A lot of good books to choose from and download for free, involves some tedious steps, but worth it. I Checked the google trends, and apparently its being most used in Ethiopia, Iran and Algeria in total volume ofcourse China. I dont think the eltist academic publishers had a market’ anyway, except for the hotshots and they’re all there, all the classics of everyone in numerous languages.
GIGAPEDIA The Napster of eBooks
October 20, 2010In this world 3 X-ray of world map
March 25, 2010An x-ray picture of the world, not as precise as below, Nick Veasey tractor in a cargo scanner. The above is just smoke without mirrors
The land that wouldn’t lie Peter Hallward
February 24, 2010The Haitian people overthrew slavery, uprooted dictators and foreign military rule, and elected a liberation theologian as president. The west has made them pay for their audacity.

After weeks of intense media attention, some of the causes of Haiti’s glaring poverty are obvious: years of chronic underinvestment, disadvantageous terms of trade, deforestation, soil erosion. What is less well understood is that — natural disasters aside — the fundamental reasons for Haiti’s current destitution originate as responses to Haitian strength, rather than as the result of Haitian weakness, corruption or incompetence.
Haiti is the only place in the world where colonial slavery was abolished by the slaves themselves, in the face of implacable violence. As historians of the revolution that began there in 1791 have often pointed out, there is good reason to consider it the most subversive event in modern history.
Independent Haiti was surrounded by slave colonies in the Caribbean and flanked by slave-owning economies in northern, central and southern America. The three great imperial powers of the day — France, Spain and Britain — sent all the troops at their disposal to try to crush the uprising; incredibly, Haitian armies led by Toussaint l’Ouverture and then Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated them one after the other. By late 1803, to the astonishment of contemporary observers, Haitian armies had managed to break the chains of colonial slavery not at their weakest link, but at their strongest.
This extraordinary victory provoked an extraordinary backlash. The war killed a third of Haiti’s people and left its cities and plantations in ruins. When it was finally over, the imperial powers closed ranks and, appalled by what the French foreign minister called a “horrible spectacle for all white nations”, imposed a blockade designed to isolate and stifle this most troubling “threat of a good example”.
France re-established the trade and diplomatic relations essential to the new country’s survival only when Haiti agreed, 20 years after winning independence, to pay its old colonial master enormous amounts of “compensation” for the loss of its slaves and colonial property — an amount roughly equal to the annual French budget at the time.
With its economy shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could repay this debt only by borrowing, at extortionate rates of interest, vast sums from French banks, which did not receive the last instalment until 1947. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s request that France pay back some of this money, in the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of independence in 2004, encouraged the former colonial power to help overthrow his government that year.
New plantations
The slaves who won the war against the French were determined, above all, to avoid any return to a plantation economy or its industrial equivalent. Over the course of the 19th century, large parts of Latin America, as well as much of Europe and Europe’s colonies, were ravaged by the systematic expropriation of peasant farms, and of collectively or indigenously owned land and resources. In Haiti, however, there was significant resistance to such trends, nourished by exceptionally resilient forms of communal solidarity and popular culture — for instance, a reliance on collective work (konbits), widely shared religious affiliations and a rich tradition of oral history. This resistance in turn solicited powerful countermeasures, including, from 1915 until 1934, the first and most damaging of an apparently unstoppable series of US military occupations.
The Americans abolished an irritating clause in Haiti’s constitution that had barred foreigners from owning Haitian property, took over the national bank, reorganised the economy to ensure more regular payments of foreign debt, imposed forced labour on the peasantry, and expropriated swaths of land for the benefit of new plantations, such as those operated by the US-owned Haitian American Sugar Company. As many as 50,000 peasants were dispossessed in northern Haiti alone.
Most importantly, the Americans transformed Haiti’s army into an instrument capable of overcoming popular opposition to these developments. By 1918, peasant resistance gave rise to a full-scale insurgency, led by Charlemagne Péralte; US troops responded with what one worried commander described as the “practically indiscriminate killing of natives”, “the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine Corps”.
The next phase in the “modernisation” of the Haitian economy was contracted out to the noiriste dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who came to power in 1957 through a rigged election in which he won only a quarter of the votes garnered by his main rival. Four years later, Duvalier ripped up the last shreds of the constitution when he arranged for his re-election, winning 1,320,748 votes to zero.
Duvalier’s determination to gain complete control over the country encountered resistance not only among the rural poor, but also among more cosmopolitan sections of the elite. He overcame both problems by supplementing the army he inherited from its US patrons with a more home-grown paramilitary force, nicknamed the “Tontons Macoutes” after a child-snatching bogeyman from Creole mythology. The paranoid ferocity of Duvalier’s regime has long been the stuff of legend. In the autumn of 1964, for instance, after a dozen young men in the south-western city of Jérémie launched a reckless insurgency, Duvalier’s militia publicly slaughtered hundreds of their kin.
By the mid-1960s, nearly 80 per cent of Haiti’s professionals and intellectuals had fled to safety abroad, and most of them never returned. Estimates of the total number of people killed under Duvalier vary between 30,000 and 50,000. “Never has terror had so bare and ignoble an object,” reflected Graham Greene (whose 1966 novel, The Comedians, is set in Duvalier’s Haiti). The CIA was impressed with the result, noting that by the 1970s “most Haitians [were] so completely downtrodden as to be politically inert”.
“Death plan”
Such downtreading was the precondition for international imposition of the neoliberal policies that began to reshape Haiti’s economy when Jean-Claude Duvalier inherited his father’s office as “president-for-life” in 1971. These policies were designed to turn the country into the kind of place international investors tend to like; Haitians soon started to refer to them as the “death plan”.
This plan has stifled public spending and forced the privatisation of Haiti’s (often highly lucrative) public assets, while accelerating the reorientation of the country’s economy away from agrarian autonomy and towards urban hyperexploitation. The case of rice production — the staple food for most of the population — is especially significant.
