Cow fighting in Switzerland: another silly human sport

Anyone who admires cows will at first be quite indignant at this story. Every spring in Switzerland, cows & heifers from the Herens breed (Eringer in German) are made to fight one another in cow fighting contests. Unlike the barbarisms of bull-fighting, it is cow against cow, not human against bull to the death, but it still attempts to turn one of nature’s most docile & peace-loving animals into fighting machines.

They say the Herens girls are a feisty breed, more aggressive than an Angus or a Holstein or all the other breeds, but when it comes to aggression that sure isn’t saying much. To a cow, feisty means stomping hooves, bellowing & mooing, a little pushing & shoving, maybe a some head-butting & locking horns–& drooling, lots of drooling. These days, the Herens are bred specially for cow combat rather than milk & meat since the winner is crowned queen, garnishes a fancy cowbell & big bucks at market. (Now we know where beauty contests came from.)

The Herens are big girls but apparently have no killer instinct at all & are completely easy-going toward humans–except against the cow fighting officials who use cattle prods to induce them to exhibit some of that feisty. Those guys, called rabatteurs, apparently have to worry about a stampede from bovines reluctant to hurt one another or to engage in even mock warfare. One cow-fight enthusiast likened them to the Monty Python soccer game between German & Greek philosophers: lots of rumination, very little action.

An anthropologist from the University of Geneva studied cow fighting & concluded the competitions were used to resolve conflicts between people. That might be giving them more dignity than they deserve. But even an animal rights group that showed up to protest thought the cows, showing more aggression toward officials than each other, got the upper hand.

Humans can learn a lot from our bovine sisters: the next time military recruiters come calling, start mooing & pawing the ground & making like there’ll be a stampede.

(Photo by Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone)

Homeless in Shanghai, China

Homeless in Shanghai, China: There’s an entire bible of aphorisms on how to judge the character of a society. The touchstones include the treatment of women, animals, & the weakest (defined as children, elderly, & those with disabilities). Malcolm X, Gandhi, Einstein, Mark Twain, Dostoyevsky, & umpteen others have all weighed in; no less a bonehead than deceased US vice-president Hubert Humphrey made his own pithy contribution. Chances are if a society is abusing any of these groups, there’s a whole raft of policies it can be damned for, making the pithiness nothing more than pieties. One would hope the few extant socialist societies would measure well on these standards against capitalism in its barbaric phase. But China, in particular, appears to be racing neoliberalism to the bottom.

Since the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the country has been engaged in what is called the most massive urbanization in human history involving the relocation (& often forcible dispossession of lands) of millions of rural residents to find work in the cities. This is a wrenching dislocation since an estimated 61 million children live apart from their parents in rural China while their parents stream into urban factories looking for work. China plans to create 400 new cities by 2020 to cope with this urban growth. (Whether they’ll be affordable is another question.) Part of urban development schemes in the major cities is also a building boom of skyscrapers–a building boom involving the forcible eviction in the past decade of an estimated 4 million people from old tenements to make room for luxury high-rises.

Estimates of homelessness in any country are completely unreliable not just because it is difficult to assess but because governments have a vested interest in lowballing the problem. That would be especially true of a country purporting to be socialist. Then there are those with right-wing agendas who want to exaggerate the problem. One source claims China had 2.41 million homeless adults & 179,000 homeless children in 2011. Another source claims 200 million adults, & 4 million children. Neither seems at all credible but even the lesser estimate is completely unacceptable in any society. In a society claiming to be socialist, it’s a travesty.

Many attribute most of the homelessness to the hukou system instituted in 1958, an abomination if there ever was one. Hukou is a system of residency permits & a method of social control registering people in their birth provinces, limiting their social benefits to that province, & restricting rural to urban migration within China. In essence, it’s an internal passport system which creates discrimination against rural Chinese. Those who migrate to cities are not eligible for basic welfare & social service programs, including public education. But they are subject to super-exploitation by employers in the same way as undocumented immigrants in Europe & the US.

Hukou is absolutely implicated in the level of homelessness in Chinese cities. But so are the forcible evictions of urban residents to make room for skyscrapers–especially as there is no mention of massive public housing projects. The Chinese government also has a different standard for poverty than the World Bank figure of US $1.25 a day. China is shamefully even stingier with a poverty line of US $1.00 a day. The Economist magazine did its best to parse that figure, claiming it has purchasing power of $1.83 in the US but no matter how you shake those pennies, it’s all chump change. While we’re at it, we should mention the wages in relation to rents: in Shanghai, the average rent for a one bedroom apartment goes from US $525 to US $960. At the Chinese poverty rate, you won’t soon see housing & starvation is a very likely possibility.

