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. 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

The nanny state may be out of a job after the election, writes Peter Millar in Stockholm

---

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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Fire Da Bums

Tiger-Cats stun Esks

Stun? How about the fact that the Esks rookie Coach and overpaid QB were stunned. All game they wandered around stunned. Our rookie coach whose claim to fame is he won a Grey Cup last year, shows that ain't true. The Esks as a team won, he rode their coattails in particular those of Jason Maas who got his and Ricky Ray's asses out of the sling on several occassions. The team was a winning combination. Ray can't throw long passes, Maas can deliver when he needs to.

Overpaid rookie Ray won the Grey Cup one year, again it was a team effort not a solo job. For that his head swells and he goes south to sit on the bench in the NFL for a year. He comes back here and Rookie Coach Maciocia which is Italian for Clown, no sorry thats Rigaleto, pays him an overpriced salary for underachieving talent.

Maciocia blamed the team over after the Labour Day Classic when Calgary handed the Esks their butts. Uh huh. The team didn't have the spirit, the hunger, the well whatever ....It's da coach stupid. Your job is to coach, to strategize, to think, to come up with plays for the team to execute.

QUOTABLE

"My job? I'm not afraid one bit, because they can't take away my kids and they can't take away my health. So whatever happens, happens. That's the least of my concerns," -- Edmonton head coach Danny Maciocia

Good say bye bye...

Your QB is the guy that fronts the team, well Ricky Ray is all about well Ricky Ray, and his biggest fan aint the rest of the team or even fans in Edmonton its da rookie coach. God if the stars in Maciocia's eyes gleamed any brighter I would think he has a 'thing' for Ricky.

And thats the downfall of the Esks this season. It was written all over last nights game. No offense, Jason Maas sat in the shotgun, heck shotgun it was a window, heck it was a full balcony of space as the Esks failed to hit him.

Defense, what defense, again in reverse a hole so big you could run a bulldozer through it.

Failed completions, lots. Ricky Ray's special throw the ball over twenty yards and it goes nowhere. Throw it under and you get a completion. And then stupid plays that even a rookie would never do...an Ray's a rookie no longer.

Hamilton couldn't run out the clock, and Edmonton had two chances to mount late scoring drives.

Their last attempt was foiled when Hamilton defensive end Steve Josue knocked the ball out of Edmonton quarterback Ricky Ray's hands with under a minute to play to preserve Hamilton's first victory since an Aug. 4 road win over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

Ray threw three interceptions and finished the day with 24 completions on 40 attempts for 323 yards.

Edmonton head coach Danny Maciocia said he felt midway through the fourth quarter that his team was on the verge of a comeback.

"Good things are happening and, unfortunately, we turned over the ball again," he said. "And that's pretty much been the story of our season."Ticats score win over Eskimos

What a disaster. Couldn't have happened to a better couple of clowns. The other guy they need to fire is Hugh Campbell, the genius who hired Maciocia, and let him hire Ray. Campbell didn't even have the guts to show up to the Labour Day classic, went fishing. At Ralph Kleins fishing hole probably. Hasn't been around for the last couple of games rumour has it. So fire him too. The team doesn't need a shake up, the leadership does.

Look the Esks are the backbone of the CFL. Don't believe me how many teams don't have Esk alumni as QB, offense, defense, coaches etc. In fact Calgary could be called Esks South and Hamilton could be Esks East. And the Esks have proveded this province with two Premiers and Edmonton with a Mayor.

Its the Esks against the Esks. And with a rookie coach and a 'rookie' QB, Ray hardly played all year last year, well it looks like we are in the toilet this year.

And I am pissed, if you hadn't guessed.

I will give noted Edmonton Sportswriter Terry Jones the finally recap of yesterdays mauling by the Tigers. Hey Terry what went wrong with the Esks?

They didn't show up until the second half.

They might as well have rolled out a red carpet down the middle of the field for Devon Fowlkes to return a punt 87 yards to the end zone. Moses didn't part the Red Sea with that much room to work.

Some will write it off as Hamilton always being a tough place for the Eskimos to play.

Balderdash!

This is only the second time since interlocking play began that the Eskimos had lost games in back-to-back seasons in Hamilton.

