When I was on DemocracyNow! last week, I managed, in my own stuttering-at-five-in-the-morning-oh-my-god-I’m-talking-to-Amy-Goodman-and-Juan-Gonzales kind of way to suggest two things about the current World Cup in South Africa. First, as S’bu Zikode told me last week
It is becoming clear that in the world cup we’re going to be excluded but our names are being used to justify the goodness of our country in the world. The country is divided. There are certain people who are benefiting and we are excluded – we want to tell the other side of the story. Some of us are homeless, hungry, don’t have freedom of expression.
In other words, the poor are being used by the World Cup. But the other point I wanted to argue was that World Cup can also, in a clearly asymmetric way, be used by the poor. This isn’t a story that makes it either to the press, or to the analysis about the ills of Fifa. Protests in Durban recently have tried to get the world’s press to shine a light on how apartheid remains, and to provide cover for street marches that would have been illegally shut down in the past. See, for instance, this:
There aren’t just grievances within South Africa’s cities, but outside them too. Here’s a release from a group working on Food Sovereignty in South Africa. I’ve not heard of them before, but I’m looking forward to hearing a great deal more when next I’m there…. More below the fold. Keep Reading »
For once, the title’s not a typo. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Food And Agricultural Organization of the United Nations have revised up its estimates of how much food prices will increase over the coming decade. As reported by Javier Blas in the Financial Times:
Far from needing explanation, Rand’s success explains itself. Rand worked in that quintessential American proving ground—alongside the likes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Glenn Beck—where garbage achieves gravitas and bullshit gets blessed. There she learned that dreams don’t come true. They are true.
Here in California, it’s dark, the votes are being counted, and two corporations – PG&E and Mercury Insurance – look like they’ve managed to buy their way into the constitution. More on the corporate take-over of ballot initiatives here.
With every great catastrophe, land becomes a laboratory – from Hiroshima to Bhopal to the Gulf, new physics, chemistries and biologies of exposure, new teratologies, new mutations. And, always, women bear the brunt. Here’s the latest from the Gulf Spill from Truthout.
Here’s an excellent piece by Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Food. He’s responding to the guidelines on landgrabbing published by the World Bank and others, suggesting that such codes of conduct are as enlightened as sustainable slavery or compassionate child abuse. More below the fold. Keep Reading »
I’m a United Auto Worker. More specifically, I’m a member of The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America.
Honestly, I wish I had the skill to fashion aerospace and agricultural implements, but the only agricultural implement that I wield is my pen – and that’s how I got into the union. The National Writers Union is a correctly punctuated and fully affiliated member of UAW’s Local 1981, whose members include the excellent Holly Sklar and Ursula K Le Guin. In our newsletter recently came word of a fine project by one of my union sisters, Sue Doro. She’s a poet, writer and erstwhile machinist. She is also, of necessity, a historian/herstorian of tradeswomen’s organising. Hers are stories that rarely make it to the textbooks. “It chills me to know that workers [sic] history can be swept away like dirt on factory floors”, she says. Which is why one of her many projects is Pride and A Paycheck – a guide to blue collar jobs, tradeswoman news, photos, poetry and art. Women’s histories and workers’ histories are alive and well, because women workers are alive and well, and still hidden.
