desiring machines yadda yadda

In part 3 of her lecture here, Silvia Federici talks about - among other things - the mechanisation of the body in mechanical philosophers and the development of anatomy in the 17th-18th century as a feature of the counter-revolution that was the establishment of capitalism.





These PUAs seem to be an expression of a contemporary mechanisation of the "personality" and the mechnical approach evo-psych takes to the mind which accompanies this stage of capitalism emphasising the discretionary consumption of the majority in the core, fuelling the development of practises of advertising and marketing, and the speculative activity of rentiers and owners of capital, fuelling the development of practises of market manipulation.

Signage

Bill Ayers speaks two blocks from my cubicle and you get this .



Is some reactionary millionaire training them to make these signs? Is this a strategy, or what?

Marx and Walking-Around Money

When I read Roger’s remarks of Feb. 25 on the piece ‘Wages’ by Marx, I wanted to comment immediately. But by the time I had outlined my response, it far exceeded any reasonable length for a comment box. I have reservations about the approach Roger has taken. His interpretation selects a single sentence from the text and draws from it implications that presume it conveys a scientific claim of universal scope. I read this sentence very differently. I believe we will find it has a very different force and scope if we consider in some detail the generic texture of ‘Wages.’

Four aspects of this texture indicate that the force of the text and of that one sentence follow from an immediate practical goal and that the scope of any claim it establishes are correspondingly limited. We need first to consider what kind of text ‘Wages’ is and how that status determines the logic that governs its argumentative construction. To specify the force of the sentence itself within this argument, we need to trace the topic of wages and their allocation fully. To understand the formulation of this topic in the crucial sentence, we need to consider how the text engaged its auditors. To grasp this engagement as concretely as we can, we need to connect the topic of wages and their use by the wage-earner to the political project Marx was embarked on.

The editors of the Marx-Engels Werke propose that Marx drafted ‘Wages’ in preparation for a talk he presented to the Deutscher Arbeiterverein (German Workers’ Club) in Brussels. This talk was the next to last or last talk in a series. I believe this ascription to be correct and that we must accordingly look at the constitution of this text as a ‘lecture’ if we are going to appreciate what Marx was saying and why he said it the way he did.

The lecture notes opens with a summary of the conclusions drawn in passages of the draft which have not survived. These conclusions establishes a ‘logic arc’ within which the statement functions. Now just as it is erroneous to retrospectively project the Marx of the future into his earlier works, it is equally erroneous to ignore the Marx of the past in reading the present Marx. At the time of ‘Wages,’ Marx’ work still retained much of the form and substance of Hegel. In keeping with Hegel’s style of dialectical argument, Marx has initially defined a fundamental relationship, then proceeds to elaborate the contradictions that unfold within this relationship. The first point of the summary establishes that capitalism treats human activity as a commodity and for workers this relationship reduces their life activities to a mere means.

The following points elaborate the processes implicit within this relationship which determine the rate of wages, such as supply and demand or the profit motive. Marx abstracts the logical properties capitalism, a logic in which life activities have already been completely permeated and transformed. After this abstraction what remains to discuss are the internal dynamics of that transformed instrumental life. When Marx concludes the lecture with a statement of the positive aspect of wages, he introduces a twinkle of starlight in this vast darkness. In Hegelian terms, after treating at length ‘necessity,’ that which capital must do in and of itself, he finds in it ‘possibility,’ that aspect of the relationship which can in its turn generate an new system of relationships out of the old.

The draft continues with notes on eight bourgeois economists pertinent to the second point of the summary. After these notes, the draft has three fully written sections in which Marx discusses his own insights into the system-internal determination of the level of wages. These sections correspond to points three through seven of the summary.

In the last two sections before the conclusion, Marx discusses measures which ameliorate the dismal rigors of wages. To appreciate the significance of these sections to the lecture’s conclusion, we now have to pay closer attention to the formulation of the test. We will see that the logic of the argument transforms dramatically and prepares the force of the conclusion.

In the first, lengthy section titled “Suggestions for Relief,” Marx mentions and criticizes three popular bourgeois proposals to insulate wage earners against fluctuating income or to generate higher wages. He then criticizes these measures because they cannot counteract the entire range of systemic pressures to reduce wages. In the second, much briefer section ‘Workers’ Associations’ Marx addresses the organizing undertaken by the workers themselves to obtain and maintain better wages. First he points out two objections to workers’ association advanced by bourgeois economists. Then he defends the formation of such associations.

To recognize how Marx transforms the logic of his presentation at this point, we must consider ‘Suggestions for Relief’ and ‘Workers’ Associations’ as a single rhetorical unit, despite their formal separation. Marx was widely read in the Greek and Latin classics in the original languages. Just as he had absorbed the principles and materials of Hegel’s philosophy, he had mastered the devices of Classical rhetoric. Marx has ordered the presentation of the topics in these two sections to form a single rhetorical unit through the mirror-symmetrical figure of chiasmus. Chiasmus consists of two parallel constructions in which the order of the constituents is reversed in the second construction. We could schematize this construction, A:B::B:A.

If we consider that dialectics assumes a dynamic relationship between at least two elements and that the dynamism induces a new relationship between those elements, then we can recognize in the chiasmus a rudimentary, prototypical schema of the dialectic. We can specify the schema that binds the two sections of the lecture. First there are two points of view, bourgeois and proletarian. There are two types of content, model and criticism. The chiastic structure of the two sections of the argument is bourgeois model:proletarian criticism::bourgeois criticism:proletarian model. The process begins in bourgeoisie’s conceptualization of their own practical activity and ends in the practical activity of the working class. The texture embodies rather than explicitly describing this historical and social development.

In the schema ‘::” stands in the place of the fulcrum on which the order is overturned. Let us consider the dramatic assertion which occupies this position in the argument. Marx prefaced his reprise of the bourgeois criticisms of association with the assessment, “What the economists remark about associations is correct …,” a characterization perhaps all the more surprising once we have heard that the economists claim association cannot maintain or raise wages. After completing his reprise of the objections, Marx repeats his assessment, but adds a crucial explanation, “ All these objections of the bourgeois economists are, as I said, correct, but correct only from their point of view.”

In moving through the rhetorical reversal of order, we have moved into a new logical grounds for understanding. We began with bourgeois models which characterize the reciprocal relations of the factors that determine wages in terms of mathematical ratios and which seek the optimal equilibrium within this constrained range of necessities misconceived as possibilities. At the same time, we have moved from the conceptual proletarian critique of the bourgeois model’s categorical insufficiencies to the workers' practical critique via organizing associations. Returning to the level of the lecture’s logic, as we pivot on this fulcrum, we also pass from the formal dialectic of ideas to the material dialectic of activity. Marx has refuted the bourgeois ideas not by an immanent critique, but by demonstrating that they advance the interests of capital in and within wage relationships and that they are irrelevant to solving the problems wages pose for workers.

After this assertion of the distinct and irreconcilable bourgeois and working class viewpoints, Marx completes this section with a discussion of associations. He does not analyze the inherent logic of associations in the way he analyzed capital. Marx approaches the organizing of associations as a practical activity and focuses on a single, salient aspect of that activity. In fact, the meaning and the force of the claim that workers can do whatever they want with their money follows from this topical focus. The reiterated perspectives on the topic delineate a textually specific sense for workers using their money, and the truncated paraphrase in the concluding section of the lecture must be read as a summarization of this more elaborate presentation of the topic.

