CCS
CCS Events
CCS Libraries
About CCS
CCS Projects
BRICS
CCS Highlights


Other Events 2010



  • Seminars on mining 13-14 January 2010

  • Patrick Bond radio debate on climate justice politics, 22 December 2010

  • Seminar on Xenophobia and Racism in SA, 10 December 2010

  • Patrick Bond at the conference on Indian Formation, 25 November 2010

  • Patrick Bond on oil and financial crises with Attac, 18-19 November

  • World Capitalist Crisis & Pan African Resistance 21 November

  • Patrick Bond at Race, Class & Developmental State conference 16 November

  • Patrick Bond seminar on ecosocialism at Inst of Social Studies, 16 November 2010

  • Patrick Bond at Historical Materialism conference, 12-14 November

  • Patrick Bond at The ‘Progress’ in Zimbabwe Conference, 4-6 November

  • Patrick Bond seminar on climate justice, 18 October

  • Patrick Bond seminar on climate politics at Trinity College Dublin, 1 October

  • Baruti Amisiat at the NADEL workshop on xenophobia 30 September 2010

  • Patrick Bond at Birzeit Univ conference, Palestine, 28 September

  • Patrick Bond in Ramallah on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, 26 September

  • Book Launch (Zuma's own goal) 19 September 2010

  • Patrick Bond & Rick Rowden on the IMF and public health 7 & 14 September 2010

  • Book Launch (Zuma's own goal) 3 September 2010

  • Patrick Bond at the International Commission of Jurists Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Camp, 31 August 2010

  • Patrick Bond at Jubilee South Africa conference on ecological debt, 21 August

  • Patrick Bond at the SA -Norway climate research seminar, 12 August 2010

  • Trevor Ngwane at Solidarity Peace Trust report on Zimbabwe, 30 July

  • Press Conference on Xenophobia 28 July

  • Anti Xenophobia Rally 3 July 2010

  • Symposium: Water, Rights and Prices: Theory and practice, 28 June

  • Patrick Bond on the World Cup, Washington, 9 June 2010

  • Patrick Bond at Grantmakers without Borders conference, 8 June 2010

  • Patrick Bond at the People's Dialogue 'Green Economy' seminar, 5 May

  • Alter-globalization Movements Conference 28 May

  • Osisa conference on climate and development in Africa, Pretoria, 21 May

  • Patrick Bond on SA climate policy on TEDxUKZN, 14 May

  • Memorial Tribute to Professor Fatima Meer 23 April 2010

  • Patrick Bond on South Africa, the World Bank, and Climate Justice, 9 April 2010

  • Manchester conference on environment and finance 15-16 April 2010

  • Patrick Bond speaks on climate debt, 5 May

  • Patrick Bond at Clark University 8 April 2010

  • Global Day of Protest Against Proposed World Bank Loan for Coal 7 April 2010

  • 'Climate Politics or Carbon Trading?: The Story of Cap and Trade' 6 April 2010

  • Seminar: Patrick Bond on South African political economy, 5 April 2010

  • Civil society tackles finance for global warming and energy underdevelopment, 4 April 2010

  • Trevor Ngwane at MARXISM 2010: Ideas to challenge capitalism, 1- 4 April 2010

  • Patrick Bond at the Conference on the right to water, 29- 30 March 2010

  • Trevor Ngwane seminar on activism and global campaigns, 26 March

  • Panel discussion: 'What is Arts and what is not?', March 25 2010

  • Patrick Bond on 'Organising for Climate Justice', Left Forum, NYC, 21 March

  • Durban Sings at the CCRRI Seminar 2 March 2010

  • Dennis Brutus memorial, 11 March 2010

  • Patrick Bond on SA economic policy, 2 March 2010

  • CCS anti-xenophobia research workshop, 27 February 2010

  • Press Conference: Keep our South African Coal in the Hole! 22 February 2010

  • Workshop on Private Public Partnerships 22 February

  • Economic Justice Course 20 February 29 May 2010

  • Durban renewable energy site visits 10 February 2010

  • Socialist Register Workshop on Crisis 6 February 2010

  • Patrick Bond on climate change & Brutus Memorial at WorldSocial Forum 28 January 2010

  • Dennis Brutus tribute, with SMI & Durban community groups 23 January 2010

  • CCS cohosts Climate Justice Now! on electricity hearings strategy, 15 January 2010

  • Patrick Bond debates NHI at Idasa, CT, 19 January 2010

  • CCS cohosts Climate Justice Now! on electricity hearings strategy, 15 January 2010



  • Seminars on mining 13-14 January 2010

    Date: January 13-14, 2011
    Time: 8:30-6:00 pm (Thursday), 8:30-4:00 (Friday)
    Venue: SEIU building, 1800 Massachusetts Ave, NW
    Washington D.C. 20036



    Dethroning King Coal in 2011, from West Virginia (January) to Durban (December)
    Patrick Bond

    South Africa’s crust was drill-pocked with abandon since Kimberley diamonds were found in 1867 and then Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) gold was unearthed in 1886. But the world’s interest in how we trash our environment perked up again last week for two reasons:

  • The shocking revelation that acid mine drainage is now seeping into the Johannesburg region’s ‘Cradle of Humankind’, home of hominid fossils dating more than three million years, where our Australopithecus ancestors’ earliest bones are now threatened by the area’s pollution-intensive mining industry; and


  • Hot contestation of new United States financing for South Africa’s proposed Kusile power plant, which will be the world’s third largest coal-fired facility.


  • In parallel battles, though, the beheading of King Coal is underway in West Virginia, where nine days after the January 3 cancer death of heroic eco-warrior Judy Bonds, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overturned the Army Corps of Engineers’ prior approval of Spruce No. 1 mine, the world’s largest-ever ‘mountaintop removal’ operation. Coal companies have been blowing up the once-rolling now-stumbling Appalachians. In order to rip out a ton of fossil fuel, they dump 16 tons of rubble into the adjoining valleys.

    After an avalanche of pressure by mountain communities and environmentalists, the EPA ruled against the “unacceptable adverse effect on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas (including spawning and breeding areas), wildlife, or recreational areas.” According to leading US climatologist James Hansen, quoted in Bonds’ New York Times obituary last week, “There are many things we ought to do to deal with climate change, but stopping mountaintop-removal is the place to start. Coal contributes the most carbon dioxide of any energy source.” The EPA also took a stance in late December to belatedly begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

    Through activism and legal strategies, US communities and the Sierra Club have prevented construction of 150 proposed coal-fired power plants over the last couple of years, a remarkable accomplishment (only a couple got through their net).

    But in South Africa, the fight is just beginning. The national government in Pretoria and municipal officials in seaside Durban will continue invoking several myths in defense of coal, Kusile and the ‘COP17’, the November 28-December 9 climate summit officially called the ‘Conference of the Parties 17’ (but which should be renamed the Conference of Polluters). Here are some strategies of the SA state and big business meant to blind us:

  • In Durban, aggressive ‘greenwashing’ will attempt to distract attention from vast CO2 emissions attributable to South Durban’s oft-exploding oil refineries and petrochemical complex, Africa’s largest port, the hyperactive tourism promotion strategy (in lieu of any bottom-up economic development), unending sports stadia construction and unnecessary new King Shaka international airport, electricity going to the very dangerous Assmang ferromanganese smelter (the city’s largest power guzzler by far at more than a half-million megawatt hours per year), sprawly new suburban developments, and inefficient electricity consumption and transport because of state failure to provide adequate renewable energy and mass transit incentives;


  • ‘Offsets’ for a tiny fraction of Durban’s emissions will again be fatuously marketed to an unsuspecting public, as during the 2010 World Cup, including mass planting of trees (though when they die the carbon is re-released) and municipal landfill methane capture – even though the increasingly-corrupt offset industry and European carbon markets which market our emissions credits are now ridiculed across the world, and in economic terms are failing beyond even the most pessimistic predictions;


  • Whacky, unworkable ‘geo-engineering’ strategies are going to multiply, such as biomass planting to convert valuable food land into fodder for ethanol fuel, or mass dumping of iron filings in the ocean to create carbon-sucking algae blooms, or ‘Carbon Capture and Sequestration/Storage’ schemes to pump power-plant CO2 underground but which tend to leak catastrophically and which require a third more coal to run, or the nuclear energy revival notwithstanding more shutdowns at the main plant, Koeberg (five years ago the industry minister, Alec Erwin, notoriously described as ‘sabotage’ a minor Koeberg accident that cost the ruling party its control of Cape Town in the subsequent municipal election); and


  • South African ‘global climate leadership’ will be touted, even though Pretoria’s reactionary United Nations negotiating stance includes fronting for Washington’s much-condemned 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which even if implemented faithfully, by all accounts, will roast Africa with a projected temperature rise of 3.5°C.


  • As even the government’s new National Climate Change Response Green Paper admits, “Should multi-lateral international action not effectively limit the average global temperature increase to below at least 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the potential impacts on South Africa in the medium- to long-term are significant and potentially catastrophic.” The paper warns that under conservative assumptions, “after 2050, warming is projected to reach around 3-4°C along the coast, and 6-7°C in the interior” – which is, simply, non-survivable.

    If President Jacob Zuma’s government really cared about climate and about his relatives in rural KwaZulu-Natal villages who are amongst those most adversely affected by worsening droughts and floods, then it would not only halt the $21 billion worth of electricity generators being built by state power company Eskom: Medupi is under construction and Kusile will begin soon. Pretoria would also deny approval to the forty new mines allegedly needed to supply the plants with coal, for just as at the Cradle of Humankind and in West Virginia, these mines will cause permanent contamination of rivers and water tables, increased mercury residues and global warming.

    More evidence of the Witwatersrand’s degradation comes from tireless water campaigner Mariette Liefferink, who counts 270 tailings dams in a 400 square kilometer mining zone. With gold nearly depleted, as Liefferink told a Joburg paper last week, uranium is an eco-social activist target: “Nowhere in the world do you see these mountains of uranium and people living in and among them. You have people living on hazardous toxic waste and of course some areas are also high in radioactivity.”

    The toxic tailings dams are typically unlined, unvegetated and unable to contain the mines’ prolific air, water and soil pollution. Other long-term anti-mining struggles continue in South African locales: against platinum in the Northwest and Limpopo provinces, against titanium on the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast, and against coal in the area bordering Zimbabwe known as Mapungubwe where relics from a priceless ancient civilization will be destroyed unless mining is halted (as even the government agrees).

    There’s another reason that the power of what is termed the Minerals-Energy Complex continues unchecked, even as treasures like the Cradle – and also the priceless Kruger Park’s surface water plus millions of people’s health – are threatened: political bribery. In addition to supplying the world’s cheapest power to BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation smelters by honoring dubious apartheid-era deals, Eskom’s coal-fired mega-plants will provide millions of dollars to African National Congress (ANC) party coffers through crony-capitalist relations with the Japanese firm Hitachi.

    Last year, Pretoria’s own ombudsman termed the role of then Eskom chairman and ANC Finance Committee member Valli Moosa ‘improper’ in cutting the Hitachi deal. As a result, even pro-corporate Business Day newspaper joined more than 60 local civil society groups and 80 others around the world in formally denouncing $3.75 billion World Bank loan to Eskom which were granted by neoconservative-neoliberal Bank president Robert Zoellick last April.

    Other beneficiaries of Washington’s upcoming trade finance package for Eskom include two desperate multinational corporations: Black & Veatch from Kansas and Bucyrus from Wisconsin. The latter showed its clout last October when in order to fund machinery exports to the huge Sasan coal-fired plant in India with US Export-Import Bank subsidies, the Milwaukee firm yanked members of Congress so hard that they in turn compelled the Bank to reverse an earlier decision not to fund Sasan on climate grounds.

    But now, after the EPA’s slapdown of Spruce No. 1, Bucyrus must be really nervous. Forty years ago, John Prine wrote the haunting song ‘Paradise’ about the strip-mining of his Kentucky homeland, with this verse describing a creature known as ‘Big Hog’:

  • Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
    And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
    Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
    Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.


  • Big Hog was a Bucyrus-Erie 3850-B dragline shovel. With West Virginia coal companies no longer buying these monsters, the company is fanatical about overseas sales. As a result, last Thursday, two dozen of us gathered by Friends of the Earth and Sierra found ourselves shouting slogans against Eskom and Bucyrus outside the Ex-Im Bank’s Washington headquarters.

    The Milwaukee corporation rebutted that Ex-Im financing was justifiable because of a Johannesburg Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) partner plus Wisconsin steelworkers jobs, even though this means that South African counterparts – especially a Joburg company, Rham, that will apparently fire scores of local employees – lose out. Bucyrus’s 2010 contract to supply Eskom with coal mining equipment became a scandal subject to a parliamentary investigation last September. Given the Witwatersrand area’s historical world leadership in mining equipment, businesses there claim there’s no obvious reason why local firms cannot supply Eskom at much lower cost (one third of Bucyrus’ in that particular case).

    Most importantly, the poor will repay this finance at a time South Africa has become the world's most unequal society and unemployment is raging. For Eskom to cover interest bills on Medupi and Kusile loans requires a 127 percent electricity price increase for ordinary consumers over four years. This has already raised power disconnection rates for poor households, and on Monday, Durban police made 25 arrests of shackdwellers for electricity theft.

