion

Same Sex Marriage

Gnostic


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Our Own Bush

While George Bush attempts to justify secret jails, rendition, and 'nuanced' definitions of torture in the name of Freedom Fries, Democracy Chips and the war on terror, nary a word is said in Canada about this same issue by the Liberal Leadership Candidates.

Nope not a word. And yet it was under the Liberals that this happened.....
Arar: Still under scrutiny four years after ordeal and this........Canada: A torturer's apprentice?......and this....Khadr Canada's Shame

And the Liberals have a Leadership candidate who not only supports the right to use torture but uses a nuanced defense of torture in the name of democracy, freedom, and the American way. And his name is Ignatieff.

Evil under Interrogation: Is Torture ever Permissible?
by Michael Ignatieff
May 15, 2004
Reprinted from the Financial Times


And he was still advocating for 'nuanced' Torture this spring after throwing his hat in the Liberal Leadership ring.


Prospect April 2006 | 121 » Essays » If torture works...
The debate over torture is not as simple as it seems. Those of us who oppose torture under any circumstances should admit that ours is an unpopular policy that may make us more vulnerable to terrorism
Michael Ignatieff


Says one right wing blogger in the U.S. of this particular article by Ignatieff.....
I had been meaning to link to this article by Michael Ignatieff in the April 2006 issue of Prospect magazine, on torture. (I am particularly interested in his quote from Ken Roth, in which Ken says that "vigorous" questioning of torture suspects is okay, but then, so far as I can tell, regards anything that goes beyond what the Geneva Conventions mandate for full blown, acknowledged POWs under Geneva III to be out of bounds, even for unprivileged combatants.) I think this is a quite brave and quite persuasive argument by Michael - this is a case in which Michael's agoniste method of moral philosophy performs impressively, and avoids the problem that Mark Steyn lampooned in an article on Ignatieff a few months ago in Maclean's, the problem of Hamletting.




And nary a word about it from any of his rivals. Because it was under the Liberal government that Canadian citizens were sent to Syria to be tortured under the illegal CIA rendition progam. And while his opponents have challenged him on Iraq and Afghanistan they have failed to challenge him on this key question.

The Ethics of Torture

A more philosophically complicated route to much the same conclusion is taken by Harvard's Michael Ignatieff in a new book, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. Ignatieff hedges his answer: He's against torture but in favor of "coercive interrogations.'' Our counter-terrorist actions should be openly debated and subject to review by all three branches of the federal government, he argues, conjuring up, in my mind, congressional debates and court decisions about whether it's OK to hack off a prisoner's finger but not his whole hand.

But the point is a serious one. The ultimate evil, Ignatieff says, would be for Americans to become so frightened that we demand a virtual police state to protect us. By comparison, giving up some civil liberties — for ourselves and our prisoners — is the lesser and necessary evil.

I think he and I would agree that the hypothetical situation does focus on one important point. Requiring presidential approval for physical abuse of a prisoner would, whatever the president decided, be a major improvement over the present situation, in which an attitude gets set at the top and just trickles down to the people at the action level, leaving the president and other big-wigs free to deny any responsibility.


Do you sir support the continued use of torture of Canadian citizens.
Yes or No.

But of coures we all know the anwser, he is a true Liberal.....


Ignatieff ducks debate with critics in torture row


So I must ask. If elected leader of the Liberals whom will he jail and torture?

Exporting Democracy, Revising Torture: The Complex Missions of Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff: Michael Ignatieff, who calls himself a liberal and a human rights campalgner, is a wolf in sheep's clothing


PMag v21n3p06 -- The Terrorized Worlds of Jack and Michael
Andres Kahar begins with a question: What do Jack Bauer, protagonist of TV's 24, and Michael Ignatieff, protagonist of reality's Harvard University, have in common? That question leads us into very dark subject matter.

