U.S. stirs a hornet’s nest in Pakistan

By Eric Margolis
Winnipeg Sun

PARIS — Pakistan finally bowed to Washington’s angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) — collectively mislabelled “Taliban” in the West.

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan’s political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan’s turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 “terrorists” killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people — most of Swat’s population — made refugees.

Pakistan’s U.S.-rented armed forces have scored a brilliant victory against their own people. Too bad they don’t do as well in wars against India. Blasting civilians, however, is much safer and more profitable.

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Naomi Wolf: Our western moment of feminist leadership is over

“…our (Western) moment of feminist leadership is over now, for good reasons. We know by now what our problems are as women in the West, and we know the blueprint for solving them. What we lack now is not analysis, but the organizational and political will to do so.

“So the leadership role is shifting to women in the developing world. Their agenda is more pressing, and their problems, frankly, are far more serious than ours - which makes it much more urgent for them to develop theories appropriate to the challenges they face.”

Naomi Klein on public anger and social change

“Capitalism is on trial. And you have an organic, grassroots, sort of spontaneous revolt against the elite - which is actually what we’re hearing with this rage at CEOs, and bonuses and government collusion with the elites. Rage is an opportunity. The rage is there, and the country is seething, the world is seething with rage. The question is, where is it going to be directed? I feel there’s a moral responsibility for the Left and for progressives to provide an alternative in this moment that is moral, that is principled, that is just, that is hopeful, because if we don’t, then that anger is so easily directed at ‘those damn Mexican immigrants,’ at ‘the first African American president.’ So I feel a tremendous sense of urgency. It’s not just, ‘Hey, our time has come.’ It’s, ‘We’d better get our act together because this anger is going somewhere.’”

Call for submissions - Workplace activism, the labour movement and the economic crisis

Striking Back: Workplace activism, the labour movement and the economic crisis
“Economic theory suggests that the convulsions of the capitalist system will eventually be resolved by the destruction of capital and a restoration of profit and production. Crisis theory predicts that unresolved contradictions only get worse. If an alternative force is not present,  there is [...]

Call for submissions

Education for a change: The education system and the work of building a better world

Who could bear to hold privilege that meant the suffering and death of others if they had not been trained from early childhood to see these others as not real? Who would tolerate, for even an hour, the inhuman conditions imposed by the privileged, if they had not been trained from early childhood to feel themselves not fully entitled to life?
-Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories

If you plan for a year, plant rice.
If you plan for ten years, plant trees.
If you plan for 100 years, educate your children.
-Chinese proverb

The education system, broadly conceived, represents both our best hope of emancipatory change and the primary mechanism for replicating the status quo. In this time of economic upheaval, the dual potential of the education system - to either prolong injustice or empower groups of people to confront it - becomes increasingly apparent and more hotly contested. In our September/October issue, “Education for a Change,” Briarpatch will surveying this contested space, exploring the challenges as well as the opportunities the current moment presents to allow us to rethink the ways we share knowledge (and consequently power) with one another, with our children, and with the children of others.