Cornel West on the US President's war crimes

Cornel West, renowned Professor at Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary and social justice activist doesn't hold back on his assessment of US President Barrack Obama, calling him a 'war criminal' and 'tied to Wall St'.

Hard not to disagree with Cornel West's assessment.

Here is what Cornel West had to say about the US President on a recent speaking tour:

“(W)hen you look at the prison industrial complex and the new Jim Crow: levels of massive unemployment and the decrepit unemployment system, indecent housing; white supremacy is still operating in the US, even with a brilliant black face in a high place called the White House. He is a brilliant, charismatic black brother. He’s just too tied to Wall Street. And at this point he is a war criminal. You can't meet every Tuesday with a killer list and continually have drones drop bombs. You can do that once or twice and say, ‘I shouldn’t have done that, I’ve got to stop.’ But when you do it month in, month out, year in, year out—that’s a pattern of behavior. I think there is a chance of a snowball in hell that he will ever be tried, but I think he should be tried…These are war crimes. We suffer in this age from an indifference toward criminality and a callousness to catastrophe when it comes to poor and working people.”

Cornel West's comments should also be seen in light of Obama's embrace of 'never ending war'. The New York Times is reporting today that the Obama administration is seeking new powers to allow it to enrage in continuous wars against those it defines as its enemies without recourse to the Congress and Senate.


 In his recent comments, West added to his charge list the following:

“When he came in, he brought in Wall Street-friendly people—Tim Geithner, Larry Summers—and made it clear he had no intention of bailing out homeowners, supporting trade unions. And he hasn’t said a mumbling word about the institutions that have destroyed two generations of young black and brown youth, the new Jim Crow, the prison industrial complex. It’s not about race. It is about commitment to justice…Maybe he couldn't do that much. But at least tell the truth. I would rather have a white president fundamentally dedicated to eradicating poverty and enhancing the plight of working people than a black president tied to Wall Street and drones.”

The poetry of Anna Swir

In Czeslaw Milosz's International Poetry Anthology A Book of Luminous Things  I read the poetry of Polish poet Anna Swir (Anna Swirszcynska).

It is revelatory.

This is sophisticated and powerful poetry without the rhetorical embellishment that characterizes so much of what passes as poetry. This is poetry that is purposeful, direct, simple and with a profound reverence for life.

Anna Swir was a Polish poet (1909-1984) whose poetry was shaped by her experience in the anti-Nazi resistance in Poland and the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World War.

Swir was arrested and faced a Nazi firing squad during the war, waiting 60 minutes to be executed.  As well as writing poetry for Polish resistance underground publications, Swir also worked as a military nurse, caring for the wounded during the Warsaw Uprising.

Many of her poems record the experiences and ravages of war, although it was 30 years after the war before Swir would write and publish the poems about her wartime experience.

As one reviewer notes those wartime experiences changed her poetry profoundly, bringing a concern for the value of the simplicity and immediacy of life.

He Was Lucky

An old man
leaves the house, carrying books.
A German soldier snatches the books
and throws them in the mud.

The old man picks up the books, 
the soldier hits him in the face.
The old man falls,
the soldier kicks him and walks away.

The old man
lies in mud and blood.
Underneath he feels 
the books.

A Conversation through the Door
At five in the morning
I knock on his door.
I say through the door:
In the hospital at Sliska Street
your son, a soldier, is dying.

He half-opens the door,
does not remove the chain.
Behind him his wife
shakes.

I say: your son asks his mother
to come.
He says: the mother won't come.
Behind him the wife
shakes.

I say: the doctor allowed us
to give him wine.
He says: please wait.

He hands me a bottle through the door,
locks the door,
locks the door with a second key.

Behind the door his wife
begins to scream as if she were in labor.
(Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan)

TO SHOOT INTO THE EYES OF A MAN

He was fifteen,
the best student of Polish.
He ran at the enemy
with a pistol.

Then he saw the eyes of a man,
and should’ve fired into those eyes.
He hesitated.
He’s lying on the pavement.

They didn’t teach him
in Polish class
to shoot into the eyes of a man.

In her later works Swir writes explicitly about women's lives, women's bodies and their sexual lives. She writes with directness and intensity about the body as both an object of desire and of suffering. There are few poets who write as beautifully and directly about erotic love and the way desire shapes our lives.

I'll Open the Window

Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.
I hear the bones grind, I see
our two skeletons.

Now I am waiting
till you leave, till
the clatter of your shoes
is heard no more. Now, silence.

Tonight I am going to sleep alone
on the bedclothes of purity.
Aloneness
is the first hygienic measure.
Aloneness
will enlarge the walls of the room,
I will open the window
and the large, frosty air will enter,
healthy as tragedy.
Human thoughts will enter
and human concerns,
misfortune of others, saintliness of others.
They will converse softly and sternly.

Do not come anymore.
I am an animal
very rarely.

(Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan)

The First Madrigal

That night of love was pure
as an antique musical instrument
and the air around it.

Rich
as a ceremony of coronation.
It was fleshy as a belly of a woman in labor
and spiritual
as a number.

It was only a moment of life
and it wanted to be a conclusion drawn from life.
By dying
it wanted to comprehend the principle of the world.

That night of love
had ambitions.

Was Pablo Neruda murdered by the junta of General Pinochet?