In the mid-1980s, local farmers were still able to produce almost all the rice Haitians consumed, but the last tariffs protecting Haitian farmers were removed in the mid-1990s and imports now account for two-thirds of consumption. Domestic production is now further undercut by the vast amounts of additional “free” rice that are dumped on Haiti every year through the ministry of USAID grantees, in particular the Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist and other like-minded churches.
Increases in the garment and light manufacturing sector were supposed to compensate for agricultural collapse. For a while, the lowest wages in the hemisphere encouraged mainly American companies or contractors to employ roughly 80,000 people in this area, while military and paramilitary coercion kept the threat of organised labour safely at bay.
By the end of the 1990s, however, a combination of international competition and local “instability” had reduced the number of people employed in sweatshops to barely 20,000, and their wages (averaging $2 a day) had fallen to less than 20 per cent of 1980 levels. Bitter experience has forced the Haitian poor to improvise robust ways of defending themselves against their oppressors. Over the course of the 1980s, opposition to both Duvalierist repression and neoliberal economic policies inspired a powerful popular mobilisation. This was able first to “uproot” Duvalier fils and his Macoutes in 1986 and then, in 1990, after an army crackdown that killed another thousand people or so, to overcome direct military rule. It forced the army’s international backers reluctantly to sanction Haiti’s first ever round of genuine democratic elections, which in early 1991 brought the liberation theologian Aristide to power on an anti-capitalist, anti-army agenda.
Haiti was the first country in Latin America to dare choose a liberation theologian as its president (twice), and this is a crucial but often neglected aspect of its recent history. The Catholic Church had long been a solid pillar of the status quo, and its partial conversion in the 1970s into a well-organised vehicle for the “self-emancipation of the oppressed” reverberated throughout the region.
Pentagon officials were quick to realise, as one American military figure put it, that “the most serious threat to US interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organised labour, but liberation theology”. Pope Jean-Paul II and his successor, Joseph Ratzinger, reached the same conclusion as their American counterparts on the religious right. Thirty years ago, in Haiti, there was only a tiny handful of small evangelical churches preaching political resignation and passive reliance on God’s grace; today there are more than 500 of them.
Yet Aristide’s election in 1990 changed the balance of power in Haiti for ever. Political violence came to an abrupt and exceptional stop. “We have become the subjects of our own history,” Aristide said, a couple of years before his election, and “we refuse from now on to be the objects of that history”.
Grotesque inequalities
That refusal remains the key to understanding the course of Haitian politics ever since. Haiti isn’t only the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere; it is now also the most unequal in terms of its division of wealth and power. A tiny minority lives in paranoid luxury, surrounded by millions of the poorest people on earth. From the perspective of its elite, Haiti’s main political problem is very simple: how, once the door to democracy has been prised open, might it be possible to preserve such a grotesquely inequitable distribution of property and privilege?
When Aristide was first elected, it was still possible to solve the problem in the usual way, by slamming the door shut. In September 1991, another US-backed military coup cut short Haiti’s “transition to democracy”. When the US eventually allowed a hamstrung Aristide to return in late 1994, he still managed to transform Haitian politics overnight, by abolishing the army that had deposed him.
A central priority for the businessmen and sweatshop owners whose interests were previously protected by the army has, understandably, been to restore or replace it. The need to do so became still more acute when Aristide was re-elected in 2000 with an even bigger share of the vote, backed up for the first time by a political organisation, Fanmi Lavalas, which won roughly 90 per cent of the seats in parliament.
The subsequent ten years of struggle in Haiti are best understood in terms of this basic alternative: Lavalas or the army. As the conflicts of the past decade confirm, there is no better way for political elites to deflect awkward questions than by redefining them in terms of crime, security and stability — terms, in other words, that allow soldiers rather than people to resolve them.
Ruthless application of this strategy after the Lavalas election victory in 2000 led to the internationally sponsored coup of early 2004, just in time to squash any celebration of the bicentenary of Haitian independence. Since they could no longer rely on Haiti’s own army, in order to overthrow a duly elected government for the second time, US troops were obliged to lever Aristide out of Port-au-Prince themselves. In mid-2004, a large United Nations “stabilisation” force took over the job of pacifying a resentful population from soldiers sent by the US, France and Canada, and by the end of 2006 another several thousand of Aristide’s supporters were dead.
Under pressure
Last year, the current president, René Préval, who ostensibly governs this UN protectorate, agreed to renew its stabilisation mandate, to persevere with the privatisation of Haiti’s remaining public assets, to veto a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $5 a day, and to bar Fanmi Lavalas, along with several other political parties, from participating in the next round of legislative elections.
The decision taken by US and UN commanders in charge of the disaster relief effort, to prioritise military and security objectives over civilian-humanitarian ones, has already caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths. Plane after plane packed with essential emergency supplies was diverted away from the disaster zone, in order to allow for the build-up of a huge and entirely unnecessary US military force. Many thousands of people were left to die in the ruins of lower Port-au-Prince, while international rescue teams concentrated their efforts on a few locations (such as the Montana Hotel or the UN headquarters) that could also be enclosed within a “secure perimeter”.
For the same reason, throughout the first week of the disaster, desperately needed medical supplies were reserved for field hospitals set up near the US-controlled airport and other “secure zones”. Hospitals in “insecure” Port-au-Prince itself, overwhelmed with dying patients, have had to perform untold numbers of amputations without anaesthetic or medication. Still more “insecure” areas such as Carrefour and Léogane — the places closest to the earthquake’s epicentre — received no significant aid for at least ten days after the disaster struck.
Unless prevented by renewed popular mobilisation in both Haiti and beyond, the perverse international emphasis on security will continue to distort the reconstruction effort, and with it the configuration of Haitian politics for some time to come. As reconstruction funds accumulate, pressure to expropriate what remains of Haiti’s public services and collectively owned land is sure to be accompanied by pressure to speed up the growth of Haiti’s booming security industry, and perhaps to restore — no doubt in close co-operation with the current occupying power — the army that Aristide managed to demobilise in 1995.
What is already certain is that if further militarisation proceeds unchecked, the victims of the January earthquake won’t be the only avoidable casualties of 2010.
