Via: "Paul D. Miller"

Hi Rana - it was with pleasure that I read your post - FINALLY, the
list is getting exciting again.

I was just in New Zealand with Suketu, and am happy to report his
book "Maximum City" won the Kiriyama Prize, which is a kind of
Pacific Rim/South Asia equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S.


New Zealand, which gets about 80% of it's energy supplies from solar,
thermal, hydro, and wind power, is a great example of a European
society that is coming to grips not only with the upcoming energy
crisis that the West has fueled, but also, it's at least got a level
comfort with diversity and multiculturalism than almost anything one
can find in Europe.

All I can say is yeah, Europe is tired, America is tired. The theory
scene is waaaay tired.

Rana, all I can say is please post more! Andreas, Keith - Rana is a
guy... It's been really funny to see you both refer to him as a
her.... Cultural Sensitivities 101, eh?

Paul


ps.
In light of the issues I think that Rana has broached on the list, I
think I'll post an article by Mike Davis on New Orleans - America's
own Third World city, right in the heart of the Red States! Rana -
try visiting there sometime!


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis The Nation
[from the April 10, 2006 issue]

Who Is Killing New Orleans?

By MIKE DAVIS

Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed
campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign
announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans.
In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on
Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with
light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the
city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around
Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one
seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back
on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain
damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in
darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip
of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the
river. Such a large portion of the black population is
gone that some radio stations are now switching their
formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is
back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the
French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd
Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of
New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is
about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day.
More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including
an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are
still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by
conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-
Democrats, have usurped almost every function of
elected government. With the City Council largely shut
out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions
and outside experts, mostly white and Republican,
propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-
black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from
local voters, the public-school system has already been
virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized
teachers and school employees. Thousands of other
unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of
Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public
medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board,
dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over
city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly"
and mount "one of the largest reconstruction efforts
the world has ever seen" has proved to be the same
fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's
bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration
has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly
in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing,
flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans
or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative
Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing
by inaction"--the likelihood increases that most black
Orleanians will never be able to return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush
impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured
the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech
that "we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's]
poverty with bold action.... We will do what it takes,
we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens
rebuild their communities and their lives."

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all
autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of
government, while its conservative attack dogs in
Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of
cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans.
Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that
was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed
state like Haiti, out of step with national values.
"Louisiana and New Orleans," according to Idaho Senator
Larry Craig, "are the most corrupt governments in our
country and they always have been.... Fraud is in the
culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in the state
of Louisiana as well."

Democrats, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus,
did pathetically little to counter this backlash or to
hold Bush's feet to the fire over his Jackson Square
pledge. The promised national debate about urban
poverty never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a
great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the
treacherous currents of White House hypocrisy and
conservative contempt.

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John
Snow's refusal to guarantee New Orleans municipal
bonds, forcing Mayor Nagin to lay off 3,000 city
employees on top of the thousands of education and
medical workers already jobless. The Bush
Administration also blocked bipartisan measures to
increase Medicaid coverage for Katrina evacuees and to
give the State of Louisiana--facing an estimated $8
billion in lost revenues over the next few years--a
share of the income generated by its offshore oil and
gas leases.

Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black
neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration
(SBA), which rejected a majority of loan applications
by local businesses and homeowners. At the same time, a
bipartisan Senate bill to save small businesses with
emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials,
leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure.
As a result, the economic foundations of the city's
African-American middle class (public-sector jobs and
small businesses) have been swept away by deliberate
decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the
absence of federal or state initiatives to employ
locals, low-income blacks are losing their niches in
the construction and service sectors to more mobile
outsiders.

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood
relief, the White House has made herculean efforts to
reward its own base of large corporations and political
insiders. Representative Nydia Velazquez, who sits on
the House Small Business Committee, pointed out that
the SBA has allowed large corporations to get $2
billion in federal contracts while excluding local
minority contractors.

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have
been the giant engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton
subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, which enjoy the
services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA
director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and
the Army Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to
Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were
spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of
profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-
torn Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is
guaranteed to be recycled as GOP campaign
contributions.) FEMA, for example, has paid the Shaw
Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install
tarps on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans. Yet the
actual installers earn as little as $2 per square, and
the tarps are provided by FEMA. Similarly, the Army
Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic yard
of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators
receive only $1. Every level of the contracting food
chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except
the bottom rung, where the actual work is carried out.
While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage
of New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers--
often Mexican or Salvadoran immigrants camped out in
city parks and derelict shopping centers--can barely
make ends meet.

The Big Kiss-Off

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana
politics, broad solidarity of interest is normally as
rare as a boulder in a bayou. Yet Katrina created an
unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin demands
for Category 5 hurricane protection and mortgage relief
for damaged homes. From conservative Republicans to
liberal Democrats, there has been unanimity that the
region's recovery depends on federal investment in new
levees and coastal restoration, as well as financial
rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners whose
insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual
damage. (There has been no equivalent consensus and
little concern for the right of renters--who
constituted 53 percent of the population before
Katrina--and of public-housing tenants to return to
their city.)

Yet by early November it was clear that saving New
Orleans was no longer high on the Bush agenda, if it
had ever been. As Congress headed toward its Christmas
adjournment, the Louisiana delegation was in panic
mode: A Category 5 plan had disappeared from serious
discussion, and there were doubts about whether the
damaged levees would be repaired before hurricane
season returned. (In early March engineers monitoring
the progress of the Army Corps's work complained that
the use of weak, sandy soils and the lack of concrete
"armoring" insured that the levees would again fail in
a major storm.)

Congress ultimately voted to provide $29 billion for
Gulf Coast relief. Yet as the Washington Post reported,
"All but $6 billion of the measure merely reshuffled
some of the $62 billion in previously approved
Hurricane Katrina aid. The rest was funded by a 1
percent across-the-board cut of non-emergency,
discretionary programs." The Pentagon won approval for
a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other
professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out
the $250 million allocated to combat coastal erosion.
Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful Republican troika--
Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott and Thad
Cochran--persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2
billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and
$5.3 billion for Mississippi, with red-state
Mississippi getting five times as much aid per
distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

Louisiana received another blow on January 23, when
Bush rejected GOP Representative Richard Baker's plan
calling for a federally guaranteed Louisiana
Reconstruction Corporation, which would bail out
homeowners by buying distressed properties and
packaging them in larger parcels for resale to
developers. Local Republicans as well as Democrats
howled in rage, and the future of southern Louisiana
was again thrown into chaos. Although the
Administration eventually promised an additional $4.2
billion in housing aid, the appropriation continues to
be fought over by Texas and other jealous states.

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course,
runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic
probity (America's most corrupt city, after all, is
located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi).
Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same
antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used
to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130
years ago. Usually it is the poor who are invisible in
the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of
New Orleans it has been the African-American
professional middle class and skilled working class. In
the confusion and suffering of Katrina--a Rorschach
test of the American racial unconscious--most white
politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only
the demons of their prejudices. The city's complex
history and social geography have been reduced to a
cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately
criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the
kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities.
Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red-brick
normalcy--or, for that matter, the pride of
homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in
the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward--have not been allowed
to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats
as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is
inherently pathological.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures--blacks
running amok, incapable of honest self-government--that
were evoked by the murderous White League when it
plotted against Reconstruction in New Orleans in the
1870s. Indeed, some civil rights veterans fear that the
1874 Battle of Canal Street, a bloody League-organized
insurrection against a Republican administration
elected by black suffrage, is being refought--perhaps
without pikes and guns, but with the same fundamental
aim of dispossessing black New Orleans of economic and
political power. Certainly, a sweeping transformation
of the racial balance-of-power within the city has been
on some people's agenda for a long time.