FRIDE - Exporting Democracy, Revising Torture: The Complex Missions of Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff has been useful to the US government as it has tried to promote democracy in the middle east. He brings to this unofficial job a special, double-edged approach: he provides conservative arguments to the liberal audience and liberal alibis to the conservatives

If you scratch a Liberal you find an authoritarian as nasty as any Tory. One who would impose a police state on Canadians if they deemed it necessary. As has happened in the past. By the very Liberal Icon whom Ignatieff is seen as reincarnating.

Trudeau
: Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed. But it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to worry about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of—

CBC reporter Tim Ralfe
(interrupting): At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that

Trudeau
: Well, just watch me.


Finally one should ask the Man Who Would Be PM where does he really feel at home.....

Legal Affairs
March April 2005

America the Mercurial

A new theory predicts when countries will honor or renege on their international obligations. Guess who doesn't fit the model.

By Michael Ignatieff


Hathaway is mistaken in assuming that domestic constituencies in all democracies will push their governments toward complying with international treaties. This may be the case in Canada and Western Europe, but it is not the case here at home. Uniquely among Western nations, the United States has an entrenched domestic constituency that actively opposes the loss of power it equates with international law. This constituency first emerged after 1945 among the Senate's defenders of segregation, when Southern Democrats opposed ratifying human rights treaties because they would put Jim Crow in the international dock. In deference to this lobby, the United States effectively withdrew from international human rights from the period of the Eisenhower presidency to the Carter Administration. In addition to the segregationists, another group opposed the Roosevelt Administration's liberal multilateralism on the grounds that the U.N. and the Security Council would step on the toes of U.S. sovereignty.



Also See

Liberal Leadership Race


CIA



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Sunday, September 17, 2006

The Spectre of Charles Whitman


As I wrote on the case of the murderous teenage couple in Medicine Hat earlier this year, who paralled the Charles Starkweather murders almost fifty years before there is an earlier cultural archtype for the campus shooter in the Charles Whitman case.

In fact the Whitman shooting at the University of Texas Library Tower in the summer of 1966 is the archtype of the phenomena of the random mass killer in American society. Before Ecole Poytechnique, Columbine or Dawson College there was Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper.

The creation of increased police power and gun control that resulted from this first incident of mass murder did nothing to prevent later incidences on campuses and schools across North America. Nor can policing, since it is always after the fact.


Charles Whitman's shootings were considered the impetus for establishing SWAT teams and other task forces to deal with situations beyond normal police procedures. It also led President Lyndon B. Johnson to call for stricter gun control policies


He too was a classic case of the Little Man suffering from the emotional plague. A plague that is spreading in our society in quantum leaps. Despite being found to have had a tumour, Whitmans actions were predetermined by his character. It is the authoritarian character development that is an interaction of society and the individual that is at the core of the creation of this aberrant behaviour. Just as the increase in serial sex murders occured after Jack the Ripper



Charles Whitman: The Texas Tower Sniper

Charlie was admitted to the University of Texas in Austin on September 15, 1961. After years of rigid discipline at home and regimented life in the Marines, he was suddenly free to use his time as he wished. Almost immediately he began to get into trouble. He and some friends were arrested for poaching deer. He accumulated gambling debts and refused to pay them, angering some dangerous characters in the process. His grades were unimpressive. He did manage some improvement after he married his girlfriend, Kathy Leissner, in August, 1962, but the Marine Corps was unforgiving of his previous behavior. His scholarship was withdrawn and he returned to active duty in February, 1963.

He was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. After a year and a half of freedom, he found the discipline and structure of military life oppressive. His wife was back in Texas finishing her degree and he was lonely. He tried to recapture his scholarship but failed, and was informed that the time he’d spent in Austin did not count as active duty enlistment. He resented the Marine Corps and it showed in his behavior. In November 1963, he was court-martialed for gambling, usury and unauthorized possession of a non-military pistol.


It is not that he, or Starkweather for that matter, are role models, they are not well remembered until events happen to remind us of them. It is that they are personality types, whose existence is increasing in society. It was forty years ago when Whitman climbed the Texas Tower and began shooting. America was at war in Vietnam but its prescence was not yet covered on nightly TV.

