[GreenYouth] Concern over CZM policy
Concern over CZM policy Date:15/06/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/06/15/stories/2009061550700200.htm Special Correspondent Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala Swathantra Matsya Thozhilali Federation (KSMTF) has expressed concern over the move by the Central government to issue notification on the Coastal Zone Management (CZM) policy. State president of the federation T. Peter said that coastal communities in the country were gearing up for an agitation against the government to protest the move to replace the Coastal Regulation Zone Act with the controversial notification. Mr. Peter challenged the Centre to place the CZM policy before the Parliament. Objections raised “The governments of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Goa and Maharashtra have raised their objection to the CZM policy. The parliamentary standing committee has also called on the government to refrain from implementing it. Yet, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is proceeding with the notification. This is an open challenge to the fishing community, Mr. Peter said. Mr. Peter alleged that the government was surrendering to the interests of the tourism, industry and sand-mining lobbies. He feared that the setback line specified in the notification would deprive the fisherfolk of their livelihood. Mr. Peter urged mainstream political parties to clarify their stand on the issue. Nationwide agitation The executive committee of the National Fishworkers Forum meeting at Kolkata on June 19 and 20 will finalise a nationwide agitation against the CZM policy. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Green Youth Movement group. To post to this group, send email to greenyouth@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to greenyouth+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[GreenYouth] Re: Fwd: Fw: [feministsindia] Article: having daughters make parents more liberal?
ok, thanks. On 6/12/09, venukm kmvenuan...@gmail.com wrote: Quite interesting...Nice forward. Thanks. On 11 June, 21:49, Maya maya.sssmgu2...@gmail.com wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Maya philom...@yahoo.co.in Date: Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 11:01 PM Subject: Fw: [feministsindia] Article: having daughters make parents more liberal? To: maya.sssmgu2...@gmail.com Maya S. --- On *Thu, 11/6/09, varsha patel varpat2...@gmail.com* wrote: From: varsha patel varpat2...@gmail.com Subject: [feministsindia] Article: having daughters make parents more liberal? To: feministsindia feministsin...@yahoogroups.com Date: Thursday, 11 June, 2009, 10:47 AM Congratulations, it's a girl and you're a liberal! http://bitchmagazine.org/post/ congratulations- its-a-girl- and-youre- a-liberal http://bitchmagazine.org/post/congratulations-its-a-girl-and-youre-a-... Breeder's Digest http://bitchmagazine.org/blogs/breeder%27s-digest blog post http://bitchmagazine.org/browse/results/content_type:blog by Veronica I. Arreola http://bitchmagazine.org/profile/veronica-i-arreola, June 10, 2009 - 2:38pm; tagged dads http://bitchmagazine.org/browse/results/taxonomy%3A3315, daughters http://bitchmagazine.org/browse/results/taxonomy%3A3314, feminist http://bitchmagazine.org/browse/results/taxonomy%3A3318, liberalhttp://bitchmagazine.org/browse/results/taxonomy%3A3317, voting http://bitchmagazine.org/browse/results/taxonomy%3A3316. There's an old saying To make a man a feminist, give him a daughter. And for the most part, I think it's true. Sure we have the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's of the world - both with only daughters and both determined to drag the USA into the dark ages - but then I think of my own dad. An old school man who immigrated to the USA from Mexico and chock full of the ideas on how girls behave. Yet he also was gifted with three daughters and no sons so he did what I've heard other men do in the same situation - He taught me to love sports. And honestly that's where my feminism sprouts from. Thus the news of a report by Andrew J. Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee out of the UK made headlines like: * Daddys with Daughters end up more liberal?http://www.feministing.com/archives/015572.html * From Personal Views to Politics, Only-Daughter Parents More Liberal http://womensissues.about.com/b/2009/05/20/from-personal-views-to-pol... * Will Daddy's little girl alter his vote?http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/643182 * Having daughters can make you a lefty http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/world/342113/having-daughters-can-m... * Having Daughters Rather Than Sons Makes You More Liberal http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/having-daughters-rather-than-s... While I did rejoice when I heard the news, I'm also a big nrrd who needs to read the report http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/daug.. .[PDF warning] and dig deeper. Was there any indication why having daughters does this to men? What about moms? Well us moms are also prone to this influence -- only in the opposite direction. Similarly, a mother with many sons becomes sympathetic to the ‘male’ case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods, and becomes more right-wing. WHA?? Then I started to think of moms I know with sons. Feminist, feminist, kinda, wavering, ummm...shit. While most of the blogs and news stories focused on the Warner Washington study cited about US Congressional voting records, the Oswald Powdthavee study actually looked at UK and German voting patterns because it was able to give us evidence of a right-leaning man switching once a daughter entered his life. AND it also showed that this daughter-effect is lost once she moves out. The biggest conclusion I took from the study that Oswald Powdthavee didn't