For those who think this too harsh on China, who want to blither on about the difficulties of development, please explain why China is lending the US trillions for war rather than investing millions in public housing?

(Photo of homeless in Shanghai by Greg Girard in “Phantom Shanghai”–taken some time between 2000 & 2007)

Afghanistan elections & Islamophobia

Human Rights Watch (HRW) posted this photo from Most Popular on Twitter on their own FB wall, headlining it “Courageous women queuing to vote in Afghanistan despite great risks.” The original tweeter said “They have more courage than I can ever hope to have.”

We always love to admire courage but we’re not getting where the courage is in lining up to vote in Afghanistan. Do they expect a siege on the election booths by the Taliban? The greater danger in Afghanistan is US-NATO occupation & the US certainly won’t be bombing the poll booths since they likely rigged the elections. They’re trying to get the government to sign that security agreement to keep US troops in the country & let them run hog wild without Afghanistan jurisdiction. They repeatedly threatened to pull out all US troops if Karzai didn’t sign it; now he’s nearly out of office & the troops & bombers are still there. But that was always a certainty: Karzai knew it; Obama & the Pentagon knew it; even we knew it.

The discussion on the HRW wall was the usual mix of Islamophobia & ignorant “bravos” but the comments from an Indian fellow stood out. He started with “Come on Middle East, come on educated muslims, come out & throw the Taliban, the Shariah Laws & the extremist muslims away into the gutter,” & went downhill from there. We don’t know much about the Indian elections except they’re the longest ones in recorded history & prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is called a fascist by the most reputable people. Modi has association with anti-Muslim violence in India & with whipping up religious conflict for electoral gain.

Islamophobia can certainly be ridiculed but it creates a political climate where idiocy & intolerance prevail. HRW certainly knew posting that photo would evoke such a clamor & in doing so they are part of the problem rather than fulfilling their stated mission of standing against persecution. Of course their stated mission is often at odds with their role, especially in Afghanistan where they do not oppose US-NATO occupation but only suggest some rules for making colonial oppression & bombing more humane.

US out of Afghanistan! US out of Iraq! (And we might add, “Cut the crap HRW!”)

(Photo from AFP)

Oppressed peoples reclaim their own names & shuck oppressor’s misnomers

One of the peculiar features of colonialism & oppression is dispossessing people of their proper names. Often colonial forces simply changed the tribal names of people but they always invented entire catalogs of insulting epithets. The peculiarity is understanding whether this demeaning originated in some psychological device in the oppressor to justify oppression or whether it is a conscious device of social hatred & social control. And it isn’t just with ethnic groups: you see it with women (we have our own catalog of epithets to ward off), with LGBTI people, & others.

This name-changing thing is a common feature of oppression–from oppressed castes in India to Native Americans, Blacks, & Latinos in the Americas. And if we knew enough about Africa, we would probably find it prevails there too. (We don’t glory in our ignorance; it is very hard to find sufficient texts in US libraries on almost any country or region of Africa. The precious few texts available are most often pickled in racism & white supremacy–& oddly are often only in the juvenile section of the library.)

There are dozens of names for Blacks in the US alone. Excluding the repugnant epithets, the proper name has changed at least four or five times since the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The Term “African-American” so in vogue now seems to be an attempt to break with the association of “Black” with Black power. As a Black co-worker once explained, “They think if they keep changing our names we’ll be fooled into thinking things are changing & stepping in the right direction when they aren’t.” Almost every single history on Native Americans is prefaced with an explanation of the name that text will use. And people, even those who are not disrespectful, are still confused over whether Hispanic is the correct term, or is it Latino?

That would explain why so many groups organizing against oppression reclaim their historic names & shuck the colonizers labels. Women are doing the same thing (though that slut thing might be a regression & concession to the oppessor’s language more than a reclaiming). Reclaiming their own names is part of reclaiming their dignity & it behooves the rest of us to learn their proper names & not just refer to them with the ethnic equivalent of “hey you.” They should not all be simply lumped together as “Indigenous”; they have names. In North America, the colonizer’s misnomer is Ojibway–the tribe calls itself Anishinaabe; the colonizer’s misnomer is Comanche–the tribe calls itself Numinu

This chart includes just a few US tribes but this process is being repeated throughout the Americas & throughout the world. Reclaiming proper names is asserting dignity & demanding respect & that’s an essential part of social transformation.

