Re: Abolition of the antithesis between town and country

[dmschanoes]

But what makes a city unsustainable?  Of course urban growth is consumptive
of resources, but all of production is consumptive of resources.  It's
reproduction that's key, the ability of the social organization to not only
sustain but expand and satisfy human needs.

Now if somebody want to argue that size alone, not class organization, but
simply size is a damning factor-- go right ahead, but that's Malthus not
Marx.

dms

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 9:46 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Abolition of the antithesis between town and country


> You might want to look at Grey Brechin's Imperial San Francisco -- a good
> study about how urban growth is very consumptive of the resources of the
> surrounding areas.  On the other hand, cities appear as the source of
> creativity.  Both sides have some truth -- moreso, the first.  I guess
> that is the way dialectics work.
>
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>

Re: Abolition of the antithesis between town and country

[Michael Perelman]

You might want to look at Grey Brechin's Imperial San Francisco -- a good
study about how urban growth is very consumptive of the resources of the
surrounding areas.  On the other hand, cities appear as the source of
creativity.  Both sides have some truth -- moreso, the first.  I guess
that is the way dialectics work.

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Abolition of the antithesis between town and country

[dmschanoes]

What exactly is it that makes a "large" city "unsustainable?" Is there
something inherent to size as opposed to social organization that is the
problem.  And if so, then how "large" is large before things become
unsustainable.

To speak in these terms is to beg the question as to how cities grow and why
they decay.  Those are historical issues with social answers, not
mathematical quantities with precise limits.

dms

Local Angel (Dir. Udi Aloni)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Local Angel (Dir. Udi Aloni): 

*  Artist's intoxicating film assembles a mosaic of Israeli-Arab struggle

SUZANNE WEISS
Bulletin Correspondent . . .
A white marble angel stands in the Palestinian-Christian cemetery in
Jaffa. The angel seems to be moving away from the bodies it is
guarding into the sea at its back. Across the sea is the West -- the
future. The angel is blown back into tomorrow. This is only one of
the angelic conundrums in Udi Aloni's highly symbolic, highly
artistic film "Local Angel," to be screened as part of the San
Francisco Jewish Film Festival on July 19 and 26.
The subtitle of "Local Angel" describes the film as being made up of
"Theological Political Fragments." And fragmented it is, as the
camera jumps from New York to Israel, from the Dome of the Rock to a
discotheque.
And the angels of the title are as numerous as the meanings you can
attribute to them. There is Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History,"
which takes off from a painting by Paul Klee. There is the angel who
spoke to Abraham and told him not to sacrifice his son (although
Aloni suggests that he may have done so anyway.) And there are a
couple of genuine "local angels," the filmmaker's mother, famed
Israeli peace activist Shulamit Aloni, and her Palestinian
counterpart Hanan Ashrawi.
Udi Aloni is a visual artist, and his movie, inspired by the events
of Sept. 11, takes him from his successful life in New York back to
the land of his birth in an attempt to understand this tragedy in
terms of his own upbringing and experience. His on-camera search
ranges from discussions with professors from both Israeli and
Palestinian universities to an interview with Chairman Yasser Arafat
to surreal scenes involving angry Arab rap singers and traditional
Hebraic chants.
A black-hooded drummer beats out a mad tattoo. A Latin Stabat Mater
is sung against a background of gyrating dancers in a disco. Israeli
soldiers check Arab identification cards as a sexy dancer sings a
love song. Soon the same girl turns into a mourner at a Jewish
funeral. It is all about sameness and contrasts. Its very historical
and very personal, the 42-year-old first-time filmmaker's love song
to his mother, to Israel and to the peace process. But all is not
sweetness and light. The two Alonis do not always agree, but the
on-camera scenes with Shulamit Aloni, now in her 70s, and her friend
Hanan Ashrawi, are anchors of reality dropped into the symbolic sea
of the whole.
Not only is the music -- pop, traditional, rap and Tamir Muskat's
original score -- great, but some of the insights really make you sit
up and notice. A female professor at Hebrew University explains the
concept that Israel will be the site of the Third Temple, therefore
justifying evicting non-believers from the premises. Just a concept
but, one that provides yet one more rationale for Arab exclusion.
Another academic, the filmmaker's friend Nono, notes that "sending
[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon to fight terror is like sending bin
Laden to build a building."
The 70-minute film was shown last year at both the Jerusalem and
Toronto International Film Festivals. Although there is no actual
plot, it is meticulously put together, rather like a mosaic. And just
when you think you've got the whole picture figured out, Aloni hits
you with a final quote, this one from Franz Kafka, perhaps the most
inscrutable Jewish writer of them all: "The messiah will come one day
after his arrival." . . .
   *