"It is necessary to judge these hands stained
by the dead he killed with his terror;
the dead from under the beaten earth
are rising up like seeds of sorrow"
Pablo Neruda (Portrait of The Man)

The New Yorker on the strange irony that on the day Margaret Thatcher died Chilean authorities were exhuming the remains of legendary Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to determine whether he was murdered by the Chilean junta led by Margaret Thatcher's great friend and ally General Auguste Pinochet.

Neruda died just 12 days after the 11 September 1973 military coup that saw Pinochet seize power in a military coup that overthrew and murdered the democratically elected President of Chile Salvador Allende. Neruda had long been a political ally and supporter of Allende. Around 3,000 people were killed during  the brutal 17-year-long Pinochet dictatorship.

It was long thought that Neruda died of prostate cancer, but recent claims by his former driver have led to suspicion that the Pinochet regime poisoned Neruda to avoid the possibility that he would become a voice of protest and dissidence overseas.

Neruda's driver claims that while Neruda was making final preparations for exile in Mexico, doctors injected the poet with a substance, after which his health rapidly deteriorated.

 The New Yorker article continues:

"In a country where, for decades, history was buried, it is fitting for Chileans to dig up Neruda to find out the truth of what happened to him. In a sense, Neruda was Chile’s Lorca, the Spanish poet who was murdered in the first weeks of Francisco Franco’s Fascist coup of Spain in 1936, and whose blood has been a stain on the conscience of his country ever since.

Chile now has a chance to do the right thing by its poet. Neruda’s beach home, at Isla Negra, some miles from Santiago on the coast, is a lovely, modest villa on a rocky beach, with windows that look out to sea and the poet’s lyrical collection of old ship mermaids as decorations. He and his widow, Matilde Urrutia, were buried there, and that is where the investigators went to look for the truth of what happened. In the end, even if Neruda died of cancer, as was said at the time, his exhumation is an opportunity to reinforce the message to authoritarians everywhere that a poet’s words will always outlast theirs, and the blind praise of their powerful friends"

The British Guardian has this story about why Neruda was such a significant political figure at the time and why he was such a threat to the Chilean junta led by General Pinochet. At the time of his death, just two weeks after the coup that overthrow Chilean President Salvador Allende, Neruda was planning political exile in Mexico where he intended to denounce and campaign against the military regime.

 The Guardian writes:

That made the poet dangerous to some very powerful people, who had shown they would stop at nothing to defend their interests. They had ousted his friend, Salvador Allende, from the presidency less than a fortnight earlier. Allende died in a coup that was as much about silencing dissident voices as bringing about regime change. Another voice, that of popular singer Víctor Jara, was cut off four days later. Neruda remained. He was perhaps the loudest. His face certainly the most recognisable worldwide. He was too dangerous.

Members of the junta are on record expressing the view on the morning of September 22 that if Neruda flew into exile, his plane would fall into the sea. In the afternoon, radio stations under military control announced the poet would probably die in the next few hours, at a time when he was still awake in the hospital. The following day he was dead.

That historical mystery alone explains why his body was exhumed this week.

Songs of Renown: Mark Knopfler Kingdom of Gold

The song Kingdom of Gold appears on Mark Knopfler's seventh solo album, the double CD set titled Privateering (released in 2012).

Knopfler's song is in the great tradition of a Celtic ballad; the beauty of the melody and Celtic instrumentation is contrasted with the violence and destruction portrayed in the lyrics.

Despite its haunting Celtic acoustic instrumentation- guitar, fiddle, pipe, drone, accordion, and whistle- Kingdom of Gold is a searing indictment of the masters of corporate capitalism.

Knopfler calls them 'the high priests of money, the 'gods of the bought and sold' and 'the turbulent raiders' who in the name of profit and power plunder and destroy from their towers on high.

Knopfler's lyrics use the analogy of the weaponry of earlier times- packs of dogs and ravens, axes, arrows, looting and burning camps- to evoke the terror and devastation wreaked by these lords of corporate capitalism. As Knopfler sees it these 'gods of the bought and sold' deploy new symbols, new weaponry- what he calls 'ribbons of numbers, circle and spin on their mystical scroll'.

But the destruction they leave in their wake is the central narrative that underpins Knopfler's remarkable song, which for me is the best track on what is arguably his best solo album.

Kingdom of Gold
By Mark Knopfler

The high priest of money looks down on the river
The dawn coming up on his kingdom of gold
When the rim of the sun sends an arrow of silver
He prays to the gods of the bought and the sold
He turns to his symbols, his ribbons of numbers
They circle and spin on their mystical scroll
He looks for a sign while the city still slumbers
And the ribbons and the river forever unroll

In his kingdom of gold, his kingdom of gold
Kingdom of gold, his kingdom of gold
Kingdom of gold

On the horizon an enemy haven
Sends traces of smoke high up into the sky
A pack of dog jackals and a rabble of ravens
Who'll come for his fortress, his castle on high

In his kingdom of gold, kingdom of gold
Kingdom of gold, his kingdom of gold
Kingdom of gold
His axes and armour will conquer these devils

The turbulent raiders will falter and fall
Their leaders be taken, their camps burned and levelled
They'll hang in the wind from his citadel walls
In his kingdom of gold, kingdom of gold
Kingdom of gold, kingdom of gold
Kingdom of gold

The real class war: Gillard Government and school funding reforms

image courtesy of The Age

Over the weekend the Labor Gillard Government announced its much heralded school education funding reforms. Prime Minister Gillard claimed that the plan would mean “better resourcing and better schools” resulting in “a stronger, smarter and fairer Australia for the future.

