As the Booker Prize-winning author of the best-selling novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy is one of India’s most celebrated literary exports. She has been feted around the world since the book was published eight years ago, but she has frustrated the literary establishment by refusing to write any more fiction and turning to political campaigning.

So when Roy brought out a collection of essays last year entitled The Algebra of Infinite Justice, the Indian academy of letters jumped to attention and rushed to honour her with their most prestigious literary award. The problem for the Sahitya Akademi is that Roy refuses to accept it. As a vehement anti-government campaigner, she says, she cannot accept commendation from a body with such strong ties to the Indian authorities. The problem for Roy is that the Akademi is going to honour her anyway.
independent.co.uk

NEW YORK – Entertainer Harry Belafonte, one of the Bush administration’s harshest critics, compared the Homeland Security Department to the Nazi Gestapo on Saturday and attacked the president as a liar.

“We’ve come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended,” Belafonte said in a speech to the annual meeting of the Arts Presenters Members Conference.

“You can be arrested and not charged. You can be arrested and have no right to counsel,” said Belafonte.

Belafonte’s remarks on Saturday — part of a 45-minute speech on the role of the arts in a politically changing world — were greeted with a roaring standing ovation from an audience which included singer Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, and members of the arts community from several dozen countries.

Messages seeking comments from Homeland Security and White House officials were not immediately returned.

He had called President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world” during a trip to Venezuela two weeks ago. Belafonte, 78, made that comment after a meeting with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

The Harlem-born Belafonte, who was raised in Jamaica, said his activism was inspired by an impoverished mother “who imbued in me that we should never capitulate to oppression.”

He acknowledged that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks demanded a reaction by the United States, but said the policies of the Bush administration were not the right response.

“Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression,” said Belafonte, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Bush, he said, rose to power “somewhat dubiously and … then lies to the people of this nation, misleads them, misinstructs, and then sends off hundreds of thousands of our own boys and girls to a foreign land that has not aggressed against us.”
news.yahoo.com

…
Even more absurd, the checkpoint was run sporadically, jack-in-the-box style, because manpower depended on importing agents from already overrun positions along the Mexican border. All this was quite legal, whispered into law during the Reagan administration, green lighting border patrol agents to set up checkpoints as deep as 100 miles inside our borders. In fact, customs and border patrol agents have the power to stop and check anyone, anywhere within this 100 mile fuzzy law zone.

When I mentioned this to a friend, he winced, recalling a youthful liberal overconfidence when the legislation was passed. “Won’t happen, it infringes too much on our right to travel.” He hung his head in mock remorse. Or maybe not so mock.

Well, happening it was, and it was infringing me and a bunch of other lawful citizens, most notably those with dark skin. While caucasians were routinely waved through, non-whites faced more questioning, detention, vehicle inspection, arrest. William Craig, a writer and college instructor, had to drive through the checkpoint to work, and sometimes the traffic jams made him late to class, despite his anglo skin. Arriving after the bell one morning, he explained the delay and asked his students their opinion about the patrol stop. “Oh, you mean the ‘whiteness checkpoint,’ one of them said. The kids snickered at the real function of the terrorist dragnet. It was little more than a racial Brandenburg Gate.

It looked that way to Brenda Taite, a 41-year-old black woman living in Claremont, New Hampshire. Taite began commuting to the Vermont Law School in South Royalton in 2003, just about the time the checkpoint went into place. And for two years she politely answered the Border Patrol questions, quickly recognizing that they went on longer for non-Caucasians like her. She also saw that those actually detained in the rest stop were usually dark skinned. And then one winter afternoon in 2005, she balked. She answered affirmatively to the U.S. citizen question, but when the agent asked her where she was coming from, she said, “I don’t have to tell you that.” She’d been through the checkpoint hundreds of times. It was cold and dark and she wanted to get home to make dinner for her 14 year old son.

“It’s the law,” the agent said.

“I know something about the law, too,” she replied.

He told her to pull over in the rest stop — secondary detention — and she was questioned by another agent. She refused to give them her social security number. A white woman driving ahead of her had been waved through, why was she being grilled?

“Is it because I’m black?” she asked.

“You want to play the race card?” one of the agents snapped. He took her driver’s license to one of the trailers. When he returned he gave her back the license.

“Go on,” he told her with an angry waveoff.

When she got home, she was in tears. She called the local paper.
counterpunch.org

“It was a campaign of fear. Didn’t you hear the radio? They told people that if they left their homes they would be arrested by the police and the U.N.,” stated Jean Joseph Jorel, a representative of the National Commission of the Family Lavalas Cell of Reflection. Jorel made the comment from Cite Soleil on January 9, the same day the Haitian Chamber of Commerce had called a national strike to condemn insecurity in Haiti and a recent spate of kidnappings throughout the capital. Roadblocks manned by the Haitian National Police and the U.N. went up throughout the capital on January 8 and traffic remained sparse as most residents stayed in their homes.