*   Local Angel

Neil Friedman
Menemsha Entertainment
1157 S. Beverly Drive, 2nd Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90035
Tel/ 0 310-712-3720
Fax/ 0 310-277-6602
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   *

*   Local Angel LLC
529 W 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 212.645.5947
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]   *
--
Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! 
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
,
, & 
* Student International Forum: 
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: 
* Al-Awda-Ohio: 
* Solidarity: 

Supply side Jesus........

[Mike Ballard]

Something by Al Franken for your amusment.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/09/17_franken.html


Hi-ho,
Mike B)

=

"Freedom is what we make of it. If we stand
against repression, authority and illegitimate
structures, we are expanding the domain of
freedom and that's what freedom will be.
That's what we create; there is nothing to
define in words."
-- Noam Chomsky
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

__
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Discovering Dominga (Dir. Patricia Flynn)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Discovering Dominga (Dir. Patricia Flynn):

*   FILM SYNOPSIS

When 29-year-old Iowa housewife Denese Becker decides to return to
the Guatemalan village where she was born, she begins a journey
towards finding her roots, but one filled with harrowing revelations.
Denese, born Dominga, was nine when she became her family's sole
survivor of a massacre of Mayan peasants. Two years later, she was
adopted by an American family. In "Discovering Dominga," Denese's
journey home is both a voyage of self-discovery that permanently
alters her relationship to her American family and a political
awakening that sheds light on an act of genocide against this
hemisphere's largest Indian majority.
On March 13, 1982, Denese Becker was a nine-year-old Maya girl named
Dominga living in the Maya highlands, when the Guatemalan army
entered the village of Rio Negro. By the time the soldiers left,
hundreds of people, including 70 women and 107 children, had been
massacred and dumped in a mass grave. They became part of the
estimated 4,000 to 5,000 men, women and children killed in the Rio
Negro area by military forces from 1980 to 1983. The Rio Negro
villagers had been marked as "insurgents" for resisting their forced
removal to make way for a World Bank-funded dam.
Dominga was one of the unaccountably "lucky" survivors of the
massacre at Rio Negro. Placed in an orphanage, she was adopted two
years later by a Baptist minister and his wife from Iowa. Dominga
became Denese. Adjusting to her new life in America, she tried to
bury the trauma of the massacre and the unspeakable memories so
foreign to her Midwestern neighbors. She graduated high school,
happily married Iowa native Blane Becker, had children, and became a
manicurist.
But Denese never completely forgot her childhood as Dominga, and was
haunted by memories of her parents' murder. When she asked one of her
adoptive cousins for help to research her past, she discovered she
still had family in Guatemala. She decided to return to find them.
Once there, she shares bittersweet memories of family and village
life with her relatives, and then the story of the killings comes
pouring out. Inexorably, Denese is drawn into the ongoing struggle of
the surviving Rio Negro community to find justice.
Forming themselves into a Widows and Orphans Committee, the survivors
had started to document the massacre and speak out for justice.
Though peace accords brought Guatemala's civil war to an uneasy close
in 1996, seeking the truth about crimes committed during the war and
redress for the victims remained difficult and dangerous. A United
Nations Truth Commission found the Guatemalan army responsible for 93
percent of total war crimes, and the killings at Rio Negro were
declared a crime of genocide. Yet as Denese discovers, the
perpetrators have not been punished, and the military is still
powerful.
Outraged at the injustice, Denese decides to become a witness in a
landmark human rights case brought against the Guatemalan military.
She joins her relatives to demand the exhumation of the Rio Negro
massacre victims from a clandestine grave and their re-burial in a
new gravesite called Monument to the Truth. Ultimately, the community
succeeds. In a dramatic moment, Denese returns once again to
Guatemala to witness a forensic team unearth the grisly remains of
the victims, including the body of her beloved father.
Back in the U.S., she begins speaking about her experiences before
school and community groups. For Denese, honoring the truth is
morally necessary, but also personally shattering. Though her husband
has fully supported her journey to rediscover "Dominga," the strains
begin unraveling their marriage. As Blane reflects, "A war that
happened so long ago has broken our family apart."
   *