As Richard Teese in the Age and David Zyngier in The Conversation point out the plan simply entrenches and intensifies the growing divide between public schools and private independent schools.

In this country over the last four decades there has been an exponential growth in government funding going to middle class and wealthy private schools. This has been at at the expense of impoverished and disadvantaged public schools.

David Zyngier writes:

Gillard’s announcement of new school spending for primary school students of A$9,271 and for secondary students is A$12,193 is to be welcomed, but needs to be seen in the context of where the money both comes from and where it will go.

Because of her previous commitments that no school will lose a dollar in funding many over-resourced independent and Catholic schools will continue to maintain their advantage at the expense of poorer resourced public schools. At the same time public schools in middle class suburbs also stand to benefit.

As Teese and Zyngier point out the Gillard Plan entrenches disadvantage because it gives significant funding increases to private and independent schools despite 1000 of those schools already being over-funded.

 Richard Teese writes in the Melbourne Age:

Non-government schools will emerge as the big winners from the Council of Australian Governments meeting on national funding reform, to be held in Canberra on April 19. Which is ironic, seeing that the greatest need is in the public system. Few schools serving the poorest communities in Australia are non-government. About 80 per cent of all disadvantaged children attend government schools. Yet despite this, state and federal governments are set to give all non-government schools real increases in funds over the next three, and possibly six years. This includes the 1000 schools currently overfunded – schools that are "funding maintained".

The Gillard government has made private and Catholic schools a political priority. As most public funding for these schools comes from the Commonwealth, getting them on side will enable Canberra to pressure the states to boost funding for government schools – by at least 3 per cent.

Even if the states agree, this will not end the large funding gap between public and private. The federal government has had the chance to intervene massively in the funding of government schools, but it will have to finance its political debt with non-government schools through more public debt. It will have little to spare for government schools. These have been thrown back on the fiscal mercies of state governments.

We risk emerging from the most thorough review of national school funding with an architecture of advantage and disadvantage that is even stronger than when we began.

This owes much to the states, not just Canberra. They have used states’ rights to advantage non-government schooling, while cutting funds to government schools. The Australian constitution has become a wall behind which conservative ministers roam freely in their ideological dreaming. The funding review promised to pull down jurisdictional walls and to put children, not governments, first. Instead, taxpayers must find ever more money for private schools and for non-government systems to carve out ever more space in a feudal delusion that ignores one basic fact. Public schools are the schools of our nation. Their needs must not come second to private advantage or sectional interest.

Mark Mazetti on Obama and America's new war

The America journalist Mark Mazetti has published an important new book The Way of the Knife that documents how US President Obama has presided over a "third war", after Iraq and Afghanistan, that has resulted in an unprecedented expansion of the power of the CIA. Mazetti describes how the CIA under Obama has been transformed into a man hunting and killing machine.

This is the drone war, targeted killing and assassinations that Mazetti describes in this article in the New York Times as:

 "......a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war"

Mazetti describes how the CIA has become consumed by drone warfare which is now the laboratory for new ways of killing.

Mazetti tells how covert drone warfare and targeted killings have been driven from the Obama White House by the President and his CIA Director John Brennan, and how it has transformed the CIA into a powerful para- military organization.

Mazetti also documents the increasing use by the CIA of private contractors and private corporations to carry out these targeted killings.

A long interview with Mark Mazetti is here

Remembering Paul Robeson

Last Tuesday (April 9th) was Paul Robeson's birthday. Robeson was born in 1898 and died in 1975, aged 77.

There is a nice piece here about the restoration and re-dedication of a huge mural of Robeson in Philadelphia.

The Mural Arts Program today rededicated a mural of Paul Robeson on his 115th birthday, while students from Robeson High School in West Philadelphia celebrated a victory inspired by the civil rights leader.
 
At nearly four stories tall, the mural of Robeson faces west on Chestnut Street near 45th, just across the street from the high school that bears his name.

Born in 1898 in Princeton, NJ, the scholar, activist, athlete, and entertainer was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and died in seclusion in Philadelphia, at age 77.

“He had the nerve to try to get out and stop lynchings during the Truman administration,” notes Frances Aulston, who runs the Paul Robeson House at 50th and Chestnut Streets.   “He walked around the White House saying, ‘This isn’t supposed to happen,’ and tried to put a stop to it.”

“He fought against poll taxes that were common during that time, and worked hard to make sure people had the right to vote,” Aulston says.  “But because he had the courage and conviction to speak out, he was persecuted greatly in this country.”

“When we saw this mural starting to fade, we knew we had to fix it,” says Jane Golden, executive director of the Mural Arts Program. “Because he meant so much to the world, we knew his image shouldn’t fade. By redoing this mural, by preserving it, it lives on for another 20 years as a beacon of inspiration.”

“He’s always an individual that influences me in my life,” said Totiana Myers, a sophomore at Robeson High.

Last December, the Philadelphia School District recommended that the school be closed. Myers battled on the front lines, along with the rest of the school’s 200-plus students, and last month the SRC announced that Robeson would be spared.

