Gone in 60 Seconds

On Saturday, Brainy and I went to this counterprotest, where we marched against the people who shoot immigrants coming across the border. No, not the Bureau of Homeland Security, but the people who shoot without a licence - the Minutemen.

At the protest itself, 700 counter protesters faced up to 200 Minutepeople who scattered themselves on the steps of California's State Capitol Building in Sacramento. The counterprotest wasn't allowed to remain anywhere near the Minutemen - we had to keep moving in order to avoid arrest. Not, of course, that there weren't arrests; the police, egged on by the Minutemen, got a little too frisky and rode their horses into a clench (the appropriate collective noun) of Black Bloc kids.

What I did hear of the Minutemen didn't reflect terribly well on them. Brainy took this photo, which is tremendously telling.

That the rally happened on the steps of California's State Capitol building in Sacramento was significant not only because Gov Schwarzenegger was invited to speak, but because around 2% of Californians are registered with the American Independence Party, whose candidate in an upcoming Orange County election, Jim Gilchrist, founded the Minutemen. The Minutemen themselves have, according to Gilchrist, a membership of around 4,500 of whom 6% are Latino.

I’m curious about people of colour who see themselves in a movement like this. I haven’t explanations other than pop-psychological ones involving self loathing and internalised racism which explain why they would want to sign up to bigotry. Then again, perhaps one doesn’t need to plumb the depths of the unconscious – my dad once told me there were too many immigrants in the UK. When I pointed out that he was an immigrant, his response was “Ah, but when I came over, I was a British subject.”

And perhaps the “immigrants are costing us millions, stealing our jobs and fucking our women” rhetoric really is as powerful as all that. Particularly on those who are confused about, and want, an identity. One woman on the Minuteman platform confessed "I'm the daughter of a Chinese immigrant, and I'm a Minuteman." Someone from the counterprotest pointed out "BUT YOU'RE A WOMAN". But I take her point - I don't think she'd like to be called a MinuteMaid. Also, as the counterprotest marched by, and there were scuffles with the police, the Minuteman MC told the crowd sadly "there's just not one American flag down there. There's anarchist flags, the green party flag too probably." Mainly, though, there were Mexican flags, which I found a bit troubling - substituting one kind of national tyranny for another isn't very wise. The Zapatista support group was there, and they very conspicuously were not waving Mexican flags.

But a good protest nonetheless. Plus, there was plenty of good art. Like this, a fine collage of our dear Governor, and Yosemite Sam.

Pakistan Quake

Oxfam is pointing out the obvious once again, but it really doesn't hurt to restate - people in the aftermath of the South Asian earthquake are being allowed to die. The UN is finding it unusually hard to raise cash. The Beeb reports Oxfam as saying

the US, Japan, Germany and Italy have given much less then they could have done according to the size of their economies...[and].. Belgium, France, Austria, Finland, Greece, Portugal and Spain - had so far donated nothing at all.

Do both write to your parliamentary representative to let them know you're appalled, but also send cash direct to Pakistan. Best place to send it - and comrades in and from Pakistan speak with one voice on this - is the Edhi Foundation. They're not online, but some bright sparks based out of MIT have put together this website through which you can funnel funds. Let them know that you want to donate to Edhi or, indeed, ADP which also gets a thumbs up.

She was also fined $14

In memoriam, Rosa Parks .

Capitalist Nigger

Chika Onyeani, author of Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success: A Spider-Web Doctrine , is full of shit. He's in South Africa at the moment, promoting his uniquely odious mixture of self-loathing, lies, and unreconstructed stupidity. Here's a bit from the Mail and Guardian's interview with him.

...What about the possibility that the Pakistani(sic), like the Chinese, have access to cheaper raw materials and commodities because of the lower cost of doing business in their countries?

People in Africa should not demand such high wages. The Indians don't mind working for peanuts as long as it is for the good of their communities.

But there are wealth-gap issues in both India and China.
Why must we concentrate on the negative? In India, the larger part of the population is still poor. So what? India is leading in a lot of ways. If you make a call to [a] credit card company, chances are it would be answered in India. Just because of the way they have been able to do the (sic) things. The reasons we have so many people going to Europe looking for work is because we have not been able to provide jobs for our people.

What would you say to comments that you are playing into the hands of racists by depicting black people as lazy and inefficient?

I don't care about what white people are thinking. It is what we think about ourselves. If we talk about it, perhaps we will stop doing it.

At the end of his book tour, I imagine he'll be welcomed as part of Hernando De Soto and Madeline Albright's High Level Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor.

The End of Jeffrey Sachs

Just been reading a paper in the European Economic Review by Elizabeth Brainerd (2001:1007-1019), on the relation between suicide and those inequities, thefts, corruptions and killings that are sanitised by the name "Economic Transition". I know I've opined about Jeffrey Sachs on these pages before (though I don't believe that I recorded that Columbia University students, in their end of year review, performed a broadway musical number in his honour to the tune of "Jesus Christ, Superstar", the chorus being "Jeffrey Sachs, Jeffrey Sachs, Turn your PR Machine to the max"). But one can never be reminded too often of the horrors that Sachs and his Harvard-based colleagues inflicted on Russia, particularly as Sachs has since tried to reinvent himself as Bono's guru, and White Wizard of Poverty Alleviation.

Brainerd's article puts the consequences of Sachs' economic prescriptions slightly differently. The graphs show the male suicide rates for a range of countries. If memory serves, Sachs had considerably more to do with the countries in (a) than in (b).

Better living through Stalin

The BBC reports on Stalin's Gujarati antics. Heartwarming stuff.