    This multiple set of interlinked climate-energy-economic travesties can only be reversed by grassroots and labor activism. At the Durban COP 17, don’t expect a global deal that can save the planet, given prevailing adverse power relations. Instead of relying on paralyzed politicians and lazy bureaucrats, South Africa’s environmental, community, women’s, youth and labor voices will be demanding serious action to address the greatest crisis of our times:

  • Major investments in Green Jobs would let metalworkers weld millions of solar-powered geysers, for example, thus allowing Eskom to switch off power to BHP Billiton’s aluminum smelters and to halt new powerplant construction without net job loss;


  • New public transport subsidies should reconfigure apartheid-era urban design and pull us willingly from single-occupant cars;


  • An employment-rich zero-waste strategy would recycle nearly everything and compost our organic waste so as to eliminate methane emissions at the remaining landfills;


  • More direct-action protests against major emissions point sources – Eskom, Sasol (apartheid’s wicked coal-to-oil company), the Engen refinery in South Durban and the new Durban-Joburg oil mega-pipeline, for instance – should better link micro-environmental struggles over local air, water and land quality to climate change;


  • More ambitious Air Quality Act regulations would label – and then phase out – carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gas ‘pollutants’, as with the US Clean Air Act;


  • Government planning and utility board decisions would halt willy-nilly suburbanisation and ungreen ‘development’; and


  • Instead of North-South financing via destructive carbon markets, the demand for ‘climate debt’ would permit the flow of strings-free, non-corrupt and effective adaptation funds.


  • Through urgent adoption of genuine post-carbon strategies like these, by the time the COP17 rolls around, the world could see in Durban a state and society committed to reversing climate change.

    But get real. Since none of these will be considered much less implemented by the current ruling crew, instead we’ll see a mass democratic movement rise, aiming to do to the climate threat what we did to apartheid and the deniers of AIDS medicines: defeat them at source, when respectively, old white politicians and their international business buddies, and Thabo Mbeki and Big Pharma, had to stand back and respect a new morality, a new bottom-up power.

    (Durban-based academic Patrick Bond’s book The Politics of Climate Justice will be released later this year, and recent articles are posted at ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?4,80.)


    Patrick Bond radio debate on climate justice politics, 22 December 2010

    Climate Change, Social Change

    Patrick Bond debates Joe Romm (former Clinton energy official) on Cancun and the principles of climate politics, on Against the Grain (KPFA, Berkeley):

    What's a world to do about climate change? Patrick Bond and Joseph Romm have very different perspectives; they talk with guest host Brian Edwards-Tiekert.

    Parts of the world are already losing their glaciers and their water supplies. Others are getting hit with unprecedented floods. Low-lying nations are making plans to evacuate their populations. So, what's a world to do about climate change? Patrick Bond and Joseph Romm weigh in with very different perspectives.
    kpfa.org/archive/id/66199
    www.againstthegrain.org


    Seminar on Xenophobia and Racism in SA, 10 December 2010



    The UN theme for International Human Rights Day 2010 is Speak Up Stop Discrimination and is intended to inspire a new generation of defenders to speak up and take action to end discrimination in all of its forms whenever and wherever it is manifested.

    In recognition of International Human Rights Day, the Umtapo Centre will be hosting a seminar to address Xenophobia and Racism in South Africa. It will bring together a small but wide range of stakeholders to address the root causes of such phenomena and seek longer term solutions that will rally people around the reclaiming of value systems such as Ubuntu.

    The Umtapo Centre has the pleasure of inviting the public to participate in this seminar to be held in Durban on Friday, 10th December 2010 at the Tropicana Hotel from 9h30 – 16h00.

    The first session will have a panel of speakers addressing the issues in an in-depth and constructive manner; and, the second session will focus very specifically on a campaign to chart the way forward.

    The programme will include the following:

    • What have been the major “turning points” in recent history that have shaped the landscape of racism and xenophobia?
    Professor Pumla Gqola, academic, feminist and author based at Wits University

    • Confronting Racism, Tribalism, Violence and Corruption in the Quest for True Humanity: Is One People, One Nation a myth?
    Andile Mngxitama, Foundation for Human Rights

    • The Media and other actors that shape Public Discourse and Myths of Race
    (tbc)

    • Grassroots responses to Racism, Xenophobia, and Violence:
    Baruti Amisi, Director, Anti-Xenophobic Community Building Project, Centre for Civil Society

    • Campaign against Racism. Xenophobia and all forms of Discrimination
    Umtapo



    Contact the Umtapo office to register BEFORE 7TH DECEMBER 2010

    Contact Details
    Arun Naicker ,
    Tel. 031 – 3093350
    Fax. 031 – 3098198 info@umtapocentre.org.za


    Patrick Bond at the conference on Indian Formation, 25 November 2010

    CULTURE, POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF SOUTH ASIAN MIGRATION


    COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: MIGRATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
    PATRICK BOND, UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL (VIA VIDEO-LINK)



    CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

    DAY 1: WEDNESDAY 24TH NOVEMBER


    9:30AM SESSION 1: CIRCUITS OF CROSS-BORDER MIGRATION

    TREATMENT OF UNWELCOME GUESTS: THE STATE OF ROHINGYA REFUGEES IN BANGLADESH
    NASIR UDDIN, UNIVERSITY OF CHITTAGONG

    SOME THOUGHTS ON THE STRUCTURING OF A MOBILE WORKING CLASS: EVIDENCE FROM THE TAMIL REGION
    RAMAN MAHADEVAN & R. VIDYASAGAR, INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT ALTERNATIVES / UNICEF

    DISPOSITIONS & DESTINATIONS: A MODEL FOR MIGRATION FROM THE BENGAL DELTA
    JOYA CHATTERJI, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

    SHAPING THE MIGRATION REGIME IN NEPAL: BETWEEN ECONOMIC IMPERATIVES & SOCIAL JUSTICE
    BANDITA SIJAPATI, NEPÂ SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

    - LUNCH -

    2:00PM SESSION 2: MIGRANT LIFE-CYCLES & REPRODUCTION OF COMMUNITIES

    THE DIASPORIC PURSUIT OF HOME: A TRANSNATIONAL PUNJABI COMMUNITY STEPHEN TAYLOR, UNIVERSITY OF NORTHUMBRIA

    FAMILIAL BONDS OF INDIANS IN THE UNITED STATES: A STUDY OF VISITING PARENTS
    AJAYA SAHOO, UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD

    INTERSECTION OF CIRCUITS OF MIGRATION
    MARGARET WALTON-ROBERTS, WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY

    - TEA -

    4:30PM SESSION 3: (RE)CREATION OF MIGRANT COMMUNITIES

    DISPLACEMENT IN NARMADA VALLEY: CASE STUDY OF TAWA DAM
    YOGESH DIWAN, PEOPLE'S RESEARCH SOCIETY

    CONSERVATION & DISPLACEMENT: THE IMPACT OF TIGER RESERVES ON INDIGENOUS FOREST DWELLERS
    BABA MAYARAM, SOCIAL ACTIVIST

    FORCED RE-MIGRATION TO SETTLEMENT COLONY: A CASE STUDY OF KANNAGI NAGAR
    CHENNAI DILIP DIWAKAR, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

    DAY 2: THURSDAY 25TH NOVEMBER

    9:30AM SESSION 1: MIGRATION & SPATIAL FORMATIONS


    MIGRATIONS FROM & INTO KERALA: SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES
    YEMUNA SUNNY, PEOPLE'S RESEARCH SOCIETY

    MIGRATIONS, TEXTS & MAPPING OF SPACE IN THE BRAHMAPUTRA VALLEY
    MANJEET BARUAH, INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY

    MARXIST & NON-MARXIST APPROACHES TO MIGRATION IN KARN ÂṬ AKA
    SIMON CHILVERS, INDIAN FORMATION RESEARCH SOCIETY

    12:30PM COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: MIGRATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
    PATRICK BOND, UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL (VIA VIDEO-LINK)

    - LUNCH -

    2:00PM SESSION 2: IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON REGIONAL & URBAN CHANGE

    THE SOCIAL & ECONOMIC IMPACT OF MIGRATION: A CASE STUDY OF WAYANAD DISTRICT
    JACOB THONDALIL, SOUTH ASIA STUDY CENTRE

    CONDITIONS OF MIGRANT WORKERS IN HOSUR, TAMIL NADU
    A. MARX, PRESIDENCY COLLEGE, CHENNAI

    ECONOMIC CRISES, LABOUR MOBILITY & WELFARE: EVIDENCE FROM TIRRUPUR
    M. VIJAYABASKAR, MADRAS INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

    MIGRANT LABOUR, WORKERS' RIGHTS & C.W.G. CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS
    SAIF EQBAL, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

    - TEA -

    4:30PM SESSION 3: POLITICS OF MIGRATION, NATION & BELONGING

    MIGRATION & CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS
    MADHAVI PUTREVU, HUMAN RIGHTS FORUM

    THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING OF NEPAL-INDIA MIGRATION
    KESHAV BASHYAL, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

    IMMIGRANTS, CITIZENS & JUSTICE: PREDICAMENT OF THE NEPALIS IN INDIA
    SWATAHSIDDHA SARKAR, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH BENGAL

    MINI-INDIA? POST-COLONIAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION IN THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS
    PHILIPP ZEHMISCH, LUDWIG MAXIMILIANS UNIVERSITÄT

    DAY 3: FRIDAY 26TH NOVEMBER

    9:30AM SESSION 1: ORIGINS & IDENTITIES OF MIGRANT COMMUNITIES


    INDIAN MIGRATION TO THE WEST INDIES DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD: A STUDY OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITY AMONG INDENTURED LABOURERS
    GHAN SHYAM, BANARAS HINDU UNIVERSITY

    MIGRATION, MEMORY & POLITICS IN NORTH EAST INDIA
    SARAH HILALY, RAJIV GANDHI UNIVERSITY

    THE IMPERIAL ROOTS OF PUNJABI NARRATIVES OF MOBILITY
    ANJALI GEERA ROY

    SOCIAL & POLITICAL EMBEDDEDNESS OF ECONOMIC MIGRATION: SITUATING NEPALI MARWARIS WITHIN THE BROADER MARWARI COMMUNITY OF SOUTH ASIA
    MALLIKA SHAKYA, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

    - LUNCH -

    2:00PM SESSION 2: GENDER, SOCIAL STRUCTURES & MIGRATION

    WOMEN & CHILD TRAFFICKING IN NEPAL: EXPLOITATION OF INNOCENTS
    VINOD K. BHARDWAJ & WANGSHIMENLA ZAMIR, GOVT. P.G. COLLEGE CHIMANPURA /
    NAGALAND UNIVERSITY


    'A PART YET APART': AN OVERVIEW OF SOUTH ASIAN FEMALE IMMIGRATION IN CANADA & ITS SOCIO-CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS
    SWAGATA BHATTACHARYA, JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

    THE POLITICIZATION OF THE INDO-CANADIAN DIASPORA: A FOREIGN POLICY CASE STUDY ANITA SINGH, DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY

    100 YEARS OF SOUTH ASIAN MIGRATION: RACE & GENDER IN THE CANADIAN IMAGINARY
    SUNERA THOBANI, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

    - TEA -

    4:30PM SESSION 3: MIGRATION & COMMUNITY LABOUR

    THE IMPLICATIONS OF MIGRATION FOR GENDER RELATIONS & COLLECTIVE ACTION: LESSONS FROM COMMUNITY FORESTRY IN THE MIDDLE HILLS OF NEPAL
    BIMBIKA SIJAPATI BASNETT, NEPÂ SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

    MIGRATION & SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE NEPAL-INDIA BORDERLANDS
    FRASER SUGDEN, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

    BEYOND THE HYDRAULICS OF DEMAND & SUPPLY: A CASE STUDY OF BHIL MIGRATION
    KUMAR SANJAY SINGH, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI



    Patrick Bond on oil and financial crises with Attac, 18-19 November

    ROUNDTABLE: Norwegian Experiences of Oil Policies - a toolbox for managing natural resources?
    Oslo November 18, 2010

    The last 10 to 15 years civil society in Norway has recognized that the Norwegian state, and Norwegian companies increasingly engage in commercial activities to extract energy abroad (petroleum, hydropower, and agro fuel). We also find that when your governments or peoples from developing countries ask what Norway did to secure wealth of the entire nation from such energy extraction the answer and guidance they get is far from complete. The Norwegian state answers that predictable access for foreign investments, and a tax regime that can provide revenue for government spending, and good governance is what has to be in place.

    However, the full scale political means of national and local ownership, conditioned access to common energy resources, the politics that secured knowledge and technology in clusters related to the energy resource, strategies to secure employment and value addition, etc are not communicated. The preconditions, that a strong labour movement and strong municipalities had secured a social state that could play a role in securing safe working conditions and distribution of value addition. This is a solid part of the Norwegian experience.

    The skilled energy history researcher from the University of Oslo – Helge Ryggvik, is asked to share this knowledge with us. The result is a rough guide to Norwegian energy experiences.