This football team is now on life support because they keep committing suicide.

Head coach Danny Maciocia, coaching from the edge of a cliff throughout a season in which he won the Grey Cup as a first-year head coach, pleaded for a show of pride from this team against Calgary.

They gave it to him and that gave Edmonton hope. Hope turned back to nope last night.

Now in the second game of the back-to-back Basement Bowl or Toilet Bowl series in which Hamilton can now match the four wins the Eskimos have to show for this season, is Maciocia going to have to plead for pride again? Against Hamilton? At home?

One thing is still there for the Eskimos this season, however. Never before have they managed to lose all nine games on the road.

See:

CFL

Football

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Kinsella Cherniak Blowback

From the Star and the horses mouth......Another senior Liberal complained the attacks on the self-described "radical reverend" backfired, turning her into a martyr among voters. "We drove votes to her," he said. The Liberals had widely distributed handouts with selected quotes from DiNovo's sermons and writings. In one instance, Watson's campaign accused her of comparing the media attention surrounding killer Karla Homolka to the persecution of Jesus Christ. It also disclosed DiNovo's admission that as a "street kid" she smuggled LSD in hollowed-out Bibles.

A tip o' the blog to BigCityLib Strikes Back

SEE:

DiNovo

Cherniak

Kinsella


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Should Feminists Have Breasts

And if they do should they expose them? Hey I am not asking, it's the kind of stupid comment one expects from the rightwhingnuts not from the feminist bloggers. But in this case a feminist blogger attacked a sister blogger for using her breasts to promote her blog. Blaming her for having them, then flaunting them. I seem to remember something about Our Bodies Ourselves being a feminist slogan. That feminists have been at the forefront of the right to go topless movement.

Anyways the cheap shots started over her being in a picture with Clinton. Where she stood out prominately in front of him. Fully clothed. Wearing an outstanding sportsbra. Very unfeminist I guess. Except the point here was a bit of bitchy jealousy that she looked good compared the collection of male and female geeks around Clinton. Boy when the personal gets political, watch out for bitchy infighting. And really its not about breasts its about Clinton. But Ann

The real reason was this ad she has on her page for T-shirts for her blog.
Shows she doesn't always wear a bra.

Feministing Shirt (price varies by style)




Althouse goes ballistic about the picture, over the big breasts on the T-Shirt and in the T-Shirt. I love this stuff, I get to actually run this pic. Cause the bottom line is that its a subversion on typical male fantasy art of women that became popular in the fifties. They were called headlights back then. Which meant Tits, breasts, women drawn for Mens comics and later for pinball machines, tatoos, pinups, etc. with exaggerated pointy breasts. This is clever, on her T-Shirt she is giving the finger.





Boy if Althouse is that narrow minded and prudish about a T-Shirt ad on a feminist blog what does she think of the women who work the sex trade at Lusty Lady in San Fransisco. These sisters fought to unionize and are feminists who put the club under workers control.

Or those who work as Strippers and are not unionized but are exploited. Wonder if they could turn to her to lawyer for them. Or would that be a bust. Bette to contact the Exotic Dancers Alliance then Althouse. Because pride in oneself apparently is not ok for Althouse. Left leaning she may be but she ain't no libertarian.

Peel & play
Professor of strip Mary Taylor empowers women
by showing them how it’s done

I prod Mary about her work with the Exotic Dancers’ Alliance. I ask her whether a stripper really is in charge of the situation when she’s up on stage. Her answer is unequivocal, “Dancers are definitely in charge. There’s always the exception, but for the most part I think that a dancer is in total control of what she will tolerate from the customer.”

While clients aren’t a problem, shady club owners are a different story. Here, clearly, there are power issues. “Because of the stigma attached to the exotic entertainment industry, [strippers] are very afraid of getting fired from a club. They’re afraid of being blacklisted,” Mary explains.

“They have a customer base built up, and they could take their entire customer base with them and leave but they’re just so afraid of talking back to an owner. Until now, they’ve had no one stand up for them and say that it’s a legitimate industry. My job with the Exotic Dancers Alliance is to help them take control.”