Today we are again at war and we are its victims as much as those abroad where the troops fight. It is incidents like Columbine and Dawson, just as it was the Texas Tower shooting that brings the war home.


Also See:

Gill


Medicine Hat



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Gill In the Armed Forces

The Dawson College killer had a brief stint in the Canadian Armed Forces. Showing again the authoritarian personality that would be evoked this week in Montreal.

Radio-Canada reported that Gill wanted to join the Canadian Forces to follow in the military footsteps of his family in India. The military confirmed that he took a leadership course in 1999 at an army base in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, east of Montreal, but dropped out after a month. He wasn't there long enough to get any weapons training Shooter had brief military service

The question here is if he was unacceptable to the Armed Forces why was he later allowed to buy guns through a gun club.

Of course his conflict with authority afirms the fact that he was suffering from what Wilhelm Reich called the emotional plague. The Little Man syndrome sees ones self as conflicted wanting to be in charge but hating those in charge. Hating the world around him because he hated himself.

Listen Little Man

You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man knows when and in what he is a little man. The little man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it.

For you are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it in the belief of doing it for the sake of "socialism," or "the state," or "national honor," or "the glory of God."

I recognized the deadly fear of the living in you, a fear which always makes you set out correctly and end wrongly. You had the happiness of humanity in your hands, and you have gambled it away.

You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. You stand on your head and you believe yourself dancing into the realm of freedom.

You could have long since become the master of your existence, if only your thinking were in the direction of truth. You are cowardly in your thinking, Little Man, because real thinking is accompanied by bodily feelings, and you are afraid of your body. Many great men have told you: Go back to your origin - listen to your inner voice - follow your true feelings - cherish love.


Also See:

Gill



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A Replacement For Ambrose

Our MIA Minister of the Environment Rona Ambrose, who by the delightful negligence she has shown, now faces law suits. She who tells us its ok if we are losing endangered species. Who creates a Green Plan in consultation with her allies in the Alberta Oil business.Who faces a private members resolution to remove her from the job.

She could easily be replaced. By someone who actually takes the environment seriously, who has a plan and who recognizes the libertarian value of DIY that can mobilize a community green campaign.

Yep I am talking about Tory bad boy Garth Turner, who on his blog says this...

So I decided to drive back to pick up Dorothy and Cheka last night and get down to the lake for a last weekend before everything hits the fan in Ottawa. I need a few more hours to finish off my Citizen’s Guide to the Environment, which I hope to have posted here in the next few days, then sent around to all the homes in the riding. The older I get it seems the more I worry about the damage we are doing to this world, and I’m committed to trying to get people to change a few daily habits.

The This-is-not-Kyoto Green Plan 2 is scheduled to be released in the next few weeks, and I’m looking forward to a bold vision that can last a generation and erase a decade of environmental irresponsibility. But a national strategy of clean air and conservation is just one aspect of a better world. My neighbour Allan going down the beach with shopping bags last night is another. He went and cleaned up the incredible pile of garbage left by mush-for-brains teenagers who held a drinking party about a kilometer from our door. Nobody asked him. He just loves this place. It loves him.


It's the stuff like this this that makes one say yeah Garth you're da man.


Also See

Kyoto

Ambrose

A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable

industrial ecology

Social Ecology.


Green Capitalism




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Barca mba Barzaak.

They come ashore in boats barely alive. A perilous journey at sea. Cuban refugees welcomed by their compatriots in Flordia? No. The migration is from Africa, economic refugees from basketcase economies, landing in Fortress Europe on the shores of Spain. The situation is a crisis of the failure of globalization, all boats are not lifted up as capitalism expands its markets.


"Barca mba Barzaak", the migrants say before jumping into the rickety wooden boats - "Barcelona or the Afterlife".