    The Norwegian foreign energy politics include several means. Intended or unintended, many of them contribute to secure Norwegian economic interests abroad. We will argue that programmes such as Oil for development, Development investment fund – NORFUND, requests through trade agreements to liberalise energy services and secure investment treaties, and of course diplomatic support for Norwegian companies all add a legitimacy for Norwegian economic interests abroad, and aim at making other countries not to use policies that Norway used through its history.

    This roundtable aim at sharing views on Norwegian (or other countries) energy activities in developing countries. Furthermore, for our partners/colleagues from developing countries to respond to the document and express what they think social civil society organisations in Norway can do to support their case in terms of their visions for future energy, environment, employment and economic justice in their countries and regions.

    PROGRAMME

    9 am: Welcome

    9.10: Introduction to the Roundtable (10 min)
    Heidi Lundeberg, Secr. General of the Latin America Solidarity Groups

    9.20: A rough guide to Norwegian Experiences in petroleum policies (40 min)
    Helge Ryggvik

    Comments (10 min)
  • Jane Nalunga, SEATINI, Uganda

  • Patrick Bond, Centre for Civil Society, KwaZulu Natal University, South Africa
  • Juan Pablo Flores, Observatorio de los Recursos Naturales, Bolivia

  • Diamantino Nhampossa, National Farmers Union, Mozambique


  • 10.30: A short break

    10.40: Roundtable discussion

    Some guiding questions

    1) Are there policy means that the Norwegian Civil society should advocate for, to secure policy space for countries to energy security and climate protection?
    2) What would eventually be hindrances at various levels to secure efficient policies, that would benefit from a advocacy cooperation
    3) What processes and conditions should be in place for civil society and their political leaders to ensure genuine accountable processes in this policy area?
    4) What challenges do you pose to future Norwegian foreign policy in the energy, climate and resource management sectors?

    11.45: Lunch break

    12.15: Continue discussion
    Are there some common conclusions?

    13.00: Short break

    13.15: Summary
    Helene Bank and Heidi Lundeberg

    13.30: End of roundtable and information about activities in Norway Social Forum

    Friday 19th November, 2pm- 4pm:
    “From stock market crash to social crisis” (with Erik Reinert (NO), Sólveig Jónsdóttir (IS) and Patrick Bond (SA))

    http://www.attac.no/omattac/nyheter/gk2010



    Globaliseringskonferansen 2010
    Publisert 16.11.2010

    Finanskrisa har ført til ei sosial krise i Europa, utsiktene til en forpliktende klima-avtale i Cancun er labre, finansmarkedene får fortsatt dominere verdensøkonomien uten noen form for demokratisk kontroll og i Norge fører New Public Management-ideologien til en forvitring av velferdsstaten. Motkreftene som jobber for demokrati, miljøvern og sosial rettferdighet møtes på Globaliseringskonferansen, ble med du også!

    Hver kveld blir det PubAttac på Kaffeglasset i Torggata. Alle nysgjerrige som vil vite litt mer om Attac i en sosial og uformell atmosfære er velkommen, sammen med gamle og nye medlemmer.

    Attacs møter på konferansen:

    FREDAG 19/11, 14.00-16.00: Fra børskrakk til sosial krise

    Høsten 2008 sprakk finansboblen, og skapte panikk i finansmarkedene. To år etterpå har finanssektoren kommet seg, takket være statlige redningspakker til en samla verdi av 36.000 milliarder norske kroner. Men den økonomiske og sosiale krisen som følger av finanskrisen, i form av arbeidsledighet, velferdskutt og økt fattigdom, ser vi først nå begynnelsen på.

    På dette møtet får dere høre beretninger om hvordan krisen slår ut for vanlige folk, som studenter, pensjonister og offentlig ansatte, i land i Europa så vel som i det globale Sør.

    Til dette møtet inviterer vi innledere som kan berette om hvordan krisen slår ut for vanlige folk, som studenter, pensjonister, offentlig ansatte etc, i land i Europa så vel som i det globale Sør.

    Innledere: Erik Reinert (NO), Sólveig Jónsdóttir (IS), Patrick Bond (ZA), Thanos Contagyris (GR)
    Møteleder: Emilie Ekeberg
    Arrangør: Attac Norge og Res Publica
    Temaspor: Økonomi, finans og handel



    A climate conference, old and new oil curses, and Norwegian ‘Good Samaritans’
    Patrick Bond 23 November 2010

    The stench of rotting blubber would hang for days over The Bluff in
    South Durban, thanks to Norwegian immigrants whose harpooning skills
    helped stock the town with cooking fat, margarine and soap, starting
    about a century ago. The fumes became unbearable, and a local uproar
    soon compelled the Norwegians to move the whale processing factory from
    within Africa’s largest port to a less‑populated site a few kilometers
    southeast.

    There, on The Bluff’s glorious Indian Ocean beachfront, the white
    working‑class residents of Marine Drive (perhaps including those in the
    apartment where I now live) also complained bitterly about the odor from
    flensing, whereby blubber, meat and bone were separated at the world’s
    largest onshore whaling station.

    Ever since, our neighborhood has been the armpit of South Africa. A bit
    further south and west, in a black residential area, the country’s
    largest oil refinery was built in the 1950s, followed by the production
    and on‑site disposal of nearly every toxic substance known to science.

    The whalers gracefully retreated into comfortable retirement in the
    mid‑1970s, their prey threatened by extinction. Conservationists had
    mobilized internationally, and thanks to the OPEC cartel, the cost of
    oil for ship transport soared in 1974, so the industry ceased operating
    in Durban. Even apartheid South Africa signed the global whaling ban in
    1976.

    What’s left is a small Bluff Whaling Museum where you sense the early
    Norwegians’ Vikingesque stance: brave, defiant, unforgiving to those
    they raped and pillaged, and utterly unconcerned about the
    sustainability of the environment they had conquered. The Bluff’s
    world‑class surfing waves regularly toss ashore decayed fragments of
    sperm, blue, fin and humpback whales’ skeletons; tens of thousands were
    killed.

    Déjà vu, earlier this month, when an invisible cloud suffused with a
    cat’s‑piss ammonia stench floated from the South Durban petro‑chemical
    complex – the continent’s largest – across the still racially‑segregated
    belt of 300,000 residents. Once again the community’s salt‑of‑the‑earth
    rabble‑rouser, Des D’Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental
    Alliance (SDCEA), called a picket against an uncaring municipal
    bureaucracy on November 12, and in the next two weeks further protests
    are planned in Durban against inadequate national energy policy and
    global climate policy.

    The unbearable smell, apparently emanating from the powerful corporation
    FFS, lasted for days, reappearing again last Friday night. Further
    south, the rotten‑egg sulfur odor from petroleum refinery SO2 emissions
    is a permanent feature. These persistent pollution crises are a visceral
    reminder: we must follow the example of Norwegian whalers on The Bluff,
    gracefully retreating from capitalism’s reckless dependence upon oil,
    coal and gas. It is a task that society cannot avoid much longer, as a
    devastating climate change tipping point looms sometime in the next decade.

    So nearly everyone was pleased, a fortnight ago, with the choice of
    Durban to host the 2011 Conference of the Parties (COP) 17, the world
    climate summit. Competition was tough. The conference centre in
    beautiful Cape Town was rejected, according to a guest post on former CT
    City Manager Andrew Boraine’s blog, because of “the high levels of
    security required… The CT International Conference Centre (ICC) falls
    way behind the ICC complex in Durban. You can lock it down completely
    and keep the over‑the‑top protesters well away from the high level
    attendees.”

    Boraine, a Johannesburg NGO colleague of mine two decades ago when he
    helped Alexandra Township civic associations defend their over‑the‑top
    protests against apartheid, is now a public‑private partnership
    facilitator. “Cape Town's proposal,” he rebutted, “took into account the
    need to be able to lock down certain areas for government delegations
    and VIPs.”

    Sorry, I don’t accept the need for to safely insulate these rascals, for
    last December in Copenhagen I witnessed how badly the VIPs performed
    when tasked with making binding emissions cuts. Not only were none made
    but even the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s minor five percent cuts (measured
    from 1990‑2012) were completely undermined.

    SA and US presidents Jacob Zuma and Barack Obama joined Chinese, Indian
    and Brazilian leaders in wrecking the last vestiges of UN democracy and
    threatening their own societies (especially Zulu and Luo kinfolk who are
    on the climate frontline), on behalf of the (mainly white‑owned) fossil
    fuel industry and (mainly white) frequent fliers (like myself). Chief
    negotiator for the G77, Lumumba Di‑Apeng, poignantly asked, “What is
    Obama going to tell his daughters? That their [Kenyan] relatives’ lives
    are not worth anything?”

    At the COP 16 climate summit, lasting through December 11 in Cancun,
    Mexico, these VIPs definitely need a strong wake‑up slap ‑ as activists
    there gave World Trade Organisation negotiators in 2003 ‑ not a quiet
    meeting place where they’ll just back‑slap.

    Actually, the strategy many in civil society considered around this time
    last year, was what Boraine unintentionally advocated: ‘locking down’
    (and in) the world leaders inside Copenhagen’s Bella Centre, so they
    would finally feel the pressure to sign a real deal, instead of the
    sleazy Copenhagen Accord.

    This would have involved blockades preventing delegates from departing
    last December 19, the way activists did in September 2000 at Prague’s
    ancient palace, where SA finance minister Trevor Manuel chaired the
    World Bank’s annual meeting. The VIPs barely scampered to safety from
    global‑justice protesters, after again doing nothing to reform
    globalisation.

    The plan to lock down the climate‑negotiating VIPs in Copenhagen was
    considered and then abandoned when Danish police turned semi‑fascistic.
    It’s not even an option worth discussing in Durban given that City
    Manager Mike Sutcliffe regularly denies permission to peacefully protest.

    But come to think of it, on 31 August 2001, a march of 15,000 to the ICC
    led by the late Fatima Meer and Dennis Brutus against a pathetic UN
    racism conference came close to barging in on the lethargic delegates.
    Recall the activists’ valid complaints then: no UN discussion of
    reparations needed for slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and no action
    against Israeli racial oppression and occupation of Palestine.

    The reason why next year, leading climate activists may decline the
    opportunity to appeal to ICC elites – either asking politely, or
    amplified with a chorus of vuvuzelas – is simple: rapidly‑rising disgust
    with filthy leaders who cannot even clean up the world’s fouled
    financial nests, judging by the recent South Korean G20 meeting, much
    less planet‑threatening emissions.

    The Cancun COP will again demonstrate that US and EU rulers will spend
    trillions of dollars to pacify the world’s richest speculators in
    financial markets, from Wall Street in 2008 to those holding state bonds
    in Athens, Dublin and Lisbon this month. But they’ll balk at a few
    hundred billion required annually to save the planet.

    “If planet Earth was a bank, they’d have bailed it out long ago,”
    British climate campaigner Jonathan Neale remarked to laughter at the
    Norway Social Forum’s opening session last Thursday. The money is
    certainly available in Oslo, thanks to a petroleum rainy‑day fund worth
    $500 billion, the world’s second largest sovereign hoard.

    Norwegians in the campaigning group Attac with whom I spent the last few
    days are also intent on fighting what a workshop leader, Heidi
    Lundeberg, last Thursday termed Norway’s “Good Samaritan masking the
    face of our new oil imperialism”. Lundeberg’s edited collection for
    Attac, Klima for ny Oljepolitikk (Oslo, 2008), demolishes Norway’s image
    as responsible global citizen.

    University of Bergen eco‑social scientist Terje Tvedt has also
    complained that Oslo’s spin‑doctoring generates “an aura of
    moral‑ideological irrefutability”. It’s especially irritating when
    accompanying a revitalized eco‑Viking rape‑and‑pillage mentality, such
    as growing collaboration with the likes of the World Bank, led by one of
    the world’s most destructive men, Robert Zoellick.

    The fake Samaritan tendency, evident when former prime minister Gro
    Harlem Brundtland ran a 1983‑87 world ‘sustainable development’
    commission, is being taken to extremes by current prime minister Jens
    Stoltenberg and environment/development minister Erik Stolheim.

    Workshop debate immediately ensued with the outraged director of the
    Oslo government’s Oil for Development fund, Petter Nore, who back in
    1979 coedited a great book, Oil and Class Struggle. “We are NOT the
    Samaritan face of imperialism!”, he clamoured, yet his own reports
    reveal the fund’s role in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, donating
    millions to lubricate the US looting of petrol and gas, and supporting a
    stable of venal oil‑rich African dictators.

    Nore’s office also promotes carbon trading to mitigate the flaring of
    gas at oil wells. He rewards both Northern financiers and Big Oil
    polluters with ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ payola, buying ‘emissions
    reduction credits’ for the Norwegian state in order to reform extraction
    systems in which, at possibly the world’s worst site, the Niger Delta,
    flaring has been declared illegal in any case.

    As do so many ex‑leftist Scandinavian technocrats, Nore has capitulated
    to the worst global trends. He’s using Norway’s oil‑infused cash‑flush
    aid to reward corporations for what they should be doing free. Activists
    from Port Harcourt’s Environmental Rights Action movement, led by Nnimmo
    Bassey (co‑winner of the Right Livelihood Award last month) know better,
    demanding that carbon trading must not legitimize illegal flaring.