“We fought hard and our fighting wasn’t in vain,” says Myers. And, she notes, Robeson stands tall, looking down on West Philadelphia, almost as a guard, smiling down.“I think this was the best birthday present we could have given him,” she says, looking up at the mural.

For more info on the Paul Robeson mural or the Paul Robeson House, go to muralarts.org and paulrobesonhouse.org.

Simon Ortiz: Busted Indians, Busted Lives

Simon Ortiz is a native American poet and writer of short fiction and non fiction. He is considered one of the most influential Native Indian American poets and writers. Ortiz is from the Acoma Pueblo Indian  tribe from New Mexico. He teaches at the University of Toronto.

Busted Boy
by Simon J. Ortiz
 

He couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old,

likely even fifteen. Skinny black teenager, loose sweater.

When I got on Bus #6 at Prince and 1st Avenue,

he got on too and took a seat across from me.

A kid I didn’t notice too much because two older guys,

street pros reeking with wine, started talking to me.

They were going to California, get their welfare checks,

then come back to Arizona in time for food stamps.

When the bus pulled into Ronstadt Transit Center,

the kid was the last to get off the bus right behind me.

I started to cross the street to wait for Bus #8

when two burly men, one in a neat leather jacket

and the other in a sweat shirt, both cool yet stern,

smoothly grabbed the kid and backed him against

a streetlight pole and quickly cuffed him to the pole.

Plastic handcuffs. Practiced manner. Efficiently done.

Along with another Indian, I watch what’s happening.

Nobody seems to notice or they don’t really want to see.

Everything is quiet and normal, nothing’s disturbed.

The other Indian and I exchange glances, nod, turn away.

Busted boy. Busted Indians. Busted lives. Busted again.

I look around for the street guys going to California.

But they’re already gone, headed for the railroad tracks.

I’m new in Tucson but I’m not a stranger to this scene.

Waiting for the bus, I don’t look around for plainclothes.

I know they’re there, in this America, waiting. There; here.

Waiting for busted boys, busted Indians, busted lives.

Simon Ortiz, “Busted Boy” from Out There Somewhere. Copyright © 2002 by Simon Ortiz. 

Michael Breen on Ben Quilty and the collateral damage of Australia's wars

My friend and colleague Michael Breen is the regional NSW correspondent for this blog. Michael lives in the NSW Southern Highlands village of Robertson, a town of 1200 people with some high profile residents, including artists, actors and sporting identities.

After many years as a Jesuit teacher, educator, leader and organizational consultant in Australia and overseas, Michael lived in Western Australia for many years where he established one of WA's leading small management consultancies. I was fortunate to work with and learn from Michael in the early years of my consultancy career.

Michael retired to the Canberra region and now lives in Robertson in the NSW Southern Highlands where he continues to write and think about contemporary issues and educates and agitates about social and political issues.

Michael is is regular contributor to this blog. One of his pieces about the Australian Aboriginal outlaw Jimmy Governor is among the ten most read pieces on the blog. He has also written poetry, a piece on the search for Malcom Naden in regional NSW, book reviews, articles on the Sydney Writers Festival, as well as providing  photos from his travels in Thailand and Myanmar.

One of the other residents of Robertson is the artist Ben Quilty who has recently returned from Afghanistan where he was the Australian War Memorial's "official" artist. 

After attending an exhibition of Quilty's "war work", Michael wrote this moving and compelling reflection on the significance of Quiltys work.  Other reviews of Quilty's work are here, here and here.

Review of the Ben Quilty Exhibition After Afghanistan at National Art Gallery School Darlinghurst 
by Michael Breen

“So often artists are the ones who go into difficult situations. Doctors and others go into difficult situations in communities, too, but they don’t make representations of these situations that transform how people see the world. All I am saying is that I want artists to feel they could take leadership in the world, not that their work will simply be relegated to what we call ‘the art world’” 
Carol Becker, Dean, Columbia University School of Arts.

The Old Darlinghurst Gaol is a fitting sandstone crucible to contain Ben Quilty’s “After Afghanistan” exhibition. As commissioned War Artist, Quilty has delivered the ADF and the Australian public more and less than was bargained for. If truth is the first casualty of war, this is not the usual jingoistic propaganda. On the contrary this exhibition is an expressionistic audit of Australia’s presence in a country which historically has conquered its invaders.

These works capture the community costs of collateral damage to the men and women and their families and Australian society endured for their service. They are precious national documents about what war does. Unlike an inanimate camera a war artist’s mind and soul are consumed in capturing and recording scenes from which most of us are protected. These works make demands on the viewer. And are the demands worth the discomfort?

How does he do it?
Quilty’s media vary but his most distinctive work is akin to German Expressionism between World War 1 and World War 11. I see it in the tradition of the Brucker (Bridge) School of Schmidt Rottulf, Emile Nolde and Oska Kokoschke. “The Bridge” was a to be a link between the past of war and a hoped for brighter future.

Quilty asked his subjects to choose a pose which depicted how they felt and thought. All he asked was their nakedness, so their bodily gestures would reflect their inner selves. He treats the bodies as an expressionist. Anatomical detail is not as important as what is below the skin. He enacts Leonardo’s admonition: “A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intentions of his soul, the former is easy, the latter hard, because he has to represent it by the attitudes and movements of the limbs. Represent your figures in such action as may be fitted to express what purpose is in their minds; otherwise your art will not be good”.