Which is why capitalism's vast armies of the unemployed, as Marx called them, are now migrating to Europe and the U.S. This then is the other face of globalization. The ugly reality that the WTO and other Free Trade deals have not benefited Africa as they have the new fordist economies of Asia.

In Africa the economic boats have not been lifted up by globalization in fact their economies are sinking, or else the multitude would not be taking to real boats to find work in Europe. With that work they can send money home. Money needed for survival, for capital to even run a farm or small business.

Until there is a fordist capitialist economy in Africa it will continue to export humans instead of goods.But such an economy would put Africa, like the new capitalist economies in Asia, in competition with Europe, the U.S. and Asia. And that would not fit the new Imperialist agenda.

Africa is the cheap labour source for Asian economies like China. It is the cheap bread basket for Europe and the U.S. It is a resource rich, capital poor source of mineral wealth for the big Mining and Petroleum companies. Africa is seen as a market for export to, as the boom in cellphones shows. It's poverty is insured by competing Imperialist capitals despite their hand wringing charity.

It is not in their interests to create a capitalist economy in Africa, tying World Bank and IMF investment first to privatization of state capitalist enterprises, a colosal failure, and now to moral economic blackmail.

In Africa of the 21st century we see the same evolution of capitalism that was experienced in 19th Century India. It took over a century before India became today what Marx had predicted for it then. In Africa that process of creation of a capitalist economy is occuring despite local politicians, religion, or Imperialist hinderance. How many human sacrifices it will take to create it is the question. In this more technologically advanced period let us hope it is faster than occured in India.


This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry. These two circumstances – the Hindoo, on the one hand, leaving, like all Oriental peoples, to the Central Government the care of the great public works, the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce, dispersed, on the other hand, over the surface of the country, and agglomerated in small centers by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits – these two circumstances had brought about, since the remotest times, a social system of particular features – the so-called village system, which gave to each of these small unions their independent organization and distinct life.

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

“Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”

[“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”]
[From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan]

Karl Marx






Missing the target


Heather Stewart
Sunday August 27, 2006
The Observer


Debt relief deals worth a total of $100bn have failed to tackle the problems of the poor countries they are meant to help, according to new research.

G8 leaders promised debt write-offs worth $40bn at last year's Gleneagles summit as part of a worldwide push to 'make poverty history'; but the authors of a report presented at the annual conference of the European Economic Association in Vienna this weekend say that, for many countries, indebtedness is a symptom of deeper issues.

Nicolas Chauvin of Princeton University, and Aart Kraay of the World Bank, examined the debt relief programmes offered to 62 poor countries since the late 1980s. They found that, in general, writing off debt has little impact on public spending or gross domestic product per capita, and many recipients slide back into the red again and again.

'We find very little evidence that debt relief has had any impact on the level or composition of public spending. Nor do we find that debt relief has led to improvements in policy or increases in investment rates,' the paper says.

'To put it plainly, in these countries debt is not the real problem but a symptom of deeper structural problems,' said Chauvin. 'Unless debt relief changes these underlying problems, it is likely that it will be followed by debt re-accumulation, in turn necessitating further debt relief.'

Twenty of the countries in the study received six or more write-offs in the 15-year period, trapped in a vicious circle by what the authors call 'persistent country characteristics', and returning for help repeatedly. Nicaragua had a total of 10 waves of debt relief, while Mali, Tanzania and Senegal all had eight.

Chauvin said the research didn't prove that debt relief was a waste of money - but it did show that multi-billion-dollar debt cancellation alone was unlikely to be effective.

The authors also found that, in general, debt relief hadn't been directed to the poorest countries in the world, or to those that are the most indebted.



Police evict Africans in raid on France's biggest squat

Police yesterday stormed the biggest squat in France, evicting hundreds of west African families from a squalid, disused hall of residence at one of France's elite universities. The decaying, five-storey Building F on the campus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the south Paris suburb of Cachan, had become a symbol of France's social and racial divide.