She tells me about a club owner she once worked for in Scarborough, who walked in to the club, turned to the DJ to say, “Get that fat pig off the stage” in reference a dancer, before spinning on his heel and walking back out.

“I was standing there, and I just said ‘You’ve gotta be kidding’. This was a girl who had been there a long time. It was just horrible. And this girl had more clients than the average girl. She was bubbly, fun, cute and had a lot of customers. This same owner would not allow black girls to work in his club, or never more than one.”

This club owner, though, helped spur Mary’s change of career. “I got nine dancers to walk out of the club once. That was my first taste of activism. When the manager saw a whole herd of girls standing outside his office door, he started screaming and said ‘Ok, big mouth, what’s going on?’” Mary


Finally I will leave the last word to liberal catnip who summed it up excellently, and whose blog led me to this litte catfight....


Feminism, Breasts & Bill Clinton
It isn't the fact that a blogger with boobs met Bill Clinton that's the real issue here. What is obvious by Althouse's need to draw attention to one woman's pose in a photograph is that she would rather restrict another woman's freedom by attempting to humiliate her and then stand on her pulpit and call that real feminism. It's actually the antithesis of the spirit of the movement and Jessica of Feministing was more than justified in feeling offended by Althouse's post. And, I'm still waiting for Ann Althouse to define feminism for me as I asked her to because that's something she needs to think about.
Seriously.

Also See:

Feminism


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Hey I Am Sorry

"The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful," Bertone said.

He opened his regular Sunday blessing with a plea for calm and understanding. "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," he told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer residence.

Still waiting for him to apologise to the rest of us who are humanist, secular, pluralist, free thinkers. Anytime now Benny baby.

Also See:

Pope

Catholic Church

Abortion

Same Sex Marriage

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Dual Power In Mexico

We are on the eve of revolution.

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of thousands of supporters of leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador elected him as "legitimate president" of a parallel government on Saturday in protest against the allegedly flawed July presidential elections.

Reminding me of a certain incident in the spring of 1917 in Russia when another dual power situation occured....Workers Power and the Russian Revolution

The revolutionary reawakening of Mexico
The revolutionary mass movement that has been brought into being in Mexico by the electoral fraud perpetrated in the Presidential elections has reached a point where clearly the power is there for the taking. If there were a genuine revolutionary party at the head of the masses we would be on the eve of socialist revolution.

By Alan Woods
Friday, 08 September 2006

Woods is of course a Trotskyist and his Leninist approach to dual power is the same old flawed theory that the masses need the party to take state power. Indeed the masses need to use this situation of dual power a ciris in the Mexican State to remove the army, police, courts, etc. from their communities the very basis of bourgoise power. That power does not come for a party but through the creation of community assemblies and workers councils. Always has always will.

The Zapatista's offer a very real model of this kind of community engagement crucial to this current situation of dual power. The competing political parties who compteted in the election and have declared themselves victors, now are appealing to the people to recognize their government as legitimate. The fact that the this creates a very real power vacuum can allow the people and their autonomous organizations an opportunity to challethe very structure of the State in Mexico. Something that could not have been done in 1910-1911 during the first Mexican revolution.

Backgrounder: Mexico's dangerous political chasm

To many observers, López Obrador's behavior only confirms charges made during the campaign that he represents ``a danger to Mexico." The reality is more complicated, and understanding it requires some appreciation of how the losing side views the controversy. To them, López Obrador's reaction is not demagoguery from a politician who cannot accept defeat, but rather a natural response to past electoral fraud and to deeply rooted injustices in Mexican society.

Mexico has seen many protests like those orchestrated by López Obrador. They represent a revival of the so-called second round -- practiced by both Calderón's National Action Party, or PAN, and López Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, during the early 1990s -- in which candidates cheated of victory by the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, took to the streets to ``defend the vote." Such tactics are far less justifiable since a set of electoral reforms took effect in 1996, but memories die hard. The left faced more fraud than the more conservative PAN did over the last two decades, and López Obrador himself lost a deeply flawed election for governor of Tabasco in 1994.