As Leonardo suggests Quilty treats the bodies so that they express all this stuff. His thick painterly strokes and pallet knife sculpt below the skin and bone. But when it comes to the faces, they are realistic and as plausible as any face wearing the experiences which carved the features. The emotions ooze off the canvas with the paint. This is the man who painted iconic Australian artist, Margaret Olley to her satisfaction and the admiration of the Dobell Prize judges.

The People.
I noticed “Jim” I’ll call him, going around the exhibition, a moist eyed, cropped straw haired tentative young man. He had an army issue camel back, water carrier. In conversation he told me how hard it was to see what he was seeing and walking around the exhibition was physically painful because of a knee wound. At first when he returned from Afghanistan he found it a welcome change to have nothing to do. But the lack of daily duties, relevance and a meaningful occupation just created a theatre for nightmare scenes. The ADF did offer services to these guys but the only people who understood were “the mates” who had “been there”. They know the context, the losses, the crazy adrenalin rushes and they could cry and drink. The exhibition corroborated Jim’s scarcely credible experiences.

Had chaps like Jim not been moved, shaken, and shattered by what was Afghanistan they would have to have been schizoid psychopaths. They were soft bodies meeting flying metal. Only because they are humans do they suffer the long-term effects of shattered bodies, relationships, families, villages and culture. They embody the recoil of weapons which our soldiers, medics and their families. They also carry the pictures of the soul rasping bastardy to which humanity can sink in war. God knows what all this does to the souls of politicians who decided to send these youngsters.

The artist in society.  

Yes, but who needs this stuff? Has Quilty gone too far? Wasn’t he just meant to capture the glory of war and the gallantry of Aussie Diggers? Shouldn’t he just have been grateful for his free trip to Afghanistan and put a good spin on it like an army does? Many would think like this. I don’t. If the function of art is to ‘hold the mirror up to nature’ its most important function may be to show us what we would not see otherwise.

War artists and historians and the media have often censored narratives and images. The objectivity with which politicians engage Australia in war is matched by the subjective experiences of men, women and children of both sides. Quilty’s figures capture the enduring physical, psychological, cultural and social effects of the choice to go to war.

Many a modern artist has settled for anodyne abstractions which will grace bourgeois’ spaces and be traded for faux appreciation and dollars, or “go nicely with the carpet”.  

Not Quilty’s images which will enhance the rooms of our psyches’, those interior rooms of the mind we seldom visit and which will help us burgeon differently.

Dave Zirin on remembering Margaret Thatcher's victims

Photo of Margaret Thatcher  in front of an image of Augusto Pinochet at a Conservative Party conference. (Reuters Photo)

"Or to put it even more simply, in the words, of David Wearing, "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims." That would be nice, wouldn't it? Let's please show some respect for Margaret Thatcher's victims. Let's respect those who mourn everyday because of her policies, but choose this one day to wipe away the tears. Then let's organize to make sure that the history she authored does not repeat"
Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin writes in The Nation here about why ordinary people are celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher.

As Zirin points in all the media frenzy about her death, the voices and experiences of those who suffered under Thatcher's policies have been ignored and forgotten

Zirin highlights the huge gulf in the reaction to Thatcher's death  between ordinary people who suffered as a result of her policies and the political, media and corporate class who benefited from them.

I received a note this morning from a friend of a friend. She lives in the UK, although her family didn't arrive there by choice. They had to flee Chile, like thousands of others, when it was under the thumb of General Augusto Pinochet. If you don't know the details about Pinochet's blood-soaked two-decade reign, you should read about them but take care not to eat beforehand. He was a merciless overseer of torture, rapes and thousands of political executions. He had the hands and wrists of the country's greatest folk singer Victor Jara broken in front of a crowd of prisoners before killing him. He had democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende shot dead at his desk. His specialty was torturing people in front of their families.
As Naomi Klein has written so expertly, he then used this period of shock and slaughter to install a nationwide laboratory for neoliberal economics. If Pincohet's friend Milton Friedman had a theory about cutting food subsidies, privatizing social security, slashing wages or outlawing unions, Pinochet would apply it. The results of these experiments became political ammunition for neoliberal economists throughout the world. Seeing Chile-applied economic theory in textbooks always boggles my mind. It would be like if the American Medical Association published a textbook on the results of Dr. Josef Mengele's work in the concentration camps, without any moral judgment about how he accrued his patients. 

Pinochet was the General in charge of this human rights catastrophe. He also was someone who Margaret Thatcher called a friend. She stood by the General even when he was in exile, attempting to escape justice for his crimes. As she said to Pinochet, "[Thank you] for bringing democracy to Chile."