Sound of the angry sea

Their governments cannot stop them. Neither can the EU, where the desperate west African migrants are headed.

The very real possibility of death at sea, perhaps as high as one in ten, seems little disincentive. Rather, it is an accepted part of a high risk equation: "Barca mba Barzaak", the migrants say before jumping into the rickety wooden boats - "Barcelona or the Afterlife".

"They see Spain as their El Dorado, even though the gates to El Dorado are firmly shut," said DJ Awadi, a hugely popular Senegalese rapper who has become an unlikely champion of the migrants' cause, after releasing a hit internet single and slideshow that captures their plight.

"It shows that these young people have lost all hope at home."

Some 12,300 African migrants, including thousands of Senegalese, have made the perilous sea journey this year to the Canary Islands, which is Spanish territory and is seen as a gateway to Europe.

That is more than double the figure for the whole of 2005. And more than 1,000 people, mainly young men who have paid thousands of dollars to middlemen and carry the hopes and dreams of their families, are thought to have died at sea, while attempting the crossing since January.

In recent months, Senegal has become the main launching point for the migrants, who come from all over West Africa, and DJ Awadi said that he felt obliged to do something to bring the debate about emigration and its causes into the open.

So last month he recorded Sunugaal, which means 'Our boat' in the local Wolof language. In the song, he rails against the Senegalese government for the mass unemployment, political arrests and corruption that have driven the youth to desperation.

"All your beautiful words, all your beautiful promises, we always wait for them," he raps angrily in the chorus.

"You promised me that I would have a job, you promised me that I would never be hungry,
You promised me a future, up to now I still see nothing,
That's why I decided to flee, that's why I break myself in a dugout,
I swear it! I can't stay here one more second,
It is better to die than to live in such conditions, in this hell."

While the music is catchy and the lyrics powerful, it was the decision to release it on the web, with an accompanying slideshow, that has made it such a hit.


The D-day package from Senegal to Spain



West Africans are paying hundreds of pounds for a perilous 1,200-mile trip by open boat

In pictures: The crisis in Los Cristianos


Angelique Chrisafis in Los Cristianos and Claire Soares in Dakar
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian


Illegal immigrants aboard a fishing boat at the port of Los Cristianos in Tenerife
Illegal immigrants aboard a fishing boat at the port of Los Cristianos in Tenerife. Photograph: Philippe Desmazes/Getty


As sunbathers lay on the beach beneath towering hotels and British tourists browsed in a souvenir shop called Bloody Hell Offer On Ciggies, a strange vessel slowly floated into shore past the jet-skis and Jolly Roger pirate ships of Tenerife's prime package holiday resort.

The small, canoe-shaped African boat heaved with the weight of more than 100 people, staring exhausted at Los Cristianos, the concrete holiday metropolis that was their first glimpse of Europe. They had been on the Atlantic for 15 days with a single Yamaha motor and no cover from the sun.

This was the fifth boat of the day carrying men in various states of desperation. As supplies had dwindled some had gone without food for five days, others had not drunk for two days. The few who could no longer bear it had dipped a plastic mug into the sea and drunk the salt water, which had dehydrated them further and started to play tricks with their brain. Others had skin raw and bleeding from wet clothes rubbing against them for days on end - "a mixture of burns from the sea salt and the petrol from the boat's engine", said a local doctor. The unlucky ones before them had wounds so infected that limbs had to be amputated.

"Thank you father and mother," was painted in French on the side of one brightly decorated boat, towed into the port by the coastguard before police helped the men into a Red Cross field hospital. "I have left my family behind, I'm scared, but I thank God I'm alive," said a man waiting in a line for a coach that would take the group to a nearby detention camp. He had paid more than a year's savings to risk his life by sailing for two weeks through this breach in Fortress Europe. But he felt it was worth risking the 1,200-mile sea-journey that has drowned between 500 and 3,000 west Africans in makeshift wooden boats this year. All he wanted was a job. The migrants' motto in Wolof, the Senegalese language, is "Barca ou Barzakh" - "Barcelona or the afterlife".