Marx comments take as their point of departure the first of the two bourgeois criticisms of association, namely that the cost of creating and maintaining an association will exceed any increase in wages obtained through the association. He rejects the very pertinence of this utilitarian logic. Against it he poses claims about how workers’ consciousness of their struggle and its depth lead them beyond a utilitarian view of wages. If the apparent struggle for wages entails an ultimate struggle against wages, then the workers “rightfully laugh” at the kind of pedants who would even try to calculate “the cost in dead, wounded and money.” In fact, “Anyone who wants to beat the enemy, will not discuss with him the costs of the war.” The mere fact that workers really are forming associations refutes the economists' claim that workers are selfish self-calculators. When we look at the organizing underway, we see wages play an obvious role in the process, “the best paid factory workers form the most associations.”

Workers assume the expense of self-organization even though it requires sacrifice, “the workers use everything they can scrimp together from their pay to form political and industrial associations and to cover the costs of this movement.” Accordingly, the employers and economists, who award minimal wage increases thinking they will be absorbed in modest luxuries like tea, rum, sugar and meat, are outraged when the workers “include in their calculation of these raises a little of the costs of the war against the bourgeoisie.” The section climaxes with the pithy contrast between the bourgeois view of wages as a means to participate in markets and the workers view of money as a means to meaningful life activity, “they even make out of their revolutionary activity the maximum of their pleasure in life.” In four, sometimes lengthy sentences, Marx crams in seven instances of the use of the meager disposable income provided by wages for the purposes of self-organized political and industrial organizing and motivated by class-consciousness.

The entire brunt of the argument is that any wage that allows more than the bare necessities can also provide a resource for the struggle to end the wage relationship altogether. When Marx concludes his lecture with the claim that wages have the “Advantage: that the worker can do whatever he wants with his money,” he summarizes the more extensive argument of the preceding section with a brevity comparable to the condensed conclusions with which the draft for the lecture began. The brevity should not mislead us. Marx does not argue that workers can spend whatever money they have on whatever commodities they want. He never once says “spend” or “buy.” He says, “use” and “do.” Within money he sees possibilities outside capitalist production and circulation. He advocates uses of money as an instrument of non-instrumentalized life activity.

So much for today and so much for the conventional, internal verbal factors in the analysis and understanding of genre. Structure and diction contribute essential components in the constitution of genres, but we still have to consider the articulated text as an active element in the dynamic relationship between Marx the lecturer and the workers in his audience. Those elements will allow us to reflect not just on what Marx said, but on the force of his talk, why he said what he said and to what end. What is the situated, pragmatic sense of “the worker can do whatever he wants with his money”? I’ll be back in a day or two with more of the story.

Commodity Fanaticism - I

Anodyne Lite comments on an evident trend of excessively passionate fanaticism for entertainment commodities and the way many young leftists seem to mistake their personal, capricious tastes in music and videos for political commitments and moral virtues.



I would offer as especially vivid specimens of this infirmity Dominic Fox (a gifted writer) and Owen Hatherley (a knowledgeable commentator on architecture). They exhibit the extreme of the principal element - the certainty that their personal preferences in art and entertainment are political and moral virtues, giving rise to an almost tearfully disgruntled pedantry, based in the most superficial kind of erudition, about the objects of their obsessions - but also display an additional symptom of the syndrome, which is that they have convinced themselves that they discover everything they like, and hasten to plant their flags in canons and bestseller lists like Colombus discovering the New World. It brings to mind a comedian whose routine involved the line, delivered in a Bimshire lilt, "Ay, get your flag out me roses man." They assert - ludicrously, because they prefer only the most popular mass culture and the best known high culture works - that everything they like was underrated and unknown before they resurrected it with their admiration and uniquely intelligent and sympathetic understanding. This then acts as a kind of explanation for the absence of any commentary on the reception history and scholarship of their favourite stuff (they are unfamiliar with this and can provide no account of it), but also permits them to become midwives to their idol's divine creativity in fantasy, almost like auxiliary authors of their favourite artworks and culture commodities. Both Fox and Hatherley seem to believe they have, for example, rescued Samuel Beckett - canonical nobelist, more frequently analysed by US academics and students than Shakespeare, and almost uninterruptedly performed - from obscurity.

From Hatherley's Militant Modernism:

Beckett’s Late Review devotees seem to have an idea of him as some sort of amalgam of Zeno the Stoic and Father Ted, yet one can’t imagine Tom Paulin or Bonnie Greer relishing being assaulted by the panic attack of Not I or wading through the thick, impenetrable tangle of repetition and horror of How it Is.

I know for a fact that Bonnie Greer has a far deeper and broader knowledge of Samuel Beckett's oeuvre than Hatherley, and also is capable, which he is not, of engaging in interpretation of the work, informed by knowledge of history, genre, medium, institution, and existing scholarship, which Hatherley could not even begin to produce, having simply no acquaintance with Beckett scholarship or with any method of literary criticism or performance theory whatever. He produces a kind of commentary on art and literature (always stressfully sincere but often insightful and despite common diction errors - he doesn't know what "replete" means but uses it often, and other awkward tics of this type - engagingly written) relying solely, as in his popular remarks on architecture, on the elaborately displayed intensity of his opinion and the forcefulness and insistence of the mock aristocratic rhetoric with which he expresses his personal tastes and prejudices. And in the passage above, he does not quite assert, but clearly implies, that the heroic, self-sacrificing acts of recognition and appreciation required for the true Beckett devotee's progress to enlightenment (which nonetheless produce from Hatherley only vague, bland, obvious description without even a hint of interpretation - horror, tangle, repetition, panic) can be accomplished only by his little clique of narrowminded, chauvinist, parochial mutual admirers. Dominic Fox similarly suggests that only these possessors of a "British" national character are capable of giving Samuel Beckett the "approval" - that white ball of clubbability that is evidently the only reaction Fox is capable of having, apart from the black ball of ostracism, to anything - that Fox, perhaps psychotically and certainly wrongly, perceives Beckett to be suing him personally for with his novels. Without their courageous unsentimentality and hyper refined aesthetic organs, these two suggest, Samuel Beckett’s genius would have gone forever unrecognised. They barely stop short of congratulating themselves for making the works of Samuel Beckett what they are today.




Anodyne Lite asks if I have anything to recommend to read on this topic - because these two are just examples of a widespread phenomenon - and I don't. It's something I wish the EC would fund me to study. I would ask Jonathan Beller's advice, as I feel sure his already published observations imply something yet to be said explicitly about why this kind of irrational attachment, this commodity fanaticism (sedulously ignored by the legions of pundits advertising a new age of fanaticisms) has become so widespread and yet remains imperceptible to its victims even when someone takes the pains to point it out with meticulous specificity.

Anyway.

When The Wire, sold as something like "to blaxploitation what the Sopranos is to gangster films", failed to attract an audience, HBO and the producers/creators devised a thoughtful promotional campaign that showed an acute sensitivity to fashions in the trendsetting sectors of the culture consuming public, lifting the terms and themes of its branding effort not from Esquire but from The Nation. It measured some distance travelled between the age of a substantial oppositional dissident critical intellectual culture and that of a dominantly delightedly and gratefully complicit one.

