Filed under: Government, Internal Politics, Law, Military, Organizing/Grass Roots, Southeast Asia | Tagged: BAYAN, morong 43, Philippines | Leave a Comment »
Coup in Niger
Posted on Sunday, February 21, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Mr Ibn Chambas said the coup leaders were keen to return to normal duties (Photo by AFP).
There was a coup in Niger recently and the military junta held a press conference justifying their position and stating that they would work to restore democracy to the country.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported:
Niger’s new military leaders promised Saturday to hold elections, but specified no date, as thousands rallied in support of the coup that ousted the strongman of the uranium-rich west African nation.
“Our intention is to stabilise the political situation… We plan to organise elections but first we have to stabilise the situation,” Colonel Djibrilla Hamidou Hima, one of the junta leaders told journalists in Mali.
Hima, speaking in Bamako, said: “The deadline will be announced at the right moment… It has been hardly 48 hours. We want to rally the people and create conditions” for an election.
He said he had “explained” the reasons for the coup to the region’s leaders gathered in the Malian capital for a regional summit, adding: “They have understood us.”
Niger’s opposition also called for polls at a mass rally in the capital Niamey as they threw their weight behind the ouster of president Mamadou Tandja on Thursday.
IOL has reported mass rallies in support of the coup despite condemnation from the UN, ECOWAS, and the AU:
All three organisations have condemned the overthrow of Tandja, a strongman who had led the uranium-rich nation for more than a decade.
The country’s new military rulers were continuing to whip up popular support on Sunday.
Thousands of people, including students and civil servants, took part in a “gigantic demonstration” in the west African country’s second city Zinder, official Voix du Sahel radio said.
The turnout was “to salute the defence and security forces for the patriotic work which it has accomplished,” the radio said.
Opposition parties which had rallied international condemnation of Tandja for unilaterally extending his presidential mandate last year had called for a massive show of support for the junta.
Supporters chanted “Long Live the Army” and other pro-junta slogans as they marched through the southern city.
Filed under: Government, Internal Politics, Military, Western Africa | Tagged: africa, niger | Leave a Comment »
ABS-CBN International Video from Consulate Protest
Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Here’s my blog post from the protest and more information on the 43 health workers who were abducted and tortured by the U.S. backed Philippine government (yeah, that’s me in the gold 49ers jacket).
Filed under: Government, Human Rights, Internal Politics, International, Military, North America, Organizing/Grass Roots, Southeast Asia | Tagged: arroyo, health, healthcare, Philippines | Leave a Comment »
Release the “Morong 43″
Posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Some of the relatives of the detained health workers at a press conference on Sunday. (Photo by Janess Ann J. Ellao / bulatlat.com)
Over the weekend, on Saturday, the military stormed the house of Dr. Melecia Velmonte and arrested 43 healthcare workers who provide important services to the vast majority of people within the area. Bayan released a press statement stating:
This mass arrest of health professionals and health workers is unprecedented and is reminiscent of the Martial Law tactics of the Marcos Dictatorship. The so-called counter-insurgency program of the government has made everyone open targets for repression.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines is also desperately trying the worn-out tactic of linking progressive partylist groups with the armed revolutionary movement. The AFP floats the blatant lie that along with guns and explosives, campaign paraphernalia of the partylist group Bayan Muna were also recovered from the site. This is obviously a vain attempt to discredit the widely-supported Bayan Muna in the upcoming May elections.
As narrated by Dr. Velmonte, those arrested were “health workers attending a training course organized by the nongovernment organization Council for Health Development (CHD).”
In line with what has been going on the past either or so years under the U.S. backed regime of president Gloria Arroyo the military accused the health workers of being members of the communist insurgency New People’s Army, illegally stormed the premises of a fellow doctor, detained them in a military center, denied access (until recently) of family members from seeing their loved ones, denied access of a team from the government sponsored Commission on Human Rights, and tortured and interrogated the health workers.
Clamor said all of the detainees were subjected to relentless interrogation and were deprived of sleep. “They were made to sit the whole time,” he said. “They [interrogators] played good cop and bad cop. They asked all the personal details and some tried to force the detainees to admit that they are NPA [New People's Army] members.” On Monday, military officials said some of those arrested had confessed to being communist guerrillas and that they were willing to testify in court against the others.