(Chart from http://blog.nrcprograms.org/american-indian-tribes-names/)

Central American immigrants endangered in Mexico

One of the most significant developments in immigration rights in several countries is that immigrants themselves are fed up to their eyeballs with racist injustice & have begun to fight on their own behalf. They are among the toughest people on the planet, given what they have to go through–& their entry into political action is one of the most promising things to come down the pike in a long time.

This 46-year-old Honduran man named Norman Saul Varela is here holding his prosthetic leg. He lost his own limb in 2005 while riding the train called “La bestia de muerta” (“the train of death) through Mexico north toward the US border. Hundreds of Central American immigrants lose limbs, are injured, murdered, assaulted, kidnapped, disappeared, raped, & robbed riding those trains. Many end up in mass graves.

If you want to know why 50,000 Mexican soldiers deployed in the militarization of the country can’t put a stop to this violence, the answer is they are likely involved through paramilitary squads serving as the southern flank of US immigration policy. They’ve certainly proven no use in stopping drug trafficking, which has increased substantially since the massive military deployments.

Senor Varela is in Mexico City to ask the Mexican Senate to stop government persecution of Central Americans & protect them from “criminal gangs”. The Senate legislated a few years ago that it is legal for Central American immigrants to transit Mexico. The problem is they haven’t made it safe. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that people forced to hop on & off moving trains & ride on top of moving trains are in grave danger. And it doesn’t take a genius or big bucks to provide safe transit–like passenger trains. But the Senate has to call off the military, reign in the paramilitary squads, & stop federal cops from searching buses & trucks traveling north for immigrants. And it has to expel all US military, civilian, & covert operatives from Mexico because the violence against immigrants has the distinct whiff of “la migra” (US border patrol) written all over it.

Our fullest solidarity with Senor Varela & his fellow immigrants. Immigration is a human right! Open the borders!

(Photo by Marco Ugarte/AP)

Forcible evictions of Roma in Madrid to commemorate International Roma Day

City officials of Madrid, Spain must have taken sensitivity training since they waited till the day after UN-designated International Roma Day on April 8th to evict & raze the homes of Roma residents in the shanty settlement of El Gallinero on the outskirts of Madrid. Madrid’s urban planners have designs on the property & apparently got an obliging judiciary to issue a court order for eviction.

This isn’t the first time city bulldozers had a go at the settlement. Last June, cops surrounded the area & moved demolition crews in; several homes were destroyed & 34 people were left homeless. Soon after the cops & bulldozers left, residents started building new shanties since they have no place else to go. The government claims it offered one-way tickets to residents to return to their own countries. What these bureaucrats need to get through their thick skulls is that Spain is their country–even though discrimination means the poverty rate in El Gallinero is 93%.

El Gallinero is a settlement of cardboard & tin huts without running water or sewage in an area prone to flooding. Residents survive, just barely, by selling scrap metal & begging.

Since April 8th was International Roma Day, we ought to remind Madrid officials that an estimated two million Roma were killed by Germany’s Third Reich; that up until 1980 Roma women were force sterilized in Czechoslovakia to stop Roma from “breeding”; that Norway only stopped sterilization of Roma in 1977; that Roma are persecuted, segregated, thrown out of settlements in several European countries, & forcibly deported–most notoriously & ruthlessly in France by the so-called socialist government.

But Madrid officials know all that. They not only want Roma settlements for gentrification schemes but they want to use Roma, as they use undocumented immigrants, to scapegoat for the neoliberal policies reducing the rest of the populations in those countries to penurious austerity.

Here Mariana Marin, her daughter, Rebeca, & daughter-in-law Alina Holban sit among Marin’s belongings after their home was demolished in belated commemoration of International Roma Day.

(Photo by Susana Vera/Reuters)

African immigrants in Germany under siege

The remarkable 1974 German film titled, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
is about a young Moroccan immigrant who meets a dowdy middle-aged cleaning woman when he is taunted into asking her to dance in a bar where she has sought refuge from rain. The signature moment in the film is when his ridicule melts into nothingness as she asks him about himself & the humanity of both merges. The rest of the film is taken up with the ferocious discrimination they faced as a couple–not primarily due to their age difference but to his nationality.