Peter Hallward teaches philosophy at Middlesex University and is the author of “Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment” (Verso, £16.99)
Paul Farmer on Haiti and Structural Violence
January 19, 2010Paul Farmer, Doctor and Anthropologst working for a long time with Haiti most marginalized groups, co-founder of NGO Partners in Health, where one can donate to the relief now and long-term reconstruction of a prefeential option for the poor in health provision.
His medical and activist work is very worthwhile to support from a radical point of view, see Paul Farmer Book The Uses of Haiti, and Pathologies of Power Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor
On Suffering and Structural Violence: Social and Economic Rights in the Global Era (Full Article here) (a slightly updated version of his article On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below by Paul Farmer; Daedalus, Vol. 125, 1996.
WHY IS HAITI SO POOR?
January 19, 2010Why is Haiti so Poor? by Bob Corbett, the prolific philosophy professor and great facilitator of knowledge and communication about Haiti on the web, at his site.
Click the link for more details of his 1986 analysis
I. Root, but Less Visible Causes of Haitian Misery
- The international community’s role.
- French colonial contribution.
- The international boycott of the new nation of 1804.
- The French debt of 1838.
- The United States Occupation, 1915-1934.
- Post World War II United States domination.
- The role of Haiti’s rulers.
- Slave-like labor systems in the early republic.
- The elite’s protection of its wealth.
- Haitian corruption.
- Human rights violations as a tool of oppression.
II. Secondary, but Immediate Causes of Haitian Misery
Language as an oppressor.
- Ignorance and illiteracy.
- The system of education (or miseducation).
- Soil erosion.
- Export crops vs. local food crops.
- The lack of a social infrastructure: inadequate roads, water systems, sewerage, medical services, schools.
- Unemployment and underemployment.
- Underdevelopment in an age of international economic competition.
- Haitian self-image.
An discussion beyond crude stereotype, of Haiti being Cursed and its government Corrupted, is needed in the medium-term, to counter the mental destruction propagated by Opinion Pieces dominating newspapers and the media. e.g. this piece in the Guardian by Jon Henley, which by all means not the worse, but based on quoting the likes of this Economist Intellgence Unit Haiti Expert, Stephen Keppel, ignorant hotshot with a buisness degree.
Better Articles in the Guardian
by
Jeremy Seabrook
Our Haiti hypocrisy
Our creaking response to Haiti’s disaster does not disguise our indifference to the country’s long-term suffering
Constant repetition of the words “poorest country in the western hemisphere” take on an incantatory menace. By whose agency does it remain so wretched? What has been the role of the US in the game of presidential ping-pong, which ousted the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, only to reinstate him, later spiriting him away once more? Why is Haiti still pursuing policies associated with the discredited Washington consensus, when that unhappy ideological confection is supposed – erroneously – to have fallen apart?
It is clear that the “population” (as opposed to the people) are seen as posing a law-and-order problem. The ground must be “secured” before supplies can be distributed.
This says much about elites and their fear of the dead, since it is known that the dead are less of a health hazard than the lack of clean water and basic nutrition for the living. Sweeping the dead into mass graves robs their loved ones of a vital need of survivors – the ability to grieve properly. How revealing it is that western TV must warn its viewers that they may be about to witness scenes of a distressing nature: nothing demonstrates more clearly the differential value of human life in the transmission of these scenes of dereliction. White people never die on screen, but the bodies of others are violated with impunity by the ubiquitous probing cameras.
by Peter Hallward the day after the earthquake
Our role in Haiti’s plight
If we are serious about assisting this devastated land we must stop trying to control and exploit it
What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere“. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. 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.
Creer en el pueblo haitiano
January 19, 2010Creer en el pueblo haitiano
16 de Enero del 2010, 9:21 PM Puerto Principe
El terremoto fue solo quien haló el gatillo: la pistola es la pobreza.
Siempre que voy a Puerto Príncipe, o simplemente pienso en ella, me asalta la mente una canción de Nat King Cole que mi hermana hacia resonar una y otra vez en un tocadiscos color crema que le regalaron por el cumpleaños, allá por los lejanos 60s. En ella, con su espanglish azucarado, Nat King Cole hablaba de una ciudad que mira al mar e invita al amor en un inolvidable atardecer.
Una ciudad que ya no existe. No por el terremoto, sino por la pobreza. El terremoto fue solo quien haló el gatillo: la pistola es la pobreza. En Seattle, en el 2001, hubo un terremoto de categoría 7 que solo causó un centenar de heridos y un muerto, un anciano infartado. El terremoto es recordado porque Bill Gates daba una charla cuando comenzaron los temblores. Un video muestra al hombre más rico del mundo emergiendo detrás de un podio con una sonrisa de pánico incrustada en la cara. No había una pistola apuntando a la cabeza de Seattle. En cambio, la pistola de la pobreza ha sido disparada muchas veces en Haití. En el 2004 una tormenta tropical, que causó dos muertos en Puerto Rico y 7 en República Dominicana, dejó cerca de 3 mil cadáveres regados en el norte del país; y tres años más tarde otras dos tormentas mataron a 600 personas.
Cuando Nat King Cole cantaba a la capital haitiana, Puerto Príncipe tenía unos 150 mil habitantes, esparcidos junto al puerto, lo que aun puede notarse en las fotos aéreas: un área cuidadosamente reticulada al oeste del Palacio Nacional que alberga una arquitectura de casas sólidas y elegantes indicativas la fuerza de la ciudad histórica. Esa era la ciudad que constituía uno de los principales atractivos turísticos del Caribe –solo superada por La Habana- y que los dominicanos habían estado visitando durante décadas en busca de las aventuras lúdicas que la entonces adusta Santo Domingo –fatalmente Ciudad Trujillo por tres largas décadas- no tenía.
