Skip to main content

Posts

How did we end up here? "In  No Name in the Street , James Baldwin describes how, not long after he settled in France in 1948, he ‘had watched the police, one sunny afternoon, beat an old, one-armed Arab peanut vendor senseless in the streets, and I had watched the unconcerned faces of the French on the café terraces, and the congested faces of the Arabs.’ With a ‘generous smile’, Baldwin’s friends reassured him that he was different from the Arabs: ‘Le noir américain est très évolué, voyons!’ He found the response perplexing, given what he knew of French views about the United States, so he asked a ‘very cunning question’: If so crude a nation as the United States could produce so gloriously civilised a creature as myself, how was it that the French, armed with centuries of civilised grace, had been unable to civilise the Arab? The response was breathtakingly simple: ‘The Arabs did not wish to be civilised.’ They, the Arabs, had their own traditions, and ‘the Arab was a
Post a Comment
Read more
"India’s entry into the new millennium has been marked by a series of dramatic ruptures with its post-independence settlement. The most insulated large economy of the capitalist developing world, with the most autonomous bourgeois bloc, has adopted a neoliberal form of integration into the world market. A right-wing, Hindu nationalist and authoritarian force, the Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, has taken power, replacing the Congress Party as the centre of the political system. India has exploded an atomic bomb. Of the four Nehruvian principles that had officially guided India’s modernizing project since 1947—socialism, secularism, democracy and non-alignment—the first and last have been abandoned; the second has been redefined to accommodate Hindu nationalism, while the third, whose preservation was  the  great success story of an otherwise mottled record, is threatened as never before." —  Achin Vanaik in 2001
Post a Comment
Read more
A headline on foreignpolicy.com: " TAXPAYERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!:  The Panama Papers confirm that the world’s elite cheat, lie, and steal. Will the masses finally do something about it?" Yes, there will be some rattles in the canteen and some whispers behind the desks then apart from a couple of exceptions, "the taxpayers" will carry on with their lives. One shouldn't underestimate how much capitalism, and its latest form, neoliberalism, has entrenched itself in people lives and minds. One shouldn't understimate the conservatism in people and the fear of taking responsibility. One shouldn't underestimate a bigger turn to the right. It is going to need events/incidents of seismic proportions to make people look for a genuine change. A discussion between Pierre Bourdieu and Günter Grass: Bourdieu: But there is a connexion between this sense of having lost the traditions of the Enlightenment and the global triumph of the neoliberal vision. I see neo
Post a Comment
Read more
From Panama, via London, with Love A system rotten to the core Panama Papers scandal grows for HSBC over Syria links With the City of London at its core, Britain's network of havens from tax, regulation and other pesky laws stretches first to the Crown Dependencies – Mann, Guernsey and Jersey – and then into the British Overseas Territories: the Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands. From there, this web extends to places like Hong Kong: not under British rule since 1997, but, according to Nicholas Shaxton, still  feeding  “billions in business to the City”. Looking at the documents leaked from Mossack Fonseca one thing is clear: Britain's network is once again at the core. More than half of the companies listed in the documents are registered in the UK or its Overseas Territories, and Hong Kong plays a huge role. Panama Papers: 'an old tradition of English piracy
Post a Comment
Read more