The Krewe of Canizaro

Power and status in New Orleans have always been
defined by membership in secretive Mardi Gras "krewes"
and social clubs. In the early 1990s civil rights
activists, led by feisty Councilmember Dorothy Mae
Taylor, forced the token desegregation of Mardi Gras,
and some of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few
African-American millionaires. Despite some old-guard
holdouts, Uptown seemed to be adjusting, however
grudgingly, to the reality of black political clout.

But as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if
the oligarchy is dead, then long live the oligarchy.
While elected black officials protest impotently from
the sidelines, a largely white elite has wrested
control over the debate about how to rebuild the city.
This de facto ruling krewe includes Jim Amoss, editor
of the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Pres Kabacoff,
developer-gentrifier and local patron of the New
Urbanism; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and
prominent Bushite; James Reiss, real estate investor
and chair of the Regional Transit Authority (i.e., the
man responsible for the buses that didn't evacuate
people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of one of the largest
black-owned banks; Janet Howard of the Bureau of
Government Research (originally established by Uptown
elites to oppose the populism of Huey Long); and Scott
Cowen, the aggressively ambitious president of Tulane
University.

But the dominating figure and kingpin is Joseph
Canizaro, a wealthy property developer who is a leading
Bush supporter with close personal ties to the White
House inner circle. He is also the power behind the
throne of Mayor Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported
Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 85 percent
of the white vote. Finally, as the former president of
the Urban Land Institute, Canizaro mobilizes the
support of some of the nation's most powerful
developers and prestigious master planners.

In a city where old money is often as reclusive as Anne
Rice's vampires, Canizaro poses as a brave civic leader
unafraid to speak bitter but necessary truths. As he
told the Associated Press about the Katrina diaspora
last October: "As a practical matter, these poor folks
don't have the resources to go back to our city just
like they didn't have the resources to get out of our
city. So we won't get all those folks back. That's just
a fact."

Indeed, it is a "fact" that Canizaro has helped shape
into reigning dogma. The number of displaced residents
returning to the city is obviously a highly variable
function of the resources and opportunities provided
for them, yet the rebuilding debate has been premised
on suspicious projections--provided by the RAND
Corporation and endlessly repeated by Nagin and
Canizaro--that in three years the city would recover
only half of its August 2005 population. Many
Orleanians cynically wonder whether such projections
aren't actually goals. For years Reiss, Kabacoff and
others have complained that New Orleans has too many
poor people. Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of
white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades
of deindustrialization (which has given New Orleans an
economic profile closer to Newark than to Houston or
Atlanta), they argue that the city has become a soul-
destroying warehouse for underemployed and poorly
educated African-Americans, whose real interests--it is
claimed--might be better served by a Greyhound ticket
to another town.

Kabacoff's 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public
housing project as River Garden, a largely market-rate
faux Creole subdivision, has become the prototype for
the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that Mayor Nagin's
Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro as
head of the crucial urban planning committee) proposes
to build. BNOB is perhaps the most important elite
initiative in New Orleans since the famous "Cold Water
Committee" (which included Kabacoff's father) mobilized
in 1946 to overthrow the "Old Regulars" and elect
reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor. BNOB grew out of
a notorious meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans
business leaders (dubbed by some "the forty thieves")
that Reiss organized in Dallas twelve days after
Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded most
of New Orleans's elected black representatives and,
according to Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street
Journal, focused on the opportunity to rebuild the city
"with better services and fewer poor people."

Fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were
scarcely mollified when at the end of September the
mayor charged BNOB with preparing a master plan to
rebuild the city. Although the seventeen-member
commission was racially balanced and included City
Council president Oliver Thomas as well as jazz
musician Wynton Marsalis (telecommuting from
Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by committee
chairs, especially Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen
(education) and Howard (finance), who lunched privately
with the mayor before the group's weekly meeting. This
inner sanctum was reportedly necessary because the
full-panel meetings did not allow a frank discussion of
"tough issues of race and class."

BNOB might have quickly imploded but for a shrewd
outflanking movement by Canizaro, who persuaded Nagin
to invite the Urban Land Institute to work with the
commission. Although the ULI is the self-interested
national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and
Canizaro welcomed the delegation of developers,
architects and ex-mayors as a heroic cavalry of
expertise riding to the city's rescue. In a nutshell,
the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite
desire to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of
black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade
to reduce its physical footprint to contours
commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable
urban infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts"
(including representatives of some of the country's
largest property firms and corporate architects)
proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city,
in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for
mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to
protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting
developer told BNOB: "Your housing is now a public
resource. You can't think of it as private property
anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI
also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation,
armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City
Council, as well as an oversight board with power over
the city's finances. With control of New Orleans
schools already usurped by the state, the ULI's
proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees
would effectively overthrow representative democracy
and annul the right of local people to make decisions
about their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil
rights movement, especially, it reeked of
disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the
paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of
white homeowners and their representatives, angrily
rejected the ULI plan. Mayor Nagin--truly a cat on a
hot tin roof--danced anxiously back and forth between
the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area while
at the same time warning that the city could not afford
to service every neighborhood. But state and national
officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson,
applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of
the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of
Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by Canizaro in
January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They
included an appointed redevelopment corporation,
outside the control of the City Council, that would act
as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and
neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent
domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt
("black people's neighborhoods into white people's
parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-fill"
tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden.
Other committees recommended a radical diminution of
the power of elected government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which
neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which
would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced
buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the
ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research
wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube
Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem
with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll
homeowners about their intentions. Only those
neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina
residents had made a committment to return would be
considered serious candidates for Community Development
Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a
public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like
the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a
job well done." But most locals found little charm in
the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with
my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in
the Council chambers on January 14, while another
demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some
hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our
homes, to make this a Disney World version of our
homes, our lives?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and
eventually disavowed the building moratorium. Soon
afterward the White House torpedoed the Baker plan and
left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG
appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New
Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens
linked by a high-speed light-rail line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has
reassured supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go
forward with CDBGs alone if necessary; in addition, he
knows that independent of the local political weather,
there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance
coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to
refinance mortgages and so on--that can make permanent
the exodus from redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as
anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana
knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until
some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have
their say.

Power Shift

Even before the last bloated body had been fished out
of the fetid waters, conservative political analysts
were writing gleeful obituaries for black Democratic
power in Louisiana. "The Democrats' margin of victory,"
said Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, is "living
in the Astrodome in Houston." Thanks to the Army
Corps's defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain
another Senate seat, two Congressional seats and
probably the governorship. The Democrats would also
find it impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992
feat, when he carried Louisiana by almost exactly his
margin of victory in New Orleans. With a ruthless
psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is
inconceivable that such considerations haven't
influenced the shameless Bush response to the city's
distress.

New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes
to the violent antipathy of white-flight suburbs toward
its black central city, so it is not surprising that
representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected
Klan leader David Duke to the state legislature in
1989) and St. Tammany Parish have particularly relished
the post-Katrina shift in metropolitan population and
electoral power. Both parishes are in the midst of
housing booms that may consolidate the hollowing out
and decline of New Orleans.

For her part, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, has
expressed little concern about this fundamental
reconfiguration of Louisiana's major metropolitan area.
Indeed, her immediate, Bush-like responses to Katrina
were to help engineer a state takeover of New Orleans
schools and to slash $500 million in state spending
while sponsoring tax breaks (in the name of economic
recovery) for oil companies awash in profits. The
Legislative Black Caucus was outraged at Blanco's
"complete lack of vision and leadership" and went to
court to challenge her right to make cuts without
consulting lawmakers. But Blanco, supported by rural
conservatives and corporate lobbyists, remained
intransigent, even openly hostile, to black Democrats
whose support she had previously courted.

Poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery
Authority, whose gaggle of university presidents and
corporate types appointed by Blanco is even less
beholden to black New Orleans voters and their
representatives than the Canizaro krewe. The twenty-
nine-member LRA board, dominated by representatives of
big business, has only one trade unionist and not a
single grassroots black representative. Moreover, in
contrast to Nagin's commission, the LRA has the power
to decide, not merely advise: It controls the
allocation of the FEMA funds and CDBGs that Congress
has provided for reconstruction.