Pero ya por entonces Haití, y su ciudad capital, comenzaban a mostrar los síntomas de la autofagia y el empobrecimiento. No se trata de que Haití fuera rica cuando era la colonia francesa de Saint Domingue, y que comenzó a ser pobre cuando los esclavos hicieron una vigorosa revolución sencillamente para poder ser personas. Ciertamente era un pulmón económico del capitalismo naciente, pero a expensas de la degradación física, intelectual y moral del 95% de la población. Los esclavos hicieron una guerra sin cuartel a las mismas tropas napoleónicas que habían rendido imperios en Europa y al final heredaron una nación en escombros y sometida al doble cerco de la contrarrevolución europea y de la ingratitud de los nuevos países independientes hispanoamericanos, a cuyas gestas los haitianos colaboraron activamente recibiendo a cambio más aislamiento. Para apaciguar los ánimos revanchistas de la ex metrópoli los sucesores de los próceres decidieron pagar por lo que sus antecesores habían logrado a sangre y fuego: Francia recibió una compensación que según los expertos equivale a unos 20 mil millones de dólares.
Pero sin lugar a dudas lo que aceleró la autofagia haitiana fue su lugar en el diseño económico regional como proveedora de mano de obra barata y desprotegida para las economías agroexpoertadoras de Cuba y República Dominicana en un principio y para todo el hemisferio posteriormente, cuando exportar fuerza de trabajo se convirtió en un gran negocio para las clases dominantes haitianas y en un drenaje brutal e irrecuperable de capital humano. Desde entonces Haití fue cada vez más pobre, y en consecuencia más personas buscaban sus sobrevivencias o sus realizaciones en otros lugares, dejando allí sus aportes y sus plusvalías, en un terrible círculo vicioso que genera más y más pobreza. Y Puerto Príncipe pasó a ser una inmensa aglomeración de cuatro millones de pobladores pobres, sin servicios, con casas colgadas de las colinas y un puerto atrozmente contaminado donde, en épocas “normales” no era difícil encontrar cadáveres de indigentes que simplemente morían de pobreza. Una aglomeración de cuatro millones de seres vulnerables. Después del terremoto, una cantidad que aun no sabemos, ahora técnicamente de sobrevivientes.
Desde la caída de la sangrienta tiranía de Duvalier –por mucho tiempo considerada como un aliado predilecto de los Estados Unidos en su lucha contra el comunismo en el Caribe- se han ensayado muchas fórmulas políticas en Haití. Se han sucedido gobiernos democráticos y gobiernos militares, se han alentado insurrecciones antigubernamentales, han ocurrido golpes militares, se han intentado gobiernos tecnocráticos bajo supervisión internacional y se han producido bloqueos y liberalizaciones. Pero Haití no ha despegado. Y creo que ha sido así porque el único recurso que puede salvar a Haití es movilizar su orgullo, su energía nacional, la misma que destrozó al ejército napoleónico en 1804, que puso en jaque a los ocupantes americanos en 1915, que destronó a Duvalier en 1986 y que en 1991 derrotó el intento de los tontons macoutes de regresar al palacio nacional. Hubo un momento en que parecía que un movimiento político había logrado hacerlo. Fue cuando Jean Bertrand Aristide y su grupo Lavalás despertaron el ánima de la nación postduvalierista, hasta que, removido por un golpe de estado, pactó con la oligarquía más insensible de este continente y regresó al poder, domesticado, de la mano de la administración Clinton. Por un tiempo permaneció en el poder –en el trono o tras el- revolcado en la corrupción, la represión y el mesianismo, hasta que Bush lo secuestró y lo depositó en la República Centroafricana. Fue un acto ilegal de prepotencia imperialista que, sin embargo, nadie lamentó seriamente.
Quizás este es otro momento decisivo de la historia haitiana. Siempre pensamos que Haití estaba tocando fondo, en particular cuando ciclones y lluvias podían producir miles de muertos, cuando su economía de subsistencia era arrasada y cuando sus habitantes comían barro con mantequilla. Pero ahora hemos entendido que las caídas no tienen fondo y es posible seguir bajando hasta la extinción.
Corresponde al mundo ayudar a detener esta caída. Se necesita dinero, recursos materiales y humanos y es obligación de la comunidad internacional acudir en ayuda de Haití, no simplemente para qué no mueran los millones de damnificados, sino para que en lo adelante la vida tenga para ellos un significado. Pero a pesar de que de ello se habla desde hace muchos años, hasta el momento la provisión de recursos ha sido lenta, limitada, y manejada por una burocracia internacional insensible y tan cara que termina tragando un porcentaje muy alto de los recursos en compensación por el riesgo que implica querer ayudar a Haití. La propuesta del presidente francés de condonar la deuda externa del país es simbólicamente relevante pero de escaso valor práctico si no se acompaña de fondos frescos suficientes que siempre serán menores que los subsidios transferidos a los grandes bancos o que los gastos realizados en las aventuras militares “allende los mares”. Y por supuesto menores que los que Haití pagó a Francia en el siglo XIX.
Pero sobre todo, la suerte de Haití debe ser decidida y realizada por los haitianos. Haití es un país aguijoneado por la corrupción, la indolencia funcionarial y el narcotráfico, y aunque coincidamos en que es necesaria en la presente coyuntura, también por la ocupación militar extranjera. Su clase política y su oligarquía han padecido siempre de una insensibilidad social que raya en el crimen. Un escenario particularmente agreste para movilizar las energías nacionales. Pero al mismo tiempo esa sociedad posee suficientes reservas morales como para creer que es posible cambiar el curso de la vida y colocar a este país al nivel de su historia. Esas reservas yacen en los campesinos del Artibonito que arañan año tras año sus misérrimos conucos; en las mujeres del nordeste que recorren distancias mayores con sus bártulos de mercancías; en los jóvenes universitarios capitalinos que un día se expusieron a la violencia oficial para mostrar al mundo el derecho de un pueblo a la vida decente; en los funcionarios que contra viento y marea, intentan hacer avanzar la institucionalidad y la eficiencia públicas; y en los cientos de miles de emigrantes que sacan tiempo y energía para trabajar extensas jornadas y estudiar, pensando en un día en que el regreso no signifique la miseria.
Es necesario imaginar un Haití para y por los haitianos, sencillamente porque no hay otro camino para revertir el trágico proceso de su permanente hundimiento y las sociedades, los pueblos, nunca se suicidan. Quiero pensar que hay espacio para convertir esta inmensa tragedia en el punto de partida de algo. También quiero pensar que seremos capaces de pagar nuestras deudas con Haití.
