Day: April 6, 2009

Morales about the IMF: “the wolf can not keep the flock”

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The Bolivian President Evo Morales has denounced Friday the injection of more than 1,000 billion dollars through the IMF against the global crisis, saying that countries at the root of the crisis can not solve it, or his words, that ‘the wolf can not keep the flock.’

‘It’s like giving money to the wolves, or to entrust the care of the flock: the wolf is not going to keep the sheep, it will devour them,’ Morales told the foreign press in La Paz, commenting on the decisions G20 in London to fight against the crisis.

‘It is not possible that the countries of capitalism, which has caused the financial crisis, are now the same from where comes the solution,’ said the Socialist leader, adding that few countries are at the origin of this financial crisis, but ‘180 must cope.’

Bolivia is experiencing the beginning of economic deceleration, and is 5% growth at best in 2009, against 6.5% in 2008.

‘As long as we do not touch the structural points of capitalism, it will be difficult to resolve the financial crisis,’ said Morales about the G20. ‘If we want to solve economic problems, we must first end the free market, then the speculative capitalism.’

Morales has challenged the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), accusing him of the award of credit conditions, as ‘the privatization of our natural resources, our basic services, to implement the business models that are part of the capitalist system.’

Source: Bolivia Rising

Democrats and War Escalation By Norman Solomon

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Top Democrats and many prominent supporters — with vocal agreement, tactical quibbles or total silence — are assisting the escalation of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The predictable results will include much more killing and destruction. Back home, on the political front, the escalation will drive deep wedges into the Democratic Party.

The party has a large anti-war base, and that base will grow wider and stronger among voters as the realities of the Obama war program become more evident. The current backing or acceptance of the escalation from liberal think tanks and some online activist groups will not be able to prevent the growth of opposition among key voting blocs.

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Video Part One: Baghdad, City of Walls By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Teresa Smith

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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning photographer and journalist from Iraq.

He began documenting life on the streets of Baghdad in 2001 and, when the Iraq war started two years later, he reported for The Guardian newspaper on those parts of the Iraqi capital that were simply too dangerous for outsiders to cover. But growing violence forced him to leave the city.

In Baghdad, City of Walls Ghaith returns to the streets of a Baghdad now divided by security walls separating the city’s Sunni and Shia residents.

Thousands of homeless roam the streets, children grow up hating Americans, the dead are buried in improvised cemeteries and there is electricity for only three hours a day.

Ghaith’s ability to move around the city despite the dangers, gives us a unique insight into this Baghdad and to a story so far untold.

Part Two | Part Three | Part Four



Video Part Two: Baghdad, City of Walls By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Teresa Smith

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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning photographer and journalist from Iraq.

He began documenting life on the streets of Baghdad in 2001 and, when the Iraq war started two years later, he reported for The Guardian newspaper on those parts of the Iraqi capital that were simply too dangerous for outsiders to cover. But growing violence forced him to leave the city.

In Baghdad, City of Walls Ghaith returns to the streets of a Baghdad now divided by security walls separating the city’s Sunni and Shia residents.

Thousands of homeless roam the streets, children grow up hating Americans, the dead are buried in improvised cemeteries and there is electricity for only three hours a day.

Ghaith’s ability to move around the city despite the dangers, gives us a unique insight into this Baghdad and to a story so far untold.

Part One | Part Three | Part Four

Video Part Three: Baghdad, City of Walls By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Teresa Smith

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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning photographer and journalist from Iraq.

He began documenting life on the streets of Baghdad in 2001 and, when the Iraq war started two years later, he reported for The Guardian newspaper on those parts of the Iraqi capital that were simply too dangerous for outsiders to cover. But growing violence forced him to leave the city.

In Baghdad, City of Walls Ghaith returns to the streets of a Baghdad now divided by security walls separating the city’s Sunni and Shia residents.

Thousands of homeless roam the streets, children grow up hating Americans, the dead are buried in improvised cemeteries and there is electricity for only three hours a day.

Ghaith’s ability to move around the city despite the dangers, gives us a unique insight into this Baghdad and to a story so far untold.

Part One | Part Two | Part Four

Video Part Four: Baghdad, City of Walls By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Teresa Smith

Leave a comment

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning photographer and journalist from Iraq.

He began documenting life on the streets of Baghdad in 2001 and, when the Iraq war started two years later, he reported for The Guardian newspaper on those parts of the Iraqi capital that were simply too dangerous for outsiders to cover. But growing violence forced him to leave the city.

In Baghdad, City of Walls Ghaith returns to the streets of a Baghdad now divided by security walls separating the city’s Sunni and Shia residents.

Thousands of homeless roam the streets, children grow up hating Americans, the dead are buried in improvised cemeteries and there is electricity for only three hours a day.

Ghaith’s ability to move around the city despite the dangers, gives us a unique insight into this Baghdad and to a story so far untold.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three


The Growing Storm | Dahr Jamail – Independent Reporting from Iraq and the Middle East

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Last weekend, the Iraqi government arrested an Awakening Group leader of a Baghdad neighborhood, then moved into the area. With the help of US occupation forces, they disarmed the militiamen under his control, but only after fighting broke out between US-backed Iraqi government security forces and the US-formed Sunni Awakening Group militia. This disturbing event is the realization of what most Iraqis have long feared – that the relative calm in Iraq today would eventually be broken when fighting erupts between these two entities.