According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading
members of the LRA believe that the sheer force of
economic disincentives will shrink the city around the
contours proposed by the Urban Land Institute. The
authority has thus refused to disburse any of its
hazard mitigation funds to areas considered unsafe, and
presumably will be equally hardheaded in the allocation
of CDBG spending. At a special session of the
legislature Governor Blanco emphasized that the state,
not local government or neighborhood planning
committees, will retain control over where grants and
loans go.

But Blanco and the elites may have overlooked the Fats
Domino factor.

'No Bulldozing!'

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged but structurally
sound homes, Fats Domino's house wears a defiant sign:
Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing! The r&b icon, who
has always stayed close to his roots in working-class
Holy Cross, knows his riverside neighborhood and the
rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the
city-shrinkers. Indeed, on Christmas Day the Times-
Picayune--declaring that "before a community can
rebuild, it must dream"--published a vision of what a
smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like:
"Tourists and schoolchildren tour a living museum that
includes the former home of Fats Domino and Holy Cross
High School, a multiblock memorial to Katrina that
spans the devastated neighborhood."

"Living museum" (or "holocaust museum," as a black
friend bitterly observed) sounds like a bad joke, but
it is the elite view of what African-American New
Orleans should become. In the brave New Urbanist world
of Canizaro and Kabacoff, blacks (along with that other
colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as
entertainers and self-caricatures. The high-voltage
energy that once rocked juke joints, housing projects
and second-line parades will now be safely embalmed for
tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience in
the Central Business District.

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first
defeat a remarkable local history of grassroots
organization. The Crescent City's best-kept secret--in
the mainstream press, at least--has been the resurgence
of trade-union and community organizing since the
mid-1990s. Indeed, New Orleans, the only Southern city
in which labor was ever powerful enough to call a
general strike, has become an important crucible of new
social movements. In particular, it has become the home
base of ACORN, a national organization of working-class
homeowners and tenants that counts more than 9,000 New
Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened
black neighborhoods. ACORN's membership has been the
engine behind the tumultuous, decade-long struggle to
unionize downtown hotels as well as the successful 2002
referendum to legislate the nation's first municipal
minimum wage (later overthrown by a right-wing state
Supreme Court). Since Katrina, ACORN has emerged as the
major opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the
city. Its members find themselves again fighting many
of the same elite figures who were opponents of hotel
unionization and a living wage.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke scoffs at the RAND
Corporation projections that portray most blacks
abandoning the city. "Don't believe those phony
figures," he told me over beignets at Cafe du Monde in
January. "We have polled our displaced members in
Houston and Atlanta. Folks overwhelmingly want to
return. But they realize that this is a tough struggle,
since we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: to
restore people's homes and to bring back their jobs. It
is also a race against time. The challenge is, You make
it, you take it. So our members are voting with their
feet."

Not waiting for CDBGs, FEMA flood maps or permission
from Canizaro, ACORN crews and volunteers from across
the country are working night and day to repair the
homes of 1,000 member-families in some of the most
threatened areas. The strategy is to confront the city-
shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied,
viable neighborhood cores.

ACORN has allied with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP to
defend worker rights and press for the hiring of locals
in the recovery effort. Rathke points out that Katrina
has become the pretext for the most vicious government-
supported attack on unions since President Reagan fired
striking air-traffic controllers in 1981. "First,
suspension of Davis-Bacon [federal prevailing wage
law], then the state takeover of the schools and the
destruction of the teachers' union, and now this." He
points to a beat-up green garbage truck rattling by
Jackson Square. "Trash collection in the French Quarter
used to be a unionized city job, SEIU members. Now FEMA
has contracted the work to a scab company from out of
state. Is this what Bring New Orleans Back means?"

ACORN also went to court to insure that New Orleans's
displaced, largely black population would have access
to out-of-state polling places, especially in Atlanta
and Houston, for the scheduled April 22 city elections.
When a federal judge rejected the demand, ACORN
organizer Stephen Bradberry said it's "so obvious that
there's a concerted plan to make this a whiter city."
The NAACP agrees, but the Justice Department denied its
request to block an election that is likely to transfer
power to the artificial white majority created by
Katrina.

It would be inspiring to see in this latest battle of
New Orleans the birth pangs of a new or renewed civil
rights movement, but gritty local activism has yet to
be echoed in meaningful solidarity by the labor
movement, so-called progressive Democrats or even the
Congressional Black Caucus. Pledges, press statements
and occasional delegations, yes; but not the
unfaltering national outrage and sense of urgency that
should attend the attempted murder of New Orleans on
the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. In
1874, as historian Ted Tunnell has pointed out, the
failure of Northern Radicals to launch a militant,
armed riposte to the white insurrection in New Orleans
helped to doom the first Reconstruction. Will our
feeble response to Hurricane Katrina now lead to the
rollback of the second?

Via: John Young

There is hardly a better prescription for dreaming of suicide, by cities,
persons or ideoligies, than comfortable success and lack of a need
to struggle to survive.

The invention of the Third World brand came from the mental laziness
non-western intellectuals and political ideolgues grown soft from the
luxury of being treated as exotics by the west -- so long as they
only intellectualized and ineptly agitated politically and posed no
serious threat. Dollops of overt and covert funding assured the
dogs of ample feedings and preenings, not lost on domestic curs
seeking the same from their caretakers and pervasive spies and
turncoats.

When all goes well, whether western or eastern, or lately African
and South American, daydreams of ending it all oneself rather than
being tortured and murdered, as if there is a correspondence between
nightmares imposed on others and aesthetic murder of one's ego,
or intellectual guilt of distancing from direct guilt of doing harm
by way of impotently attacking the doers of crimes against humans.

Third World is hoary nomenclature of world bankism or worse, UNism,
promise without substance, so it is no wonder it has become a star
powerfully attacting celebrity do nothings -- hardly limited to aging
rock stars, say, where Hugo Chavez's luxurious accommodations
are concerned, it's a tourist magnet, oh my, Che, what a come down
to t-shirts and trickets in a VE mall.

Third World was peopled by political rock star academics and indies
looking for replacement funding for the petered out Cold War brand,
now seeking alternatives to the threadbare Viet Nam schtick, the
civil and human rights carcasses, the ethnic, feminist, negritude,

marxian flayed corpses.

Meanwhile, western cities have continued to rot with untended
pathologies, sustained by the greatest number of spies and police
and largest military and military-addicted economies ever in history.
Vile and villainous neighborhoods so overplayed by the media that
nobody wants to squander a career looking at the failure of generations
of promises at home for a better and safer homeland, and thus
embarassing the erstwhile leaders of the poor who promised to lead
their people better than alien insensitive outsiders, and where there
is as much evidence for intellectual dishonesty as can be found
outside the countries which must spawn critics and apologists or
be judged uncivilized by perfectly mirrored other critics and
apologists.

It will be come increasingly fashionable to argue that the poor can
do a better job of helping themselves than unreliable outsiders. That
is a predictable cycle which follows failed intentions of good hearts
when funding disappears -- except for last gasp efforts to justify
abandoning the needy.

And fat-gutted outsiders will become so bereft of purpose that suicide
becomes highly appealing -- in the abstract, burp. Call it Camusian,
rebel without cause.