Jorel made his comments from Cite Soleil, a bastion of support for ousted president Aristide and current presidential candidate Rene Garcia Preval. It has served as a launching site for massive demonstrations demanding the return of Aristide and most recently as a staging ground for large Preval campaign rallies. Residents of Cite Soleil accuse Haiti’s business community of pressuring U.N. forces to commit a massacre there on July 6, 2005.
zmag.org

JOHANNESBURG: Anti-globalisation protestors are gathering this week for the first World Social Forum in Africa, the world’s poorest continent which they say is the worst victim of a process aimed at reducing inequalities.

Thousands of anti-globalisation activists, debt relief campaigners and African advocates for the rural poor were to meet in the west African country of Mali from Wednesday to discuss alternative development models.

Africa, which is home to 10 per cent of the world’s population, accounts for less than 1.5 per cent of global trade, and has been completely bypassed by globalisation, analysts say.

“It has been an unmitigated disaster for Africa,” said Pheki Moyo, a researcher at the Pretoria-based Africa Institute.

“In terms of the balance of forces, globalisation has not yielded anything to Africa,” he told AFP. “In the 1950s, Africa’s share in world trade was around seven per cent. In 2002, it was around two per cent and stands now at 1.5 per cent. “

“In the same token, foreign direct investment in the 1980s was around 30 per cent and in 2002-2003 it dropped to seven per cent. We are dragging behind other poor and developing areas, especially Asia,” said Moyo.
jang.co.pk

…Men and women like Corporal Poole, with multiple devastating injuries, are the new face of the wounded, a singular legacy of the war in Iraq. Many suffered wounds that would have been fatal in earlier wars but were saved by helmets, body armor, advances in battlefield medicine and swift evacuation to hospitals. As a result, the survival rate among Americans hurt in Iraq is higher than in any previous war – seven to eight survivors for every death, compared with just two per death in World War II.

But that triumph is also an enduring hardship of the war. Survivors are coming home with grave injuries, often from roadside bombs, that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress.
nytimes.com

…
Why did it take nearly a week for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to mobilize private buses to evacuate thousands of city residents desperately seeking rescue from the horrific conditions in the Superdome, the Convention Center and the open tarmac of Interstate 10?

Clues to that mystery will come in the form of an audit into a FEMA contract for hurricane evacuation services awarded in 2002 to the Federal Aviation Administration. An initial report on the audit, which was quietly opened last October by the DOT’s Office of Inspector General, is nearing completion and will be released to the public soon, a DOT official told Reconstruction Watch.

So far, the IG’s office suspects that that the FAA “did not verify that the services were performed,” said David Barnes, a public affairs officer in the Office of Inspector General. As a result, the IG “has raised questions about the FAA’s internal controls.”

The audit is also focused on Landstar Express America Inc. A trucking and logistics company based in Jacksonville, Fla., Landstar is a politically well-connected corporation that’s risen to the top of the U.S. transportation industry without actually owning any trucks. Chairman Jeffrey Crowe served until recently as head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and last April Florida Gov. Jeb Bush appointed him to his Advisory Council on Base Realignment and Closure.
counterpunch.org

Neoliberalism, Katrina and the Asian Tsunami
The recent controversy surrounding the plan to rebuild New Orleans and the passage of the first anniversary of the Asian tsunami cap a year in which a host of catastrophic disasters caused widespread death and destruction and garnered worldwide media attention. In so doing, these disasters revealed certain fundamental truths regarding economic development in both the developed and developing world. Two of the most well-publicized disasters in particular, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, exposed the extent to which public welfare and security were undermined by governments’ deference to the interests of private profit, militarism, and laissez faire capitalism. These events have opened the door for a fundamental reevaluation of the current neoliberal model of economic development being pursued in the United States and elsewhere.

…In its emotional effect and in the ways it makes its points, this motion picture is much more akin to poetry or music. Malick uses cinema in a way no one else uses it, in a way that no one else has ever used it. Through elliptical and seemingly oblique methods, he forges moments of staggering emotional power.

Ideally, it would be best to pull down a screen and show you the beginning of “The New World,” rather than clumsily describe what can’t be described. But let’s try.

As Wagner’s prelude to “Das Rheingold” plays, Malick depicts, in those first minutes, the landing of British colonists on what was soon to be known as Virginia. He intercuts from the people aboard the ships to the Indians watching from the woods, alarmed and curious. Moving almost as if in a ballet, the Indians are seen in silhouette against the blue waters, as the ships, now 50 yards away, pull ever closer. Nothing can stop it now. American history is about to begin.