    The same problem can be found in another Norwegian Clean Development
    Mechanism strategy: planting alien invasive trees in plantations across
    several East African countries. This wrecks local ecology and pushes out
    indigenous people, as my colleague Blessing Karumbidza from the Durban
    NGO Timberwatch recently reported: “the Norwegian firm Green Resources
    has entrenched itself in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania where it
    looks to acquire at least 142 000 hectares of land… to plant exotic
    trees (varieties of eucalyptus and pine) for the purpose of selling an
    expected 400 000 tons of carbon credits to the Norwegian government.”

    Along with Norway’s serious environmentalists and development advocates,
    I find it heartbreaking that the government’s wonderful Soria Moria
    declaration is being trashed by Stoltenberg and Stolheim. The 2005
    manifesto promised a U‑turn, for example, through shifting funding from
    the World Bank to the United Nations.

    Even in the North’s most left‑leaning government, it was all fibbery, as
    shown when Bank executive directors had a chance to turn down the
    notorious $3.75 billion Medupi coal loan in April. The Norwegian
    representative only managed a limp abstention, not the no! vote
    demanded by a South African‑led global coalition of 200 concerned groups.

    When Nore told the workshop that fifty governments had come to his
    agency for assistance in managing oil resources, including South Africa,
    I flashed back to South Durban’s oil grievances:
    • massive greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to SA’s emissions of
    CO2 per unit of per person GDP being twenty times worse than even the US,
    • regular fires, explosions, and devastating oil pipe leaks,
    • the world’s highest recorded school asthma rates (Settlers Primary)
    and a leukemia pandemic,
    • extreme capital‑intensity in petro‑chem production and extreme
    unemployment in surrounding communities,
    • a huge new pipeline to double the oil flow from Durban to Johannesburg
    (already two children were killed after falling into unprotected
    trenches), and
    • an old airport earmarked for expansion of the petrochemical, auto and
    shipping industries.

    South Durban is one of the world’s extreme sites of climate change cause
    and effect: well‑paid managers run leaky‑bucket toxic factories by day
    and escape to plush suburbs by night, and gasping residents either
    slowly die from the exhaust or wake in fear when the refineries erupt
    with noxious fumes late at night. Yet thanks to one of Africa’s finest
    eco‑social campaigning groups, SDCEA, the area can become an inspiring
    site for fighting petro‑power and visioning alternatives.

    Consistent with a global consensus that whales should be left in the
    ocean, the only solution to the climate crisis is one that genuinely
    decent Norwegian community residents, fisherfolk, environmentalists and
    social activists are promoting in their own petrol‑rich Lofoten region.
    The demand there is identical to one made by South Durban residents fed
    up with smells far more damaging than the decomposing blubber of
    yesteryear: “leave the oil in the soil!”

    (Patrick Bond , based at the University of waZulu‑Natal Centre for Civil
    Society ‑ and University of California‑Berkeley
    Department of Geography, co‑edited a 2009 UKZN Press book: Climate
    Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society.)


    World Capitalist Crisis & Pan African Resistance





    World Capitalist Crisis & Pan African Resistance & the launch of three books:

    Date: Sunday November 21
    Time: 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
    Location Details: Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission Street in San Francisco at 3rd (BART: Montgomery or Powell Exit)
    Speakers: Horace Campbell, Syracuse Univ. , Eunice Sahle, UNC Chapel Hill, Patrick Bond, UKZN South Africa & Patricia Daley, Oxford Univ.

    Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics
    (by Horace Campbell, publisher: Pluto)
    World Orders, Development and Transformation
    (by Eunice Sahle, publisher: Macmillan)
    Zuma’s Own Goal: Losing SA’s ‘War on Poverty’
    (coedited by Patrick Bond, publisher: Africa World Press)

    This is a FREE event, open to the public. RSVP requested by email or phone PriorityAfrica@yahoo.com
    or Tel: (510) 663-2255

    This event was originally scheduled to be held at the African Studies Association conference. It has been moved to this location to support United HERE Local 2, which is in dispute with the St. Francis Hotel. The organizers affirm their support for these workers, honor their struggle, and ask for your solidarity.

    www.priorityafrica.org


    Patrick Bond at Race, Class & Developmental State conference 16 November



    A Half-Century of Competing Political Economic Traditions in South Africa
    By Patrick Bond, Presented to the conference on Race, Class and the Developmental State 16 November 2010, Port Elizabeth





    The Red Location Museum and the Department of Development Studies, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University 15- 16 November

    Race, Class and Developmental State Conference Programme

    Monday 15th November 2010

    Colloquium opening in partnership with Mayor’s Office
    Venue: City Hall (Vuyisile Mini Square)
    Time: 17h00 for 17h30

    18h00-18h10 Welcoming Address: Deputy Executive Mayor: Cllr Nancy Sihlwayi

    18h15-1845 Professor John Saul
    “The Working Class” and a Whole Lot More: On Conceptualizing “Revolution,” “Democracy” and “Development” in Contemporary South Africa.

    John Saul is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Science and African Studies at York University in Toronto and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

    Question Time

    Book Launch Programme
    The Struggle for the Eastern Cape; Subjugation and the Roots of South African Democracy 1800-1854 (Published byKMM ReviewPublication).

    The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana, and the Missionaries (BaslerAfrika Bibliographien).

    19h20-19h25 Introduction: Professor Devan Pillay

    19h25-19h55 Author: Professor Martin Legassick

    Tuesday 16th

    Venue: Art Gallery (Red Location Museum)

    09h00 -10h00
    Chair: Janet Cherry

    Jacklyn Cock
    Connecting Bread, Land and Peace

    Olajede Olayede

    10h00 to 10h10 Coffee

    10h10- 11h30
    Chair: Olayede Olajede

    Andrea Hurst

    Legassick, Schopenhauer, and Monsanto: A Schopenhauerian take on the complexities of race, class and capital

    Matthews Blatchford
    Towards an evaluation of the South African Left

    Steven Friedman
    Whose Liberation? Why a Party-Forgotten Left Critique of ANC Strategy Has Contemporary Implication

    11h30 – 11h40 Coffee

    11h40 – 13h00
    Chair: Ciraj Rassool

    Teresa Connor
    Bill Freund
    The Union of South Africa; A Developmental State

    Patrick Bond
    Half-Century of Competing Political Economic Traditions in South Africa

    13h00 – 14h00 Lunch

    14h00 to 15h20
    Chair: Mathew Blatchford

    Janet Cherry and Richard Haines
    The ‘working’ class without the ‘working’: The case of Kwazakhele

    Ben Cousins
    What is a ‘smallholder’? Class-analytical perspectives on small-scale farming and agrarian reform in South Africa

    Ciraj Rassool

    15h20-15h30 Coffee

    15h20-15h40 Summary of the Colloquium.
    Janet Cherry
    Martin Legassick

    Vote of thanks: Christopher Du Preez



    PICTURES FROM THE CONFERENCE




    Patrick Bond seminar on ecosocialism at Inst of Social Studies, 16 November 2010

    Special Research in Progress Seminar - Patrick Bond

    Ecosocialist Politics and Climate Justice
    Patrick Bond has longstanding research interests and applied work in global governance and national policy debates, in urban communities and with global justice movements in several countries. He is professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies where since 2004 he has directed the Centre for Civil Society. His research focuses on political economy, environment (energy, water and climate change), social policy and geopolitics, with publications covering South Africa, Zimbabwe, the African continent and global-scale processes.
    More

    Event Details:
    Date:16 Nov 2010 13:00 hrs until 14:00 hrs
    Location: Room 4.01
    How to get to ISS
    Speaker: Patrick Bond
    Contact: Annet van Geen or Bram Buscher
    www.iss.nl


    Patrick Bond at Historical Materialism conference, 12-14 November

    Ecosocialist Politics and Climate Justice (tentative directions)
    Slide Show from Patrick Bonds Presentation to the Conference



    Financial Capital Before and After the Crisis (Socialist Register)
    Date:Friday, 12 October
    Chair: Greg Albo
    Speakers: Sam Ashman, Patrick Bond, Adam Hanieh

    Political Ecology in a Time of Crisis
    Date:Sunday, 14 October
    Chair: Giorgos Galanis
    Speakers:
    James Anderson and James Goodman – Crises of Capitalism and Ecology:
    Capitalismʼs Three Contradictions and Conflicting Ecological Responses

    Patrick Bond – Ecosocialist Politics and Climate Justice
    Emanuele Leonardi – The Environmental Side of the Current Economic Crisis: Toward an Ecological Critique of Neoliberalism



    CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

    www.historicalmaterialism.org


    Patrick Bond at The ‘Progress’ in Zimbabwe Conference, 4-6 November

    Holiday Inn - Bulawayo 3 – 6 November 2010



    ZIMBABWE CONFERENCE ON ‘PROGRESS’BULAWAYO, 3-6 NOVEMBER
    Rough notes typed by Patrick Bond




    Will Zimbabwe again regress?
    Patrick Bond, Bulawayo 12 November 2010

    Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal – If leaders of a small African country stand up with confidence to imperialist aggression, especially from the US and Britain, it would ordinarily strike any fair observer as extremely compelling. Especially when the nightmare of racist colonialism in that country is still be to exorcised, whites hold a disproportionate share of economic power and state’s rulers appear serious about changing those factors.

    But that country needs a second glance. What may seem to some a progressive and brave government is upon closer examination a tyranny whose leader repeatedly acts against grassroots and shop-floor social solidarity, and notwithstanding rhetoric about land redistribution, is ultimately very hostile to its own society’s poor and working people, women, youth, elderly and ill.

    “Progress in Zimbabwe” was the title of a four-day conference in Bulawayo last week, gathering mainly academics but also leading civil society strategists. It was organised by University of Johannesburg political economist David Moore and by Showers Mawowa of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) School of Development Studies and the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development.

    Said Moore, “For many analysts, the end of progress is signified in the political projects of Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe African Nation Union-Patriotic Front [ZANU-PF] – not to mention the Government of National Unity.” It has been two years since South Africa’s then-president Thabo Mbeki negotiated dysfunctional power-sharing between Mugabe’s junta and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

    Just before the deal took effect in early 2009, the local currency collapsed entirely, and is no longer used. On the upside, that move ended hyperinflation and empty shop shelves. The tiny elite is happier, as is the World Bank (not yet lending, but carefully looking over the state’s shoulder). Yet without any ability to earn hard currency, what is a peasant or the unemployed person (90 per cent of the workforce) to do?

    A related problem: monetary policy is now set in Washington and Pretoria, since the US dollar and South African rand are now Zimbabwe’s core currencies. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe cannot stimulate the sickly economy because its governor, Gideon Gono, gave Zimbabwe “monetary gonorrhea”, a corrupting disease transmitted from his overworked printing press to the economy as a whole.

    A $2 billion bill for Gono’s leftover local debt is being negotiated and another $5 billion plus in foreign debt remains unpayable. Progressives writing the National People’s Convention Charter in February 2008 demanded a debt audit before any World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans are serviced and, as happened similarly in Ecuador in December 2008, “the right of the people of Zimbabwe to refuse repayment of any odious debt accrued by a dictatorial government”.

    Politically, progress against Mugabe’s dictatorship is terribly fragile, as the army is now being deployed in many hotly contested peri-urban and rural areas. Since paramilitary violence forced Tsvangirai to pull out of the mid-2008 presidential run-off election (after winning the first round – but, claimed Mugabe’s vote counters, with less than 50 per cent), a constitutional rewrite outreach process has provided space for 4000 meetings in recent weeks.

    Many were marred by intimidation. Worse, a mid-2011 election announced by Mugabe promises a return to bad habits: outright violence, including murder, ending in poll thievery. The most likely scenario, according to leading commentator John Makumbe, “The MDC will win and Zanu (PF) will again refuse to concede power.” So back they will go into the cul-de-sac of renewed power-sharing talks.

    History reviewed
    Hence the “Progress in Zimbabwe” conference was devoted mainly to recording regress not progress, given Zimbabwe’s deep plunge. History needed reviewing, for after all the most banal measure of progress, that of the economics profession, is per person gross domestic product (GDP) and the point it began declining may surprise.

    Per capita GDP didn’t begin its slide in February 2000 when President Robert Mugabe lost his first election (a constitutional referendum) and unleashed war veterans on white farmers. Nor was it on November 1997’s Black Friday, when the Zimbabwe dollar lost 74% of its value in four hours, a world record. Nor was it when the Washington-sponsored structural adjustment program began in 1991, nor when independence in 1980 meant the small economy’s re-articulation with hostile global capitalism after 15 years of sanctions.

    If one thinks of progress in this conventional way, as GDP per person, then Zimbabwe began shrinking in 1974, as indeed was the case in most of Africa, as the world slowdown hit the poorest continent hardest, at a time when most African leaders had succumbed to neocolonialism. In Zimbabwe, overproduction of luxury goods, machinery and steel for a limited market left the economy with huge excess capacity at a time of shrinking confidence in Ian Smith’s racist Rhodesian Front regime. After liberation was won in 1980, the economy then recovered some of the lost ground in a growth spurt from 1984 to 1990.