Via: Rana Dasgupta

[sent this message 2 days ago but it does not seem to have shown up.
again... R.]

thanks for his, andreas.

actually i am not so interested in prophecy, and i am not trying to
suggest a teleology.

to me the "feeling" that the third-world metropolis may be, not a place
of sterility, but a place of fertility - and that it may produce futures
for the entire world - is interesting *as a feeling*. it is revelatory
of feelings about the limits to the creative potential of the western
city. it destabilises western narratives of historical development. it
diminishes the western monopoly on modernity and gives birth to a plural
self that might acknowledge other principles.

in fact i might be suggesting a softening, or a broadening of the
existing telos of urbanity, rather than imposing a new one. the fact is
that cities are already discussed with reference to a telos. i was
trying to point out that many cities that do not seem to be en route to
that telos are imposing themselves with an agressive, but undeniable,
modernity.

the relationship of such a "feeling" to actual historical unfolding is
complex however, and i do not mean to mistake one for the other. if the
situationists envisioned a future in which all material problems would
be definitively solved and the main challenge would be to prevent
ourselves getting bored - it says much about 5Os and 6Os france, and
very little about any actual future, any "teleology". the question to
ask of such a vision is not "did it turn out to be true?" but "what are
the conditions of possibility for such a vision?"

when i talk, therefore, about the rise of new asian corporate
formations, massive wealth, etc - it is not "triumphalism", nor is it to
suggest that the question of the future is solved. [living in delhi at
the moment it is difficult to be unequivocal about such epic visions of
the future, which in their reality are terrifying.] it is simply to
trace some of the conditions of possibility for this "sudden stardom" in
the media industry. in part, those conditions have to do with sheer power.

the question of how "exemplary" the third-world city might be is very
difficult. i think the fascination remains exotic: the third-world city
is not an ego ideal for the west, even if it might show signs of
world-changing, and even enviable, ardour. but i think the heightened
"visibility" you talk of is certainly more than simple apocalyptic
euphoria [the third-world city as image of this collective disaster of
globalisation]. no matter how apocalyptic the situation feels, this
theme is about new creatures being born, so it is not an end.

Yours

R

Via: Keith Hart

Andreas,

Thank you for bringing up again the fundamental issues raised by Rana's
essay. My own immediate response to her exchange with Ben was
intemperate; so you have given me another chance to be more reasoned.

The main demographic event of the last half-century was the rise of
Third World cities. These have been seen in fairly pathological terms as
having created a "planet of slums" (Mike Davis). Black Africa, which
began the twentieth century with only about 1% of its people living in
cities, ended it with half of them living there. It is a matter of some
interest what social and cultural forms are emerging under these
conditions, but we know at least of a religious revival, an explosion of
the modern arts and a proliferating urban commerce, usually referred to
as 'informal'.

Rana raised the question of how these seismic shifts in the size,
location and character of the human population might be manifested in
the cultural representations of the West. A century ago, as Sven
Lindqvist makes clear in Exterminate All The Brutes, the answer would
have taken the form of a genocidal impulse rooted in centuries of
colonial exploitation. Today it is more likely to take the form of a
vision of Africa as a dying continent (Stephen Smith's Negrologie:
pourquoi l'Afrique meurt, Hubert Sauper's movie, Darwin's Nightmare or
just the endless reporting of disease, war, hunger and death). In 2005
this vision was linked to a rescue mission (at least at the propaganda
level) launched by a bunch of cynical politicians and fronted by ageing
rock stars).

How long is it since the main threat to planetary ecology was an excess
of black babies? Now we are told that Africa is dying, even though its
population is still increasing at 2.5% and the continent has just
reached a share of the world's population equal to its share of the land
mass, a seventh. Meanwhile Europe cannot reproduce itself and goes into
paroxysms of nationalism and xenophobia when faced with the prospect of
having to replace its working-age population from abroad.

It is not as if the threat posed by proliferating poor masses is new to
the western imagination. In the present case, we are witnessing also the
prospect of a decisive shift of production and capital accumulation to
countries like China, India and Brazil. The West's grip on a world
economy designed to generate substantial unearned income for us is
slipping. This surely explains the Americans' resort to military
imperialsim as a last ditch attempt to hold on by force and Blair's
decision to go down with thier guns blazing rather than work for a
European alternative. And the Europeans, what is their global strategy?
Myopia and withdrawal.

Somehow all of this must be registering in people's minds. The French,
as usual, give prominent expression to their sense of a deep malaise,
even if the solutions on offer seem equally introspective. I live in
Paris which has become the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow
shopping capital of the world. I like it here, because it is so
unexciting. Andreas's Berlin must be more exciting, especially if it has
moved on from being the building site it was when I last visited. I
doubt if there would be many Indians ready to vote for Mumbai as the
city of the future. It would be good to have a discussion about what
cities offer promising social possibilities. But there is this unspoken
undercurrent. Has the West finally hit the slippery slope of its
long-advertised decline?

Some people would say that we are not only dying, but committing
suicide. London's Institute of the Contemporary Arts is putting on a
'discussion' next month. (Can't you imagine it? I think we have lost it.
Well, there are still signs of greatness...).

http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=14824

The Suicide of the West?

The success of Western civilisation can be attributed to just six
factors, according to Chris Smith and Richard Koch: Christianity,
optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism and individualism.

These principles, however, have been increasingly eroded over the past
century so that where once citizens of the West felt a collective
confidence and pride, they instead appear to be heading for collective
suicide. Should the West try and save the concepts on which it was based
or replace them with new ones? Speakers: Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury,
UK MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony
Blair's cabinet; Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle; Roger
Osborne, author of Civilization: A New History of the Western World and
Jeremy Stangroom, co-founder, The Philosophers' Magazine.

Wed 19 Apr 19:00 Nash Room

And on that suicide note,

Cheers,

Keith Hart

Via: "kenjisiratori.com"

You're into producing electronic music with hypnoskull ever since 1992. In
the past years you were often regarded as one of the innovating acts in the
scene of the new industrial movement. How do you feel about that ?

hypnoskull: That doesn't bother me at all. I don't care about this kind of
attention at all. It even turned out against me, as it lays the standards
for my productions very high. It's funny when I see that a lot of new
projects and bands seem to refer to my project and say that it has inspired
them a lot. I don't think about this too much as I'm stuck into my own daily
reality.

So you don't care at all ?

hypnoskull: No. Which does not mean that I don't like it sometimes. It is
just. funny.

Last year in summer (2005) the rumour went that you had played your last
show on the Noxious Art festival in Vesoul, France. Was it true ?

hypnoskull: No. I was just very pissed off that night, cause I drove all the
way up to Vesoul in a car without airco and it was freaking hot outside. It
was a hell of a drive. That made me say all these things probably. The
knowledge that I had to drive back the day after wasn't doing any good
either. In the meantime I did a few shows, smaller ones. I agreed with the
management that next time I have to do shows that are further away, I will
get a driver or go by plane. I am a very lazy traveler indeed. I hate
traveling in general. It's just not funny. I love different places and
continents and countries, very much, but this traveling thing. no. I often
tend to say very strange things about hypnoskull. It's because I both hate
it and love it at the same time. That particular night, I hated it so bad,
you cannot imagine. Fortunately the gigs are better then.

Some people were happy that you were not planning to play anymore.

hypnoskull: Too bad for them (laughter).

Okay, the industrial scene has mixed feelings about your sidesteps towards
breakcore and drum'n bass, what do you think about that ?

hypnoskull: Nothing. Just that it says all about the industrial scene. I
never thought in terms of genres or styles. I fit into my music what I like.
Breakcore and drum'n bass contain both very uplifting and energetic, raw
stylistic elements that I like. If someone doesn't like that, it's his or
her problem, not mine.

You could be one of the biggest stars of the new industrial movement if you
would adapt a bit more to your core audience, right ?

hypnoskull: I am a stubborn music producer, not a puppet-on-a-string of any
labelhead or a&r creep. If I would want fame, I'd produce shit for the
charts, certainly not narrow-minded industrial-only powernoise kinda
material. Which does not mean that I don't like powernoise or rhythmic
noise, on the contrary. It's just that I want to be who I am, so I do what I
want. It's just all about progression, and if that's the offer I have to
make for this freedom, I'm gladly making it.

Some people in the scene think you're far too serious about all the 'tough'
talk in your album-texts and liner notes.

hypnoskull: They don't know me and certainly don't read inbetween the lines.
It's just how the hypnoskull project works. It's simple music and it has a
seriously twisted yet hidden message inside each time.