Haroldo Dilla Afonso
An Open Letter to David Brooks on Haiti
January 19, 2010An email from Haiti Justice Blog
Dear friends of Haiti:
The United States Government has given Haiti a lot of misguided aid in the
past. What it has never given is respect. This must change.
Three days after the earthquake, columnist David Brooks published in the
New York Times a slanderous article about Haiti. Even if he meant well, he
spent 7 paragraphs spreading one of the oldest and most damaging myths
about Haiti that have circulated ever since the Haitians freed themselves
from French slavery in 1804. He blamed Haiti´s poverty on its religion and
culture. He said that what Haiti needs now is “intrusive paternalism.” That
kind of thinking is the greatest danger now hanging over Haiti´s future.
I have joined with my friend Carl Lindskoog, a scholar studying Haitian-
American communities, to compose an open letter to David Brooks that
explains how his views are so misguided and injurious. The letter is
attached to this message, along with the names of the 179 people who
have signed it to date, including Brian Concannon, Director of the Institute for
Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor at
MIT.
Dear Mr. Brooks,
In your January 15, 2010 opinion piece in The New York Times, “The Underlying Tragedy,” you present what you seem to believe is a bold assessment of the situation in Haiti and what you certainly know is a provocative recommendation for Haiti’s future. You also offer some advice to President Obama. In order to successfully keep his promise to the people of Haiti that they “will not be forsaken” nor “forgotten” the President, you say, has to “acknowledge a few difficult truths.” What follows, however, is so shockingly ignorant of Haitian history and culture and so saturated with the language and ideology of cultural imperialism that no valuable “truths” remain. Please allow us, therefore, to present you with some more accurate truths.
First, Haiti is not a clear-cut case of the failure of international aid to achieve poverty reduction. For almost its entire existence Haiti has been shouldered with a load of immense international debt. The Haitian people had the audacity to break their chains and declare independence in 1804 but were later forced by France to re-purchase their freedom for 150 million Francs, a burden that the country has had to carry throughout the twentieth century.
What’s more, the “aid” Haiti has received from its powerful neighbor to the North has never been the sort that would help the country reduce poverty or achieve meaningful development. In the early-twentieth century the principle “aid” Haiti received from the United States came in the form of a brutal military occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934. After “Papa Doc” Duvalier ascended to power “aid” meant assistance to a ruthless (but conveniently anti-communist) dictator. The U.S. gave Duvalier $40.4 million in his first four years in power, briefly suspended military and economic assistance to the dictator in 1963, but resumed shortly thereafter, restoring full military and economic aid to Duvalier by 1969. In the early 1970s and 1980s when “Baby Doc” Duvalier was at the helm, the “aid” the United States and other international agencies contributed failed to reduce poverty but did enrich foreign investors in the newly constructed assembly industry. Economic policies that the U.S. forced upon Haiti decimated its agriculture for the benefit of American farming while driving Haiti’s peasants into Port-au-Prince and other cities where they found few jobs and scarce housing. Four years after Baby Doc’s departure the Haitian people decided to help themselves by democratically electing a new leader, but the United States aided Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s domestic opponents in the coup of 1991 and did so again in 2004. It is no wonder then, that that such “aid” from the United States has failed to lift Haiti out of poverty.
Equally unconvincing is your argument about “progress-resistant cultural influences,” which brings us to important truth number two: Haitian culture is not “progress-resistant” as anyone familiar with the examples you yourself provide can attest to. If Vodoun or “the voodoo religion” as you put it, “spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile,” how do the majority of Haitians manage to survive on scant resources and less than two dollars-a-day? How do so many Haitians manage to travel abroad, find and maintain difficult jobs, and send money back home if not through careful planning and a fierce defense of precious life? How do the nationwide customers of Fonkoze, the Haitian banking operation that teaches literacy and business practices to curbside marketers to whom it makes small loans, achieve such strong records of loan repayment? In fact, it might be Haitian culture itself (and even Vodoun) which allows Haitians to persist. After all, the Vodou spirit Ogou (St. Jacques) is honored as a clever planner and master of skills. So was the champion of Haiti’s war of independence, general Toussaint L’Ouverture, a onetime slave who entered history as a military and diplomatic genius.
The third important truth we have to offer (and we hope President Obama is listening as well) is the opposite of your call for “intrusive paternalism” as the solution to Haiti’s woes: Haiti does not need nor does it want the paternalism of the United States. Haiti is literally dying of cultural imperialism.
Whenever America’s leaders and pundits speak of subordinate peoples, the ideology of imperialism shines through. As it does in your words, Mr. Brooks, so it has done for far too many earlier Americans. President William McKinley, for example, facing the difficult question of how he was to govern the newly-conquered Filipinos worried that
left “to themselves they are unfit for self-government-and they would soon have anarchy and misrule . . . [So] there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.”
Closer to home, those who worried about an earlier form of “progress-resistant cultural influences” decided it was better to remove the children of Native American families than to let them absorb the backwardness of their pagan and uncivilized parents and community. A common refrain by these “reformers” was “kill the Indian, save the man.” And now, Mr. Brooks, you propose to save the Haitians from themselves by replacing Haitian cultural values and institutions with “middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.” Imperialism, whether economic or military, is the primary reason for the conditions that so worsened the impact of the earthquake on January 12. Haitians need less imperialism, not more.
During the Vietnam War an American officer famously stated that “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” Today Haiti is virtually destroyed. The earthquake having done the hard part, Mr. Brooks, you think “intrusive paternalism” will save it. Lacking a foundational understanding of Haitian history and culture, and bearing the familiar colors of American imperialism you and your ilk will do vastly more harm than good.
Tom F. Driver
Paul Tillich Professor Emeritus of Theology and Culture
Union Theological Seminary
Carl Lindskoog
Doctoral Candidate, Department of History
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Protected: On balances of power, internal affairs and freedom. Conversation with Other Asias.