Even the post-reform period has not been free of controversies. In 2003, the PAN joined forces with the PRI to name the leadership of the independent agency that administers elections over the objections of the PRD. Then, last year, PAN and PRI legislators impeached López Obrador as mayor of Mexico City on a minor charge, and Mexico's attorney general attempted to prosecute him. Had legal proceedings continued, they would have prevented López Obrador from running for president. Only widespread public opposition and mass protests forced the administration of President Vicente Fox to back down.

We are on the eve of Revolution in Mexico again, as we were almost 100 years ago.
The revolution of 1910 was not just a national revolution but one that impacted directly on America, and whose impact reamains today. The current American political and media campaign against Mexican migrants is the result of the 1910 revolution. The porous border works both ways, while imposing NAFTA on Mexico was deemed as the solution to the problem of Mexicos lack of industrial development, it has done little to stop the tide of Central American economic refugees seeking the good life in America, as America exploits their countries.

Americas intervention in the Mexican revolution and in all subsequent revolutions in Latin and Central America is based on the imperialist policy of the Munroe Doctrine. It is an extention of the plantation poltical economy that dominated the Old South in the U.S. It was Confederate America that invaded and took over the former Spanish colonies in the region. And they did it as an expansion of their plantation agrarian economy.

What Amercia exported was a deliberate policy of economic underdevolopment, aligning with Hacienda owners to maintain a cheap labour peasant economy. That underdevelopment continues today with minimal industrialization in the region, labour intensive, and export driven. Thus NAFTA and other economic agreements are still based on the American plantation mentality of the Confederacy. The ideal being America manufactures and exports, Latin America, Mexico, Central America and the Caribean provide raw resources, agricultural products, and parts.

Thomas D. Schoonover. The United States in Central America, 1860-1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System.

In the nine essays which comprise the book, Schoonover illustrates this theme and draws out the complexities of competition between social imperialistic nation/states, in particular the rivalry between the United States and Germany for Central American trade, and the policy conundrum when the dynamics of foreign policy conflict with the ideology of racial hierarchy.

Each essay deftly places an important, often well-known, incident in U.S.-Central American relations into a world systems conflict. From this point of view, confederate diplomacy toward Central America is seen as a new peripheral state exerting the political power of cotton because confederate diplomats misunderstood the relationship of their political economy within the world system of the time. During the Civil War, moreover, they sought bases for privateering and trade but had to overcome the recent legacy of filibustering expansionism. After the Civil War, as Schoonover argues in "George McWillie Williamson and Postbellum Southern Expansionism," the South, now with the full support of the northern industrial elite, continued to seek expansion southward. Since "overproduction," the received wisdom of the time, overseas outlets were considered by many the key to maintaining jobs as a means to social stability. To bring to life the dynamics of tensions between various metropole states competing for economic advantage in Central America as well as the tensions between the imperatives of social imperialism abroad and aspects of the domestic ideology, Schoonover presents two fascinating case studies. In the Eisenstuck affair of 1878-79, a dispute erupted after the step-daughter of Paul Eisenstuck, who married into a Nicaraguan family and later filed for divorce. This dispute led to alleged violence against the Germans, and the German government sought U.S. support. At this point the United States was caught in a dilemma: if the United States did no support Germany, the principle of rights for foreigners would be compromised. If the United States did support Germany, it risked the enmity of Nicaragua and might compromise that founding document of American dominance--the Monroe Doctrine. Either way, the status of the United States as the primary metropole power in the region was at stake.

At times tensions within the United States' world view, ideology and the demands of social imperialism were played out in Central American diplomacy. In his chapter titled "The World Economic Crisis, Racism, and U.S. Relations with Central America, 1893-1910," Schoonover examines the dilemma American diplomats faced representing North American Negro workers in Guatemala. Within the context of early-twentieth-century racism, does the United States exert its power to protect citizens of color against unjust charges? Race also played an important role, Schoonover argues, in rationalizing Theodore Roosevelt's actions in Panama during the revolution of 1903. In this essay, Schoonover also analyzes the arguments of a Columbia University Law Professor's memo justifying Roosevelt's actions in terms of American exceptionalism: "Exceptionalism places the U.S. government beyond contract and international laws." This idea from the past has been resurrected today.