    Income in 1990 was much better distributed than under Smith’s white rule – or than under Mugabe’s kleptocracy after it became avaricious in the mid-1990s. A small black middle class had emerged mainly through the expansion of Zimbabwe’s civil service, though the World Bank successfully insisted that it shrink by 25% during the 1990s.

    Sorting out the politico-ideological confusion in historical context requires, according to Sheffield-based Zimbabwean Ian Phimister, a “distinct paradigm of radical historiography”. But Muchaparara Musemwa lamented that their discipline still lacks cohesion and purpose. Phimister recommended the new book, Becoming Zimbabwe – featuring work by Alois Mlambo, Brian Raftopoulos and younger historians, which treats the contemporary degeneration in historical context.

    By all accounts, a central challenge in an era of Mugabe’s state-sponsored “Patriotic History” – a mirror image of Rhodesia’s racist settler history – is recovery of the liberation tradition from damage done even before Independence in 1980, a task aided by the coming publication of Wilf Mhanda’s autobiography. Mhanda’s leadership of the Zimbabwe People’s Army offered an alternative liberatory trajectory, one Mugabe violently suppressed two years before signing the Lancaster House compromise deal that maintained the repressive state and white-biased property relations entirely intact.

    Mugabe’s overarching need, it seems, is control of the telling of history – as a way to remind his subjects there was once a time when ZANU-PF was indeed a popular force, like fish swimming in the sea of the people. Regurgitation of that memory is what motivates the “talk left, walk right” project of crony nationalist capitalism, which Mugabe and so many other post-colonial despots adopted, as Frantz Fanon predicted in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth.

    Today the main legacy of this struggle is “securocrat” control of the state. As Joshua Mpofu remarked, “Talking about political parties is like chewing gravel. Military culture never died, and a lot of public institutions are headed by brigadiers and generals.”

    Land
    Another memory is of a time when indigenous Zimbabweans controlled their land. According to Blessing Karumbidza, whose recent UKZN doctorate describes post-independence land experiences, there will be “a truly restructured and dynamic farming sector if and only if the support mechanisms and institutional regimes necessary for land and agricultural rationalisation are put in place”.

    That’s not happening insists University of Zimbabwe (UZ) geographer Esther Chigumira: “Bifurcated land ownership continues, not by race but by class, favouring elites who are politically connected.” Those nationalists, recalled former war veteran and now UZ sociologist Wilbert Sadomba, emerged from internecine liberation movement feuds and “hijacked that revolution, in connivance with international capital. We war vets are opposed to both ZANU-PF elites and MDC elites. We see neither being able to take the country forward.”

    Added leading liberation-era intellectual Ibbo Mandaza, “There was a ZANU-PF that we were part of, the liberation movement, and then there was Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, which is very different. Mugabe is essentially right wing, notwithstanding the anti-imperialist rhetoric.” As for his own role, Mandaza confessed, “We helped in many respects dress up an essentially right-wing regime in leftist clothing.”

    Raftopoulos agreed: “This discourse threw off many African scholars, most importantly in the Mamdani debate. ” He was referring to the great Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani’s 2008 London Review of Books defence of Mugabe. The two most prominent scholars who are supportive of land redistribution, Mamdani and Sam Moyo, were invited but could not attend. In their place, Ben Cousins from the University of the Western Cape promoted the post-2000 land reform’s “changing structures of ownership and new agrarian structure”, concluding, “The positives probably outweigh the negatives.”

    In the main A1 land program, he said, “about a third of the new farmers are succeeding, a third getting by, and a third getting out”. The negatives in Cousins’ list include “the collapse of large-scale commercial farms, which contributed to wide-scale economic decline; the motor force of land reform was the ZANU-PF power grab; the decline of the rule of law; violence.” Added Zimbabwean human rights advocate Elinor Sisulu, “food security, environment, HIV/AIDS, and the gender and class dimensions.”

    No matter how Zimbabwe needed to end white domination of good farms before 2000, an overall judgment on the land invasions (which sporadically continue because 10 per cent of 4000 white farmers hung on by hook or by crook) will wait for long-term evidence. The spate of new research by those associated with Moyo and Cousins does show a few selective sites of success, especially in Masvingo province near the ancient Great Zimbabwe empire’s capital, but critics argue this is not a typical region.

    MDC criticised
    But opposition policies came in for equally harsh critique. “In the 1990s the motivation for the MDC was the struggle for social and economic justice – and that’s the crucial unique character of the MDC’s origins”, said Hopewell Gumbo of the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development. “But the trend to neoliberalism within the MDC means we will not see progress. We need to look for new alliances and new formations.”

    But the terrain is uneven, Harare-based urban civic organiser Mike Davies pointed out the profusion of petit-bourgeois suit-and-tie professionals among the capital’s NGO cadre: “They acquire a self-preserving aspect perhaps more concerned with continuation than function. They became more remote from their members, even elitist, losing their accountability, more concerned with meeting donor aspirations and requirements than serving the needs of their members.”

    According to Davies, “opportunistic elements make every effort to preserve their positions, often at some cost to their member organisations and undermining their stated goals. In my opinion, we failed to identify and contain these elements as well as the vehicles that carry them. As a result, the super-NGOs captured the voices of civics and domesticated them for the consumption of an increasingly externalised audience of international donors and Zimbabweans in the diaspora.”

    How then can progress emerge against both a sell-out to the Washington Consensus (by either or both of the leading parties) and Mugabe’s fake populist language and violence-prone delivery – short of awaiting his death, and then the inevitable ZANU-PF power struggle (between the Mujuru and Mnangagwa factions) that could be even more disruptive?

    Mass action, solidarity
    An answer came from the leading trade unionist present, Kumbirai Kudenga: “In terms of mass action, we need people without fear. If you’re not used to going to the ground, it’s hard. Mass action is for people who are used to the ground.”

    She even provided a new vehicle: “We have a Democratic United Front for the workers, especially for mass action. What we need is support. Can you take down our email: zimlabour@gmail.com. That is if you are serious, we are there to act.”

    For the rest of us, according to Raftopoulos, a renewed “international labour solidarity discourse is one of the best antidotes to Mugabe’s rhetoric”, especially the “exemplary solidarity” shown in April 2008 when in Durban, South Africa’s transport workers refused to unload 3 million bullets destined for Mugabe’s army from the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang.

    Even if the conference was way too top heavy with talking heads and NGOers, all agreed that a new surge of such solidarity will be needed next year, when regress again trumps progress in Zimbabwe.

    Patrick Bond is on sabbatical from the UKZN Centre for Civil Society. He now based at University of California-Berkeley Department of Geography. His books include Uneven Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe’s Plunge.



    Draft Programme

    Nov 2-3: Zimscon Papers and Planning

    Nov 3: PM 14:00-16:00 Registration for ‘Progress Conference’

    (1) Nov 3: PM 16:00-18:00 The Philosophy of Progress and Zimbabwe
    Chair: David Moore
    Speaker: John Hoffman
    Discussants: Amanda Hammar, Colin Stoneman

    November 4

    (2) Nov 4 AM 1 8:30-10:00 Narratives of Progress: Zimbabwean Historiography
    Chair: Gerald Mazarire
    Author: Ian Phimister
    Discussants: Muchaparara Musemwa, Pathisa Nyathi
    Key Participants: Munyaradzi Nyakudya, Luise White

    Break 10:00-10:30

    (3) Nov 4 AM 2 10:30-12:00 Landed Economies: Farming & Farmers Then & Now
    Chair: Itai Zimunya
    Author: Blessing Karumbidza
    Discussants: Jocelyn Alexander, Easther Chigumira
    Key Participants: Bill Kinsey, Prosper Matondi, Lionel
    Cliffe, Wilbert Sadomba, Ben Cousins, Philan Zamchiya,
    Joe Hanlon

    Nov 4 Lunch 12-13:00

    (4) Nov 4 AM 3 13:00-14:30 Resources: Cursed or Blessed Political Economies?
    Chair: Bill Freund
    Authors: Showers Mawowa and Richard Saunders
    Discussants: Joseph Chaumba, Sobona Mtisi
    Key Participants: Claude Kabemba, Farayi Maguwu

    Break 14:30-14:45

    (5) Nov 4 PM 4 14:45-16:15 Roundtable: ‘Intellectuals’ and Progress in Zimbabwe
    Chair: David Moore
    Participants: Ibbo Mandaza, Prof. Maphathu-Ncube,
    Brian Raftopoulos, Luise White

    Break 16:15-17:00

    (6) Nov 4 PM 5 17:00-18:30 SAPES Trust Policy Dialogue Forum
    National Heroes, National Shrines and Joshua
    Nkomo's Legacy: Policy Implications?

    Chair: Cyril Ndebele
    Presenter: Pathisa Nyathi
    Discussants: Saul G. Ndlovu, Norma Kriger

    Formal Welcome 19:00 - National Art Gallery: Bulawayo & Dinner

    November 5

    (7) Nov 5 AM 1 8:00-9:30 Economy and Society Restructured: New Formations
    of Labour and Capital

    Chair: Showers Mawowa
    Authors: Lloyd Sachikonye & Godfrey Kanyenze
    Discussants: Colin Stoneman, Rob Davies
    Key Participants: David Mupamhadzi, Richard Kamidza

    Break 9:30-9:45

    (8) Nov 5 AM 2 9:45-11:15 Labour’s Past, Present and Future
    Chair: Roger Southall
    Author: Brian Raftopoulos
    Discussants: Tapiwa Chagonda, Kumbirai Kudenga,
    Hamadziripi Tamukamoyo

    Break 11:15-11:30

    (9) Nov 5 AM 3 11:30-13:00 The Parties & Their Politics
    Chair: Norma Kriger
    Author: Ibbo Mandaza
    Discussants: John Makumbe, James Muzondidya
    Key Participants: Nqobizitha Mlilo, Joshua Mpofu

    Nov 5 Lunch 13:00-14:00

    (10) Nov 5 PM 1 14:00-15:30 Civil Society: Strategies for Emancipation?
    Chair: Amanda Hammar
    Author: Kirk Helliker
    Discussants: Erin McCandless, Mike Davies
    Key Participants: Rose Marie Depp, Booker Maguire,
    Mary Ndlovu, David Sanders, Frances Lovemore, Elinor
    Sisulu

    Break 15:30-15:45

    (11) Nov 5 PM 2 16:00-17:30 Identities: Gender, Ethnicity, Race, Displacement
    Chair: John Hoffman
    Author: Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi
    Discussants: Joy Chadya, Blair Rutherford
    Key Participants: Amanda Hammar, Sabelo Ndlovu,
    Sostina Takure, Pathisa Nyhathi

    Break 17:30-17:45

    (12) Nov 5 PM 3 17:45-19:00 Zimbabwe Compared: ‘Progress’ in the Rest of Africa
    Chair: David Moore
    Roundtable Participants: Bill Freund, John Saul, Roger
    Southall, Luise White

    Dinner 19:00 - Anywhere

    November 6

    (13) Nov 6 AM 1 8:30-10:30 Roundtable: Perspectives on Progressive Policies
    Chair: Deprose Muchena
    Participants: Patrick Bond, Bertha Chiroro, Fay Chung
    Lionel Cliffe, Hopewell Gumbo, Jabusile
    Madyazvimbishi-Shumba, Wilfred Mhanda, John Saul,
    Elinor Sisulu, Colin Stoneman

    Break 10:30-11:00

    (14) Nov 6 AM 2 11-12:00 Wrap-Up
    John Hoffman, Felix Fandyroy Moyo


    Patrick Bond seminar on climate justice, 18 October

    Please join us for our weekly Doing Debating Development speakers series: Climate Justice: Space, Scale and the Politics of Climate Change
    by special guest
    Patrick Bond, Director, Center for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
    Date:Wednesday, 18 October
    Time:12:00pm - 1:00pm
    Venue:3201 Hunt Hall

    Patrick Bond has longstanding research interests and applied work in global governance and national policy debates, in urban communities and with global justice movements in several countries. He is professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies where since 2004 he has directed the Centre for Civil Society. His research focuses on political economy, environment (energy, water and climate change), social policy and geopolitics, with publications covering South Africa, Zimbabwe, the African continent and global-scale processes. In service to the new South African government, Patrick authored/edited more than a dozen policy papers from 1994-2002,including theReconstruction and Development Programme and the RDP White Paper.He held other positions at Johannesburg NGOs (the National Institute for Economic Policy,1996-97 and Planact, 1990-94); at the University of Zimbabwe’s Department of Political and Administrative Studies (1989-90); and in Washington, DC at the Institute for Policy Studies, Pacifica Radio, MarketPlace Radio, and several international trade unions (late 1980s). He was also active in the international anti-apartheid movement and US student and community movements.