Buy or rent the video (sale, $295; rental, $95) at
.
--
Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! 
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
,
, & 
* Student International Forum: 
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: 
* Al-Awda-Ohio: 
* Solidarity: 

Abolition of the antithesis between town and country

[Louis Proyect]

(In last month's Monthly Review, which I have just taken a look at, there's
a review of Mike Davis's "Dead Cities". As most of you know, I strongly
identify with his belief that large cities like Los Angeles are
unsustainable. The review alludes to Engels's "On the Housing Question",
which is an extended polemic with Proudhon on the housing shortage. In Part
3, Engels has a formulation that pretty much epitomizes what I have been
saying about such questions on the Internet for some time. It is also what
John Bellamy Foster has been saying in print publications. Nothing about
this is a departure from classical Marxist thought.)
The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no
less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and
wage workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical
demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded
this more energetically then Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of
agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give
back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only
the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this.
When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure
than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day
into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes
what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from
poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the
antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis.
And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own
filth for at least thirty years.
On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to
transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as
such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the
whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and
agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of
the means of communication-presupposing the abolition of the capitalist
mode of production-would be able to save the rural population from the
isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for
thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of
humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be
complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished;
the utopia begins when one undertakes "from existing conditions" to
prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of
present-day society is to be solved. And this is what Mulberger does by
adopting the Proudhonist formula for the solution of the housing question.
full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch03.htm

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

Happy New Year

[Dan Scanlan]

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/123003Madsen/123003madsen.html

At year's end, signs of dictatorship abound in Washington

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
December 30, 2003—As 2003 winds to a close, it is perhaps timely to
assess the state of affairs in the nation's capital. As a long time
resident of Washington, DC, it is striking how this city has
changed—and not for the better.
The telltale signs of dictatorship and fascism abound in this city on
the Potomac. Some of the signs—concrete barricades and 8-foot walls
around monuments—are apparent. Others, like video cameras, although
more subtle, are every bit as ubiquitous. For those who have never
visited Washington, DC, or who traveled here during better times, the
city that is suppose to represent the aspirations of the American
people is now a hollow shell of its former self.
The White House Ellipse is now a security bivouac. The grassy area
that once played host to Frisbee games between dogs and their owners,
touch football scrimmages, and throngs of tourists marveling at the
south façade of the White House are largely gone. They have been
replaced by chain link fences, concrete Jersey barriers, menacing
black Secret Service SUVs, squad cars, and security "men in black"
armed to the teeth. Sitting in the midst of this security encampment
is the National Christmas Tree. Once surrounded by rosy-cheeked
youngsters who marveled at its thousands of ornaments and lights up
close, the tree is now viewed after dark from afar—its future as
endangered as its rooted relatives in the Rocky Mountain and Alaska
National Forest and Wilderness areas.
Vice President Dick Cheney sent out thousands of Christmas cards this
year that extolled the Bush administration's international imperial
agenda by suggesting God approves it. Taking a quote by founder
Benjamin Franklin out of context, Cheney's card read, "And if a
sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable
that an empire can rise without His aid?" Fascists, imperialists, and
colonialists throughout history have tried to invoke God's name in
justifying their global ambitions. The Bush-Cheney regime is no
different and hopefully it will meet the same fate as its fascist and
imperial antecedents.
Across Constitution Avenue, the Washington Monument is surrounded by
an 8-foot wall, reminiscent of the one that used to divide Berlin and
the one now being built to bifurcate the West Bank. A similar wall
surrounds the U.S. Capitol—the so-called "peoples' house," and one
has been erected on one side of the Supreme Court. The steps of the
Supreme Court are now largely restricted to access by "we the
people." The Capitol Building is constructing an underground security
control center that will soon screen Girl Scouts and 4-H Club members
as suspected terrorists.
If you are doing a news report or a documentary and set down a camera
tripod on the National Mall or at any of the monuments, you will be
confronted by nasty Park Police, who order you not to film without
permission from the Park Police. Bush's thugs in the Interior
Department even go after their own. US Park Police Chief Teresa
Chambers was recently fired because she had the temerity to question
orders from above to use her thin forces to take on even more
"homeland security" surveillance duties.
The famed Washington Metro system now bans the sale of newspapers in
its stations. Newspaper vending machines have been boarded up. Trash
piles up on subway platforms and trains because waste containers on
the concourses are also banned. Recorded announcements appeal to
passengers to report anyone who looks "suspicious." Recently there
was an incident in the Metro Center station in which a vicious Metro
police German shepherd viciously lunged at a man's seeing-eye dog.
The police dog's handler seemed amused by the incident while the poor
blind man was truly as upset and disoriented as his canine companion.
The ghosts of Bull Connor of Alabama (who ordered German shepherd
attacks on African American civil rights marchers) and the dog
handling Nazi guards of Auschwitz must be smiling down on Washington,
DC.
Retractable barricades now appear around the Senate and House office
buildings. Streets around the Capitol, with their barricades and
guards, resemble Checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin or the armistice
site at Panmunjom on the 38th parallel of Korea. Even the once
publicly-accessible Library of Congress, complete with its own
barricades, seems to say in agony, "I'm closed to the public."
Fly out of or into Washington's National Airport and you're informed
that if anyone stands up within 30 minutes from takeoff or landing,
the plane will be diverted to another airport under military escort.
Of course, none of the planes involved in 911 took off from National
Airport. But in an era of Code Orange terror alerts being declared
around every American holiday, the people just do as their told and
don't ask why.
The Christmas Code