August 29, 2009Mudimbe – The Invention of Africa – and other Free Books online
June 28, 2009Some free online-books, at multiversitylibrary.com, important works on Africa by Africans. The procedure is a little unconvetional, you put in your email, and they send you a link. It works though. Also saves typing up and makes finding passages easier!
The Invention of Africa – V.Y. Mudimbe
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa – Walter Rodney
African Perspective on Colonialism – A. Adu Bohen
Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
Decolonising the Mind – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Democracy and Development in Africa – Claude Ake
From Colonialism to Independence – Semakula Kiwanuka
Moving the Center – Ngugi wa Thiong?o
No Longer at Ease – Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
The Asia Section is filled, includes Orientalism by Edward Said and The Intimate Enemy by Ashis Nandy
The Latin America has only Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, and an annoying sounding book by Gustavo Esteva.
Okwui Enwezor and African Modernity
June 28, 2009The Okwui Enwezor talk at the tate Trienalle 2009 was quite interesting as it lies at the intersection of Academia and the arts imagination and discussion around African Modernity. The issues he touched upon have been around academia for a while, this having ‘missed modernity’, the industrial revolution or expiriences of its decomposition (eg. Keith Hart, James Ferguson, Achilles Mbembe), although his literature genealogy important, like wallerstein and Mbembe, since their often overlooked in proclamations of constant novelty and the heralding of unprecedentness, wallerstein interms of economic continituies/cycles, and Mbembe for the continiuity of representations of africa, as the Lack (of modernity, of enlightenment).
Although its curious that he follows a linear-modernization model when he goes on to say that Africa has never been modern (as opposed to 1- Hyper modern west, and 2 Modernizing East). Not very theoretically interesting if you measure Modernity with industrial output and accordingly appropiate state-regimes of accumulation. What if ”we have never been modern” either (Latour), i.e. in the everyday we don’t orientat ourselves in cleansed and purged modernist spaces. Even in (post-)industrial urbanity we live in what Henri Lefebvre called “concrete” spaces, the spaces of everday folklore and meaning, rather than in the “abstract space” as envisaged by the urban planner or the engineer. And Africa has had atleast as many attempts at producing abstract spaces as England, through grand colonial mappings, the Bauhaus construction of the suburbs in Casablanca, and the IMF structural adjustment plans and the countless development projects now undertaken both by trained elites and western experts’.
But also, its curious to unproblematically categorize the Super-modernity of Europe, as the first an utmost expression of modernity, as Enwezor does, without taking into account, that Europe celebrates itself now in the terms of post-modernity, as having superceded modernity, as the overcoming of utopian and productivist values, as the end of ideology and history ((Jameson – A Singular Modernity), and that the political discussion in the rest of the world, aswell as revolving around identity politics, still are stongly pursuing modernist visions, e.g. Bolivia and the mines or the Zambian Copper Miners (Ferguson)
The non-Avant-Garde Avant-Garde International Necronautical Society talk, Prologue 4: Borders: Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy: Tate Declaration on Inauthenticity with the fake Simon Critchley, is recomendable, for its entertainment value aswell for the occasional theorical glimpses it allows, especially on Humour).
Backdoor Broadcasting Company, Thinking Allowed – Academic Audios
June 22, 2009Backdoor Broadcasting Company , mostly talks held at Birkbeck, including Masterclass things, e.g. 06/2009 Zizek on Communist Culture, and a better quality audio of Butlers Frames of War
Thinking Allowed BBC4 more light-hearted and mostly thoroughly interesting 15min interviews with Academics (usually Sociologists, Historians and Anthropologists), hosted by Laurie Taylor, witty and with insightful analyses of class issues. Archives has good overview on past topics.
Adbusting
June 22, 2009This is an amazing adbusting… well suited for all those ads whith yuppies enjoying their new liquor, their new telephone connection, coffee at a new outlet… Ahh relieving, a very Freudian Joke, you get to live out unconsious aggressiveness, but it also puts into focus the psychotic relentless smile of yuppies, who are happy about everything consumable.
‘THE END OF ISLAMIC IDEOLOGY’
June 21, 2009Reading the chapter from Hamid Dabashi’s IRAN a people interrupted
‘The Islamic Republic is a categorical contradiction in terms- it is neither a republic nor Islamic. It is not a republic because it is a theocracy; it is not Islamic because Islam (Shi’ism in particular) cannot be in power without instantly discrediting itself. From its very earliest manifestation, Islam emerged as the religion of protest, and in its long and tumultuous history, both political and doctrinal, it has never lost that initial defining moment of its political potency. The dialectical paradox that has remained textual to Qur’ranic revelation- its Meccan chapters charismatic and revolutionary, its Medinan verses somber and institution building- has never abandoned the long and arduous Islamic
history. In these terms, Shi’ism is the quintessence of Islam as a religion of protest and can only remain valid and legitimate as long as it posits itself as a revolutionary project. The instant that Islam (Shi’ism) becomes a dominant (state) ideology it contradicts itself. This paradox is definitive to Islamic political and doctrinal history. The Islamic Republic, as a result, and ipso facto, has placed Islam in a position of tyranny, which in turn discredits and dismantles Islam itself- in the most basic tenets of its doctrinal principles. From Umayyads (661-750) to the Abbasids (750- 1258) down to all other major and minor Islamic empires and dynasties, there has never been a Islamic form of government that has not been radically challenged and opposed in precisely Islamic terms. As soon as a dynasty has come to power in Islamic terms of legitimacy, a revolutionary movement has arisen to challenge it in precisely in Islamic terms. This paradox is now the central dilemma of the Islamic Republic, in which it is trapped and from which it has no escape, except dismantling itself. A regional integration of the most progressive forces in both the reformist and the conservative camps in Iranian politics is the only way it can at once sustain its domestic legitimacy and pose a highly effective politics of resistance to the predatory demands of globalized capitalism and the empire it engendered. But it cannot do so without radically revisiting its very doctrinal basis- and thus the self defeating paradox that at once animates and contradicts it.