Therefore, if I want to know why someone would celebrate the death of Baroness Thatcher, I think asking a Chilean in exile would be a great place to start. My friend of a friend took to the streets of the UK when she heard that the Iron Lady had left her mortal coil. Here is why:

I'm telling [my daughter] all about the Thatcher legacy through her mother's experience, not the media's; especially how the Thatcher government directly supported Pinochet's murderous regime, financially, via military support, even military training (which we know now, took place in Dundee University). Thousands of my people (and members of my family) were tortured and murdered under Pinochet's regime—the fascist beast who was one of Thatcher's closest allies and friend. So all you apologists/those offended [by my celebration]—you can take your moral high ground & shove it. YOU are the ones who don't understand. Those of us celebrating are the ones who suffered deeply under her dictatorship and WE are the ones who cared. We are the ones who protested. We are the humanitarians who bothered to lift a finger to help all those who suffered under her regime. I am lifting a glass of champagne to mourn, to remember and to honour all the victims of her brutal regime, here AND abroad. And to all those heroes who gave a shit enough to try to do something about it.

The Thatcher legacy

So former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is dead. 

Like many others I won't be mourning her passing. It is more important to acknowledge and remember all those who suffered because of her policies and all those who resisted and opposed her.

Film Director Ken Loach sums it up well:

"Margaret Thatcher was the most divisive and destructive Prime Minister of modern times, mass unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed — this is her legacy. She was a fighter and her enemy was the British working class ... How should we honour her? Let's privatize her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she would have wanted."

Writing on the Overland Blog Jeff Sparrow reminds us that we should never forget many of Thatcher's political positions:

How to remember Margaret Thatcher? Shall we recall the friend of Augusto Pinochet, the woman who protested bitterly about the arrest of Chile’s murderous dictator, a man to whom, she said, Britain owed so much? What about the staunch ally of apartheid, the prime minister who labelled the ANC ‘terrorists’ and did everything possible to undermine international action against the racist regime? The anti-union zealot who described striking miners defending their livelihood as an ‘enemy within’, hostile to liberty? The militarist who prosecuted the Falklands war, as vicious as it was pointless? The Cold Warrior, who stood by Reagan’s side, while the US conducted its genocidal counterinsurgencies in Latin America? The British chauvinist who allowed Bobby Sands to slowly starve to death?

Both Jeff Sparrow and Rjurik Davidson writing in Overland reminds us that Thatcher's political legacy is very much alive and grows stronger here in Australia . Davidson makes the connection between Thatchers political and economic agenda and Julie Gillard and the Australian Labor Party's embrace of market fundamentalism.

In his piece Margaret Thatcher and the Misapplied Etiquette  Glenn Greenwald challenges those who demand respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death, arguing that such silence is not just misguided but dangerous. He writes:

But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. 

When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms. 

Greenwald concludes that:

There's something distinctively creepy about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn't change simply because they die. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history.

In the New Left Project Tom Mills has written an excellent piece The Death of a Class Warrior in which he reviews Thatcher's political career and political legacy. Mills argues that Thatcher provided:

a sustained, violent assault on British society launched on behalf of big business in the name of ‘strong government’ and cloaked in the rhetoric of national renewal. 

Mills argues that Thatcher was able to appeal to and draw on a range of impulses that had developed during the 1970's and had coalesced into a coherent political ideology (often called neoliberalism  or market fundamentalism).  She did this by using the coercive powers of the state to: 

• portray markets as a moral force
• bring about mass support for big business 
• champion markets as an empowering democratizing force
• portray certain forms of state and Government intervention as hampering Britain’s economic effectiveness and corrupting its moral character.
• attack the social basis of collective action and collective ideas
• emasculate those institutional forms that could build an alternative to neo-liberal/ market fundamentalist regimes (such as trade unions, public ownership of public assets and services and  civil society)
• fusing neoliberalism (market fundamentalism) with the moralistic, reactionary politics of ‘Middle England’ and tying the interests of capital to the bigoted preoccupations of their political base.

This sounds awfully like the political agenda of Tony Abbott and the Liberal National Coalition here in Australia.

In their piece in Counterpunch The Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers make the direct link between Thatchers economic and political policies and the current economic and financial crises gripping the UK and Europe.

Mrs. Thatcher became the cheerleader for what became the greatest giveaway of the century as the City of London’s gain became the industrial economy’s loss. Britain’s lords of finance became the equivalent of America’s great railroad land barons of the 19th century, the ruling elite to preside over today’s descent into neoliberal austerity............The Iron Lady was convinced she was rebuilding England’s economy, while in reality it was only getting richer from London’s outlaw banks. Throughout the world, the damage wrought by this financialized economy has been immense.

Hudson and Sommers also point out that one of Thatcher's greatest effects was on the British Labor Party:   

As the uncredited patron saint of New Labour, Mrs. Thatcher became the intellectual force inspiring her successor and emulator Tony Blair to complete the transformation of British electoral politics to mobilize popular consent to permit the financial sector to privatize and carve up Britain’s public infrastructure into a set of monopolies. In so doing, the United Kingdom’s was transformed from a real economy of production to one that scavenged the world for rents through its offshore banks. In the end, not only was great damage inflicted on England, but on the entire world as capital fled developing countries for safe harbors in London’s banks. Meanwhile, governments throughout the world today are declaring “We’re broke,” as their oligarchs grow ever more rich.

And then there is music. Here are 21 Incredibly angry songs about Margaret Thatcher

The poetry of Mario Benedetti

"When I'm buried/ don't forget to put a Biro in my coffin."
Mario Benedetti

Mario Benedetti (1920-2009) is a Uruguayan poet, considered one of Latin America's finest poets.