Clamor said Dr. Alex Montes of the Community Medicine Development Foundation (Commed) was forced to admit that he is an NPA guerrilla.
On Monday morning, along with Karapatan (a human rights organization) chairperson Marie Hilo, a contingent of folks affiliated with Bayan-USA and NAFCON protested in front of the Philippine Consulate and were able to have a twenty-minute meeting with the vice consul general demanding the release of the health care workers and that all there rights be respected. Ms. Hilo was also able to give her concerns that cases like these would continue to increase and intensify as the government seeks to “completely destroy” the insurgency by the end of 2010.
Along with trying to have complete victory over the New People’s Army the government is also lumping legal political, human rights, and healthcare organizations that engage in human rights work along side of the communist insurgency. The only crime that these healthcare workers did was providing genuine care for the people and in trying to stand up for true democracy and for human rights within their country. Unfortunately, it seems that this won’t be the last incident of human rights abuses by the U.S. backed Philippine government during the year of 2010.
Filed under: Government, Human Rights, Internal Politics, Military, Organizing/Grass Roots, Police Brutality, Southeast Asia | Tagged: BAYAN, healthcare, karapatan, Philippines, rizal | 1 Comment »
Rocky Rivera on iTunes
Posted on Monday, February 8, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Click on pic.
Filed under: Arts, North America | Tagged: eyeasage, hip hop, rap, rocky rivera | Leave a Comment »
links for 2010-02-07
Posted on Sunday, February 7, 2010 by Jack Stephens
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"This mass arrest of health professionals and health workers is unprecedented and is reminiscent of the Martial Law tactics of the Marcos Dictatorship. The so-called counter-insurgency program of the government has made everyone open targets for repression."
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"More than a hundred retired New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers said in a survey that the intense pressure to produce annual crime reductions led some supervisors and precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics, according to two criminologists studying the department."
Filed under: BookMarx | Comments Off
The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital
Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 by Jack Stephens
In the latest issue of the Monthly Review John Bellamy Foster writes:
The question I raised at the beginning of this article is: Has capitalism entered a new stage? In the 2006 article on “Monopoly-Finance Capital” I referred to monopoly-finance capital as a new phase of the monopoly stage of capitalism. If we see the stages of capitalism—say, nineteenth-century competitive capitalism and the twentieth-century monopoly capitalism—as dynamic periods in which economic transformation creates the basis of a whole new means of advance in accumulation, then the period of monopoly-finance capital does not seem to merit such a designation. Rather, the accumulation of capital has remained stagnant in the center of the system, while it has become increasingly dependent on speculative finance to maintain what little growth there is. What we may be witnessing in the present phase is the weakening of capitalist production at the advanced capitalist core as a result of a process of maturation of the accumulation process in these societies: hence, the stagnation-financialization trap. Financialization, however, has, paradoxically, helped to promote wealth and power in this context, creating a complex, contradictory reality in the age of monopoly-finance capital. There can be little doubt that this is an unstable situation, and that capital accumulation at the core of the system is, in many ways, running up against its historic limits.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economics, Globalization, International, Marxism | Tagged: Capitalism, John Bellamy Foster, Marxism, Monthly Review, socialism | Comments Off
links for 2010-01-31
Posted on Sunday, January 31, 2010 by Jack Stephens
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"The destruction of truth is so advanced in capitalist culture that it should come as no surprise that even in the halls of Critical Theory, imagined sanctum sanctorum of independent consciousness and conscience, truth is now openly profaned and condescended to by some among those who, historically, have been charged with sheltering its sacred flame–the intellectuals. 'The truth never dies, but is made to live as a beggar', goes the Yiddish proverb, reminding us that truth has always suffered in this world. But no intellectual movement of recent memory has so beggared the truth as poststructuralism has…The prerogative of truth was thus transformed from a right of the oppressed into an object of study for the technical or academic expert."
Filed under: BookMarx | Comments Off
links for 2010-01-27
Posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 by Jack Stephens
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"For more than forty years, the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) has been a leading outlet for innovative research in non-orthodox economics. As the journal of the Union for Radical Political Economics, the RRPE promotes critical inquiry into all areas of economic, social, and political reality."