What can’t be conveyed but must be explained is the strong effect of this artful arrangement of images and music. In those first moments, Malick realistically depicts the colonists’ arrival and creates a wistful dream of it, a dream in which we know everything that is to come. He shows us a moment of greatness, of incalculable historical importance, and also of tragedy — for the Indians who stand there in complete innocence.

This is the beginning of everything and the end of everything, and to see it all so distinctly, presented with such a full-hearted understanding of the event in all its meaning, is almost too much to bear. There will be people who will walk into this film cold and within five minutes find themselves sobbing, without quite knowing why.

…As we all know from grammar school, Pocahontas saved Smith from being beaten to death in an Indian ritual, and what follows, in the movie, is an innocent romance. Later, her aid to the British causes her to be ostracized by her own people, and we find her suddenly wearing incongruous, bulky English clothes, looking as if her soul has been smashed. But it hasn’t. She regains her spirit and is courted by the kindly John Rolfe (Christian Bale), and when they marry, they devise what has since become a time-honored way for non-Americans of different backgrounds to create future Americans: They have a child on American soil.

A later scene, of Pocahontas playing hide-and-seek with her child in a manicured English garden, completes our sense of her journey with eloquent simplicity. It suggests all the things Malick wants to express about the inspiring resiliency of Pocahontas’ personality and also about the character of what was being created in the new world. A powerful concluding image shows the sky as Pocahontas once saw it. An insect zips across the corner of the screen — that’s how fast that life went by, and yet such grandeur in the living of it.
sfgate.com

I guess it would take away from the aura of high romance to really look at the tragedy of Pocahantas. Idealization of what must have been the stark reality of her 22-year life is one of those tricks of imperialist discourse: the viewer can be lulled into feeling great that some level of humanity is being ascribed to her at least. There is no ‘grandeur’ in choking on the blood from rotted lungs. How ironic that Pocahantas died hideously from TB. She was a great favorite among the British upper classes, and her picture appeared everywhere as an advertisement for Virginia tobacco.

Turning a story of rape and exploitation and death into a beautiful piece of cinema, a soul-stirring entertainment for the masters of the universe–it sure makes me want to sob, but I know why.

‘Blonde is beautiful’ mystique
Is it politically correct for us to see King Kong?” a friend joked when the latest version of the movie classic opened. A movie clip that shows Kong staring mesmerized at the fair Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts, caused me some uneasiness because it’s hard not to see the subliminal racism in a story about a big black beast falling tragically in love with a pale blonde beauty.

But lured by reviews touting the special effects and the dramatic story, I went to see the movie anyway. While it certainly has racial overtones, I was more disturbed by its gender message: that fair-skinned blondeness is the essence of female beauty, so powerful an aphrodisiac that it can tame a savage beast.

King Kong is just the latest ripple in a cultural tidal wave of celebrations of a certain kind of Caucasian beauty. Pick up a newspaper or magazine, or watch the entertainment shows on television, and you’re bombarded with a profusion of blondes: Paris, the Nicoles (Ritchie and Kidman), Scarlett, Charlize, Ashlee, Gwyneth, Mary-Kate and Ashley, to name a few. Even the African-American hottie of the moment, Beyonce, has golden skin and flowing blonde hair, while Halle Berry, the African-American actress most celebrated for her beauty, is fair with white features. Even in movies with predominantly black casts, the female objects of desire are consistently fairer than their male counterparts.

A step backward

“We move forward on things, and there are ways we keep stepping back,” says Kathe Sandler, an African-American filmmaker whose 1992 documentary, A Question of Color, explored African-Americans’ hang-ups about skin color, hair texture and facial features. Lately, she has noticed the extreme sexual objectification of women in popular music videos and the “European premium” placed on the women of color in them. “They’ve got to have really long hair, and I’ve never seen so much wig-wearing going on,” Sandler says.

Jean Kilbourne, who has studied female images in advertising for 30 years in her film series Killing Us Softly and her book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, says the emphasis on being pretty and sexy, even for young girls, is worse now, the result of companies’ desire to sell products and the media working in the service of the advertisers.

The images are impossible for most females to achieve, but they sell products and make girls feel negatively about their own looks. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that the more adolescent and pre-adolescent girls read fashion magazines, the more likely they were to diet and to feel unhappy about their bodies. Researchers at the University of Michigan and Boston College found that while African-American girls ignored images of skinny white female bodies on television and elsewhere, they were concerned about their inability to match white standards of hair and skin color.

Decades after the women’s rights movement expanded the view of a woman’s worth beyond her physical appearance, and long after the “black is beautiful” movement asserted that African features were also attractive, we seem to be regressing.