seem to highlight was the socialization of children and families. The fact that women, on the average, see more worth from social programs like public safety makes them more willing to pay taxes for them. Men, on the other hand don't and thus don't like paying taxes. I know, huge generalizations. So instead of proof that conservative policy agendas hurt womenhttp://www.feministing.com/archives/015572.htmlwe need to look at why men don't connect with social programs? Do we raise them more to depend on just themselves or on a community? And what does that mean for our country? Many feminists I know are raising boys and have raised some amazing feminist boys. I don't think we are so influenced by the gender of our children as influenced by the social environment that our children are headed into. Thus parents of girls know or learn that it's freaking tough to be a woman in a man's world. What we need to do a better job is helping parents of boys see that it's tough for men in a man's
[GreenYouth] Iran Election: A View from Left
http://socialistworker.org/2009/06/15/iran-boils-over ANALYSIS: LEE SUSTAR Iran boils over Lee Sustar looks at the dynamics driving mass protests and repression in Iran following the rigged presidential election. June 15, 2009 IRAN WAS in uncharted political territory following mass protests against what was almost certainly a rigged presidential election victory for incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The long-festering divisions in the Iranian ruling class have become wide-open splits as the result of mass support for the reformist presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Mousavi. A vicious police crackdown on demonstrations in the capital city of Tehran was accompanied by the arrest of more than 130 prominent Mousavi supporters--including Mohammad Reza Khatami, the brother of former President Mahmoud Khatami, a former speaker of the parliament, and the son-in-law of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a leader of the 1979 Islamist revolution. Other figures rounded up by police include Mostafa Tajzadeh, a minister of the interior under Khatami; Behzad Nabavi, a former minister of industry; and Mohsen Mirdamadi, organizer of the 1979 occupation of the U.S. Embassy. In the past, such crackdowns were aimed mostly at liberal newspaper editors, human rights activists and labor union organizers. Now major politicians are getting the same treatment from Ahmadinejad, who the street protesters call a dictator and liken to the former Shah of Iran, the U.S.-backed strongman who was toppled in 1979. This struggle at the top of Iranian society may lead to more rebellion from below. Unlike previous elections, where even victims of election fraud swallowed the results, Mousavi has refused to do so. Instead, he called on his supporters to remain on the streets, and formally requested that the authorities grant permission to hold further protests. Hard-fought presidential elections--including vote stealing to boost the tally by one or two percentage points--are nothing new in post-revolution Iran. But Ahmadinejad's claim of more than 62 percent of the vote isn't credible. While it's possible that the president's support among the poor, particularly in rural areas, could have made him the top vote getter among five rivals, it's highly unlikely that he could have captured an outright majority to avoid a second-round election between the top two candidates. The most obvious sign of fraud is that the losing candidates failed to win even their own hometowns and regions, according to election authorities--which is practically unheard of in Iran. For example, Mousavi, according to the official results, did badly in the province of Azerbaijan, even though he is an Azeri who is popular there. As Middle East expert Juan Cole wrote: It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karroubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karroubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than 1 percent of the vote. The question is: Why would Ahmadinejad risk such an obvious and crude manipulation of the voting results? Any answer at this point is speculation. But there is a logic to stealing the election, and by an overwhelming margin--by claiming an outright majority of the vote, Ahmadinejad could avoid a second-round runoff election against Mousavi, his main competitor. In the last days before the June 12 vote, Mousavi's backers mobilized demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, not just in the capital city of Tehran, but in provincial cities as well. Ahmadinejad likely feared that even bigger protests would unfold in a second round, and give Mousavi a victory. The apparent calculation was that it would be safer to declare a first-round victory to put a decisive end to any challenge. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, endorsed the election results in the hopes of restoring order. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - NATURALLY, THE election results spurred more protests. So far, the demonstrations have withstood violent attacks by police and paramilitary groups known as basij, who patrol the streets for supposedly un-Islamic behavior such as immodest dress by women. And by hardening the divisions in the Iranian ruling class, the election fraud has ushered in a new era in Iranian politics, in which rival groupings may finally crystallize into something like permanent political parties--a development that has until now been blocked by the Shia Islamist clerical establishment at the core of Iranian politics. So what comes next is anybody's guess. But to better understand Iran's political dynamics, it's helpful to look at the social base of the leading candidates. Ahmadinejad, as a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the
[GreenYouth] The Ending of America's Financial-Military Empire