What is that general message ?

hypnoskull: It's about how absurd the western society is. I'm just a
messenger, so I don't judge, I just see and feel what's going on out there.
So I don't have any real message, it's just important to me that people
realize that they have their own choices in life, that's just all. They have
to be aware and see the importance of their own lives. Actually, it's quite
some positive vibe when I think about it.

So they don't understand the point, maybe you should try to write it down
more clearly ?

hypnoskull: No, for Christ's sake, no. It's part of the hypnoskull game I'm
playing. I'm not telling stories to entertain my audience. They have to dig
for it themselves, or don't, as they want.

As we speak, you are recording your new album, could you tell more about it
?

hypnoskull: Yes. It's titled 'PANIK MEKANIK' and it will be straightforward
dancefloor hypnoskull stuff. In one or another strange way it will be very
retro-like. I mean, when programming the beats for this album, It turned out
to sound very. harsh yet danceable. Not too complex once again. It's subtle
yet very hard pounding and has serious noise attacks. I think the heaviest
ever on a hypnoskull rhythmic track.

Aha, so you are making a record for the scene !

hypnoskull: Fuck off, dude, I do my thing. Okay, they probably will go 'hey,
hypnoskull is going for the industrial scene at last', but it's just what is
happening right now.

Anyway, the smell of easy success is out there.

hypnoskull: Not for me, I'll leave that to some other acts and projects,
they're very good in that. Like I told, I just do my thing.

Who are these 'other' projects ? Come on, tell !

hypnoskull: That's what you want, isn't it ? Let me tell you this, in the
past I have managed to create some serious annoyment in this scene for
talking honestly about what I thought about some big other projects and
about why I thought they were into producing music. I don't feel like
talking any longer about them. Everybody knows who they are. And who am I to
diss these people again, I mean, if they feel allright with it, and their
audience adores them, who the hell am I to talk about them, right ?

Too bad. Seems like you lost your sharp tongue while getting older ? Is it
true you turned 33 last year ?

hypnoskull: Let me tell you this, I will never lose my sharp tongue, but it'
s indeed just a question of getting older and, ahum, 'wiser' I guess. I
still fight my own war, but just with the music and sounds. Like I told in
for example the album (G.O.D.)-once again, if they don't have the skills to
be my real enemy, they are no enemy. That makes the circle of possible
enemies very small, year after year.Was that sharp enough ? See the
difference in approach, right. Yes, I turned 33 this year. It's my magic
number, my lucky number 3, the magical 3-squared year." Thanks. Going
further on this, you are also often called 'arrogant'. "That's when I say
thank you. In this world full of spineless followers of trends and empty
consumers of mass-media-trash opinions, you are easily called 'arrogant'
when you sharply condemn this evolution. I always look who calls me
'arrogant'. The day one of my close friends would call me 'arrogant' I will
be warned. It always depends on who's talking, right ?

Okay, another one. Rumours go that you refuse 8 out of 10 possibilities to
perform live. Is that true ?

hypnoskull: Yes.

Why ? Other bands have to search for shows themselves and are happy that
they find gigs at all.

hypnoskull: I'm not 'another' band or project.

I mean, why are you refusing shows that much ?

hypnoskull: Several reasons. It's either too far and I have to travel by
plane for hours for one show only, or it's in a club I don't like, . many
reasons.

You don't like playing live ?

hypnoskull: Sometimes I love it, sometimes it's a drag. I always pick and
choose shows. I also reduce equipment to the absolute minimum. I use a
digital harddisk tracker to play on stage, and I just mix stuff together in
a different way. Sometimes I bring some old trashy drummachine too and make
some fresh beats, whatever. The only thing for me that is important is that
it has to be intense. Nothing more sickening than playing in some goth-club
where everybody stands there and looks at me cause they don't understand it.
I need at least some 10 people in the crowd who go insane and in their way
annoy the rest of the audience. It's just amazing when shit like that
happens. It's that punk-vibe which is often not there these days. It became
too serious, and certain people just want to see and listen to electronic
music with this 'intelectual' gaze. That's also okay for me, and so are the
goths, but. I rather have some good old-fashioned moshing and pogo-shit
going on frontstage, that pushes me all the way, I can tell ya. Dancefloors
should be small warzones on my shows, but not hostile warzones, just a zone
where people who want to lose it all can go nuts all the way and back. I don
't promote that they beat each other up.

You don't like the 'intelligent, kinda laptop scene' ?

hypnoskull: I didn't tell that. I just like it more when people dance wild
and go insane on my stuff. It's made for that sole purpose, you know.

The last few years you have presented collaborations on your albums. Is
there a collaboration with another project on your new album too ?

hypnoskull: Not with another musical project this time, but one with a
Japanese underground writer of harsh experimental cyberpunk SF-stuff. His
name's Kenji Siratori from Hokkaido, and he wrote quite a lot of books.
David Bowie is a fan of one book, Blood Electric. Siratori contacted me and
wanted to work together, so I did. It will be funny. Everyone coming up with
this crazy Japanese writer, and everybody probably thinking they're special.
That's why I like this guy. His working ethic is based upon spitting insane
amounts of creativity around by using the net, books, collaborations. I like
that. I was very glad to have him on one track.

If it's a writer, it's probably a spoken word track ?

hypnoskull: No, he wrote, read and recorded 6 minutes of weird cyberpunk
lyrics, which I sampled, processed, cut, and used into a pure danceable
track. The result is strange, but very hypnoskull.

Do you think hypnoskull can go on and on in the near future ?

hypnoskull: Yes, what's the point ?

I mean, will the inspiration stay to create album after album ?

hypnoskull: I could easily release one album every three months, so yes, I
don't think that will be a problem.The question is, will there still be a
label willing to put it out in the future, but that's not my concern at all.
If this would happen, I put all the new stuff free online on my website.



Latest effort : "(G.O.D.) - once again" full album for belgain label spectre
records : www.spectre.be In the pipeline : "PANIK MEKANIK" full album for
german label ant-zen records : www.ant-zen.com More info on hypnoskull :
www.hypnoskull.com or through escape 3 organisation, the project's
management at www.escape3.org or www.escape3organisation.com


----- End forwarded message -----

Via: "Frederick Noronha (FN)"

Bihar radio man's station shut down
By Imran Khan, Indo-Asian News Service

Patna, March 27 (IANS) A popular rural radio station in Bihar
has turned silent after the authorities closed it down
because its owner, a poor and illiterate man, did not possess
an operating licence.

The Radio Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1 channel, beaming from
Mansoorpur village in Vaishali district for the past three
years, was closed down Sunday for running illegally - to the
disappointment of hundreds of people who loved to tune into
it.

"The Radio Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1 was closed for violating
the Indian Telegraphs Act," Sanjeev Hans, the Vaishali
district magistrate, told IANS over telephone Monday.

A formal police complaint has also been lodged against the
owner, Raghav Mahto, and the equipment seized, said Hans. A
three-member team of the union communications and IT
ministry, which visited the village Sunday, seized the radio
equipment, said Hans.

"The team seized the antenna and other equipment used by
Mahto to run his radio station," he said.

The trouble for Raghav Radio started early this month when
the district administration directed local officials to
submit a report on the private radio station. The government
sought a report on it after the story of Mahto's successful
radio station was splashed in the national and international
media.

The union communications ministry sought information on the
station and directed that action be taken if it was found to
be running without a licence.

But locals are upset over the closing down of the station.
The villagers said they would protest the action and demand
that the station be revived.

The 20-something Mahto had admitted to this correspondent
earlier that he was not aware that a licence was required
till he was informed last month that it was illegal to run a
private radio station.

He said then that he did not have enough money for a licence
fee. "I don't even have the money for medical treatment of my
father who is suffering from cancer."

While the government considers him an offender for violating
the rules, for the people residing in and around Mansoorpur
village he is a hero. People prefer Radio Raghav to the
national channels and Mahto is more popular than the local
legislator and MP.