A radical reformulation of ‘Islam’, now incarcerated within the clerically anchored ‘Islamic Republic’, effectively amounts to (1) recognizing its own polyvocality- its jurisprudence historically checked and balanced by its philosophy and mysticism; and (2) allowing the cosmopolitan context of its contemporary anti-colonial modernity to work the dialectic of its polyvocality out- its Islamism placing itself next to to the nationalism and socialism that have historically checked and balanced it. Among the myriad consequences of such an emancipatory reimagining of Islam in its modern and medieval history is the effective abandoning of the faulty Eurocenticity of a singular modernity, by which the rest of humanity must abide. In its contemporary context, this full-bodied version of Islam will posit the terms of an anti-colonial modernity that is worldly in its roots and cosmopolitan in its consequences.’ (217/18)
‘Trapped in the charismatic appeal of that abiding memory ['the collective sentiment of the earliest nucleus of revolutionary Shi'ism], Ahamdinejad may indeed go to war- with the United States, with Israel, with any of the Persian Gulf states (or perhaps the United States and Israel may hand him the opportunity by invading Iran)- for the fire of war cleanses and purifies the evil that this zealotry sees dominant in the world […] The effective transmutation of a popular vote into populism , its alliance with the militarism will put Ahmadinajad’s presidency on a catastrophic course leading to a frightful fascism. [the book was published in 2007]…The republic of fear..will result [that] will impose draconian limitations on the latitude that has, in the past, been allowed to the social behavior of middle-class Iranians, the flamboyant youth, and the Gucci revolutionaries. [even though, I think, the recent Ahmadinajad's speeches included talking about relaxing the activity of the 'moral police'] This will scare and dishearten the middle-class Iranians and force them even more into belligerent secularism, vulgar consumerism, and ultimately escape the claws of the Islamic Republic[..] The impoverished classes will most certainly not be the beneficiaries of this exodus of capital. The Islamic Revolution never had the economic courage of its political imagination, never dared to opt for a socialist economy, even from its very ideological basis in the ideas and principles of ideologues such as Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani and Abu al-Hassan Bani Sadr. So called Islamic economics are fundamentally based on a secured niche in global capitalism. But this economics wants to have its cake and eat it too. It needs foreign investment and a robust capitalist economy, but it doesn’t want the Bourgeois International and its preference for tight jeans, loose scarves, and the democratic institutions that go with global capitalism. [although, someone like Chakrabarty would disagree: individual freedom is not a necessary condition for capitalism as it is for Marx] The Iranian economy under Ahmadinejad will thus remain heavily dependent on oil revenues. Jobs will remain scarce unless A. can transmute the oil revenue into a productive, labor-intensive economy- a critical task that all his predecessors have failed to meet. Chances are that he will not succeed, for he is very much at the mercy of the global economy, which allots Iran only a role as an oil producer […] (235)
The hope for the restitution of that cosmopolitan culture, now compromised by a militant Islamism that has no patience or tolerance for anything it deems un-Islamic, can come from an entirely unexpected corner if we consider the flowering relationship between President Hugo Chaves of Venezuela and his Iranian counterpart….Chaves has a categorical admiration for the Islamic Republic, and sees it as a potential ally across the globe. This admiration can extend beyond a mere transcontinental but vacuous camaraderie, with occasional economic benefits for both, only if Chaves uses his leverage with the Islamic Republic to have it open up its medieval gates to political dissent and institutional changes in its theocracy. The relationship is of course reciprocal- namely, if Chavez fails to raise principled questions with the Islamic Republic and thus help restore the Iranian cosmopolitan political culture, then the theocratic disregard for human rights and the mutation of Iranian cosmopolitan political culture into a clerical tribalism of the worst kind, now definitive to the Islamic Republic, will turn around and corrupt the social democratic aspirations of Chaves.’ (237)
What seems to be exciting about the Iraninan movement now is that it got organized precisely without such a benevolent intervention from the outside, but by the people, across the class lines, themselves. Hopefully, it will have implications beyond the conservative reformism of Mousavi and contribute towards the re-articulation of the cosmopolitanism of Islamic anti-colonial modernity again.
Appadurai Audio
June 15, 2009Here is the recording from the recent Arjun Appadurai opening speech from HKW coference Beyond Multiculturalism
Beyond?! and where? Multiculturality blog has a nice review of the event
Beyond Multiculturalism? HKW Internationaler Kongress starts Tomorrow 17:00
June 3, 2009| Beyond Multiculturalism? 04.06.2009 – 06.06.2009
Fragen an die Einwanderungsgesellschaft |
| Do 04.06.2009 17:00h Teilnahme frei
|
| Tag 1 | Tag 2 | Tag 3
Begrüßung durch Bernd Scherer Die Gestaltung von Einwanderung wird in den meisten Staaten immer noch national gedacht, obwohl Fragen von Migration und gesellschaftlicher Diversität im Kontext der Globalisierung nicht mehr im Rahmen einer Nation verhandelt werden können. Angesichts von weltumspannenden Migrationsströmen und zunehmender sozialer Ausdifferenzierung werden Vorstellungen von homogenen Bevölkerungen obsolet, Grenzen zwischen Mehrheit und Minderheiten immer verschwommener. Führt das einerseits zu neuen, hybriden Identitäten, so auch andererseits zu sozialer Unsicherheit, die sich punktuell in Rassismus, Ausgrenzung und Gewalt entladen können. Der Abend zeigt Zusammenhänge von Globalisierung, Migration und Gemeinschaft und sucht nach einem neuen Verständnis sozialer Formationen. Arjun Appadurai, weltbekannter Anthropologe, thematisiert in Werken wie „Modernity at Large“ oder „Fear of Small Numbers“ die kulturellen Dimensionen von Globalisierungsprozessen. |
How to do things with farts: Factory Work and Subversive Farting
May 21, 2009I work part-time in a Factory in Berlin, on a traditional assembly-line. Its 12hours shifts so i thought there would be plenty of time to think about what occurs according to Marx’s theory of value. Although the occassional mental reliefs when one can gasp at the theoretical implications of work were rare. So i sought mental relief not in a theorized rationalization but in reflections on the concrete activities of working and farting (or rather the burned sulfur smell on the assembly line), through a Benjaminian ‘Profane Illumination’
Marx writes of work: ‘He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. (Capital Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value)
This was quite obvious when subjected to traditional disciplnary assembly-line procedure. It is an insight that doesnt emerge in service-jobs where your communicative personality is subsumed into some sort of production process, since the labour-activity is expirienced as an authentic ‘being yourself’, like a bartender or something. Although the line is thin, call center jobs involve an equal mechanization of bodies, minds and voices. Alienation it seems should be a self-evident concept, but i suppose its out of fashion since yuppie/media jobs involve now some sort of project of self-realization, of the pursuing of the prescribed inner purpose, like being a creative and autonmous market actor.