Twenty five years before The Wire's inauspicious first broadcasts, it was still unusual for people to admit liking, much less admiring, the television programmes they watched. Fifty seven channels and nothing on. But the mainstreaming of pomo irony launched a reversal of this attitude by at first introducing the (consoling, reassuring) idea that mindless shit could be watched with an attitude that transformed the activity of watching it into politically subversive cultural sabotage.

Audience fragmentation had to advance considerably before this pomo posture could really be widely exploited, since it belonged to an elite not the majority. ABC, under the guidance of an inexperienced hip former development executive Jamie Tarses, foolishly and without the confirmation of scientific study launched a re-branding campaign expressing this Nick at Nite, Harvard Lampoon irony at an extreme (TV is Good. and Watch TV. You have plenty of brancells to spare. or It's a beautiful day. What are you doing outside? Watch TV) which was a disastrous failure. For HBO's then tiny subscription base, upscale and confident that its consumption expressed its entitled and free "choice", this campaign might have worked, but for a major network still in the days of national airwaves broadcasters' dominance, aiming at a broad general audience, the tone was severely ill-judged.

Year after year, however, the posture steadily conquered television, in typically softened and veiled versions. From there, it was an obvious and easy step to the creation of programmes which absorbed this suggested audience irony and could be themselves perceived as critical or subversive, "quality" television vended as a traditional rich dramatic experience, but not spoilt by any pose of sincerity which would imply an insulting assumption of audience gullibility, and liberated from some difficult traditional requirements for dramatic writing by post-modern gimmickry, updated with irony and reflexivity. With these new programmes which collapse the relation pomosity established between the viewer and re-runs of Donna Reed, the audience participates in the programme's own sensibility with a newly justified reversion to passivity and endorsement. Mad Men is the most complete case, and unsurprisingly is set in the period which was the contemporary setting for many of the programmes on Nick at Night for which the suggestion of subversive, ironic consumption was originated by Harvard Lampoon veterans.



Those tasked with puffing the ailing cop-soap-blaxpolitation series The Wire decided - how very cannily would become evident after a couple of seasons - to claim for their show qualities which specifically academic, intellectual fans of The Sopranos (that programme it was trying in a sense to supply the "black" version of) - qualities defining serious dramatic art with lofty aims, socially responsible and intellectually nutritious rather than violent sensational junk - had attributed to HBO's first series to get a network sized audience. The influential culture critic and celebrated 2nd wave radfem Ellen Willis was the one to provide inspiration for the elements of The Wire's future branding for the newly active niche of culture industry and academic viewers who considered themselves critically sophisticated connoisseurs of an underappreciated art form they would rescue from its status as unjustly despised:

The richest and most compelling piece of television--no, of popular culture--that I've encountered in the past twenty years is a meditation on the nature of morality, the possibility of redemption and the legacy of Freud.

To be sure, The Sopranos is much else as well. For two years (the third season began March 4) David Chase's HBO series has served up a hybrid genre of post-Godfather decline-of-the-mob movie and soap opera, with plenty of sex, violence, domestic melodrama and comic irony; a portrait of a suburban landscape that does for northern New Jersey what film noir did for Los Angeles, with soundtrack to match; a deft depiction of class and cultural relations among various subgroups and generations of Italian-Americans; a gloss on the manners and mores of the fin-de-siècle American middle-class family; and perfect-pitch acting, especially by James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano; Edie Falco as his complicated wife, Carmela; Lorraine Bracco as Dr. Melfi; and the late Nancy Marchand as the Sopranos' terrifying matriarch, Livia.

Cumulatively, these episodes have the feel of an as yet unfinished nineteenth-century novel. While the sheer entertainment and suspense of the plot twists are reminiscent of Dickens and his early serials, the underlying themes evoke George Eliot: The world of Tony Soprano is a kind of postmodern Middlemarch, whose inhabitants' moral and spiritual development (or devolution) unfolds within and against the norms of a parochial social milieu.This era being what it is, however, the Sopranos' milieu has porous boundaries, and the norms that govern it are a moving target. In one scene, the family is in mid-breakfast when Tony and Carmela's teenage daughter, Meadow, apropos a recent scandal brought on by a high school classmate's affair with her soccer coach, declaims about the importance of talking openly about sex. Yes, Tony agrees, but not during breakfast. "Dad, this is the 1990s," Meadow protests. "Outside it may be the 1990s," Tony retorts, "but in this house it's 1954." It's wishful thinking, and Tony knows it.

Ellen Willis, Our Mobsters, Ourselves, The Nation, 2001

The first thing one notices is that Ellen Willis has lost her mind. At least, she has lost the critical capacities which once operated in, or were operated by, her mind alongside the functioning of sensual and aesthetic responsiveness. Here we see an unmistakable case of rationalisation, but one so frantic and excessive it's laughable. Or ought to be. A once sharp and curious culture critic devotes herself now to concocting a truly risibly exaggerated encomium to her favourite show, probably to alleviate some anxiety about the intensity of her own attachment to it. In the period known as the post-modern, consensus became difficult and even suspect with regard to the evaluation of aesthetic and entertainment products. But it is worth asserting the continued obviousness and intelligibility of aspects of discourse and symbolic artifacts. And it is obvious, not contestable, that The Sopranos is not particularly like Middlemarch, and that it is rather very much like other, earlier television, all the television Willis once pretended not to be watching and therefore must not now seem to recall. Tony Soprano declaring it 1954 at his table is a strikingly exact echo of Archie Bunker at his. The patriarch champion of Tradition, disconcerted by modernity and its disruption of hierarchies and order, is a beloved topos of popular culture - before Archie Bunker and George Jefferson's celebrated comic versions there were dozens upon dozens, in varying styles and temperaments, notably Yul Brenner's Siamese King, Topol's Shtetl milkman, and yes, of course, most relevant here, Don Corleone who resists 'the future' and its messenger the narcotics trafficking Virgil Solozzo - but it is not found in Middlemarch.



Where the culture critic who remained critical and serious should sense the obligation to interpret the representations and symbolic material, as for example the change from All in the Family to The Sopranos involving the erasure of any unpleasant acknowledgements of the discomfort of real class stresses (working for a living), Willis abdicates or evades, shields her eyes from signification which might distress a fanatic devotee of the programme invested in its virtue as a confirmation of the innate instinctive virtue of her tastes. Instead of interpreting the programme's content, in context of history, genre, tradition, medium, instituion, etc, Willis, spaniel-like, sniffs out and feasts on the bits of bloody meat that are the pomo references (to Freud, for example, or Queer Theory or Billy Budd), these mere flashes that, as Jameson explained, create an illusion of content without the substance, empty passing mentions scattered through the otherwise formulaic dialogue and scenes precisely to distract, delight and defang the submissive critic who has lost her mind.

Tony Soprano is the entrepreneurial Archie Bunker, criminalised for glamour and fashionable intertextuality, but also for ideology's sake, for television's purpose is to disguise the reality of social life in the guise of exposing it, and among the things television must, and the Sopranos does expertly, conceal is the distance between the mythic condition of the small businessman/entrepreneur in the US and the real situation.