Re: pitfalls of economic journalism

[Carrol Cox]

What company is Bhs? What business is it in? I've never heard of it, but
then I've never heard of most companies.

Carrol

Re: Mad Cows and the Market

[Mike Ballard]

--- Seth Sandronsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Mad Cows and the Market
> By SETH SANDRONSKY
>
>
> http://www.counterpunch.org/sandronsky12272003.html

Nice one Seth!  I especially appreciated this section:

What market ideology fogs is the social relations at
and away from the workplace that prop up the market,
while focusing on the prices of what people grow and
make for sale. A dead German termed this process
"commodity fetishism."

In his view, the focus on the market exchange of
commodities blurs the human energy that created them
in the first place. Despite humans creating the
commodity form, the former is hidden beneath the
surface of the latter due to the nature of the market.

Thus we know about the exports of U.S. beef threatened
by MCD. But we know little about immigrant Mexican
workers inside America.

They, for example, labor in the Midwest meatpacking
industry for non-union wages. There, "undocumented
laborers, kept compliant by INS raids and
surveillance, are increasingly the preferred
employees," author Christian Parenti writes in his
book Lockdown America.

In the meantime, the MCD story is unfolding, far from
over. As this history happens, a re-thinking of
markets may also occur.

***
You finished your article by stating:

Accordingly, the market can be changed so that working
people control it instead of being controlled by it.
With that consciousness emerging, they can, slowly,
begin the necessary work to bury MCD and other
products of the market.

**

Sounds like the dreaded "dictatorship of the
proletariat" to me.  Nice to see the concept put down
so articulately.

Wobbly greetings,
Mike B)





=

"Freedom is what we make of it. If we stand
against repression, authority and illegitimate
structures, we are expanding the domain of
freedom and that's what freedom will be.
That's what we create; there is nothing to
define in words."
-- Noam Chomsky
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

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Find out what made the Top Yahoo! Searches of 2003
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pitfalls of economic journalism

[Eubulides]

"You don't know what the fuck you are reading. And nor does this Ian
Griffiths. You want to fucking sack him. You haven't got a fucking clue.
Do you want some lessons? Get in your car, come to my fucking office...
You can't read, you people. You shouldn't be allowed to write fucking
newspapers"

Bhs boss Philip Green reacting to an analysis of his accounts by Guardian
journalist Ian Griffiths
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1114191,00.html

finally israel does something right

[Michael Perelman]

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/world/2003-12-30-israel-vs-microsoft_x.htm
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: FT op-ed: Pakistan's moderate islamicists vs. its extremists

[ravi]

i hope this doesn't put a damper on the extremist wings (VHP, RSS) of
mr.vajpayee's right-wing fundamentalist party's (BJP) freedom to
continue to kill, rape and terrorize the muslim minority in india. that
would be real progress and we wouldn't want that.