Benedetti was also a political figure and a powerful voice for social justice  in his native Uruguay. He was pursued by the Uruguayan military junta in the 1970’s for his leftist writings and forced to live in exile  in Buenos Aires and Spain. He returned to Uruguay after the restoration of democratically-elected governments in the 1980’s.

Here is an article written after Benedetti death.

His poem “Desaparecidos,” is from a term used in Latin America for dissidents and students that were “disappeared” by police and military agents during most of the 70′s.

Desapaecidos
Mario Benedetti

They’re out there somewhere/ all assembled
disassembled/ bewildered/ voiceless
each seeking the others/ seeking us
hemmed in by their question marks and doubts
with their eyes on the ironwork in the plazas
the doorbells/ the shabby rooftops”

Little Stones at My Window
Mario Benedetti
 
Once in a while
joy throws little stones at my window
it wants to let me know that it's waiting for me
but today I'm calm
I'd almost say even-tempered
I'm going to keep anxiety locked up
and then lie flat on my back
which is an elegant and comfortable position
for receiving and believing news

who knows where I'll be next
or when my story will be taken into account
who knows what advice I still might come up with
and what easy way out I'll take not to follow it

don't worry, I won't gamble with an eviction
I won't tattoo remembering with forgetting
there are many things left to say and suppress
and many grapes left to fill our mouths

don't worry, I'm convinced
joy doesn't need to throw any more little stones
I'm coming
I'm coming.

Benedetti dicated his last poem to his secretary:

My life has been like a farce
My art has consisted
In this not being noticed too much
I've been as a levitator in my old age
The brown sheen of the tiles
Never came off my skin
(Fragment)

Mia Pepper on the failed nuclear renaissance in WA

In an important Op Ed piece in the West Australian this week (republished here in the excellent online WA publication The Stringer) anti-nuclear activist and campaigner Mia Pepper of the Conservation Council of WA shines the light on the myths and illusions that have contributed to the failed nuclear renaissance in Western Australia.

The Barnett Government has campaigned hard on its support for a strong uranium industry in WA. Its recent election victory has been praised by the uranium industry lobby, with the Managing Director of Toro Energy claiming that the election result sent a message to the uranium industry that WA is ready and open for business.

But as Mia Pepper points out the risks associated with uranium meeting, particularly the international conditions and the widespread opposition to uranium mining in WA, don't bode well for the industry's prospects in WA

Pepper writes:

Despite the past four years of a pro-uranium government in WA, 42 interested companies, 253 tenements with exploration drilling, and millions of dollars in subsidies, there has not been a single uranium mine approved.

BHP Billiton has sold Yeelirrie WA’s biggest uranium deposit; and dissolved its uranium division.
And the world’s largest uranium miner, Cameco, has put Kintyre, WA’s second biggest uranium deposit, on hold stating that development of the deposit is not economically viable. In early 2013 the company wrote down the value of the Kintyre project by US$168 million, and stated that the uranium price would need to jump from its current low to US$67 lb for the project to break even.

Paladin, a Perth based uranium miner has said the uranium price would need to be even higher at US$85 lb to justify any further investment in the industry, and in February 2013 it wrote down its uranium assets by US$123 million.

Despite this back-pedalling by experienced companies, there is no shortage of uranium hopefuls, like Toro Energy, who remain enthusiastic about the price of uranium recovering, despite the lack of evidence to support their optimism.

Toro Energy, a small company with no mines and no proven experience, is leading the charge with WA’s most advanced uranium proposal – Wiluna – a much smaller deposit than Kintyre or Yeelirrie. As its name suggests, Toro is bullish about pursuing this small deposit despite the shaky economics, the lack of investor interest and fierce public opposition.

There are few grounds to suggest that uranium prices will ever bounce back to the high prices seen in 2007. Long term projections do suggest a more modest recovery, but not to the levels that would make most uranium projects in WA economically viable. The demand for uranium is simply not there.
Uranium is different to other minerals. It pushes moral boundaries, it permanently pollutes country and it contributes to the global nuclear waste problem and proliferation risk. Uranium is unwanted, unnecessary, and uneconomic – altogether a bad way for mining investors to lose money.

John Ford's The Searchers: A new book about the making of the legend

John Ford's epic movie The Searchers is a film classic, often cited as one of the greatest and most influential western movies of all time.  

Ford's film is dark and complex and explores themes of racism, male emotionality, violence, individualism, family relationships, relationships between Indians and white settlers, the American character, and the opposition between the forces of progress and civilization and the frontier wilderness.

Ford's film tells the story of former Civil War veteran Ethan Hawke (played by John Wayne) who returns to Texas in mysterious circumstances. Within days of his return Hawke's brother, wife and children are killed by a roving Indian band who abduct Hawke's youngest niece.  Hawke and his adoptive part-Indian nephew spend years searching for his abducted niece

 For me The Searchers ranks as one of the greatest films of all time.

So I was particularly interested to read Brian McFarlane's review How the west was begun in the Melbourne Age of a new book about Ford's film titled The Searchers: The Making of an America Legend by Glenn Frankel (and interview with Glenn Frankel is here).