In the past week around 3,000 illegal immigrants from west Africa have reached the Canary Islands by boat, taking advantage of a window of perfect sailing conditions from the coast of Senegal and Mauritania. Around 23,000 made it to the Spanish archipelago this year, five times the total for the whole of last year. Most have arrived in Tenerife.

"This is Spain's worst humanitarian crisis since the civil war," said Adán Martín, president of the Canaries' regional government. The former army barracks being used as detention centres across the Canaries are overflowing and the measures to patrol the coastlines are inadequate, he said. More than 700 teenagers who have arrived on boats without their parents have had to be made wards of the Spanish state. But accommodation for them is so full that a camp is being built at the top of Tenerife's mountain.

Spain's prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, this week vowed to expel the "cheating" immigrants. But almost all arrive without papers and refuse to reveal their nationality in order to avoid repatriation. Most are from Senegal which has no repatriation treaty with Spain, others are from Mali, Mauritania, Gambia and Guinea Bissau.

After the men have spent 40 days in a holding camp, the Spanish have no option but to release them, often flying them to cities such as Madrid or Valencia and leaving them on the street with a sandwich, no money and a paper requesting they leave Spain, which is easy to ignore. Hundreds have made their way to Barcelona where there is a large Senegalese community to help them. Others slip into illegal employment.

Those arriving say the passage to the Canary Islands in an open fishing boat, known as a "pirogue" or "cayuco", is referred to in Senegal as the "D-day package" after the Normandy landings. For at least £400 per person, a boat of 60 or more passengers will set out with petrol for the motor, rice, biscuits and water and gas bottles to cook and keep warm. Seventeen people died last month when a gas bottle exploded. Most of the passengers cannot swim and are scared of water so sit rigidly in one place getting sores on their backs and shoulders from rubbing against the wood.

The trip can take a week to two weeks, but there have been cases of boats getting lost and taking 20 days. Many of the boats have a global positioning device, but some malfunction. Earlier this year one boat washed up on the other side of the Atlantic in Barbados with 11 desiccated corpses on board.

High in the mountainous pine forest of northern Tenerife, Mamadou Gueye, 17, who recently arrived by boat, sat at a school desk in a teenage holding centre concentrating on his Spanish lesson.

"I'm the oldest of four, I had to come here to help my parents," Mamadou said. "It's just a normal part of life. At home everyone knows someone who has left by boat. I came in a pirogue with 140 people, none of whom I knew. We sailed for a week, eating rice. When the waves got high, the others said: 'Don't worry, as soon as we get to Spanish waters, our suffering will be over'. When I left my father said to me, 'If you need to cheer yourself up, think about football. Say your prayers, don't fight other boys and behave well.' I'll stay for five years and then go home to beautiful Senegal."

Senegal, despite its relative stability, has an unemployment rate of 40% and half the population is under 18. Of 11 million Senegalese, around 3 million are living abroad. Most are working illegally and sending home £363m in official remittances a year - equivalent to 9% of the country's GDP.

In Los Cristianos, locals in bikinis line up at the port to watch as each new boat comes in. "Soon our kids will be learning African history at school, not Spanish, and there will be no jobs for them," said one woman. A poll by Spanish radio station Cadena Ser found 89% of Spaniards thought too many people were arriving.

A handful of immigrants whose corpses came ashore in boats are buried in Tenerife's capital's cemetery in graves marked "unknown immigrant". Many locals are sad that the blue expanse around the islands are now known as the watery graves of Africa. "It's not the image we'd want," said a Spanish tourist from Bilbao.