--ravi

Re: a warning for Michael Perelman

[Doug Henwood]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

That's a New York Story, not a Chico story.   Maybe, a warning to
Doug & Lou.  :->
Things are tight here, no doubt, but if Michael's office still looks
like it did when I saw it, and if Chico were hit by even a mild
earthquake, our esteemed moderator might not be heard from for weeks.
Doug

FT: Modest success of secular schools in Pakistan

[Michael Pollak]

Financial Times; Dec 30, 2003

BACK PAGE - FIRST SECTION: Secular education chalks up success with
Pakistan's poor

By Farhan Bokhari

In one of the poorest areas of Pakistan's biggest city, it is no surprise
to see walls plastered with graffiti calling for volunteers to join a
Taliban-style Islamic organisation.

More startling is the sight of Karachi's children lining up to go to
school underneath the freshly daubed slogans.

Goth Dhani Bukhsh, a suburb near the city's airport, would once have been
an ideal recruitment ground for militant groups, which rely on poor,
under-privileged boys with few prospects.

But today the enthusiasm of students in Goth Dhani Bukhsh is palpable.

Unlike the poorly resourced government establishments, their school, run
by The Citizen's Foundation, offers uniforms, libraries, computer and
science laboratories and subsidised tuition fees. Moreover, boys and girls
are educated together, which is highly unusual in Pakistan.

"As Muslims, we have the responsibility to teach good moral values and
equip people with ways to earn a living," says Ahsan Saleem, a Pakistani
industrialist with interests in banking and textiles, who chairs the TCF.

"Our programme is secular in that it is mainstream, but we don't claim to
be secular. Without confronting anyone else we want to give good
education."

The foundation, which was established by six businessmen in the mid-1990s
with the objective of taking education to Pakistan's poorest, has so far
built 140 schools and has ambitious plans to increase that to 1,000.

To raise funds and cover running costs, the TCF has expanded its chapters
offshore, through a network of Pakistani expatriates from the oil-rich
Persian Gulf region, parts of Europe including the UK, the US and Canada.

Students such as Mohmmad Tariq, a 10-year-old and the eldest of nine
siblings, know the value of the TCF school from personal experience. He
works for three hours at a local shop in the evening to subsidise his
family's income. "My mother stays at home to look after my eight brothers
and sisters and my father is a porter at the airport," he says.

"The only way that I could go to school came through TCF."

Maimoona Qayyum, the school's head girl, appreciates the difference
between a government school and her own.  "My father is a school teacher
at a government school. But he sent me here because he knew that I would
get a good education. I want to be a doctor when I grow up."

Until the TCF was set up, an Islamic madrassah, or religious school, would
have been more typical in Pakistan's most impoverished areas. It would
offer religious education only for boys. Girls would have either stayed at
home or received no more than primary education.

The success of the TCF is viewed by many Pakistanis as an antidote to the
spread of such a sectarian education.  In the past two decades, up to
10,000 madrassah schools have sprung up across Pakistan, offering the
incentive of a free education and the eventual opportunity of a job - even
if that means a wage earned through activism for a hardline group.

The influence of madrassah schools largely went unnoticed until the
September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, which prompted a number of
western countries to begin pressing Pakistan for a clampdown on their
network. But senior Pakistani officials warn that a tough approach could
prompt a backlash from Islamic groups.

But in neighbourhoods where a TCF school has been set up, it is becoming
less likely that a madrassah will be established, or that students will
leave their TCF school for an alternative. "One of our successes is that
students who come to TCF know that all their needs are going to be met by
the foundation," says Salma Majid, a TCF school principal.

Mrs Majid, who joined the school a year ago, quit her job at a large
school in the heart of Karachi, attracted not only by the success of the
TCF experiment but also by the support extended to teachers as well as
students.  She and her colleagues, for example, are picked up and dropped
off by school vans every day.

Mr Saleem notes that in a country of 145m people, the TCF's efforts rank
as no more than a modest experiment.

"The road to any society's success must lie in reducing illiteracy," he
says. "We may be just beginning something new."

FT op-ed: Pakistan's moderate islamicists vs. its extremists

[Michael Pollak]

[The argument that the MMA has substantially moderated in a relatively
short time since taking power is interesting]

Financial Times; Dec 29, 2003

A perfect moment to secure peace in Kashmir
By Mansoor Ijaz

Early next month, Pakistan is due to host the annual South Asian
Association for Regional Co-operation summit in Islamabad. If all goes
well, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, should meet Atal
Behari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister, to discuss the dispute over
Kashmir. But the run-up to the summit has been far from smooth.