The station was running like a community radio service
providing local news and views in the local dialect and
entertainment for the villages in Muzaffarpur, Vaishali and
Saran districts.

Apart from Hindi songs and news, it would provide information
about crimes in the area, programmes on AIDS awareness, polio
eradication, on literacy initiatives and news about missing
people as well as local functions and festivals. But free of
cost.

Mahto, who has an electronics repair shop at Gudri Bazar near
Mansoorpur and loves tinkering with old equipment, had
stumbled upon his innovation by chance.

He said he would love to run his radio station again if he
gets government clearance or help from people. "If someone
helps me I will go for it again."

Indo-Asian News Service

Via: Andreas Broeckmann

dear rana,

though i am neither well-travelled in the third world and its
metropolises, nor a student of their socio-economies, i would like to
raise some questions with regard to your thought-provoking article.
the hypothesis (the Third-World metropolis is becoming the symbol of
the "new") is of course rivetting, however:

what if those cities which you, equally polemically, characterise as
'suffocating piles of slums and desperation (that) are too exhausted,
too moribund to bring forth futures', are becoming more _visible_,
yet not more exemplary for anything but the escalating miseries of
globalisation, with the destruction of agricultural economies and the
migration of people?

i will happily join all sorts of speculations about what might and
what might not happen in the future. i also admit that (and this
seems to be the main point of your article, right) you successfully
instill a sense of unease about the way west-europeans might live in
the future.

yet, living in the mellow and fairly well-organised city of berlin,
and having seen different places and many different ways of living, i
fail to see why your hypothesis needs to be put forward in such a
triumphant language. what if the cities and circumstances you
describe are in fact not the future, but a present condition which
might be overcome, alleviated, collapse, change?

i guess that what i want to take issue with is the simple teleology
of your speculation. as though there were not many other models for
the way in which people live _today_, for the way in which cities are
changing, and for the way economic and social change is affecting the
development of urbanisms. and for the way in which we want to imagine
that change.

regards,
-a

Via: "dr.woooo"

amongst the teargas, http://www.libcom.org/blog
a couple of 'bridges' for broadening struggle or distractions perhaps ...



Euromayday] Dadvsi Code Terrorists
cedric cedric at blablaxpress.org
Fri Mar 24 13:57:36 CET 2006

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Via: "brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr"

[Here is a slightly extended version of the text I read on Sunday night, at
the Boell Foundation in Berlin, for an event connected to Jordan Crandall's
Under Fire program. Thanks to Anselm Franke, Thomas Keenan, and above all
Gene Ray for pushing this one a little further. - BH]

first image:
http://medias.lemonde.fr/mmpub/edt/ill/2005/11/01/h_4_ill_705542_355431.jpg

IMAGES OF FIRE
The banlieue riots and the unanswered question of the welfare state


Violence is the hard drug of the information society. It interrupts the
program, it cuts through the rhythm of stress, entertainment and boredom
that passes for ordinary experience. The images of violence sear into your
mind, like witnesses of the present. That's how I remember the nights of
October and November in France. I can still see the images of the flames,
the skeletons of the burning buses. I can still hear the strange thud of
the exploding cars, I can still feel the tension that separates the police
with their helmets, tear gas and flashball guns, from the ghetto kids with
their hoods and scarves, their paving stones and Molotov cocktails. All
that happened so close to where I live, but so far away, worlds away from
the city center; I only saw it through the media. For three weeks, it
looked as though Gaza, Beirut and Baghdad had come to the outskirts of
Paris, Strasbourg and Marseilles. Then the pressure of the image subsides,
the memory blurs and fades, until a new convulsion ? like the huge social
movements unfolding in France right now - comes to chase away what seems
unforgettable. Just as the riots themselves chased away what had seemed
unforgettable: the "no" vote on the referendum for a European constitution.

What's hidden in the blazing light of the mediated image? I want to look
back on those nights of October and November, when a European society was
literally "under fire." The point is to find another interpretation for the
images of violence, so they don't appear as proof that race wars are
inevitable in Europe, and in the world. By comparing the riots in the
banlieues with the middle-class protests unfolding in France right now, it
can be shown that what's at stake is an old but still unanswered question:
the transformation of the welfare state in response to the demands of the
global economy. This is a case where the representation of violence
directly influences its organization, through the effects that the image
exerts on electoral politics. It has become the responsibility of
intellectuals, and of all citizens, to work both with and against this
"hard drug," which seems to generate an anxiety that can only be quelled by
massive police deployments, or by the militarization of society itself ? as
we've already seen in the US, and to a lesser extent, in Great Britain.

What happened, then, in the poorest districts of the French suburbs, from
October 27 to November 17, 2005? The events began with the death of two
teenagers, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, who ran in fear from a squadron of
police on their way back to Clichy-sous-Bois, in the northeast of Paris.
They were returning home from a soccer match and they didn't have their
papers on them. Along with a third boy they scaled a fence and hid in a
dangerous transformer for a period of around thirty minutes, until both
were electrocuted. Local youth, convinced that the boys had been pursued to
their deaths, began to riot in Clichy that night, following a pattern which
has become typical in France, after every killing of immigrant children at
the hands of the police.

As you probably know, disturbances in the housing projects, or "cites," are
anything but rare in France these days. In the course of the year 2004,
approximately 20,000 cars were burned; in the first nine months of 2005,
that number had already reached 28,000. That's an average of a hundred a
night. The events of Clichy-sous-Bois would probably never have have made
it beyond a byline in the local papers if the interior minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, had not provoked outrage by calling the inhabitants of the suburbs
"scum" on October 26. And the insurrection might never have spread if
police hadn't thrown a tear-gas grenade in front of an occupied mosque in
Clichy, on the night of October 30. After that, the riots began to multiply
in the Paris region, then throughout the country, finally touching almost
300 different communities. Each suburb seemed to compete for visibility.
Buses, schools, stores, municipal buildings and garbage cans were set
ablaze by relatively small groups of youths, armed with gasoline, matches
and large quantities of stones, used for confrontations with the police.
Some 10,000 automobiles were ultimately torched, including 1,400 on the
single night of November 7. Over 4,000 arrests were made and some 600
individuals were condemned to prison sentences. Yet no deaths and few
serious injuries could be directly attributed to the insurrection - a fact
which must mean something. The events were finally stopped by what seemed
like the sheer fatigue of the protesters, but also by the imposition of
special police powers under a state of emergency, using a law that dated
from the Algerian war. The colonial overtones of that law were lost on no
one; and the latent racism of French society suddenly appeared in broad
daylight, embodied by the Interior Minister.

What were the reasons? The complaint of the mainstream left was that there
were no spokesmen, no explicit demands, no political representation ? only
wordless violence. The right was much more explicit. A deputy minister
blamed the outburst of violence on "polygamy" ? the very reason that
colonial France had used to deny citizenship to Muslim Algerians. Sarkozy
also voiced that argument, but insisted more heavily on the need to repress
organized gangs. The specter of Islamist terror networks in the suburbs was
raised, in the international as well as the national papers. A book by a
certain Charles Pellegrini, hot off the presses in November 2005 under the
title Banlieues en flames, can give you an idea of the rhetoric. On the
fourth page, Pellegrini quotes the center-right newspaper Le Figaro:
"Projections based on data from the National Institute of Statistics show
that if immigrant fertility does not change, in around 25 years, by 2030,
their mass with their descendants could represent some 24 percent of the
total French population." This is the language of invasion: "The
development of immigration remains preoccupying, since from 1997 to 2002,
the number of foreigners who took up residence on French soil has grown by
70 percent." Pellgrini openly scorns the cultural programs that the left
set up in the suburbs: "The remedy bears no relation to the malady, which
translates into delinquency, violence and Islamism, imputable to a
minority, concentrated in the housing projects, in total rupture from our
society."