Like Russia, the Mexican revolution was an inspiration for a mass movement to overthrow capitalism. Like Russia it was peasant based, a movement for land reform, and thus was limited in its scope. The underdevelopment of the working classes in both countries limited their ability to confront the worlds industrializing hegemon the United States. Europe itself was aflame in revolutionary movements at the end of WWI and only the boom in the North American economy offset the pending doom that old Europe faced.

As America intervened in Mexico it too intervened to prop up old Europe. It could because of a crucial new resource that would fuel post WWI American capitalism and its resulting Fordist modes of production. Oil.

But still another economic power stands in the wings of the world political theatre: petroleum.

The victory of the Entente in the World War was in the last analysis a victory of the superior war technology of America. For the first time oil triumphed over coal for the heating of the submarines and ships, of the aircraft, motors, tanks, etc., was accomplished with oil and by a technology which had undergone especially high development in America and opposite which the German technology was backward. After the ending of the World War, the most pressing imperative for America, if it did not want to lose again the hegemony won over world economic domains, was to bring the oil production of the world into its hands in order to thus monopolise the guarantees of its ascendancy.

The richest oil field lie in Asia Minor (Mossul) and belong to the zone of the English protectorate; the way to them leads over Europe. American oil capital began very quickly to secure this path for itself. Starting from France it pressed on by courtesy of the gesture of the French statesman or the bayonet of the French military towards Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, as far as Turkey. The war between Greece and Turkey, the revolution in Bulgaria, the Lausanne talks, the Balkan incidents, the military convention between France and the little Entente, etc., are more or less connected to the perpetual striving of American oil capital to procure for itself a large base of operations for the confrontation which must follow sooner or later in the interest of world monopoly over oil with the competitors, England and Russia. Just as the oil trust has been at work for decades in Mexico to obtain dominion over the Mexican oil fields through a chain of political shocks, putsches, revolts and revolutions, so it also leaves no stone unturned in Europe in order to take possession of the approaches to the oil districts of Asia Minor, against every competitor and every opposition. Germany represented the only gap in the path. As the endeavours to detach South Germany from North Germany and bring it under French overlordship did not lead to the goal—in spite of the enormous sums made ready for the financing of the Bavarian fascist movement and anti-state conspiracy and because the interests of New York clashed here with the interests of Rome, oil capital applied other tactics. Supported by the depreciation of money consequent on inflation and certain stock-exchange manoeuvres, it bought up one economic combine after another and thus gradually brought the entire power of German capital under its control. When the Stinnes combine, for which the proffered quota of shared profits was not high enough, offered resistance and opposed its conversion into the mere appendage of an international community of exploitative interests, force was resorted to. The military occupation of the Ruhr meant the fulfilment of long-cherished wishes of oil capital just as much as it was a deed after the heart of the French mining industrialists.

From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution by Otto Ruhle 1924

The dual power crisis in Mexico, the turn to he left in Latin America are the result of American intervention in the regions since the 19th Century. The industrialization of these regions in the 20th century opened the possibility of real proletarian revolution. Unfortunately that development was not as advanced as Fordist production in the U.S. Thus these revolutions were limited to national movements and land reform for the mass of the population who were peasants.

Bolivia today is a prime example of this contradiction, that the working class in that country remain indigenous peasants in an underdeveloped economy. They may mine, and work in gas plants but their basis of existence is sharecrops predominately cocaine. Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Argentina all face similar problems of underdevelped industrialization because of a lack of Fordist production. Only Mexico has a fordist economy. One that can compete with America.

And contrary to the purpose of NAFTA it was not to allow for greater development of this fordist base in Mexico, but to act as a buffer, to restrict that competitive development.

The Mexican crisis along with the move to the left in Latin America, shows that contrary to the myth of American Hegemony and it's Cold War victory, revolution is still the counterbalance to Imperialism and rapacious capitalism.

Argentina proved that when its economy went down the drain. Dual power was created in the communities, new currencies and barter were developed, community assemblies organized all forms of social and ifrastructure needs. Workers seized their bankrupt factories and made them operational, and profitable. A dual power situation still exists in Argentina, regardless of the State or ruling party in power.

While America worries about its border security, and the vast wave of migration from Mexico, there is a revolution brewing on their border that no fence will contain.

Viva La Revolucion!

¡Tierra y Libertad!

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