See:

Migration

Multitude

Africa

Globalization

Fordism

Development Versus Population Growth

Water War

IWD Economic Freedom for Women



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From Nanny State To Ikea

The last nanny state in Europe has gone down in defeat...Swedish TV predicts slim centre-right election win, thanks to those nice folks at Ikea, shoopers and workers alike. It's a generational shift young against old, those unemployed and underemployed wanting jobs....voting for the New Moderate party...modeled on New Labour in the UK. The vote was an attack on taxes, unemployment, with just a hint of racism thrown in for good measure. Since refugees and other migrants get full benefits.

The right has moderated its anti-immgrant stance replacing it with a general appeal to produce real jobs not public sector ones. To reduce working class taxes and red tape for business. Its an appeal that appears to have won them votes from the Left.

Anders Bengtsson, 45, an engineer, defected from the Greens to the Moderates after a lengthy chat outside the party's cabin. "Too many people are not working and too many rely on the state. We need to break this cycle and try something new."

Swedes set for a swing to the right


To the golf club? Hop on,' chirps driver Lars Leijon, 58. The bus doors slam and Leijon heads out towards the western suburbs of the Swedish capital. 'When I was a boy I was with my father in his Volvo when we hit a cow on the road, just where the golf course is now. We were all peasants in those days.'

These days Sweden has changed. It is about to hold a general election that could end the world's longest experiment in wealth enhancement, the egalitarian way. Next Sunday the Social Democrats - who created the 'Swedish model' during a rule that has lasted for 65 of the past 71 years - may lose power to the centre-right Alliance. If stolid Prime Minister Goran Persson survives, opinion polls suggest it will be by a whisker.

The doors open at Troxhammar Golf Club, 18 holes of bright green landscaping where cowhands' descendants now stroll with expensive clubs. In the car park the driver of a black Saab cabriolet with personalised numberplates slides his clubs into the boot and swaps score cards with a man loading his golf bag into a decorator's van. Even golf is egalitarian here.

In the clubhouse printer Rickard Jansson sips beer with Peter Rignell and Mats Fredlund, both groundsmen at Rasunda football stadium. 'The Alliance will win. We are sick and tired of paying taxes to keep 23 per cent of the population living on benefits,' says Jansson, 37.

Rignell, 44, says he used to identify with the Social Democrats as the workers' party. 'Now they're the party of the jobless.' Fredlund, 64, says criminals are better off in Sweden than law-abiding elderly people. 'Our prisons are like hotels. Everyone has their own room and there is always someone to accompany you if you want to go outside. No old person has that luxury.'

The working-class golfing trio are typical new voters for the New Moderates - the main party in the Alliance whose leader, Fredrik Reinfeldt, says he heads the 'new workers' party'. Reinfeldt, 41, who plays down his middle-class background to the point of allowing it - falsely - to be believed that he was raised in a high-rise suburb, has clawed his way from the free-market wing of his party to its centre. Nursing a casual T-shirt and jumper look in the party's publicity pictures and declaring himself an Abba fan, he makes much of being a father of three who likes a clean home and draws up efficient grocery shopping lists.

Reinfeldt will be Prime Minister if the Alliance - a two-year arrangement with the Christian Democrats, the liberal Folkpartiet and the Centerpartiet - is victorious in the election.

Along with its new pastel logo, his party has watered down policies that gave it just 15 per cent of the vote in the 2002 election. The tax cuts it wants now are for the low-paid.

'They have realised that Sweden, fundamentally, has a social democratic electorate with values - such as equality and the environment - that you cannot go against because they are inbred,' said Gunnar Wetterberg of the white-collar Saco trade union. 'There is no point in campaigning for tax cuts for the rich because even high-income earners in Sweden want wage gaps to be closed.'

On paper Sweden has one of the most competitive economies in the world. Its companies - such as Ikea, Ericsson, H&M, Volvo and Scania trucks - turn out record results. In the past decade the country has followed the British example of privatising and deregulating. Some of Persson's policies - such as cutting pensions in the mid-Nineties - have been harsh. Sweden's elderly wait three years for a hip replacement.