Despite the vitriol, the special information service of the French police
declared, in a report leaked to the papers, that there was absolutely no
evidence of any organization between the rioters, or of any links to
Islamist groups, or even any encouragement from local imams. Instead it was
stated that "the youth of the problem districts feel penalized by their
poverty, the color of their skin and their names... It seems as though they
have lost all confidence in the institutions, but also in the private
sector, the source of desires, jobs and economic integration." Some 4.7
million people of both French and immigrant origins, or approximately 8% of
the urban population, live in mass housing projects in the 752 so-called
"sensitive urban zones," where unemployment rates for youth from 16 to 25
years old can reach as high as 40 percent. This is a dull, slow violence;
it can't be captured in an image. The "sensitive zones" are clearly
segregated from the city centers: they are difficult to reach by bus and
have no access by metro or tramway. The housing stock is decayed,
educational and sporting facilities are of abysmal quality, drug
trafficking is common. Residents complain of job discrimination based on
their names and their address. Local police have been withdrawn from these
zones by the recent right-wing government; but punitive raids are frequent,
and resentment of the cops is the reason most often given for joining the
insurrection.

None of these problems are new. The first riot in the French banlieues
occurred in 1979, at a time when mass unemployment had already set in, and
when those who could afford it had already fled the suburbs. In the 1980s,
the Socialist government of Fran?ois Mitterrand set up special
rehabilitation funds and cultural programs under the name "developpement
social des quartiers" (DSQ); but these were considered a failure by 1990,
when rioters in the projects outside Lyons destroyed the rock-climbing
walls that were supposed to give them some healthy entertainment.
Subsequent programs focused on the demolition of large complexes and their
replacement by middle-income housing. But community associations were also
supported, and subsidized jobs were created for the so-called "older
brothers," who were basically assigned to keep the peace in their
neighborhoods. Two decades of Socialist government brought great advantages
to the middle classes, to state functionaries, unionized labor, cultural
workers and also to the new urban professionals of the information society;
while at the same time, significant efforts were deployed to put a lid on
the intensifying problems of mass unemployment, without any cure for the
underlying causes. Social democracy, cultural development, welfare: what
all these words really signified was a state of slow decay or "suspended
animation" for the banlieues.

In a book entitled Quand la ville se defait (When the City Falls Apart,
2006) the sociologist Jacques Donzelot shows how the notion of welfare
first arose in the late 19th century, as a way of defending society from
the potential violence or disease of its members, who were increasingly
gathered at close quarters in the city. This protection of society from the
individual was achieved, he says, through the individual's protection by
society: unemployment benefits kept workers from falling into poverty, and
therefore from becoming dangerous criminals; while health insurance and
sanitary services kept them from succumbing to potentially contagious
diseases. The postwar apartment complexes, built from the 1950s to the
1970s at the height of the French welfare state, were supposed to be an
apotheosis of this double protection. They sought to create a healthy new
city for all the social classes, from the production-line worker to the top
engineer; and they monumentalized this condition of urban equality, using
modular architecture to create a symbolic relation with the modern
industries that brought wealth to everyone. But the dream fell apart with
the collapse of the industrial economy on which it was founded. Donzelot
shows that from the early 1980s onward, the urban condition in France
tended to fracture into three separate zones: the single-family housing
developments of the new exurban communities, built for middle classes
fleeing both the violence of the suburbs and the rising rents of the city;
the gentrified historical centers, increasingly occupied by new
professionals trying to catch the rising wave of the information society;
and finally the decaying suburbs, where unemployed industrial workers and
migrant families are relegated to the failed modernism of poverty,
immobility and social invisibility. The question he seems to be asking, is
just to what extent these three zones can really become hermetic to each
another, before something really breaks.

To grasp what the triple division of the city means in political terms, I
think you have to understand that France, along with Austria, Belgium,
Italy and Germany, has a "corporatist" or "continental conservative" type
of welfare state ? as distinguished from the social-democratic and liberal
versions (cf. G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism,
1990). Under the French version of the corporatist welfare state, the
payment of the most generous pensions, health plans and unemployment
benefits is supposed to come from special mutual funds established by
specific professions and branches of industry. The state only administers
those funds, which will typically be disbursed to middle-class families
living in the detached housing of the exurban communities. But the state
also has to fill in the gaps, both when the mutual funds can't cover their
obligations, and when a minimum of universal coverage becomes necessary for
the unskilled employees and jobless people outside of the corporatist
system. It's exactly this universal-minimum coverage that has been
inexorably cut over the last twenty years, along with other public
provisions like education. The cuts leave the inhabitants of the banlieues
on the short end of the stick, while the rest of the population begins to
tremble in fear at the increasing crime and delinquency of the suburban
children. Meanwhile, the new professionals and business elites gathering
around the speculative project of gentrification call for lower taxes, less
regulation and greater labor flexibility, in order to continue profiting
from the information economy ? and, they say, to provide new sources of
employment for the former industrial workers. But these demands, in their
turn, strike fear and resentment into the hearts of those who depend on the
largess of the state. As Donzelot shows in his book, a sharp contradiction
then arises between the people concerned with society's protection of the
individual, or social security, and the people concerned with society's
protection from the individual, or civil security. The former, who are
often state functionaries, are pushed them to the far left of the spectrum,
represented in France by the Trotskyist parties, which rally around the
defense of public services; while those more concerned with civil security,
often lower-income whites who couldn't leave the suburbs, are pushed to the
far right, represented by the National Front, with its slogan of "France
for the French" and its appeal to the strong-arm language of authority.

The most recent effect of this contradiction between civil and social
security was a deep split of the popular vote between the far right and the
far left in the April 2002 presidential elections, a split which decimated
the Socialist candidate in the first round and, to everyone's astonishment,
positioned the National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen as a possible
president. Frightened leftist voters then helped bring Jacques Chirac to
power by an overwhelming majority. But his center-right government, while
mouthing the civil-security rhetoric of the National Front, has in reality
proceeded to implement the neoliberal agenda of the business elites ? which
means flexibilizing the labor markets, lowering the taxes on capital, and
eliminating the deficits of the corporatist welfare state. This is
basically the program of the Lisbon Agenda for the competitiveness of the
European Union in the info-economy, which is also the program adopted in
Germany, via the Hartz reforms and Agenda 2010. It was applied successfully
in France to raise the retirement age of teachers, railway workers and
other state functionaries. But it was also applied to cut the Socialist
programs of support for community associations and jobs for the "older
brothers." And the price for those cuts was the insurrection. So what's
represented in the images of political violence that you saw coming from
France in October and November of 2005 is not an Islamist uprising in the
heart of Europe, but instead a defensive reaction against a
racist-influenced attempt to finally dismantle the minimum social-security
protections that had kept the suburbs in a state of isolation and suspended
animation over the last two decades.

With its combination of a neoliberal economic agenda and a fascistoid
appeal to authority, the center-right UMP ? that is, the French version of
neoconservatism ? has reopened the question of the welfare state with a
vengeance. And it is continuing to do so today. Under the cover of a law
for the so-called "equality of chances," devised in the wake of the
November uprising, the right is now attempting to flexibilize the labor
force of young people up to 26 years old, by instituting a job contract
that can be freely terminated by the employer at any time during a two-year
trial period. This is the CPE: Contrat premi?re embauche. That law is being
challenged by a truly massive coalition of high school and university
students, temp workers, unionists and anti-government forces, all assembled
in the refusal of increasingly "precarious" social conditions. What you see
on the images now coming out of France is the circulation of political
violence out of the suburban zones to which it had been relegated, and into
the gentrified centers of the historical cities. The interesting thing will
be whether the precarious children of yesterday's middle classes can
surmount their parents' fear ? and corporatist self-interest ? to make
anything more than a merely rhetorical common cause with the
insurrectionalists of the banlieue. As usual, that will depend a lot on how
violence in the images gets represented, and by whom. The symbolic targets
of the protests are in any case the same: the school system (but this time
it's the Sorbonne); the automobile (but this time it's the fancy ones
parked on the Left Bank); and finally, of course, the police. What the
right appears to be looking for now in France is a massive confrontation
with all the social forces that have any inclination to defend the welfare
state, as though they were driven to see whether a neoliberal agenda can
really be imposed by neoconservative means. The outcome of this
confrontation remains, in my view, highly uncertain.