But putting Willis' particular case of commodity fanaticism and the details of the individual commodity which has provoked it aside for the moment, clearly much had changed in both mainstream and progressive dissident attitudes toward corporate mass culture since the days (beginning in the 70s) when feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist critics, radical and reformist, began seriously (in the academy and in a growing field of hip journalism) to look at both popular culture and mass culture commodities in search of an understanding of the symbolic and ideological aspects of class rule and the reproduction of social relations of inequality, opression and exploitation. At some point - not so long ago, perhaps 1999 - a rival function of cultural criticism, disguised as the perfection of this critical, emancipatory project, arose, and now we see that the dominant production, in both academia and hip journalism, is purely promotional, a branch of marketing. Culture critics who have lost their minds and succumbed to commodity fanaticism have reverted to the deployment, on culture commodities, not of the arsenal of critical practises developed by the radical criticism of the 70s, 80s and 90s, but of scarcely updated criteria of literary criticism and art appreciation established in the 19th century, from various formalisms to moral functionalism which in its current incarnation proposes to evaluate television programmes and movies almost solely with regard to the mass media's imagined social function of delivering democratic representation.

This latter position holds - reasonably enough - that one must welcome something like Queer Eye for a Straight Guy if only because the increased visibility of likeable gay men on television seems to reduce expressions of homophobia and violence against gay men. Not every claim of this kind is true, but the type of claim and its argument is undeniably valid, though not as a defence against full interpretation and critical exegesis of the culture commodity which has this positive trait. Unsurprisingly, however, the logic is rarely accepted thoroughly by those who deploy it, but is usually deployed opportunistically (a characteristic of commodity fanaticism is this opportunistic shuffling of criteria, axioms and critical practises) - programmes are not open to criticism, usually, on the grounds that they fail to perform such positive functions. It is a merit but not after all an obligation for television "art". And worse, the criterion can, under the influence of passionate enough commodity fanaticism, be called upon in a distorted way to justify programmes and movies which actually demonstrably incite or aggravate prejudices, hatred and violence against people conforming to a type presented as such, on the grounds that the type derives from and reflects "reality" and that real people referred to by this fictional type (say, clockers) benefit from being visible on television even if presented as terrifying, heartless, dangerous and needing to be incarcerated or annihilated, so best to be down with from the safety of the other side of the fictional bullet proof flat screen of the tv.

HOPE II: Can Disaster Capitalists Save Haiti?

Can low-paying garment industry save Haiti?

By JONATHAN M. KATZ, Associated Press Writer – Sun Feb 21, 5:24 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Jordanie Pinquie Rebeca leans forward and guides a piece of suit-jacket wool and its silky lining into a sewing machine, where — bat! bat! bat! — they're bound together to be hemmed.

If she does this for eight hours, she will earn $3.09. Her boss will ship the pinstriped suit she helped make to the United States, tariff-free. There a shopper will buy it from JoS. A. Bank Clothiers for $550.

In the quest to rebuild Haiti, the international community and business leaders are dusting off a pre-quake plan to expand its low-wage garment assembly industry as a linchpin of recovery. President Barack Obama's administration is on board, encouraging U.S. retailers to obtain from Haiti at least 1 percent of the clothes they sell.

But will that save a reeling country whose economy must be built from scratch?

Few Haitians have steady incomes, and unemployment is unmeasurable; before the quake it was estimated at between 60 and 80 percent. In cities, most scrape by selling in the streets, doing odd jobs or relying on remittances from abroad that make up a quarter of Haiti's $7 billion gross domestic product.

Garments are central to the economic growth plan commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last year, a 19-page report written by Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier and promoted by former President Bill Clinton as special envoy to the impoverished nation.

They say the sector could quickly produce hundreds of thousands of jobs thanks chiefly to two things: an existing preferential trade deal with the nearby United States, and cheap Haitian labor.

The deal is the Haiti Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, or "HOPE II." Passed by the U.S. Congress in 2008, it lets Haiti export textiles duty-free to the U.S. for a decade. Last year, $513 million worth of Haitian-made apparel, the bulk of exports, was shipped with labels including Hanes and New Balance. Factory profit margins average about 22 percent, according to Washington-based Nathan Associates Inc.

The cheap labor is Jordanie Pinquie Rebeca, and others like her.

During a recent shift at the South Korean-owned factory where she works six days a week, employees softly sang a Creole hymn beneath the hot fluorescent lights: "Lord, take my hand. Bring me through."

It was HOPE II that persuaded the bosses to move their Dominican plant and rename it DKDR Haiti SA. Nearly all the 1,200 people still working there after the quake make the new "outsourcing" minimum wage of 125 gourdes a day, about $3.09 — approximately the same as the minimum wage in 1984 and worth less than half its previous purchasing power.

Pay was even lower last year when lawmakers raised the country's minimum from $1.72 a day to almost $5 in response to protests. But owners complained, and President Rene Preval refused to enact the law. A compromise allowed non-garment workers to receive the higher minimum, but stuck factory workers with the "outsourcing" wage.

DKDR complied but cut production-based incentives, according to general manager Chun Ho Lee. Producing 600 pieces in a day used to yield a worker a bonus of $2.47. Now it's worth $1.23.

Rebeca, though stylish in her paperboy hat and spaghetti-strap dress, sleeps on the street and barely eats. With a day's pay she can buy a cupful of rice and transport via group taxi, and pay down debt on her now-destroyed apartment. Anything left over goes to cell phone minutes to call her boyfriend, who was evacuated to the Dominican Republic with a leg fracture sustained in the quake, or her 4-year-old son, Mike, whom she sent to live with relatives in the countryside.

Meanwhile, holding that low-paying job makes it tough to get handouts from relief workers.

"The foreigners are giving people food outside, but I can't get anything. I have to stay here working all day," she said.

All sides agree that garment-industry wages are too low to feed, clothe and house workers and their families. Even factory owners acknowledge that reality — though they deny running sweatshops and say the businesses have an important role.

"It's not enough to make a decent living, but it's the first step" toward economic recovery, said George Sassine, president of the Association of Industries of Haiti.

Others said relying too much on clothing assembly is risky.

"The garment sector is creating trouble for the economy because of social tensions and the low wages," said prominent Haitian economist Kesner Pharel.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, himself an economist, said that while the garment industry shouldn't be ignored, increased investment should be sought in more enduring sectors such as agriculture and tourism.

Still others fear a return to darker times: Under the brutal Duvalier dictatorships that ended in the mid-1980s, a small elite reaped the profits from facilities that assembled garments, baseballs and toys for sale in the U.S.

Last month's earthquake cracked the metal-roofed DKDR building's walls and prompted a costly, two-week shutdown. Another company's factory, west of the capital in Carrefour, collapsed entirely, killing at least 300 workers.

But garment industry production has already rebounded to 80 or 90 percent of capacity, and the boosters' enthusiasm is unshaken.

In a recent opinion piece published in The New York Times, Collier likened the moment to the opening of the American West: "The earthquake could usher in such a boom in Haiti."

There are currently 25,000 garment jobs, three-quarters less than there were 20 years ago. Most are in the same industrial park where DKDR's plant is located. Owners want to expand to two new sites outside Port-au-Prince in line with government wishes to reduce pressure in the debris-choked capital where most of the 200,000 quake victims died.