It was evident from that film that racism against immigrants was rampant in Germany even before immigration became a central issue in US politics. There certainly is no glory in outpacing the US on that question but a considerable amount of shame. There are now an estimated one million African immigrants in Germany, distinguished as either North African or Sub-Saharan, which is code describing either Arabic or Black ethnicity. Some immigration agencies estimate there are now between 7 & 8 million undocumented African immigrants living throughout the European Union (EU) countries–at least two-thirds of them from North Africa since EU immigration policy toward Black Africans is so violent, attempting to keep them isolated in squalid refugee camps on Mediterranean islands or massively deport them.

European regimes are torn on the issue of immigration in the same way as the US regime. On the one hand, these countries rely on the cheap, exploitable labor of foreign workers for any number of jobs–& “illegal” status makes them super-exploitable. But on the other hand, whipping up anti-immigrant fervor among working people is a marvelously effective weapon for divide & conquer.

This young immigrant is being dragged away from a confrontation where riot cops in Berlin surrounded & tried to dismantle a makeshift refugee camp. The report says “violence broke out” between refugees who had accepted a deal by the city to leave the camp & move to a renovated hostel & refugees who insisted on staying. The confrontation was likely less between skepticism & credulity about authorities & their promises than it was another instance of ‘violence breaking out’ when riot cops attack protestors.

Immigration is a human right!

(Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Chinese betrayal of the Palestinians

It may still be uncertain where China is headed politically since linking its fortunes to the barbarities of neoliberalism but this picture shows its headed fast in the wrong direction. Chinese president Xi Jinping invited Israeli president Shimon Peres for a three day state visit which began today. There are no reports on why Peres was invited or what they will be negotiating but it doesn’t fare well for Palestinians that in welcoming oratory, Xi encouraged Israel in the phony Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The talks have long been dead as a doornail & all attempts to slap them into life only make them look more politically obscene. You cannot bomb people & wrest their farms & cities from them while talking peace. You are either completely stupid or corrupt as hell to claim otherwise. Though in Xi’s case, he’s likely sucking up to Israel to get a better deal on military technology like the $1 billion surveillance equipment they once bought.

In cringe-worthy rhetoric, Xi said the Chinese & Jewish people have always gotten along, especially during WWII when they commonly opposed fascism & militarism. Of course the falling out came after WWII with the establishment of Israel on Palestinian lands in 1948. Until Mao’s death in 1976, China’s foreign policy was based, at least rhetorically, on opposing colonialism & championing the oppressed. Diplomatic relations with Israel were not established until 1992 but Israel had a long, secretive military relationship with China since at least 1979, but probably earlier. It now has what is called a “pragmatic, flexible diplomatic strategy” in the Middle East–a term that covers a multitude of betrayals of the oppressed, & not just the Palestinians.

The Jerusalem Post, a conservative Israeli newspaper, reported a few years ago that the Chinese were “allured by Israeli military prowess & by “Jewish genius” exhibited in men such as Karl Marx & Albert Einstein.” We don’t know about Einstein but we’re certain Marx would roll over in his grave at such a statement. He may have been an imperfect man, but he had no truck with such elitist ethnic chauvinism & would never have betrayed the oppressed. If there is such a thing as “Jewish genius” you sure wouldn’t know it from the Zionist propaganda machine which has been stuck on one note shrieking “antisemite” since its inception.

Any extant Maoists should try to explain this disgraceful scene where innocent Chinese children are hauled out to wave flags for a country shamed before the world for its violence toward Palestinians.

(Photo of Peres at the welcoming ceremony by Alexander F. Yuan/AP)

Israeli bombing & ethnic cleansing in Gaza

This photo of a Palestinian responding to the Israeli bombing of a smuggling tunnel (earlier this month) captures the breadth & barbarism of Israel against Gaza–which is at once a siege of constant bombings & an embargo on vital human needs like medicine & foods. Palestinians are forced to build underground tunnels to smuggle what Israel won’t allow claiming Gaza uses much of the stuff to build bombs–though Israel has never been able to explain how books, paper, blankets, penicillin, aspirins, antibiotics, chocolate, spices, & other vital products are used in constructing heavy artillery. Such an embargo is however extremely effective in ethnic cleansing.