I'm not going to try to predict what will happen over the next few weeks.
Whether violence will erupt again in the banlieues, and how far it will
continue to circulate through the center cities, is something you will be
able to see with your own eyes, through a multiplicity of media. I will
predict, however, that over the next few years in Europe, the question of
the welfare state is going to remain open, and that situations like the
ones in France will happen in other countries, at greater or lesser degrees
of intensity. Because the "corporatist" model of the welfare state has
become clearly untenable in the post-industrial information society; but
European populations do not seem to be willing to permit its replacement by
a liberal, Anglo-Saxon model. What will dominate the agenda on the social
policy front is instead the Danish notion of "flexicurity," which is an
attempt to strike a balance between flexibility and social security. What
this involves, paradoxically, is deregulating the labor markets and, at the
same time, offering unemployed workers exceptionally high benefits (up to
90% of their former income). The reason it works is that the Danes also
impose reeducation programs and guided job searches that keep the
unemployed from remaining too long beneath the care of the state. These
flexicurity programs are a very interesting attempt to adapt the
social-democratic form of the Nordic welfare states to the new demands of
the information society; and it's now becoming important to see how they
could be transferred to the more complex situations of larger countries
like France and Germany. But what I want to suggest, in conclusion, is that
the "hard drug" of violent images has already injected itself to the notion
of flexicurity, and that it will continue to overdetermine the burning
question of the welfare state in Europe.

The French banlieue riots made us forget the "no" vote on the European
constitution; then the controversy over the Jyllands-Posten caricatures
made us forget the riots in the banlieues. This time, the issue was not the
welfare state, but freedom of expression; and the site of the conflict was
not the closed world of the French suburbs, but the wide-open theater of
the "clash of civilizations," opposing so-called "Western values" to the
Islamist forces at work in the Middle East. However, if you look behind the
image of Danish embassies burning in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut, you will
see that over the past ten years, precisely during the time it developed
the flexicurity programs, Denmark has become an explicitly racist society,
whose political agenda has been shaped decisively by the far-right Danish
People's Party. The twin issues of this party are fear of foreigners and
protection of the welfare state. It's as if the benefits of education, and
of mobility through society, could only be extended to white people ? so as
to protect the limited number of high-quality jobs available in the
information society. And in fact, the conflict over the caricatures was
also an occasion for the People's Party to win support from traditional
social-democratic voters. As in France, the danger is that social benefits
can be regained, and maybe even reinforced, behind the rising barrier of
racism.

Now, by saying this, I am not trying to deny that the affair of the
caricatures was manipulated by Islamists in Denmark and in the Middle East,
and by the Syrian and Iranian governments, because it clearly was, as
important accounts have proved
(randomplatitudes.blogspot.com/2006/02/cartoon-row-dissected-part-1.htm).
The manipulation is something serious, which can have long-term
consequences. What I am trying to say is that it's an illusion to believe
that the problems of unemployment in Europe can be solved by a simple
appeal to the information society, because the contemporary economy also
involves a tremendous amount of low-end service jobs which are increasingly
being done by immigrants, for the benefit of aging and retired whites. The
neoliberal economy thrives on exactly those jobs, which can also be
performed by people without any papers at all, people exposed to every kind
of exploitation. To fail to address the economic situation of immigrants,
to allow their children to slide into delinquency and violence, and then to
instrumentalize the specter of criminality for the election of right-wing
governments whose liberal agendas which can only leave those immigrant
populations durably marginalized, or even spatially segregated as in the
case of France, is the surest way I can imagine to guarantee that the
growing Muslim populations in Europe will not take the road of secular,
enlightened society, but instead will succumb to the propaganda of Islamist
forces which are, in effect, very desperately trying to win their favor.
But the Islamization of Muslims in Europe can only give rhetorical fuel to
the neoconservative program of a security system at home, and a neocolonial
empire for the hinterland. Over the next ten years, the real question of
the welfare state, and the real contradiction between the logics of civil
and social security, will revolve around the treatment of immigrant
populations in Europe, and their inclusion to, or exclusion from, the
benefits of the information society. Only if this problem is solved within
the EU, on what I'd like to call the substantial or constituent level, can
Europe expect to have any positive impact on the rest of the international
system, of which it is obviously an inextricable component.

The point of this text has been to show the entanglement of an entire set
of economic dispositions, social forces, rhetorical strategies, political
formations and generations of human beings, forming a system that gives
effective meaning to the images we see on television, in the press and on
the Internet. But the point is also to step outside that deadly
entanglement, which is still founded on the consumer society, on the
structure it has been given by the state, on the pyramid of retirement
savings still seeking its path toward the financial sphere, and on the way
that speculative investment of every kind ? even in the info-economy ?
still ends up driving the classic imperialist scramble for resources, and
above all for oil. The strange irony of the October-November insurrection
is that its raw material was gasoline, its exalted target was the motorcar,
and its true destination was the broadcast media. But that was the only way
to get a message ? even a speechless one ? into the infotainment veins of
welfare-state capitalism, which is still massively Fordist, despite
everything about the factory system that has ended in failure.

So now I want to suggest a kind of thought experiment. Next time you see
images of fire, with smashed schools, burning cars, and confrontations with
the cops, think about all that's behind them, and try asking a few
questions. What would it take for every group of people, with their faces,
their problems, their qualities, their locations, to become visible to each
other in a society that wasn't sealed off into hermetic zones and dead-end
streets? What sort of education could be an entirely liberating experience,
that gives direct access to tools you can use? What kinds of mobility can
be built into the urban fabric, and how do people find their paths through
a society that has become radically unequal? Finally, what confrontations
could be staged with the outdated forms of the state, that wouldn't always
bring us face to face with the eternal return of the police?

If it becomes possible to see the images of fire in this way, as a blazing
language of unanswered questions, then maybe, just maybe, Bouna Traore and
Zyed Benna won't be dead for nothing ? "mort pour rien," the words you
could read on the tee-shirts, as the witnesses walked silently through the
city of Clichy-sous-Bois on Saturday the 29th of October, 2005.


last image:
http://medias.lemonde.fr/mmpub/edt/ill/2005/11/02/h_4_ill_705884_par443783.j
pg


Brian Holmes - www.u-tangente.org

Via: Jeebesh Bagchi

Dear friends,

Over last 35 years we have seen many an internal dislocation of
habitations and life world within the city, Delhi. This is something
that started with high intensity in Delhi from early 70s. Now the
process of this internal dislocation has become intense and harder.

Nangla Maachi is a 30 year old habitation. It was made by its
inhabitants over this period. It is along the river bank and next
toPragati Maidan (Progress Ground). It is now become an valuable real
estate..

Built on prime land for the new urban development, the process of its
dislocation has begun.

Also, in Nangla Maachi Sarai/Ankur had set up a cybermohalla lab two
years ago. Many a practitioner have been through the lab.

Over these two years, diaries have been written by the lab practitioners
They have many an entry about life in Nangla. These diary entries are
also a way to stubbornly remind us all that Nangla was made into an
lively, heterogeneous habitation by countless peoples effort and needs
to be remembered for this creative act of making and finding ways of
living together.

Recently, an entry read - "Packing up and leaving from Nangla has
begun." The diary is now a record of a contested terrain of the
violence of dislocation.

We have set up a blog in both English and Hindi, to share with a wider
public the various diary entries of the practitioners. Do visit it, read
it, circulate it, share it and link it further. Your comments and
stories will be very valuable.

English language blog:
http://nangla.freeflux.net/

Hindi language blog:
http://nangla-maachi.freeflux.net/

More posting from the practitioners will be made. Countdown to another
disappearance of self organised urban space has begun.

best
Jeebesh