*http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson06152009.html* *Appointment in Yekaterinburg * *The Ending of America's Financial-Military Empire * By MICHAEL HUDSON The city of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the end of the road for the tsars but of American hegemony too; as the place not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground. Challenging America is the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the so-called BRIC nations --Brazil, Russia, India and China. The attendees have assured American diplomats that it is not their aim to dismantle the financial and military empire of the United States. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, for NATO or for the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. After all, that is what a multipolar world means. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO. Yet the Yekaterinburg meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda -- nothing less than the replacement of the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry, suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) built on the Clinton administration’s legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits *ad infinitum*. What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745319890/counterpunchmagaincreasingly multipolar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth. The artificially maintained unipolar system,” Mr. Medvedev spelled out, is based on “one big center of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.” At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is the fact that the United States makes too little and spends too much, particularly its vast military outlays, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia announced just last week, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and the US buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia. The sticking point for all these countries is the ability of the United States to print unlimited amounts of dollars. Overspending by U.S. consumers on imports in excess of exports, U.S. buy-outs of foreign companies and real estate, and the dollars that the Pentagon spends abroad all end up in foreign central banks. These banks then face a hard choice: either to recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the “free market” force up their currency relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency. When China and other countries recycle their dollar inflows by buying US Treasury bills to “invest” in the United States, this buildup is not really voluntary. It does not reflect faith in the ability of the U.S. economy to enrich foreign central banks for their savings. Nor does it represent any calculated investment preference. It is simply a matter of a lack of alternatives. U.S.-style “free markets” hook countries into a system that forces them to accept
[GreenYouth] Left Debacle In Kerala and Elsewhere
I would suggest that in Kerala, it was not just the Lavlin case. The fundamental mistake occurred when the Left lost touch with the masses. The crudely self righteous sermons in favour of what they called 'Development' and the criminal insensitivity toward the plights of victims of a neo-liberal political agenda were never taken without a pinch of salt. This seems true not just of those directly affected by new forms of deprivation but also others, who expected sort of care for human rights and natural justice on such things esp from a Left set up. While these criticisms were totally ignored by the Party, the Kerala leadership( with the backing of the Polit Bureau) even rubbished them as a handiwork of some imagined 'bourgeois media syndicate'. Kerala saw an entire Party being mobilised to defend Pinarayi, in the context of clear accusation of huge misappropriation of public funds and charges of corruption (Lavline). Thousands of landless people, mainly dalits, occupying a big rubber estate land in Chengara (Pathanamthitta dist) demanding it to be distributed to them was seen by the CPI(M) less a land issue than a 'conspiracy' by (foreign funded) NGOs and psuedo intellectuals. Direct assaults were unleashed (ostensibly in the name of protecting the interests of rubber tapping workers unions, and by goondas masquerading as CITU activists) against poor dalits including women and children. An honourable negotiated settlement on the Chengara land struggle was never attempted and is still pending. By and large, the media has been sympathetic to this issue though the CPI(M) showed it as yet another proof of 'meadia conspiracy'. Perhaps many of us we could even visualize the worst- some thing like Nandigram developing. Apparently thanks to the intervention by an enlightened section within and outside the Left set up, that didn't happen. In relation to the electoral debacle of the CPI(M) and the Left, I like to quote a statement in an analysis by the CPI(ML) (Liberation): ''...The epicentre of the anti-CPI(M) political earthquake lies squarely in the Singur-Nandigram seismic zone where the CPI(M) has been punished for its arrogant and coercive attitude to the peasantry and the intelligentsia, for its ruthless attempt to implement the same economic policies that it claims to have been opposing all along.. Though development like Nandigram did not happen here, land related issues in many places where people face threats of imminent eviction and brutal state violence are still continuing in Kerala. These have to do with issues connected with anti poor ,neo-liberal agenda often aiding Corporate land grabbings. -- http://venukm.blogspot.com/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Green Youth Movement group. To post to this group, send email to greenyouth@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to greenyouth+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