The US policy that has led to this recent violence has been long in the making, as it has only been a matter of time before the tenuous truce between the groups came unglued. For it has been a truce built on a deeply corrupt US policy of backing the predominantly Shia Iraqi government forces while paying the Sunni resistance not to fight both government and occupation forces.

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“Death of a Demonstrator in London Was Not So ‘Natural’: Police Provoked Confrontations” by YVKE Mundial with Pueblos Sin Fronteras

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Activists interviewed by an alternative journalism collective Pueblos Sin Fronteras reported that the police provocation made the protests violent, penning demonstrators in separate corrals and preventing them from moving for hours, without access to water, food, or restrooms.  This may explain the collapse of a citizen who died this Wednesday while the demonstrators were being corralled by the police.

The protests in London this Wednesday, which were among many protests against the meeting of the leaders of the 20 most industrialized countries, ended with the death of a demonstrator, the arrests of more than 80, and tens of injured people.

The initially peaceful protests turned violent as the police penned thousands of citizens who marched against the G20 policies into ‘corrals,’ preventing them from moving for hours.

Activists interviewed by Pueblos sin Fronteras condemned the officers who for hours blocked men, women, and children from moving, denying them access to food, water, or restrooms.

The clashes with the police were concentrated in the financial center of London.  Environmentalists, students, workers, and pacifists denounced the governments for continuing to bail out the banks, which caused the global economic crisis, and ignoring the poor.

A group of youths smashed windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland, the banking institution that caused popular anger when the news of its former president receiving an annual pension of over a million dollars became public, at a moment when the economic crisis is hitting Great Britain hard.

Later, the police beat up a group of students who were engaged in an act of peaceful civil disobedience, holding a sit-in in the middle of the street.

The original article ‘Muerte del manifestante en Londres no fue tan ‘natural’: Policía provocó los enfrentamientos’ was published by YVKE Mundial on 2 April 2009.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

MRZine – Monthly Review

"Chávez: The Empire of the Dollar Is Coming to an End"

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Proposal for the Creation of the ‘Petro’ Currency Should Not Be Seen in Isolation

Caracas, 31 Mar (ABN) — The proposal of the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, to create a new currency called the ‘Petro’ should not be seen in isolation from what is happening in today’s global economy, said the governor of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV), José Félix Rivas Alvarado, on Tuesday, in an interview broadcast by TeleSur.

The BCV governor noted that the initiative should not be isolated from the proposal of the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, to create a currency for trade called Sucre.

Rivas Alvarado said that, if these approaches are analyzed separately, ‘this mistake must be avoided.’

‘These proposals are accompanied by the proposal for production that has to do with the financing of development, how to channel capital flows, which remain open veins of Latin America, flowing from the countries of the South to the North,’ explained the BCV governor.

For Rivas Alvarado, such initiatives are for the purpose of pursuing the autonomy of Latin America, which is experiencing a unique opportunity.

He explained: ‘For that purpose, sovereign economic policies’ accompanied by ‘an initiative for energy integration and development finance that is different from the prevailing financial architecture’ are ‘important.’

The BCV governor said that new approaches must foster ‘not the logic of the valorization of capital on the global level but the development of a regional pole of power.’

He also emphasized diversity among nations when it comes to discussions about the economic crisis, and efforts to overcome it should not be made solely from ‘the financial point of view’ but must encompass the cultural and productive ones.

‘As President Evo Morales said, cultures and peoples have burst onto the scene.  Economists don’t take this reality into account in their models, but it exists.  It’s a historical heritage,’ the BCV governor illustrated his point.

President Chávez has proposed, at the summit of Arab and South American Countries held in Doha, Qatar, the creation of the ‘Petro’ as new common currency backed by the reserves of oil and gas states to combat the ravages of the global financial crisis.

The original article ‘Propuesta sobre creación de la moneda Petro no debe verse como algo aislado’ was published by the Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias on 31 March 2009.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Source: MRZine – Monthly Review

Palestine: Silwan, The very eye of the storm By Akiva Eldar

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2 April, 2009

Jawad Siam pulled out a brochure issued by the Jerusalem municipality heralding development plans for his place of residence, the village of Silwan in East Jerusalem. He pointed to the map in the brochure, where the neighborhood’s streets were marked. “You see this, Hashiloah Road?” he asked. “All these years, it was called Ein Silwan Street. ‘Ma’alot Ir David’ Street? That was Wadi Helwa Street. The street next to it, ‘Malkitzedek,’ used to be Al-Mistar Street.”

From two small rooms, not far from the Old City walls, Siam and his colleagues in Silwan’s Ein Helwa neighborhood committee, as well as a small group of Jewish friends, are waging a tenacious struggle on one of the world’s most volatile battlefields. As he sees it, the “conversion” of the street names, the settling of Jews there with the encouragement of rightist organizations, and the municipality’s intention to demolish dozens of buildings in the neighborhood, are merely a prelude to an eventual transfer plan. The real goal, he believes, is the expulsion of Ein Helwa’s 5,000 residents, part of a goal of reducing the Palestinian presence in the area.

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