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Activism is Not a Crime: Feb. 6th in San Francisco
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Click here for Manilatown Heritage Foundation website
For those who can make it check out this exhibit at the Manilatown Heritage Foundation on the roles of activists and community organizers in the Philippines and the continued (deadly) repression by the government against them. The opening reception will be on Saturday February 6th. Also, remember to check out my blog series (which I need to finish!!!!) on my trip to the Philippines and the organizers and activists I met down there and their stories I heard.
Southern Tagalog, Luzon, Philippines: Organizers, workers, peasants, and youth march during the Lakbayan (Photo by Jack Stephens). Click for my Flickr account.
Filed under: Arts, Internal Politics, International, North America, Organizing/Grass Roots, Southeast Asia | Tagged: Human Rights, Manilatown, Philippines | Comments Off
links for 2010-01-23
Posted on Saturday, January 23, 2010 by Jack Stephens
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"This book is an unusually readable and lucid account of the development of Derrida's work, from his early writings on phenomenology and structuralism to his most recent interventions in debates on psychoanalysis, ethics and politics.
Christina Howells gives a clear explanation of many of the key terms of deconstruction – including différance, trace, supplement and logocentrism – and shows how they function in Derrida's writing. She explores his critique of the notion of self-presence through his engagement with Husserl, and his critique of humanist conceptions of the subject through an account of his ambivalent and evolving relationship to the philosophy of Sartre. The question of the relationship between philosophy and literature is examined through an analysis of the texts of the 1970s, and in particular Glas, where Derrida confronts Hegel's totalizing dialectics with the fragmentary and iconoclastic writings of Jean Genet."
Filed under: BookMarx | 1 Comment »
Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy
Posted on Friday, January 22, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Photo by James Andanson (Apis/Sygma/Corbis).
Over at The Exceprt Mill I quote Christina Howell’s and her views on Sartre’s place in contemporary philosophy:
Not only did Sartre’s critics of the sixties and seventies attempt, unwittingly perhaps, to fossilize him in the classical works he had himself by then outgrown, but they did not accord those works themselves a fair reading. The decentered subject, the rejection of a metaphysics of presence, the critique of bourgeois humanism and individualism, the conception of the reader as producer of the text’s multiple meaning, the recognition of language and thought structures as masters rather than mastered in most acts of discourse and thinking, a materialist philosophy of history as detotalized and fragmented, these are not the inventions of Lacan, Foucault, Levi-Strauss and Derrida; nor are they to be found merely in Sartre’s latter works such as the Critique (1960), Words (1966) or the Idiot of the Family (1971-1972) where it could be argued that they should be attributed to his receptivity to the major trends of his age (though the Critique of Dialectical Reason would still predate most of the French Structuralists’ major works). The notions are, rather, present from the outset: in the Transcendence of the Ego (1936), in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1940), in Nausea (1941), in Being and Nothingness (1943), and even in his most polemical theoretical work, What is Literature? (1948).)
Filed under: Academia | Tagged: existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, philosophy, Sartre | Comments Off
Peasants March on the Capital Demanding Land Reform
Posted on Friday, January 22, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Filed under: Internal Politics, Organizing/Grass Roots, Radicalism, Southeast Asia | Tagged: Philippines | Comments Off
links for 2010-01-20
Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 by Jack Stephens
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"Marxism is not a body of truths from which we deduce a politics. Politics is a creative practice proceeding from what is new in the present. In this practice, Marxism (and its developments) is a necessity, but the practice itself must be a process of forging new truths.
We are not revolutionaries because we are Marxist (or Maoists, or etc.), but we are Marxists (and whatever else may be necessary and applicable) because we are revolutionaries, because we seek to forge an emancipatory politics, a politics capable of overcoming the present and pursuing a communist future."
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"Much of my disappointment can be blamed on the irritatingly trite screenplay. While I understand that Cameron’s project is explicitly foregrounded as a retelling of the romantic “first contact” story – and hey, maybe we can start invoking Joseph Campbell as well to raise the comparison on an even more macro level – it’s done so in a terribly predictable fashion, with events proceeding in automatic lockstep. Surely myths, with their corresponding narrative elements, don’t have to be retold in such a banal manner? Sure, no one believes for a minute that Jake Sully, played by a lifeless Sam Worthington, would actually carry out his military orders, but his effortless decision to go native happens almost as if… it’s what the motif demanded."
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Rocky Rivera’s Album Release Party in San Francisco
Posted on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Jack Stephens
Click on the pic
Filed under: Arts, North America | Comments Off