Reinfeldt says the government's claim of having reduced unemployment to 6.8 per cent is a lie, pointing out that 1.5 million Swedes, a quarter of the workforce, are unemployed, on extended sick leave or have taken early retirement. An astounding 547,000 Swedes between the ages of 16 and 64 draw early retirement pensions, 12,000 of them under 24.

Reinfeldt has the wisdom not to refer to them as 'benefit scroungers'. They are 'the excluded', forced into oblivion for statistical expedience and thus more likely to appeal to the Lutheran fibre for fairness. Under Reinfeldt, they would be coaxed back to work.



Swedes vote on nation's welfare


September 18, 2006

PUSHING her half of a two-part sofa bed across the carpark at the biggest Ikea in Europe, 24-year-old Jana Norsfeld had no doubt about the main man in her future: the bald one in the open-necked shirt smiling down from the election poster opposite.

Despite both having degrees, Jana and her boyfriend, Lars, (pushing the other half of the sofa) have been unable to find full-time work since leaving university and are living in state housing on benefits.

Things are not hard but nor are they as good as the couple had hoped, which is why they wanted Swedish voters overnight to ditch the party that has ruled them for 65 of the past 74 years.

If they do - and the polls show a close race - it may be the beginning of the end for the Swedish social model, which was hailed by The Guardian last year as the world's "most successful society".

This is a welfare state with bells and whistles: unemployment benefit at up to 80 per cent of salary for 12 months; and 18 months on similar pay for maternity or paternity leave, or to care for sick children (a benefit that is widely abused, particularly in summer).

Daycare for working parents costs at most $220 a month for the first child, dropping rapidly for others. Child benefit starts at $50 a week. The elderly receive state earnings-related pensions, up to 90 per cent housing benefit and free care homes. Public transport is cheap and efficient with no journey in Stockholm costing more than about $3.70.

Daring to challenge the economic basis for all this is the bald man on the poster: 41-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt, sports fan, amateur dramatist and career politician whose Centre-Right "new" Moderate party is challenging the high-tax, big-budget, comprehensive welfare state in which nanny not only knows best but also holds the purse strings.

The party's proposals would be funded partly by cutting unemployment benefit from 80 to 70per cent of previous salary, the risk in popularity offset by the promise that cuts in employers' costs will mean more new jobs.

Reinfeldt also aims to cut, then abolish, a 1 per cent property tax and to halve national income tax for those earning less than $6000 a month, although that is not as radical as it sounds given that the average Swede's tax bill of almost 56 per cent includes a swag of local and municipal taxes.

He has gained support from captains of industry, notably Ericsson boss Carl-Henric Svanberg, for promises to cut state dabbling in business. He would privatise government holdings in 57 companies from SAS airlines to the makers of Absolut vodka.

Reinfeldt believes the apparently bullish economy (5.6 per cent growth in the second quarter of this year) is based on sand. Thanks to the relatively low value of the krona, Volvo's exports may be booming, but last Monday it announced 1500 job cuts worldwide, half of them in Sweden. A day later British department store chain Debenhams said it would close its flagship outlet in central Stockholm next January because of poor turnover.

Reinfeldt believes many Swedes retire early reluctantly because the tax-versus-benefit equation does not add up.

He will have winced, however, at a newspaper allegation that he pays his children's Lithuanian nanny 40 per cent less than a Swede would get. His press secretary declined to comment beyond saying the calculation had been done "a strange way". But it touches the topic everyone knows is an issue but nobody will argue about: immigration. Sweden was one of only three European Union countries along with Britain and Ireland to open its doors fully to eastern Europeans last year and continues to accept large numbers of asylum-seekers almost without question.

Bestselling crime author Henning Mankel - creator of Inspector Wallander, one of the country's biggest exports - spends six months in Africa each year but has noticed disconcerting changes that grow each time he returns to his home.

"Fifteen years ago we did not have the ghettos outside the big cities that we have today. Today we have all these segregated young people in the suburbs. In some ways we are very close to what is happening in France," he wrote in the current issue of South of Sweden.



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