    Among Patrick Bond's immense list of publications are the following books directly related to the topic of his talk: Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society: Negative Returns on South African Investments (co-edited with Rehana Dada and Graham Erion for Rozenberg Publishers and UKZN Press, 2008, 2007); Trouble in the Air: Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere (edited with Rehana Dada for CCS and TransNational Institute, 2005);Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest (UKZN Press and Merlin Press, 2002);

    Patrick earned his doctorate in economic geography at Johns Hopkins (1985-92), following studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance (Philadelphia, 1983-85) and an undergraduate economics degree at Swarthmore College (Philadelphia, 1979-83). He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1961, and has a son, Jan (born in 1995).

    Chris Benner, Ph.D.
    Chair, Community Development Graduate Group
    Chair, Geography Graduate Group
    Associate Professor, Community and Regional Development
    Human and Community Development Department
    University of California Davis
    1309 Hart Hall
    One Shields Ave
    Davis, CA 95616
    (530) 754-8799
    ccbenner@ucdavis.edu

    http://hcd.ucdavis.edu/news/seminars.php

    Human and Community Development Dept. University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue


    Patrick Bond seminar on climate politics at Trinity College Dublin, 1 October

    The Politics of Climate Justice, Debt and Development The annual TCD/UCD Development Research Lunchtime Seminar Series recommences on 1st October. This seminar series is organised jointly by TIDI at TCD and the Human Development Initiative at UCD. Prof. Patrick Bond, Director of the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa will deliver the first seminar of the series. Sandwiches provided.

    Date:Friday 1st October
    Time: 1-2pm
    Venue: TCD/UCD Innovation Academy, 3 Foster Place, off Dame St., Trinity College Dublin (please view map and directions here)
    Contact: Adrian Corcoran, adrian.corcoran@ucd.ie, www.ucd.ie/hdi/ or tidi@tcd.ie




    www.tcd.ie/tidi

    467

    Baruti Amisiat at the NADEL workshop on xenophobia 30 September 2010

    NADEL
    National Association of Democratic Lawyers
    WORKSHOPS 2010 ENTRANCE FREE



    WARNING
    Residents laugh as foreigner burns in his own blankets


    CERTIFICATES OF ATTENDANCE WILL BE ISSUED

    WORKSHOP 1:
    Xenophobia
    What are you scared off?

    Presented by Mr Baruti Amisi


    VENUE: KWAZULU-NATAL LAW SOCIETY
    TIME: 13H: 30– 14H: 30
    DATE: 30TH SEPTEMBER 2010 - THURSDAY

    WHO’S INVITED?
    CANDIDATE ATTORNEYS; PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANTS; ATTORNEYS; ADVOCATES; MAGISTRATES; PROSECUTORS; COURT OFFICIALS; LLB GRADUATES; AND OTHER LEGALLY INCLINED INDIVIDUALS.

    For further Information contact:
    Harshna Munglee
    ( Chairperson: Workshops - NADEL PMB )
    TEL: (033)3875411, FAX: (033)3875411/0866195447, EMAIL: info@hmung-lee.co.za
    R.S.V.P NOW!!!!!
    LIMITED SEATS AVAILABLE



    Patrick Bond at Birzeit Univ conference, Palestine, 28 September



    Geographies of Aid Intervention in Palestine

    Recent scholarship has highlighted the little effectiveness of the aid industry in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories, and even its complicity in sustaining the Israeli occupation. A blind faith in economic development to keep alive the peace process, as well as the dominant post-conflict framework that has shaped most developmental interventions since the Oslo accords, have contributed to bury the root causes and socio-political realities of the Palestinian colonial context. Less research has been done about the developmental micro-geographies of aid intervention and the ways in which these practices are negotiated, implemented, and contested. The aim of this conference is thus to critically explore the ways in which aid intervention reshapes the socio-political, spatial, economic, and environmental relations, in addition to thinking about alternative forms of aid that respond to Palestinian needs and rights not only in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but beyond.

    27 - 28 September 2010

    Venue: Said Khoury Development Studies Hall - Birzeit University
    Location Birzeit: Occupied Palestine
    Organizers: Middle East and North Africa Research Group (Ghent University)
    Center for Development Studies (Birzeit University)
    Supporter:Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad ‐ University Development Cooperation (VLIR‐UOS)

    Pre registration in this conference is not required

    Conference Program

    Monday 27th September 2010

    8:15 - 8:45 Registration

    8:45 - 8:50 Opening Remarks
    Dr. Khalil Hindi - Birzeit University President

    8:50 - 9:00 Opening Remarks
    Samia Botmeh, Director of the Centre for Development Studies, Birzeit University

    Sami Zemni, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Research Group, Gent University

    9:00- 9:30 Keynote address
    Sara Roy, Harvard University
    Perspectives on Palestinian (de-)development

    9:30 - 11:30 Session One: The legacy of Aid in Palestine's colonial present

    Jamil Hilal, Independent Researcher
    Civil society in the context of settler-colonialism and the establishment of the PA

    Islah Jad, Birzeit University
    NGOs and the Depolitization of Palestinian Social Movements

    Jalal Al-Huseini, IFPO
    The refugee aid industry during Oslo

    Rina Jabareen, ADALAH
    Aid and subjugation: Palestinians inside Israel

    11:30 - 11:45 Coffee break

    11:45 - 13:45 Session Two: Palestine as a humanitarian space

    Didier Fassin, Princeton University
    The humanitarian politics of testimony

    Ilana Feldman, George Washington
    Naive humanitarians, exemplary victims, and the limits of humanitarian space

    Hassan Jabareen, ADALAH
    The discursive and spatial performativities of law

    Numan Kanafani, University of Copenhagen
    The political economy of food aid to Palestine

    13:45 - 14:45 Lunch break

    14:45 - 16:45 Session Three: Development, Neoliberalism and Security

    Mandy Turner, University of Bradford
    The limits of peace building under Occupation: an analysis of the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan

    Dawood Hamoudi
    Stop the Wall Campaign: Donor money and Israel's economic vision

    Aisling Byrne, Conflicts Forum
    The development of neo-colonial structures under the guise of state-building
    Eileen Kuttab, Birzeit University
    Building a neoliberal citizen: education and the reproduction of aid.

    Tuesday 28th September 2010
    9:00 - 9:30 Keynote address

    Patrick Bond, University of Kwazulu-Natal
    Post-liberation aid, finance and neoliberal public policy: The case of South Africa

    9:30 - 11:30 Session Four: The political logics of donors (and recipients)

    Khalil Nakhleh, Independent researcher and writer
    Development mythology in Occupied Palestinian Authority Areas

    Benoît Challand, New School for Social Research, New York
    Foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude

    Guy Burton, Birzeit University
    Revenue without a cause: Arab financial assistance in Palestine

    Ayman Abdel Majeed, Birzeit University
    Perceptions of Palestinians towards international aid

    11:30 - 11:45Coffee break

    11:45 - 13:45 Session Five: Development under occupation

    Raja Khalidi, UNCTAD
    The economic dimensions of prolonged occupation: continuity and change in Israeli policy towards the Palestinian economy

    Jad Isaac, ARIJ
    Environmental Colonialism

    Hassan Ladadweh, Birzeit University
    Facing Palestine's uneven development

    Fathy Khdirat, Jordan Valley Solidarity
    The Eastern Border: developing Area C

    13:45 - 14:45 Lunch break

    14:45 - 16:30 Session Six: Encountering and contesting the aid regime

    Iyad El Riyahi, Bisan
    Palestinian development between sovereignty and dependence - the case of industrial zones in the West Bank.

    Ingrid Jaradat Gassner, Badil
    Political advocacy: reverting and challenging the neutrality of the aid paradigm

    Nora Lester Murad, Dalia
    Indigenous resource mobilization for Palestinian-led social change & development

    16:30 - 16:45 Coffee break

    16:45 - 17:45 Session Seven (roundtable discussion): Imagining alternative


    Patrick Bond in Ramallah on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, 26 September



    BNC Event: South African anti-apartheid strategy and BDS, then and now

    The Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanctions National Committee(BNC)cordially invites you to a public presentation entitled
    South African anti-apartheid strategy and BDS, then and now

    by Professor Patrick Bond Political economist and professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in South Africa. Professor Bond authored/edited more than a dozen policy papers from 1994-2002, in service to the new South African government. He was active in the South African anti-apartheid movement and the US student and community movements, and is currently active with the Palestinian BDS movement.

    Time: Sunday, 26 September 2010, 6:00 pm
    Place: Friends Meeting House









    South African anti‑Apartheid Activist Addresses Palestinian Audience

    Over 120 people filled the Friends Meeting House in Ramallah on Sunday
    evening to hear from South African Professor Patrick Bond, a veteran
    anti‑Apartheid activist and academic at the University of KwaZulu‑Natal.

    Professor Bond's presentation, organised by the BDS National Committee
    of Palestine (BNC) and chaired by Birzeit University academic Samia
    Botmeh, a steering committee member of PACBI, focused on the efficacy of
    the South African boycott campaign and useful lessons for the
    Palestinian BDS campaign. Citing examples from history such as the Irish
    boycott campaign of 1880 against British land agent Charles Boycott
    (from which the tactic takes its name) and the Indian boycott of
    imported British cloth, Professor Bond emphasised the crucial role that
    boycott has played in many liberation campaigns, especially against
    Apartheid South Africa, and the role it could play in attaining
    Palestinian freedom and self determination.

    Boycott began in South Africa as an indigenous tactic used by local
    committees to reduce the bus fares in Alexandra, Johannesburg. In later
    years, boycott was developed as an international weapon of solidarity to
    support the struggle inside against Apartheid policies with notable
    examples being the boycott of fruits, the sporting boycott and the
    expulsion of South Africa from the International Olympic Committee in
    1970. Government support for boycott and sanctions, most notably UN
    Resolution 1761, passed in 1962, calling for a voluntary severance of
    diplomatic ties and a cessation of trade with Apartheid South Africa
    subsequently added an official component to the grassroots campaign.

    Accompanying the presentation was a short film on the role of Chase
    Manhattan Bank, whose refusal to roll over its short‑term loans lead to
    a major financial crisis in South Africa and accelerated the end of
    Apartheid. The strength of the anti‑Apartheid campaign eventually led
    business leaders to seek reconciliation between their business interests
    and the political demands of the ANC. It was in direct meetings between
    ANC leaders and these business representatives that the transition of
    capital’s allegiance from formal Apartheid was confirmed, dealing a
    powerful blow to the Apartheid system. A price was paid by the South
    African liberation movement, however, in the form of accepting some
    liberal measures that would allow capitalists to maintain class
    privileges in the post‑apartheid era. The film also showed the vibrancy
    and strength of the grassroots movement which made South Africa
    ungovernable in the last phase of apartheid rule.

    Questions at the end of the presentation focused on role of churches in
    the boycott, the fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement on
    the ground in Palestine and the role of collaborating elites both in
    Palestine as well as the South Africa. The meeting ended with a warning
    by Professor Bond about the limitations of boycott tactics if not
    anchored in sustained grassroots struggle in Palestine. The strength of
    the boycott movement was only possible due to the uprisings in the South
    African townships and its success in Palestine would similarly depend on
    the revitalization of the nationalist struggle on the ground. Further,
    Professor Bond warned that whilst South Africa provided a concrete
    example of how Apartheid could be overcome, it also represented an
    example of how Apartheid can reconstitute itself in economic forms which
    precipitate an even greater degree of inequality along class lines
    rather than racial ones. One can only hope that Palestine, in this
    respect, can provide a new model of a post‑colonial experience in which
    the horrors of colonialism are replaced by a future based on genuine
    political social and economic justice and equality for all.
    www.badil.org



    Palestine liberation recalls anti-apartheid tactics, responsibilities and controversies
    Patrick Bond 13 October 2010

    On a full-day drive through the Jordan Valley late last month, we skirted the earth’s oldest city and the lowest inhabited point, 400 meters below sea level. For 10,000 years, people have lived along the river separating the present-day West Bank and Jordan.

    Since 1967 the river has been augmented by Palestinian blood, sweat and tears, ending in the Dead Sea, from which no water flows out, it only evaporates. Conditions degenerated during Israel’s land-grab, when from a peak of more than 300,000 people living on the west side of the river, displacements shoved Palestinian refugees across to Jordan and other parts of the West Bank. The valley has fewer than 60,000 Palestinians today.

    But they’re hanging in. “To exist is to resist,” insisted Fathi Ikdeirat, the Save the Jordan Valley (http://www.jordanvalleysolidarity.org) network’s most visible advocate (and compiler of an exquisite new book of the same name, free for internet download: http://www.maan-ctr.org). At top speed on the bumpy dirt roads, Ikdeirat maneuvered between Israeli checkpoints, through Bedouin outposts in the dusty semi-desert, where oppressed communities eke out a living from the dry soils.

    Just a few hundred meters away from such villages, like plush white South African suburbs drawing on cheap black township labour, stand some of the 120 Israeli settlements that since the early 1970s have pocked the West Bank. The most debilitating theft is of Palestinian water, for where once peasants gathered enough from local springs and a mountain aquifer to supply ponds that fed their modest crops, today pipe diversions by the Israelis’ agro-export plantations leave the indigenous people’s land scorched.

    From the invaders’ fine houses amidst groves of trees with green lawns, untreated sewage is flushed into the Palestinian areas. The most aggressive Israeli settlers launch unpunished physical attacks on the Palestinians, destroying their homes and farm buildings – and last week even a mosque at Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem.