On Frankel's book McFarlane writes:

The Searchers is a film of peerless visual beauty and enormous emotional complexity. It both celebrates and interrogates the mythic qualities that had developed around America's romance with opening up the land, and scrutinises those who took it up and those they took it from. It's a film about loss and finding, and then loss again. Even the majestic setting (Monument Valley, on the Arizona-Utah border, standing in for Texas because it was Ford's favourite location) sears the eye with its beauty, and inspires a kind of terror as well.

Glenn Frankel's book tells the enthralling story that gave rise to this film. Half the book is given to exploring the daunting and often tragic history of the settlement of Texas; the other half covers Alan LeMay's 1954 novel, The Searchers, and the magisterial film that makes something new of the novel, but remains true to its core. Frankel, a journalist and editor, emerges here as an exemplary historian. He treats what is clearly contentious material, in matters of race and gender, with precision and even-handedness. 

He is impressively thorough in his research, but doesn't let it clutter his narrative. The evidence for his data is there if you want to read it, but you can trust it and simply surrender to its absorbing and terrible story.

 

The brilliance of Spike Milligan

Two sketches that capture the brilliance of comedian Spike Milligan.

In Monty Python's Life of Brian Spike appears in just one scene and says very little. But the scene is side-splittingly funny, arguably the funniest scene in the movie.

Spike plays a prophet ignored by the masses. (He is in the middle of the shot in the brown oufit). Watch his reactions to all that is going on around him. Just hilarious.

His appearance was completely unplanned. By chance, Milligan was visiting World War Two battlefields in  Tunisia, where Life of Brian was being made, and was invited to join the scene. After shooting the scene Milligan disappeared off set and could not be found for later scenes.

Here is another Spike Milligan classic- The Irish Olympics

Should corporate and business advocates lead NGOs who fight for social justice ?

The  appointment of  Jennifer Westacott, CEO of the Business Council of Australia  as Chair of the Mental Health Council of Australia is further evidence of the trend towards  the "corporate and business takeover" of the not- for- profit sector in Australia.

This "takeover" occurs in many ways and brings the not-for-profit sector closer to the value, agendas and practices of corporate Australia and the business sectors.

One of the many ways this occurs is through the "revolving door" of business and corporate leaders appointed to senior management positions and the Boards of not- for- profit agencies.

The intent of the "takeover" is to harness the not-for-profit and civil society sector (the non- market sectors) so it adopts and serves (and does not challenge) the interests, visions and hegemony of corporate Australia and business interests.

Jennifer Westacott may be eminently qualified and deeply concerned about the mental health of her fellow Australians.

But the Business Council of Australia, the organization she leads, is actively and forcefully pursuing agendas to slash public spending on social security and social spending and promote privatization of public services.

It is hard to see how the CEO of  the Business Council of Australia, a powerful business and corporate lobby group, who argues, advocates and lobbies for policies that are antithetical and hostile to the social justice agenda of the mental health sector could seriously advocate and fight for the interests of the people and stakeholders the Mental Health Council represents and acts on behalf of.

Who can forget the Business Council's campaign to reduce public spending on income support for people with mental health problems struggling to survive on the Disability Support Pension.

As CEO of the Business Council since 2011 Westacott has been an active player in advocating and lobbying to protect and advance the interests of corporate Australia. She is a forceful advocate for what she calls "unleashing the wealth creating parts of the economy"to allow them to pursue endless economic growth.  This requires that social policy become a fundamental plank of, and subservient to economic policy that is  pro-growth, in other words pro-corporate and pro business. 

In the BCA view of the world social policy and the needs of vulnerable and marginalized people are secondary to the interests of  unleashed and unrestrained corporations and business who they claim are the real drivers of economic growth and social prosperity. The BCA and Westacott view is that business and corporations are the ones that really create prosperity and wealth.

Westacott regularly argues the BCA line that it is only by unleashing economic and business growth that social prosperity and the vision of a good society can be achieved. Westacott argues that the Australian mindset and cultural values has to change to support this unleashing of the power of economic growth.

In 2011 Westacott gave the Sambell Oration for the Brotherhood of St Laurence where she laid out her views about social policy. While she was reflecting the views of the Business Council of Australia,  the speech shows how profoundly her world view and vision is shaped by corporate and business ideas that are antithetical and hostile to a not- for- profit sector committed to social justice.

In the Sambell Oration Westacott called for a new partnership between the NGO sector, Government and business and urged the sector to engage in difficult conversations. The real purpose of those conversations was primarily for the NGO sector to adopt and advocate pro- business and pro- corporate policies of the Business Council of Australia that she argued were necessary to ensure wealth creation and economic growth, and ultimately social prosperity.

Westacott called on the NGO sector to support a new social contract, part of which was built upon accepting the BCA  agenda of :

• the need for eonomic growth to be unleashed
• lower corporate and personal taxes
• removal of any "regulation" that restricts profit making
• more flexible labour market
• reducing the size of Government and cutting Government spending

As Bernard Keane argued in Crikey Westacott's interventions in public policy have almost always driven by the self interest of the business community and corporate Australia.

The decades long neglect of the needs and well being of people with mental illness and their family members, carers and people affected has partly been the result of the dominance in public policy circles of the sort of "market fundamentalist" (neo-liberal) policy ideas that Jennifer Westacott and the Business Council of Australia advocate.

What on earth leads NGOs to think that corporate and business advocates and lobbyists who advocate for market fundamentalist policies are the best people to fight for and speak on behalf of some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people?