It’s politically incorrect to admit it, but to some extent we’re still color struck. I think of my former colleague, a white blonde, who talked about feeling “rewarded” for her looks every time she walked into a room. I also think of Indian families who tout their daughters’ fair complexions in marriage ads, of southern African women who are ruining their skin with bleaching creams, and of the little white, African-American and Asian girls, who despite their parents’ assurances that they are beautiful as they are, long for long blonde tresses.

“Racial overtones”??? How about an island teeming with murderous black savages? How is it possible for the author to de-couple western notions of beauty from racism? This is why a lot of smart people caution us about feminism as it is understood by white women. The first feminists in England were after all unapologetic fans of imperialism, and this attempt to separate the issues of sexism and racism always feed into the dominant discourse.

What do we expect from Peter Jackson? I was a lifelong fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the films forced me to see Tolkein’s racism and Jackson’s faithful adherence to it. By the time the elephants trotted out in volume III, the inferred racial identity of every orc and goblin and lord of Darkness became clear.

Berkeley astronomers studying two nearby stars in the Milky Way galaxy have discovered rings of frozen rocky debris surrounding them that strikingly resemble the ring of debris around our own solar system known as the Kuiper Belt.

They are now on the hunt for signs that at least one of those stars may be an alien sun with a solar system all its own containing one or more planets where life could develop, according to UC Berkeley research astronomer Paul Kalas.

The still-mysterious Kuiper Belt surrounds our own solar system, and hundreds of thousands of icy objects abide there, along with the many short-period comets that frequently flash across our skies. The newly discovered debris disks might well surround similar solar systems, Kalas and his colleagues say.

On Thursday, the Astrophysical Journal posted an online version of a new report by Kalas and his colleagues, saying observations by the Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time revealed details of the exceptionally bright debris disks surrounding two of 22 stars that the Hubble’s new Advanced Camera has been surveying.
sfgate.com

…Last week, the mayor’s Bring Back New Orleans commission released its recommendations on rebuilding, which are filled with the expected double talk and half promises regarding what neighborhoods can be rebuilt, pegged to vague tests and benchmarks.

But most infuriating, featured in all the coverage of the report, is the estimate given by the commission, politicians, developers, and media that only half of the city’s population is expected to come back to New Orleans in the next several years. The so-called experts advise us to be “realistic,” and accept that the city has to have a “smaller footprint” because so many people will not be returning.

Where do the reduced population statistics come from? The truth is that the “experts” are manipulating the truth for their own ends. They are creating a situation where half the city is kept from returning; then saying that we need to reduce our expectations to this reality they have created.

This week, 90% of Tulane University students came back to resume classes in uptown New Orleans. The majority did not have long-term ties to the city, but they returned because Tulane and the city wanted them back, and worked to get them back. With housing and encouragement, the majority of New Orleans would be back today. This is a completely avoidable displacement, happening in slow motion before our eyes.

It is also paternalistic, with experts brought out, one after another, to tell us – especially poor and Black New Orleanians – what is best. You can’t come to this neighborhood yet, it’s not safe for you. You can’t rebuild, we don’t know if your neighborhood will be viable. You can’t move back to New Orleans – we think you’ll be better off somewhere else, where the welfare is better.

For the city’s poor, more hurdles are being put up. Some residents who have returned are blocking the installation of FEMA trailers in their neighborhoods. Hotels are planing evictions of New Orleanians in preparation for Mardi Gras tourists. The city plans to demolish homes before people can even come back to see them.

It’s perhaps a symbol of Republican dominance and Democratic cowardice that free-marketers have chosen this overwhelmingly Democratic city as a front line in their war on government institutions created for the poor. Charity Hospital is forced to remain closed. Public housing tenants are pressured to remove their belongings. The public schools remain mostly closed, while the school system becomes the landscape for social experimentation by right-wing school privatisers.

Within the first two weeks after New Orleans was flooded, the right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation released its plans to capitalize on the disaster. Near the top of the list was promotion of “school choice” and school vouchers. Pre-Katrina, New Orleans schools were among the most segregated in the nation, with some of the nations lowest spending going to public schools, which had a wide array of problems including collapsing infrastructure and so little money for elective courses that in some schools JROTC, the military recruiting program for high schools, was a mandatory class.

The proposed changes do nothing to address these issues, instead they exacerbate the problem, diverting funds from the poorest schools, and continuing a system with two tiers of schools, one for those with the privilege, and one for everyone else. As an added benefit for privatisers, the teachers union – previously the largest union in the city – faces virtual elimination under this scheme, as staff are laid off and new schools open with mandates to cut salaries and eliminate health insurance.
zmag.org