    The Gaza Strip has suffered far worse. Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ bombing and invasion in early 2009, the 1400 mainly civilian deaths, the use of white phosphorous, political assassinations and the relentless siege are responsible for untold misery. International solidarity activists – including a Jewish delegation last month – are lethally attacked (nine Turks were killed in May) or arrested while trying to sail ships to Gaza with emergency relief supplies.

    As Ikdeirat pointed out, the Jordan Valley’s oppression appears as durable, for Netanyahu vowed in February this year ‘never’ to cede this space to the land’s rightful owners. On our way back up to Ramallah for an academic conference, Ikdeirat looked down on his homeland from the western mountains, and outlined the larger struggle against geopolitical manipulation, land grabbing, minority rule, Palestinian child labour on Israeli farms and other profound historical injustices.

    Given the debilitating weaknesses within Palestine’s competing political blocs - Hamas in besieged Gaza and Fatah in the Occupied West Bank, as well as the US-Israeli-Fatah-backed unelected government in Ramallah led by the neoliberal prime minister (and former World Bank/IMF official) Salam Fayyad - this is a struggle that only progressive civil society appears equipped to fight properly.

    To illustrate the potential, 170 Palestinian organizations initiated the ‘Boycott, Divest, Sanction’ (BDS) campaign five years ago, insisting on the retraction of illegal Israeli settlements (a demand won in the Gaza Strip in 2005), the end of the West Bank Occupation and Gaza siege, cessation of racially-discriminatory policies towards the million and a half Palestinians living within Israel, and a recognition of Palestinians’ right to return to residences dating to the 1948 ethnic cleansing when the Israeli state was established.

    The BDS movement draws inspiration from the way we toppled apartheid: an internal intifadah from townships and trade unions, combined with financial sanctions that in mid-1985 peaked because of an incident at the Durban City Hall. On August 15 that year, apartheid boss PW Botha addressed the Natal National Party and an internationally televised audience of 200 million, with his belligerent ‘Rubicon Speech’ featuring the famous finger-wagging command, “Don’t push us too far.”

    It was the brightest red flag to our anti-apartheid bull. Immediately as protests resumed, Pretoria’s frightened international creditors – subject to intense activist pressure during prior months - began calling in loans early. Facing a run on the SA Reserve Bank’s hard currency, Botha defaulted on $13 billion of debt payments coming due, shut the stock market and imposed exchange controls in early September.

    Within days, leading English-speaking businessmen Gavin Relly, Zac de Beer and Tony Bloom began dismantling their decades-old practical alliance with the Pretoria racists, met African National Congress leaders in Lusaka, and initiated a transition that would free South Africa of racial (albeit not class) apartheid less than nine years later.

    Recall that over the prior eight years, futile efforts to seduce change were made by Rev Leon Sullivan, the Philadelphia preacher and General Motors board member whose ‘Sullivan Principles’ aimed to allow multinationals in apartheid SA to remain so long as they were non-racist in employment practices.

    But the firms paid taxes to apartheid and supplied crucial logistical support and trade relationships. Hence Sullivan’s effort merely amounted, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, to polishing apartheid’s chains. Across the world, taking a cue from the internal United Democratic Front, activists wisely ignored attempts by Sullivan as well as by ANC foreign relations bureaucrat (later president) Thabo Mbeki to shut down the sanctions movement way too early.

    Civil society ratcheted up anti-apartheid BDS even when FW DeKlerk offered reforms, such as freeing Nelson Mandela and unbanning political parties in February 1990. New bank loans to Pretoria for ostensibly ‘developmental’ purposes were rejected by activists, and threats were made: a future ANC government would default.

    It was only by fusing bottom-up pressure with top-down international delegitimization of white rule that the final barriers were cleared for the first free vote, on April 27 1994.

    Something similar has begun in the Middle East, as long-overdue international solidarity with Palestinians gathers momentum, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s bad-faith peace talks with collaborationist Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas go nowhere. Yet if another sell-out soon looms, tracking the 1993 Oslo deal, we can anticipate an upsurge in BDS activity, drawing more attention to the three core liberatory demands: firstly, respecting, protecting and promoting the right of return of all Palestinian refugees; secondly, ending the occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands; and thirdly, recognizing full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

    Abbas and Fayyad are sure to fold on all of these principles, so civil society is already picking up the slack. Boycotting Israeli institutions is the primary non-violent resistance strategy.

    BDS, says Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (http://www.pacbi.org), “remains the most morally sound, non-violent form of struggle that can rid the oppressor of his oppression, thereby allowing true coexistence, equality, justice and sustainable peace to prevail. South Africa attests to the potency and potential of this type of civil resistance.”

    For more than 250 South African academics (plus Tutu) who signed a BDS petition last month, the immediate target was Ben Gurion University (BGU). During apartheid, the University of Johannesburg (UJ, then called Rand Afrikaans University) established a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for scientific exchanges with BGU, which came up for renewal at the UJ Senate on September 29 (details are at http://www.ujpetition.com/).

    Perhaps influenced by Mandela’s ill-advised acceptance of an honorary doctorate from BGU, the UJ Senate statement was not entirely pro-Palestinian, for it promoted a fantasy: reform of Israeli-Palestinian relations could be induced by ‘engagement’. Shades of Sullivan empowering himself, to try negotiating between the forces of apartheid and democracy.

    On the one hand, the UJ Senate acknowledged that BGU “supports the military and armed forces of Israel, in particular in its occupation of Gaza” – by offering money to students who went into the military reserve so as to support Operation Cast Lead, for example. To its credit, the UJ Senate recognized that “we should take leadership on this matter from peer institutions among the Palestinian population.”

    On the other hand, in an arrogant display of constructive-engagement mentality, the UJ Senate academics – many of whom are holdovers from the apartheid era - resolved to “amend the MOU to include one or more Palestinian universities chosen on the basis of agreement between BGU and UJ.”

    Fat chance. The UJ statement forgets that Palestinian universities are today promoters of BDS. Even Al Quds University, which historically had the closest ties (and which until Operation Cast Lead actually encouraged Palestine-Israel collaboration), broke the chains in early 2009, because, “Ending academic cooperation is aimed at, first of all, pressuring Israel to abide by a solution that ends the occupation, a solution that has been needed for far too long and that the international community has stopped demanding.”

    The man tasked with reconciling UJ’s Senate resolution with Middle East realpolitik is UJ Deputy Vice Chancellor Adam Habib. In 2001 he founded our University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and led substantial research projects nurturing progressive social change. Habib was banned from entering the United States from 2006-10, for his crimes of being Muslim and speaking at a 2003 anti-war protest, and he is probably the most eloquent and highest-profile political analyst in South Africa today.

    However, Habib made a serious mistake, when recently remarking: “We believe in reconciliation... We’d like to bring BGU and Palestinian universities together to produce a collective engagement that benefits everyone.”

    Even Habib’s enormous persuasive capacity will fail, if he expects liberal Zionists to recognize the right of Palestinians to self-determination and Israel’s obligation to comply with international law. Writing in the newspaper Haaretz in early October, BGU official David Newman celebrated Habib’s remark and simultaneously argued, point-blank (with no acknowledgement of the South Africa case), “Boycotts do nothing to promote the interests of peace, human rights or – in the case of Israel – the end of occupation.”

    (Yet even Israel’s reactionary Reut Institute recognizes BDS power, arguing in February 2010 that a “Delegitimization Network aims to supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle by turning Israel into a pariah state” and that “the Goldstone report that investigated Operation Cast Lead” caused “a crisis in Israel's national security doctrine… Israel lacks an effective response.”)

    Habib deserves far better than a role as a latter-day Leon Sullivan uniting with the likes of Newman, and I hope he changes his mind about ‘engagement’ with Zionism.

    After all, last year I witnessed an attempt to do something similar, also involving Habib and BGU. At the time of Operation Cast Lead and the imposition of the siege, Habib, Dennis Brutus, Walden Bello, Alan Fowler and I (unsuccessfully) tried persuading two academic colleagues - Jan Aart Scholte of Warwick University and Jackie Smith of Notre Dame - to respect BDS and decline keynote speaking invitations to an Israeli ‘third sector’ conference (http://web.bgu.ac.il/NR/rdonlyres/E6905E1E-6760-4E01-9BB2-D9161225BF97/0/ICTR_0209_En.pdf).

    BGU refused to add Palestinian perspectives (a suggestion from Habib), and the lesson I quickly learned was not to attempt engagement, but instead promote a principled institutional boycott. Today as then, what Habib forgets is Barghouti’s clear assessment of power relations: “Any relationship between intellectuals across the oppression divide must be aimed, one way or another, at ending oppression, not ignoring it or escaping from it. Only then can true dialogue evolve, and thus the possibility for sincere collaboration through dialogue.”

    The growing support for Palestinian liberation via BDS reminds of small but sure steps towards the full-fledged anti-apartheid sports, cultural, academic and economic boycotts catalyzed by Brutus against racist South African Olympics teams more than forty years ago. Today, these are just the first nails we’re hammering into the coffin of Zionist domination – in solidarity with a people who have every reason to fight back with tools that we in South Africa proudly sharpened: non-violently but with formidable force.

    (Bond, a Durban-based political economist, was a recent visitor to Palestine at the invitation



    Book Launch: Zuma's own goal 19 September 2010







    ASAUK Biennial Conference 2010

    16 – 19 September
    St Antony’s College, University of Oxford


    Sponsors: Royal African Society; Routledge; Journal of Southern African Studies; African Affairs/Oxford University Press; African Studies Centre and Rhodes Chair of Race Relations, University of Oxford; PLAAS, University of the Western Cape and IDS Sussex (for land panels).

    ASAUK 2010 Conference Programme
    St Antony’s College and adjacent locations, Oxford
    Thursday 16th September 2010


    10.00 – 14.00 Registration, Registration Desk, Hilda Besse Building
    14.00-15.30 Panels A1 – J1
    15.30 – 16.00 Tea and Coffee
    16.00-17.30 Panels A2 – J2
    18.00 – 19.00 Sub-plenaries

    St Cross College

    'States Creation and the Crisis of Governance in Nigeria', Prof Rufus Akinyele

    Nissan Theatre, St Antony’s

    Land Reform in South Africa’, Prof Lungisile Ntsebeza

    19.00- 20.30 Supper – St Antony’s Hall

    20.30–22.00 ASAUK AGM – Nissan Lecture Theatre, St Antony’s

    20.00-21.30 Book launches and drinks, Combined Common Room, St Antony’s: Greg Mills, Why Africa is Poor (Penguin); Pnina Werbner, JoAnn McGregor, and others: three collections on displacement and contemporary African diasporas (Brill, Berghahn, and Journal of Southern African Studies).

    Friday 17th September 2010

    9.30 – 11.00 Panels A3 – J3

    11.00 - 11.30 Tea and Coffee

    11.30-13.00 Panels A4 – J4

    13.00 – 14.00 Lunch – St Antony’s Hall, Hilda Besse Building

    14.00-15.30 Panels A5 – J5

    15.30 – 16.00 Tea and Coffee

    16.00-17.30 Panels A6 – J7

    18.00 – 19.00 Sub-plenaries:

    ‘The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Unresolved Conundrum of Race in the Post-colonial Period’, Dr James Muzondidya (Mary Kingsley Zochonis Lecturer),

    Nissan Theatre, St Antony’s College

    ‘(In)visibility in African Cultures’ Dr Veronique Tadjo,
    Combined Common Room, St Antony’s College

    19.00- 20.30 Supper – St Antony’s Hall

    20.30–22.00 Presidential Address - William Beinart; Announcement of the Distinguished Africanist Awards and Audrey Richards thesis prize - Megan Vaughan – St Antony’s Hall

    Saturday 18th September 2010

    9.30 – 11.00 Panels A7 – J7

    11.00 - 11.30 Tea and Coffee

    11.30-13.00 Panels A8 – J8

    13.00 – 14.00 Lunch – St Antony’s Hall, Hilda Besse Building

    14.00-15.30 Panels A9 – J9

    15.30 – 16.00 Tea and Coffee

    16.00-17.30 Panels A10 – J10

    18.00 – 19.00 Sub-plenaries:

    Johnnie Carson, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Affairs on the US and Africa

    Nissan Theatre , St Antony’s College

    'Asian Solutions to African Problems: What Can Africa Learn about Development from South-east Asia', Dr Tim Kelsall

    Combined Common Room, St Antony’s College

    19.00- 20.30 Supper – St Antony’s Hall

    20.30-21.30: Announcement of the African Affairs Author Prize and Oxford University Press Reception; Lionel Cliffe,‘Tribute to Basil Davidson’ - St Antony’s Hall

    21.30 –23.00 St Antony’s Buttery - disco

    Sunday 19th September 2010

    9.30 – 11.00 Panels A11 – J11

    11.00 - 11.30 Tea and Coffee

    (PLEASE RETURN ALL KEYS TO THE REGISTRATION DESK)

    11.30-13.00 Panels A12 – J12


    16th-17th September, 9am to 5pm

    Exhibition at Rhodes House Library:

    ‘Elections in Africa’ and ‘The Heinemann African Writers Series’.