At an October investors conference, Clinton laid out a vision for Haiti's economy in which garments play a central role: "The rich will get richer, but there will be a much, much bigger middle class, with poor people pouring into it at a rapid rate."

For Haitians like Rebeca, who is unable to find other work, the chances of making that leap seem dim.

"We're just fighting to survive," she said, sewing.

Inappropriate for some users

"This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community.
To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by signing in or signing up."

Tee-hee Party

Americans Against Pubes

"So why are blood, destruction, poverty, hunger and orphans good for the Jewish State? "

The following article appeared in Maariv, Israel’s second most popular newspaper, and was written by Tamir Haas who identifies himself as a "publicist" and "media consultant." It was translated into English by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel.

At a time when our country is under media attack on the basis of harsh and anti-Semitic reports, and we are forced to contend with terrorists who have assumed the winning image of victims of war, one could say that the Haiti disaster is the best thing that could have happened to us. So why are blood, destruction, poverty, hunger and orphans good for the Jewish State? First of all because global attention has been drawn elsewhere and the international media have a more interesting story to cover. Second, because every disaster-area needs a hero, and right now we are it. I must admit that I would not be surprised if the image aspect of setting up a hospital in Haiti, as well as the IDF rescue efforts, was given greater weight than humanitarian considerations. If I am right, then finally, someone in the Knesset has done the right thing, deciding to take advantage of the opportunity to prove to the world how kindhearted and capable we are. And if the Foreign Ministry manages to make further use of the Israeli success stories in Haiti and market them to the world, all the better. We can only hope that none of our talented politicians is caught in front of a camera saying “We showed the world. We were really awesome in Haiti,” or something like that – a distinct possibility considering the recent mess with the Turks. Better to be modest.

Conspiracy Praxis: 'Lord' Hutton issues 70-year gag order on David Kelly murder evidence

Evening Standard, 24 Jan 2010:

70-year gag order on David Kelly death evidence

Evidence relating to the death of Government weapons inspector David Kelly is to be kept secret for 70 years, it has been reported.

A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported.

And a 30-year secrecy order has been placed on written records provided to Lord Hutton's inquiry which were not produced in evidence.

The Ministry of Justice said decisions on the evidence were a matter for Lord Hutton.

Headline edited for typos:

Jimmy 'The Duke' Hutton brags: "Yeah, we killed Kelly. Live with it, suckers."

From a Wiki summary of Lord Almighty's stellar career:

... On March 30, 1994 as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, he dismissed Private Lee Clegg's appeal against his controversial murder conviction. On March 21, 2002, Lord Hutton was one of four Law Lords to reject David Shayler's application to use a "public interest" defence as defined in section 1 of the Official Secrets Act at his trial.

Lord Hutton represented the Ministry of Defence at the inquest into the killing of civil rights marchers on "Bloody Sunday". Later, he publicly reprimanded Major Hubert O'Neil, the coroner presiding over the inquest, when the coroner accused the British Army of murder, as this contradicted the findings of the Widgery Tribunal.[1]

The Rt. Hon. The Lord Hutton, QC, PC

Lord Hutton also came to public attention in 1999 during the extradition proceedings of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet had been arrested in London on torture allegations by request of a Spanish judge. Five Law Lords, the UK's highest court, decided by a 3-2 majority that Pinochet was to be extradited to Spain. The verdict was then overturned by a panel of seven Law Lords, including Lord Hutton[2] on the grounds that Lord Hoffmann, one of the five Law Lords, had links to human rights group Amnesty International which had campaigned for Pinochet's extradition.

In 1978 he defended Britain in the European Court of Human Rights when it was found guilty of torturing internees without trial. He sentenced 10 men to 1,001 years in prison on the word of 'supergrass' informer Robert Quigley who was granted immunity in 1984.

Lord Hutton was appointed by the Blair government to chair the inquiry on the circumstances surrounding the death of the British scientist Dr David Kelly at the heart of the September Dossier controversy. ...

The road to almightiness (short version):

Styles

* Mr Brian Hutton (1931–1970)
* Mr Brian Hutton QC (1970–1979)
* Sir Brian Hutton QC (1979–1988)
* The Rt. Hon. Sir Brian Hutton QC (1988–1997)
* The Rt. Hon. The Lord Hutton QC PC (1997–)

I wonder what he did to deserve all those honours.

Chomsky a.o.

letter

Maybe Those Mayans Were Right

Il presidente Nobel per la pace e il suo segretario di Stato parlano chiaro: "Any attack on America - from Pentagon hackings and industrial espionage to forced technology transfer and mercantilist weapons like currency manipulation - represents an act of aggression and will not be tolerated" [SGA].

China's war on the U.S. economy.[sic sic sic]

Andy Kershaw: "Stop treating these people like savages."

Why does it take a music broadcaster to speak such plain truths and to show some elementary human decency? It's clear that Kershaw actually knows Haiti. So why hasn't the BBC got him reporting from there, instead of the truly execrable Matt Frei?

Haitians have faced their tragedy with dignity and stoicism – not that you would know it from the way the disaster has been reported

[...]

This assumption that there is a security threat has gone completely unchallenged by an army of foreign press, equally unfamiliar with Haiti and the character of the Haitians. Indeed, TV reporters particularly, having exhausted the televisual possibilities of rubble, have been talking up "security", "unrest" and "violence" when all available evidence would indicate anything but.

Astonishingly, among these TV dramatists, I am sorry to say, is the BBC's Matt Frei. An incongruously ample figure around Port-au-Prince, Frei has been working himself up all week into what is now a state of near hysteria about "security" and the almost non-existent "violence".

Over the weekend we saw him anticipating an outbreak of unrest, standing before a crowd of thousands of hungry, humiliated Haitians as they waited, patiently and quietly, to be given rations by UN soldiers. Their dignity and stoicism seemed to escape Frei who was, in any case, looking away from them while ranting about the inevitability of looming bloodshed – conspicuously unlikely, judging from the evidence of his own report. (When he is not almost tumescent about violence, Frei speculates and pontificates pompously to camera, or booms at earthquake victims in French. Most Haitians don't speak French. They speak Creole).

Frei's reluctance to recognise the amazing self-control of these desperate people, and instead to amplify the hysteria about violence for which he has scant evidence, has brought him at times worryingly close to calling the Haitians savages.

Disgracefully, on Monday's Newsnight, Frei had the audacity – and again, anything but the evidence – to declare: "The dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten." [...]

Trending: Slow Genocide

PressTV:

Israel has opened the floodgates of one of its dams in the eastern part of the Gaza Strip, flooding Palestinian houses and causing severe damage.

The Israeli authorities opened the dam's floodgates without any prior warning or coordination with local authorities in Gaza, stunning the residents of the area, the Press TV correspondent in Gaza reported late on Monday.


There has been heavy rain in the region over the past 24 hours. It seems the Israeli authorities could not handle the huge amount of rainwater and decided to open the floodgates without prior warning.

Because Gaza is located in a low-lying area and the elevation decreases on the way to the Mediterranean Sea, water gushed into the area, flooding two Palestinian villages and displacing a hundred Gazan families.

The locals say Israel intentionally caused the floods, the Press TV correspondent said.
The waters from the dam, called the Valley of Gaza, flooded houses in Johr al-Deek village, which is southeast of Gaza City, and Nusirat in the eastern part of the territory, where the Al-Nusirat refugee camp is also located.