Events in the past month have brought to the surface the struggle between
Pakistan's increasingly pragmatic parliamentary Islamists, their more
militant brethren and Gen Musharraf's US-backed moderates for control of
two vital policy areas: how to make peace with India over Kashmir and who
should control Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme.

The prospects for peace looked good in November, when Pakistan announced a
ceasefire along Kashmir's line of control. Gen Musharraf was emboldened by
support from an unlikely source - the coalition of Islamist parties in
Pakistan's deadlocked parliament that make up the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal.

The MMA has been a thorn in Gen Musharraf's side since winning elections
and forming governments in Pakistan's two western provinces last year. It
also won enough votes at the federal level to block Gen Musharraf's plan
to consolidate his position as army chief and president, with the power to
dissolve any government he did not like.

Winning at the ballot box, however, seemed to infuse a new sense of
responsibility into the fundamentalists.  Maulana Fazlur Rehman, for
example, one of the most important MMA leaders, went to New Delhi this
summer to meet Indian diplomats. It was a successful visit. India's
intelligence chief told me at the time that he found Mr Rehman reasonable
enough for there to be sustained dialogue with Pakistan's fundamentalists
over Kashmir.

Back at home, Mr Rehman persuaded his fellow MMA members of the long-term
electoral benefits that would accrue from standing side-by-side with Gen
Musharraf as peacemakers rather than with extremists who were in any case
losing the struggle in Kashmir. The strategy paid dividends last Wednesday
when Gen Musharraf agreed to MMA demands by announcing that he would step
down as army chief at the end of 2004 and would not dismiss any government
formed during the remaining three years of his term as president without
the consent of Pakistan's Supreme Court.

But the accommodation between the president and the Islamists is
threatened by the extremists, who fear that the Musharraf-Vajpayee meeting
could produce real peace in Kashmir. They are also angered by Gen
Musharraf's reaction to the International Atomic Energy Agency's discovery
of evidence that Pakistan has transferred nuclear technology to Iran. In
response to international pressure, Gen Musharraf ordered the
interrogation, in the presence of US intelligence, of, among others, Abdul
Qadeer Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear programme and a
man revered in Pakistan's radical circles.

The result: a Christmas Day assassination attempt on Gen Musharraf's life,
the second in 11 days. The knowledge shown of the president's movements
has raised fears in army circles that extremists may have infiltrated his
security apparatus. That fear is also shared in the capitals of the Saarc
countries. Cancellation of Mr Vajpayee's visit on security grounds cannot
be ruled out.

At the same time, there has been much press speculation that Pakistan is
just one assassination away from falling into the hands of nuclear-armed
fanatics. Such views are mistaken. While tussling with the Islamists in
parliament this year, Gen Musharraf has quietly been appointing his
successors. In the event of his death, continuity of government is
assured. Besides, Gen Musharraf's reaction to the IAEA intelligence would
have been unthinkable without the full support of the army and the more
moderate Islamists. Pakistan is maturing, not crumbling.

That is why Mr Vajpayee must go to Islamabad and meet the Pakistani
leader. The prospects for peace have seldom been better. Gen Musharraf can
at once undermine the extreme Islamists, whose survival depends on
fuelling unrest in Kashmir, conciliate their parliamentary counterparts
and allay western concerns over one of the world's nuclear flashpoints. It
is a chance that must not be missed.

The writer jointly authored the blueprint for the ceasefire in Kashmir
between Mujahideen fighters and Indian security forces in July 2000

Re: a warning for Michael Perelman

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Dec. 30, 2003, 1:34PM
Man trapped for 2 days under pile of books, papers
Associated Press
NEW YORK- A man who says he sells books and magazines on the street
was rescued after being trapped for two days under a mountain of
reading material in his apartment.
Patrice Moore, 43, had apparently been standing up when the books,
catalogs, mail and newspapers swamped him on Saturday. Firefighters
and neighbors rescued Moore on Monday afternoon and he was
hospitalized in stable condition this morning with leg injuries.
"I didn't think I was gonna get out," Moore told the New York Post,
adding that he called for help repeatedly.
His landlord discovered him Monday after coming to the apartment to
give Moore a small loan and heard a strange voice inside. The
landlord pried the door open with a crowbar, found Moore trapped and
alerted the fire department.
The apartment was stuffed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling
with stacks of paper.
That's a New York Story, not a Chico story.   Maybe, a warning to
Doug & Lou.  :->
--
Yoshie
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