There are concentrated periods, often lasting several days & weeks, of Israeli bombing in Gaza but it never really ends. Drone sorties are most often triggered by Israeli claims of rocket attacks from Gaza. It’s become difficult for Israel to explain why thousands of alleged rockets have caused so little property damage & no casualties (including injuries from shrapnel) directly related to a rocket in the past several years. Zionist ideologues do not know shame but you have to hand to hand it to them for inventiveness in war & malice. They claim the lack of death & destruction is due to the massive civil defense infrastructure they built up in southern Israel near Gaza. They have bomb shelters, the noisy Red Dawn siren system, & the vaunted Iron Dome missile shield against rockets from Gaza. That means they never have to produce a single piece of evidence for the alleged rocket barrage.

There’s no question Israel sets off that noisy siren system & ushers people into bomb shelters to scare the hell out of them & justify the war footing against Gaza. It’s also likely some Palestinians in Gaza attempt to send over makeshift bombs loaded with blankets & oregano. But isn’t that Iron Dome working for Israel? Can’t the damn thing thwart such artillery?

Israel also claims it’s targeting Hamas military sites in Gaza. That doesn’t explain why they took out a washing machine factory in a refugee camp, a metal shop, schools, & homes; killed many civilians; injured dozens of others; & are keeping the people of Gaza under a reign of terror.

According to B’Tselem & the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, two Israeli human rights groups, there is a dramatic increase in the number of Palestinians injured or killed by gunfire near Israel’s apartheid wall encircling Gaza. Since December, B’Tselem documented 55 Palestinians injured near the fence–43 of them by live ammunition & two by tear gas canisters. There have also been several fatalities, including children & a mentally ill woman, but there is no reliable figure on how many. Mind you, they were all killed within Gaza on farm lands considered off-limit zones to the Israeli military. The military claims they were sabotaging the fence but that’s as believable as thousands of rockets bombarding Israel.

Support Palestinian justice by boycotting all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729), supporting the cultural boycott of Israel, & demanding “No military aid to Israel!”

(Photo by Hatem Omar/AP)

Homeless in Los Angeles, USA

The more you know about the world, the more you realize the global predators with manicured nails & swanky clothes collaborate with each other on everything from immigration policy to housing policy–& collaborate in ways working people haven’t yet learned to do. In Manila & Rio de Janeiro & Dakar, in the interests of gentrification, they’re forcibly evicting people from tenements, sometimes offering them chump change to just disappear, & refusing to build affordable housing for increasing numbers of impoverished residents. This explains the astronomical growth in homelessness.

And here we are in Los Angeles, the capital of glitz & glamor, the center of the movie industry with its diamond-specked red carpets, & countless millionaires & billionaires who make their fortunes producing American mythology & fostering white supremacy. The city of LA is on a gentrification spree with federal monies pouring into the area for redevelopment–which does not include a massive affordable housing program. Thousands of people, including children, elderly, & disabled, are not only homeless but forced to live in their cars, or become squatters in garages & abandoned, dilapidated office buildings, warehouses & manufactories. Many of these properties are firetraps filled with mold & lacking sanitation. Many residents actually pay rents upwards of $600 a month to live in these hellholes. So much for the “richest country in the world!”

LA County has an estimated 376,000 families (likely a lowball figure) earning less than $25,000 a year for a family of four in a city where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,500 to $1,700 a month. $25,000 a year won’t get you an affordable broom closet. Poverty in the US is considered a relative thing since the World Bank considers $1.25 a day per person the poverty line in most of the world. That adds up to about $470 bucks a year or $1,880 for a family of four. World Bank officials likely consider the poor in LA to be living high on the hog–& the poor in general to be living far too long.

That’s probably why federal monies for redevelopment are zoned around areas of greatest poverty like South LA & directed instead to upscale areas like Hollywood. This gives homelessness & poverty its distinctive ethnic colorations.There’s an international think tank somewhere coming up with these schemes to impoverish most of us & enrich the few & the only way they will be stopped is working people collaborating, from Manila to Rio to Dakar to LA. That “workers of the world” thing has become an iron law of survival in the barbaric phase of capitalism. Our demand must be an outraged chorus of “Housing is a human right!”–& we will accept nothing less.

(Photo from it.paperblog.com; photographer not identified)