The Valley of Gaza is about 8 kilometers long. It starts on the eastern Gaza border with Israel and ends in the Mediterranean.

The houses of many Palestinians have been flooded and a number of people are trapped inside or on their roofs, while many have also gone missing, the Press TV correspondent said.

"no UN. no police. no US marines and no violence or chaos or anything. just people helping each other."

Sent on January 17, 2010, 3:34AM by Dr. Evan Lyon of PIH

can't get through much now but beyond the horror, one very striking reality is that things are totally peaceful. we circulated in PAP in the middle of everything until just now. everywhere. no UN. no police. no US marines and no violence or chaos or anything. just people helping each other. drove past the main central park in PAP where at least 50K people must be sleeping and it was almost silent.

people cooking, talking, some singing and crying. people are kind, calm, generous to us and others. even with hundreds lying on the ground, open fractures, massive injuries of all kinds.

there are few dead bodies on the street. stench is everywhere. the city is changed forever.

we had a late day opportunity to evacuate 4 patients to the US. these may be the first haitian nationals allowed to leave for the US. but martinique has taken over 200. the DR has taken many many more. so we circulated in PAP looking for urgent cases. found hundreds but picked up the 4 to get out, hopefully to philadelphia. open fractures, gangrene, one 4 year old boy with a leg broken in 3 places, a minor head wound, and now 4 days of sleeping outside with IV fluid and maybe some pain meds. probably none.

at the airport, we drove onto the tarmac to meet the air ambulance. surrounded by marines and UN, massive weapons. a humvee with a gunner turret at the top drove by. the noise from the large transport planes was deafening. us citizens and haitian american citizens leaving by the hundreds on US planes. and our small team of haitian and american docs evacuating a drop in the bucket. my ears are still ringing from the noise of it all.

"More Like the Green Zone in Iraq Than A Humanitarian Aid Distribution Centre" - Al Jazeera in Haiti

Mass Manipulation

AT THE SCENE
Nick Davis, BBC News, Haiti
Relief is finally getting through to some in Port-au-Prince but it's a trickle - not a flood - of the aid needed by the people here.

The US navy is using helicopters to drop supplies of bottled water using soldiers on the ground to keep control. The UN also has distribution points handing out high-energy bars to the hungry.

But demand is outstripping supply - with food and water being taken faster than they can pass it out.

...

The BBC's Mark Doyle in Leogane, west of Port-au-Prince, described the scene as "apocalyptic", with thousands left homeless and almost every building destroyed.

But in a sign of hope, rescuers pulled a woman alive from rubble on Sunday. Twelve others were rescued on Saturday, the UN said.

There are also security concerns amid reports of looting.

The US Southern Command's Lt-Gen Ken Keen said that while streets were largely calm there had been an increase in violence.

"We are going to have to address the situation of security," he said, quoted by the Associated Press.

"We've had incidents of violence that impede our ability to support the government of Haiti and answer the challenges that this country faces."

AFP news agency quoted one of its photographers as saying police had opened fire on looters in a Port-au-Prince market, killing at least one of them.

It's really mass torture. Starve people, deprive them of water, then start to hand out sustenance in dribs and drabs, adding to the mental anguish, hoping people will fight over things, rather than simply providing enough for everyone right away, as was more than possible. Meanwhile, the obedient media conjure images for the audience for the news elaborating on the Pentagon's key theme "air drops will start riots". Why would air drops of water and food and necessaries incite riots? It's nonsenseical. It's absurd. Unless the audience is prepared - which alas much of it is - with an image to supply to that caption: the image of animals, hungry wolves, starving, maddened, and one bone tossed among them. Of course the audience is envisioning beastly savages and something inadequate, one bone, one bottle, falling from the sky among them, not enough for all. Why? Because that is the law of nature - there is never enough for everyone. There simply can never be. That is how God made the world.

In fact, the least competent Oxfam employee could have directed an operation, with the resources available, which would have completely met at least the nutritional needs of the entire population certainly within 12 hours. Housing, medical and rescue needs of course are more difficult after such a catastrophe, but there was no reason for anyone in Haiti to be hungry and thirsty for even 24 hours. These are tactics of population control and manipulation, by which the occupying power aims to break the will, spirit and solidarity of the population.

Palast

Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama? (...) In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.

CARICOM Refused Entry Into Haiti by US Occupation Forces

THE CARIBBEAN Community's emergency aid mission to Haiti, comprising Heads of Government and leading technical officials, failed to secure permission Friday to land at that devasted country's aiport, now under the control of the United States.

Consequently, the Caricom 'assessment mission', that was to determine priority humanitarian needs resulting from the mind-boggling earthquake disaster of Haiti last Tuesday, had to travel back from Jamaica to their respective home destinations..

On Friday afternoon the US State Department confirmed signing two 'Memoranda of Understanding' with the Government of Haiti that made 'official that the United Stateas is in charge of all inbound and outbound flights and aid off-loading...'

Further, according to the agreements signed, US medical personnel 'now have the authority to operate on Haitian citizens and otherwise render medical assistance without having to wait for licences from Haiti's government...'

Prior to the US taking control of Haiti's airport, a batch of some 30 Cuban doctors had left Havana, following Wednesday's earthquake, to join more than 300 of their colleagues who have been working there for more than a year.

Last evening the frustration suffered by the Caricom mission to get landing permission was expected to be raised in a scheduled meeting at Jamaica's Norman Manley International Airport with US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton.

...

Asked whether the difficuties encountered by the Caricom mission may be related to reports that US authorities were not anxious to facilitate landing of aircraft from Cuba and Venezuela, Prime Minister Golding said he could 'only hope that there is no truth to such immature thinking in the face of the horrific scale of Haiti's tragedy...'

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=161583443

Ten Things the US Can and Should Do for Haiti

Ten Things the US Can and Should Do for Haiti
by Bill Quigley

One. Allow all Haitians in the US to work. The number one source of money for poor people in Haiti is the money sent from family and workers in the US back home. Haitians will continue to help themselves if given a chance. Haitians in the US will continue to help when the world community moves on to other problems.

Two. Do not allow US military in Haiti to point their guns at Haitians. Hungry Haitians are not the enemy. Decisions have already been made which will militarize the humanitarian relief - but do not allow the victims to be cast as criminals. Do not demonize the people.

Three. Give Haiti grants as help, not loans. Haiti does not need any more debt. Make sure that the relief given helps Haiti rebuild its public sector so the country can provide its own citizens with basic public services.

Four. Prioritize humanitarian aid to help women, children and the elderly. They are always moved to the back of the line. If they are moved to the back of the line, start at the back.

Five. President Obama can enact Temporary Protected Status for Haitians with the stroke of a pen. Do it. The US has already done it for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Sudan and Somalia. President Obama should do it on Martin Luther King Day.

Six. Respect Human Rights from Day One. The UN has enacted Guiding Principles for Internally Displaced People. Make them required reading for every official and non-governmental person and organization. Non governmental organizations like charities and international aid groups are extremely powerful in Haiti - they too must respect the human dignity and human rights of all people.

Seven. Apologize to the Haitian people everywhere for Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.