Im posted at the sulfur-section of the solar panel assembly line. A group of 3 workers waits every 5 minues for a box containing the panel-to-be to come out of an oven onto a portable conveyor belt, that looks like a foosball table. Someone weighs a few grams of Sulfur, which are distributed on the side of the box that will contain the next unprocessed panel that will be inserted in at the front of the conveyor belt oven. A second worker takes the hot panel, where the sulfur has been burnt onto to the next station in the assembly line. I was mostly unscrewing and screwing the bolts of the box after the processed panel had been replaced by a new one to be inserted into the front.

I made some jokes to entertain during the occasional free minute. But i aimed to deploy a humour that employs its immediate surroundings, that designtes the immediate symbolic surroundings through their materiality. This strategy emerged, as a counter to the jokes of another worker, who put a piece of black tape on his upper lip and did the hitler things. I also passed through a stage of conservative joking. There was an air-brush to blow away dust, and while waiting i used it to fan my sweaty forehead and made the same joke “Im in a convertible car, or on the Titanic”. This joke like the Hitler makes external references and introduces them to the immediate surroundings, but doesnt challenge them, they are just a prop like the square bit of black tape to put on your face. Its an escapist joke, wishing to be somewhere else, more bourgeois (The joke wouldnt work as an escapist relief i had said “Im in a hurricane”)
A subverisive joke would have as its butt the concrete, or more specifically the arbitraryness and fragility of what we assume to be the concrete. A made a fart joke that brought in the materiality of the situation, not of the general economic materiality, which people there were quite aware of, but of what we were up to. When the boxes were opened for the processed panel to be taken to the next stage, there was sometimes still a wiff of the burned sulfur, so i said “Either someone farted or someone has been burning sulfur nearby”. The fart is just a signalling to the joke and its butt, because if someone had actually farted it would be embarassing rather than funny. If the joke had just been “Did someone fart” it would have been incomplete, what was added was the concrete dimension, the literal incorporation of the surroundings: that we were burning sulfur. The comic signalling of the fart allowed a suspension of what we were seamlessly and continually doing. It brought to display our material surroundings, momentarily bringing the activity of burning sulfur into a fragility. This seemed clear since one of the workers quickly responded in a serious tone “No, the smell comes from the burned sulfur in the box”, in order to performatively reassert the taken for grantedness and self-evidentness of our material undertaking, in order to pull back the symbolically suspended material process of the assembly line that was the butt of the fart joke.
Might a Fart be something subversive (if we read it into “bodily collective innervation” and “revolutionary discharge”)
“The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto”" (Walter Benjamin – Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia)
I have a Marxist Fart-Joke: What does one do when “all that is solid melts into air”? Fart
Yes Men Workshop
May 21, 2009Andy Bichelbaum from the Yes Men was in Berlin for a workshop, where he discussed with activists their plans for actions in a YesMen tradition. In the evening we went to see his new movie ‘The Yes Men Fix the world” and here are a few thought about their strategy.
This is fantastic, spoiling the glamour of the red carpet and shifting the spectators gaze onto the rotten core of the glamourous spectacle, bringing into focus the absuridity of the festivity and its pomp.
The YesMen exemplified this intrusion and subtraction well that i talked about in my previous post on the G20 protest. Their innovative strategy is revealed when their at their comic best, when they play the corportate exaggerations (like WTO representative, McDonals, Halliburton and the Survivaballs), rather than in their simulation of Corporate Social Responsbility (like Hurricane Kathrina or the infamous 300 million viewed Union Carbide Bhopal disaster intervention, that is when they’re strategy is “identity-correction”, where they demask and denounce the individual corporations negligence, putting up logos of corporations and personifying the cause of troubles). In these latter Corporate Social Responsibility stunts, the aim is somekind of positive project, an alternative agenda/possibility. In the first variation of YesMen stunts, exaggeration and grotesqueness’ are the main techniques. I think they differ from Billionares for Bush and the like, because they go through the process of intrusion and therefore undertake the work of breaking the binary to get at that non-binaric stance momentarily reached by the subtraction. For Example when you see those security / weapons manufacturers ask questions about how the new Halliburton Survivaball suite could withstand biological attacks then you witness their state of being duped of their dupidity, which shows how the whole weapons industry depends on the nodding support and forced awe and applause directed at positions of power (also in the classic WTO example of the yesmen, where people still clap at the end). Somehow the systems symbolic power is revealed, to the viewer, or the non-dimwitted. But it seems its not so much a matter of wit, as the fact of not being materially immersed in the structuring envirments that ritually calls for your mental and bodily obidience to those with the sceptre and crown. But by switching these insignias of power in the immersed environment (the survivaballs at the Conference-Hall for Corporates listening to the hotshots) they reveal the relations which sustain the corporate fests. As with the survivorballs suits when the crash the BMW gala in Berlin (the video above), the grotesqueness of the gowns and all those bodies dressed in suits is amplified.
So the intrusion is the mimicking /performing of the e.g. Corporate-Capitalist symbolic identity, but the attendees dont notice these impersonations, for them it would be ‘buisness as usual’”. This is more destabalizing than ‘denouncing’, since it allowes a momentary burst of laughter, an incredulity and anxiety that contains an awareness of the fragility and arbitraryness of the Symbolically based mechanism of corportate power.
(Ill try to post radical jokes at the end of each post)
Stephen Colbert – what happens if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it – then my illegal logging buisness is succeeding
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