Eight. Release all Haitians in US jails who are not accused of any crimes. Thirty thousand people are facing deportations. No one will be deported to Haiti for years to come. Release them on Martin Luther King day.

Nine. Require that all the non-governmental organizations which raise money in the US be transparent about what they raise, where the money goes, and insist that they be legally accountable to the people of Haiti.

Ten. Treat all Haitians as we ourselves would want to be treated.

The Security Situation III

The US-run aid effort for Haiti is beginning to look chillingly similar to the criminally slow and disorganised US government support for New Orleans after it was devastated by hurricane Katrina in 2005.

...The rhetoric from Washington has been very different during these two disasters, but the outcome may be much the same. In both cases very little aid arrived at the time it was most needed and, in the case of Port-au-Prince, when people trapped under collapsed buildings were still alive. When foreign rescue teams with heavy lifting gear does come it will be too late. No wonder enraged Haitians are building roadblocks out of rocks and dead bodies.

In New Orleans and Port-au-Prince there is the same official terror of looting by local people, so the first outside help to arrive is in the shape of armed troops. The US currently has 3,500 soldiers, 2,200 marines and 300 medical personnel on their way to Haiti.

Patrick Cockburn in the Independent, which also reports:

Haitian authorities are rounding up troublemakers to prevent sporadic looting from turning into wider violence in the aftermath of the Caribbean nation's devastating earthquake, a senior security official said.

"There have been some attempts to make trouble. There are thieves coming out," Haitian police inspector-general Jean-Yonel Trecile told Reuters late yesterday.


"To make sure this does not spread, we have taken a number of these people off the streets. We have arrested about 50 people. I hope now we will stay peaceful."


Shooting has broken out several times in downtown Port-au-Prince, witnesses say, since Tuesday's earthquake, killing tens of thousands of people.


Some refugees, in makeshift camps all over the coastal capital, say thieves are preying on their meager possessions, while looters have been carrying goods out of a few shops.


But Haiti's feared gangs do not appear to be terrorizing the streets as they have in the past, locals say. The desperation of the homeless and hungry also has so far not turned into mass protests or ransackings, although many worry that may still happen.

The Security Situation II

WHERE IS THE AID IN HAITI?

By Roger Annis

January 15--Evidence of monstrous neglect of the Haitian people is mounting following the catastrophic earthquake three days ago. As life-saving medical supplies, food, water purification chemicals and vehicles pile up at the airport in Port au Prince, and as news networks report a massive international effort to deliver emergency aid, the people in the shattered city are wondering when they will see help.

BBC World Service reports that Haitian officials now fear the death toll could rise to 140,000. Three million people are homeless.

BBC reporter Andy Gallagher told an 8 pm (Pacific Time) broadcast tonight that he had traveled “extensively” in Port au Prince during the day and saw little sign of aid delivery. He said he was shown nothing but courtesy by the Haitians he encountered. Everywhere he went he was taken by residents to see what had happened to their neighbourhood, their homes and their lives. Then they asked, “Where is the help?”

“When the Rescue teams arrive,” Gallagher said, “they will be welcomed with open arms.”

CBC Radio One’s As It Happens broadcast an interview this evening with a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross. He said he spent the morning touring one of the hardest hit areas of the city (the district was not named), in the hills that rise from the flat plain on which sits historic Port au Prince. “In three hours, I didn’t see a single rescue team.”

The BBC report contrasts starkly with warnings of looting and violence that fill the airwaves of news channels such as CNN and are being voiced by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He was asked by media in Washington why relief supplies were not being delivered by air. He answered, “It seems to me that air drops will simply lead to riots.”

Gates says that “security” concerns are impeding the delivery of aid.

So the US military has gone in, got control of all the aid supplies, and is witholding them to maximise the death toll and suffering, and hoping to provoke something that will provide 5 seconds of film that looks like "unrest". The White House pursues this tactic unabashedly despite widespread awareness - this time, unlike in New Orleans or Iraq - of their chicanery, their pre-meditated machinations and their aims.

UPDATE

BBC Headline: Security fears stalk Haiti as quake survivors await aid:

There are mounting security concerns in Haiti's earthquake-hit capital as distribution problems continue to hamper getting aid to survivors.

Days after the quake devastated Port-au-Prince, killing tens of thousands, there are some reports of gangs preying on residents and looting.

Official say thousands of prisoners are unaccounted for after the main prison was destroyed.

Relief has been arriving, but little has moved beyond the jammed airport.

In a highlight box on the BBC website it says:

Andy Gallacher, Port-au-Prince


The airport here in Haiti has now become the central hub for the huge aid operation that is now finally under way.

The Haitian government has handed over control of the entire facility to the American military, who are here in large numbers.

US soldiers have started the tricky operation of controlling the massive amount of air traffic that is now flooding in, and aid agencies from across the globe are arriving minute by minute.

But the fact remains that much of the aid - tents, blankets and medical supplies - is still sitting on the runway in Port-Au-Prince.

Well you know how "institutions" are, not very competent...

A link directs to the story, with the headline Chaos in Haiti as aid arrives...

Despite concerns about security Haitians are showing incredible patience but it is now being severely tested as the hours pass.

Chaos, fear, stalking. Patience waning. Tricky operation of controlling massive air traffic? Someone wrote that with a straight face. The assumption is that the audience is brain damaged from the barrage of film and television and has no longer any sense of plausibility.

"The Security Situation"

Rebecca Solnit's book A Paradise Built In Hell is timely. It reminds us that people are always cooperative and altrustic in times of crisis, and that elites always "panic", defame, aggressively repress and terrorise the victims of calamities like this. As Naomi Klein's hit book also stressed memorably, elites are every day better prepared to exploit situations like the one created by the earthquake that rocked Haiti; think tanks are full of experts hired to do nothing but prepare plans to be put into effect when opportunity knocks. Those plans include the preparation of propaganda and pr tactics to be rolled out in the ways which plentiful research has proven most effective. PR, publicity and journalism professionals know what they are doing, how to telegraph, seed, introduce and develop a story, themes and motifs, how to spin, select and manipulate reality as it is processed into spectacle. They are proactive not re-active; they have experience; foreseeable events do not take them by surprise.

The propaganda is starting already to imply the criminality and dangerousness of the victim population,setting the stage for the wild scary stories to come with which the imperialists will jusify the escalated militarisation of Haiti. The US ruling class and its comprador Haitian elites will be looking to make a lot of militants and leftists disappear under cover of this mass death, and to fix the boot even more firmly down on a population with a long tradition of revolutionary commitment, courage and perseverance. Our credulity is being counted on.

Spirit Of The Times

The ferociously hostile comments in reply to Peter Hallward's obvious, uncontroversial, unobjectionable remarks on Haiti in the Guardian read like they were all excerpted from Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:

Zizz:

...we white Leftist men and women are free to leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-torturing guilt. Although Pascal Bruckner's critique of the contemporary Left often approaches the absurd, this does not prevent him from occasionally generating pertinent insights-one cannot but agree with him when he detects in European politically correct selfflagellation an inverted form of clinging to one's superiority. Whenever the West is attacked, its first reaction is not aggressive defense but selfprobing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world; Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are merely reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the White Man's Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man's guilt) : if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after-effect of colonization: they are merely imitating what their colonial masters used to do, and so on) :

We need our miserabilist cliches about Africa, Asia, Latin America, in order to confirm the cliche of a predatory, deadly West. Our noisy stigmatizations only serve to mask the wounded self-love: we no longer make the law. Other cultures know it, and they continue to culpabilize us only to escape our judgments on them.

…"The West is not detested for its real faults, but for its attempt to amend them, because it was one of the first to try to tear itself out of its own bestiality, inviting the rest of the world to follow it." The Western legacy is effectively not just that of (post)colonial imperialist domination, but also that of the self-critical examination of the violence and exploitation the West itself
brought to the Third World. The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past…

…Someone who cannot be accused of softness towards the colonizers is Frantz Fanon: his thoughts on the emancipatory power of violence are an embarrassment for many politically correct postcolonial theorists. However, as a perspicuous thinker trained in psychoanalysis, he also, back in 1952, provided the most poignant expression of the refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers:

I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. . . . My black skin is not a repository for specific values . . . . Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century? . . . I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors.

speedkermit
13 Jan 2010, 10:34PM

If we are serious about helping we need to stop ­trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.

It's the Guardian 'we' again - you don't get it in any other newspaper.

I'm sure many people have seen some of the horrific footage by now and want to contribute something in emergency aid, but is it not enough that they be allowed to do it out of compassion rather than guilt? Why does there always have to be some misery vulture gleefully finger-wagging and apportioning blame before the bodies are even cold? And what do the foreign policy decisions of Western governments in places such as Haiti have to do with their citizens anyway? Did Americans vote to keep them subjugated? Was it anyone's manifesto pledge? If they were all smiley Fairtrade farmers like on the back of your bag of coffee beans, would the earthquake never have happened? Isn't a force 7 quake pretty damn devastating wherever it hits? How will you contrive to make 'us' all responsible when Tokyo finally gets flattened?

isotope
14 Jan 2010, 7:28AM

Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Would you please refrain from voicing these ridiculous Chomsyite conspiracy theories, at least until this present crisis has been resolved?

I notice there's not a single mention of Papa Doc Duvalier or his equally charming son in your article... do you think that maybe, just maybe, having a pair of violent, corrupt dictatorial thugs in power for a period of 30 straight years might have something to do with Hati's current wretched state? Oh, of course you don't. According to the Marxist school of international relations, the problems suffered by the developing world are exclusively attributable to the wicked west- poor countries don't have any responsibility whatsoever for the state they're in.

Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster.

But not from famine caused by their economic system. That's why Castro had to introduce rationing of food after the USSR collapsed.

If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board.

Yes, by emulating the Cuban model, the Haitians may be able to advance from being the poorest country in the Western hemisphere to being like Cuba ... which is the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.

"We" didn't do the damage. The earthquake did. "We're" trying to provide aid. Even in the "black is white" world of the radical left, that should be obvious.

martinusher
13 Jan 2010, 8:43PM

There may be a problem with neoconservative economics but you have to ask yourself what we're getting for it. The people are oppressed and exploited, that's true. What's less clear is how we're doing it -- that's we, the ordinary people.

It would be more constructive to not try to pin blame on us, to try to make us feel guilty just because we have food and they don't. We should recognize that this is an extreme example of the kind of society unbridled capitalism brings. Its a total free-for-all economy with the government powerless and the people voiceless. The vision we're sold is of an idealistic state where everyone's free to be prosperous but Haiti is the reality.

Rustigjongens
13 Jan 2010, 8:52PM

This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history,

Total rubbish. In fact yesterday Mr Monboit was accusing the Spanish of the most brutal colonial exploitation using dubious figures in relation to the Spanish exploitation of South America.

I would also suggest that you look at the disgraceful behaviour of the Belgians in the Congo as the yardstick for brutal colonial exploitation.

As for Cuba, get a bloody grip man.

The only thing true about your article is that nearly all Western nations have blood on there hands due to colonial expansion policies, but the same is true of countries from Africa, Asia, Americas and the Middle East.

Tip: try for balance when attempting to use awful natural disasters as a smokescreen for attacking nations that you obviously do not like.

MimpleSigned
13 Jan 2010, 9:00PM

Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

You can't bring history into this. That was then, this is now. I stayed up half the night watching the news about this, and I'm not interested in what the US government of yesteryear did. I want to know what I can do to help now, even if it's a small and relatively insignificant contribution to a disaster fund.

I have to add, I was sickened at the way the Sky News presenter (the woman on at around 11pm last night) asked the most stupid and inane questions in her attempt to keep the audience engaged ("this is apocalyptic... what can be done for the people who are now screaming under the rubble?", or words to that effect).

Sometimes, I hate these so-called news channels. The BBC, to give them credit, presented the facts in a sober and measured manner.

TheShermanator
13 Jan 2010, 9:23PM

Haiti has been a basket case for years.

Nobody is exploiting Haiti because there is nothing in Haiti worth exploiting.

To blame 100% of Haiti's problems on outside ( i.e. US) interference, as Mr Hallword suggests, is a ridiculous oversimplication of the situation.

Having said that, Haitians desperately need foreign assistance following this tragedy. Let's all hope that corruption in Haiti does not result in this foreign aid being wasted.

Armedleftist
13 Jan 2010, 10:03PM

Haiti has been independent since 1804.
It's problems are not our fault.
Now, can we get them some emergency aid, please.

Gangoffour
13 Jan 2010, 9:31PM

I look forward to pasty white boy Hallward telling the 45,000 American citizens that live their, most vastly darker than he, that they are no longer needed or wanted.

Dysphoria

(CNN) -- James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle "Avatar" may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

On the fan forum site "Avatar Forums," a topic thread entitled "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible," has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope.


...A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie," Elequin posted.

Glen Ford

Chris Hedges

Iran

But with Congress acrimoniously debating the reform of healthcare, it is to Iran that one of America’s poorest communities is turning to try to resolve its own health crisis.

A US doctor and a development consultant visited Iran in May to study a primary healthcare system that has cut infant mortality by more than two-thirds since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

Then, in October, five top Iranian doctors, including a senior official at the health ministry in Tehran, were quietly brought to Mississippi to advise on how the system could be implemented there.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The social cost of this budget in terms of massive unemployment, a definite sharp rise of those in serious poverty, a likely strong rise in emigration, cuts in community services, and its certain effect of increasing housing repossessions will be enormous. Hundreds or even thousands of young unemployed people living in rent allowance accommodation will almost certainly be driven to homelessness.

The reason for this unthinkable harshness has been the government’s pandering to those in the high echelons of international financial markets and large business groups in Ireland.

The reaction from Goldman Sachs (PDF):

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist, set out five stages in the process of dealing with loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In the process of coping with its economic loss, Ireland appears to be somewhere between Stage 4 (depression) and Stage 5 (acceptance). By contrast, a number of other Euro-zone economies, in similar positions to Ireland, appear to be stuck somewhere between Stage 1 (denial) and Stage 2 (anger).

Open Letters from Birkbeck are Surely Imminent

Savonettes

In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.

"A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration," read the document, written by Meir to Israel's ambassador to Poland, Katriel Katz.

What Is This Thing....

Césaire

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies – loftily, lucidly, consistently – not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress – even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress – all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action.


And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally – that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul – they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.

Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire

(via)