    More



    To ASAUK Conference participants

    There was a wonderful response to the ASAUK call for papers with close on 450 abstracts and proposals submitted. We adopted an inclusive approach and tried to find space for as many contributions as possible. Apologies to those whose papers were not chosen. Given overall space constraints, we felt that it would be very difficult to run more than 10 parallel sessions. The gaps that have appeared in the programme are the result of recent withdrawals and there was not sufficient time to fill them.

    We felt that a single overall thematic focus would exclude too many people. But we have tried to achieve some continuity and sequential debate by organising the conference around streams of papers on similar topics. There are particularly strong streams on: democratisation and elections; land and agriculture; literature; migration and diasporas. There are also smaller groups of panels on particular countries – notably South Africa, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Nigeria – as well as clusters on religion, environmental issues, small-scale mining, popular culture, heritage, urban livelihoods, development and range of other themes. We would like to thank the many panel organisers who have helped to make this such an interesting programme, especially Oliver Bakewell, Nic Cheeseman, Zoe Norridge, Paul Nugent, Robin Palmer and Ian Scoones.

    We have not tried to assign chairs for the different panels centrally; stream and panel convenors have generally done so. Where a chair has not been appointed, we would appreciate it if one of the panel take responsibility for keeping time and fielding questions. As we noted in an earlier circular, when four people are presenting, each should talk for no more than 15 minutes, when three, not more than 20 minutes and when two, 25 minutes. This will ensure time for discussion. Please be disciplined – it will allow for productive participation and feedback.

    We also mentioned in an earlier circular that powerpoint should be avoided unless essential for images or figures – particularly in four person panels. If you need powerpoint, please try to get the file to David Kerr by Tuesday 14th. We would also suggest, especially if you cannot get your file to David, that you go to the relevant room in the break before your panel and ensure that the file is loaded and works.

    We do not have facilities for copying papers. If you would like to circulate a full paper, please bring the hard copies with you.

    Information for the conference follows below as does the latest full list of panels and papers with rooms assigned. Abstracts arranged in the sequence of panels will be bound separately.

    When you arrive, please go to the registration desk in the Hilda Besse building, St Antony’s College to collect your conference pack and keys. As there is not a sufficiently large room, there will not be a plenary at the beginning of the conference, so please go directly to the appropriate panel rooms by 2pm on Thursday. We will be holding academic sub-plenaries at 6pm each evening, and the closest there will be to plenary are the presidential address and awards in St Antony’s dining hall at 8.30 on Friday 17th.

    We look forward to seeing you in Oxford. There are a large number of participants, well over 300, and all our resources and facilities will be at maximum capacity. Patience may be required and we may need some help. It should be an exciting and rewarding event.

    William Beinart, ASAUK president and David Kerr, ASAUK administrator.

    12th September 2010


    Patrick Bond & Rick Rowden on the IMF and public health 7 & 14 September 2010

    Priority Africa Network (PAN) EVENT: 082310

    Contact: PriorityAfrica@yahoo.com

    This and all Africa events in the Bay available at: http://www.priorityafrica.org/

    Date: Tuesday(s), September 7 and 14
    Time:12:30 pm on 9/7 brownbag &
    6:30 pm on 9/14

    Rick Rowden, author of
    The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF has Undermined Public Health and the Fight Against AIDS”

    September 7th, brown bag lunch at Global Exchange 2017 Mission Street in San Francisco Tel: (415) 255-7296

    September 14th, World Affairs Council - Introduction by Patrick Bond
    312 Sutter Street, San Francisco

    Rick Rowden, PhD student in economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, and former senior policy analyst for the
    Washington DC office of the international development NGO, ActionAid

    Patrick Bond is senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies and a visiting scholar at the UC-Berkeley Department of Geography.


    Bay Area local and anti-IMF activist, Rick Rowden, returns to SF to discuss his new book (London, Zed Books), and to answer your questions about the IMF, the global economic recession and how citizens are mobilizing with a rights-based approach for alternative economic policies.

    Rick is an expert on the IMF, a former senior policy analyst for the Washington DC office of the international advocacy NGO, ActionAid,
    which works with women’s rights organizations, small farmers and health and education activists in 45 countries around Africa, Asia and Latin America.

    During the recent global financial meltdown, the IMF launched a public relations offensive in which it tried to re-invent itself, promising to change its unpopular economic policies that are attached as conditions on the loans it gives to developing countries during economic crises. But Rowden will dispel these myths, show what the IMF is really up to, and explain how its policies impact the economies of developing countries and in particular, how they undermine the financing which is desperately needed for public health services and the fight against HIV/AIDS.

    He will also discuss the many ways in which networks of activists throughout the Global South are using a human rights-based approach to challenge these economic policies and open public spaces for a broader discussion of possible alternative economic policies for creating jobs and increasing
    public investment.

    A graduate of SF State, Rick Rowden taught Political Science at Golden Gate University in San Francisco and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay before moving to Washington DC, where he spent nearly a decade working with activists around the world against the policies of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. Recently, he worked for the United Nations in Geneva and is currently doing his PhD in economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, India.

    This event is organized by Priority Africa Network, ActUP East Bay, International Development Exchange (IDEX) and Global Exchange.

    For more information, please contact PAN email: priorityafrica@yahoo.com or call (510) 663 2255

    Priority Africa Network
    Mailing Address: P O Box 2528
    Berkeley CA 94702
    Office: PAN/BAJI
    1212 Broadway, Suite 812
    Oakland CA 94612
    Tel: (510) 663 2255
    Fax: (510) 663 2257
    PriorityAfrica@yahoo.com

    http://www.priorityafrica.org


    Book Launch (Zuma's own goal) 3 September 2010



    A new book on South Africa’s socio-economic crisis
    edited by Brij Maharaj, Ashwin Desai and Patrick Bond, with chapters by Gillian Hart, Ben Fine, Andries du Toit, Greg Ruiters, Prishani Naidoo, Franco Barchiesi, Fred Hendricks, Lungisile Ntsebeza, Enver Motala, Salim Vally, Carol Anne Spreen, Jackie Cock, Hein Marais, Mark Heywood, Mary Galvin, Lenny Gentle, Trevor Ngwane and James Ferguson




    Patrick Bond at the International Commission of Jurists Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Camp, 31 August 2010



    Capitalism, the Privatisation of Basic Social Services
    and the Implementation of Socio-Economic Rights:

    Challenges and Advocacy Strategies for Human Rights and Social
    Justice Actors, Learning from the Johannesburg Water Defeat


    by Patrick Bond, Director of the Centre for Civil Society,
    University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society

    Presented to the International Commission of Jurists
    Southern Africa Socio-Economic Rights Camp:
    Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Advocacy and Litigation

    Johannesburg, 31 August 2010





    AGENDA
    SOUTHERN AFRICA SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS CAMP:
    ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS ADVOCACY AND LITIGATION IN
    SOUTHERN AFRICA
    BIRCHWOOD HOTEL, JOHANNESBURG, 30 AUGUST – 2 SEPTEMBER 2010
    DAY ONE: 30 AUGUST 2010


    8:30 - 9.00 Arrival and Registration of Delegates



    SESSION ONE: OPENING CEREMONY



    Session Chair: Martin Okumu-Masiga, Senior Legal Adviser


    9.00 - 9.30 Welcome Address and Introduction of ICJ: Arnold Tsunga, Director, ICJ Africa Regional Programme

    9.30 - 10.00 Introduction of OSISA and of the Symposium: Deprose Muchena, OSISA Deputy Director

    10.00 - 10.30 Key Note Address by Prof N Barney Pityana, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Africa
    “The Realization of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the SADC Region: Using the Rule of Law as an Instrument of Effective Advocacy and Litigation”

    10.30 - 10.45 Vote of thanks followed by Group Photo Session

    10:45 - 11.00 TEA BREAK



    SESSION TWO: ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS UNDER INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW


    Session Chair: Justice Unity Dow, ICJ Commissioner


    11.00 - 11.30 Conceptual and International Legal Framework for the Protection of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights –Professor Michelo Hansungule, Centre for Human Rights, UP & ICJ Commissioner

    11.30 - 12.00 Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the African Regional System: Opportunities for Litigation and Advocacy by Human Rights and Social Justice Organisations – Commissioner Mumba Malila, Deputy Chairperson, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights

    12.00 - 12.30 Protection and Promotion of Socio-economic Rights in the SADC Legal and Institutional Framework: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities, Justice Charles Mkandawire, Registrar of the SADC Tribunal and ICJ Commissioner

    12.30 – 13.30 DISCUSSION AND EXPERIENCE SHARING

    13.30 - 14.30 LUNCH BREAK


    SESSION THREE: REGIONAL ADVOCACY AND LITIGATION OF ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: PRACTITIONERS’ EXPERIENCES
    Session Chair: Irene Petras, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights


    14.30 - 15.00 Litigating Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights: From the selection of cases to the implementation of rulings: Issues, Challenges and Strategies - Ms Angela Naggaga, Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa

    15.00 - 15.30 Litigating Economic, Social and Cultural Rights before the SADC Tribunal: Issues, Challenges and Possible Strategies – Norman Tjombe, Legal Assistance Centre

    15.30 - 16.00 Triggering and Building up Regional and Social Support for an Economic, Social and Cultural Right Litigation and Advocacy - Roshnee Narrandes, OSISA Policy and Advocacy Manager

    16.00 - 17.00 DISCUSSION AND EXPERIENCE SHARING

    17.00 - 17.30 HOUSEKEEPING AND CLOSE OF DAY ONE



    DAY TWO: 31 AUGUST 2010



    SESSION FOUR: DOMESTIC IMPLEMENTATION OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES


    Session Chair: Sandra Ratjen, Senior Legal Adviser, ECOSOC Rights, ICJ


    9.00 - 9.30 Domestic Implementation of Socio-economic Rights with a Specific Focus on South Africa: Mechanisms, Challenges and the Role of Civil Society Organisations, Dr Christopher Mbazira, University of The Western Cape

    9.30 - 10.00 Courts and the Enforcement of Socio-economic Rights: Centralising the Role of Civil Society Organisations, Christian Courtis, Program Officer, OHCHR

    10.00 - 10.30 Budget Analysis and Monitoring for the Realisation of Socio-Economic Rights: Indicators, Benchmarks and Opportunities for Human Rights and Social Justice Advocates, Advocate Jacob Van Garderen, Director, Lawyers for Human Rights

    :10.00 - 11.00 DISCUSSION AND EXPERIENCE SHARING

    11.00 - 11.15 Tea Break

    11.15 - 11.45 Mainstreaming Women, Children and Vulnerable Persons’ Needs in the Promotion and Protection of Socio-economic Rights in the SADC region, Alice Kanangoni: Communications and Gender Programme Manager

    11.45 - 12.15 Challenges and Opportunities for the Protection of Workers’ Rights in Southern Africa, Mr Bongani Masuku, COSATU

    12.15 - 12.45 Capitalism, the Privatisation of Basic Social Services and the Implementation of Socio-Economic Rights: Challenges and Advocacy Strategies for Human Rights and Social Justice Actors, Professor Patrick Bond, Director Centre for Civil Society, University of Kwazulu Natal

    12.45 – 13.45 DISCUSSION AND EXPERIENCE SHARING

    13.45 – 14.45 LUNCH BREAK



    SESSION FIVE: CHALLENGES TO DOMESTIC IMPLEMENTATION OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS



    Session Chair: Louise Olivier, OSISA Law Programmes Manager


    14.45 - 15.15 Litigation of Socio-E conomic Rights, with a specific focus on the right to health and HIV/AIDS: Tools, Challenges and Strategies for CSOs, Priti Patel, HIV/AIDS Project Lawyer, Southern African Litigation Centre

    15.15 – 15.45 The Right to Education in the SADC Region: Challenges and Strategies for an Effective Litigation and Advocacy - Boaz Wakuru, African Network Campaign on Education for All

    15.45 – 16.15 Land Reform Programmes and the Protection of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: The case Studies of Zimbabwe and South Africa, Professor Shadrack Guto, UNISA

    16.15 - 17.15 DISCUSSION AND EXPERIENCE SHARING

    17.15 - 17.30 HOUSEKEEPING AND CLOSE OF DAY TWO



    DAY THREE: 1 SEPTEMBER 2010



    SESSION SIX: DOMESTIC IMPLEMENTATION OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES (CONT)




    Session Chair: Obiageli Oraka, Programmes Lawyer, West African Bar Association


    9.00 - 9.30 Challenges to an Adequate Standard of Living including Housing, Food and Water in the SADC: Tools, Challenges and Strategies for Civil Society Organisations, Sandra Ratjen, Senior Legal Adviser, ECOSOC Rights, ICJ

    9.30 - 10.00 Development Initiatives and the Protection of Socio-economic Rights: The case of the Lesotho Dam Project, Thuso Ramabolu, Transformation Resource Centre

    10.00 - 10.30 Access to Water and Protection of the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Botswana: Challenges and Opportunities, Alice Mogwe, DITSHWANELO – The Botswana Centre for Human Rights

    10.00 - 11.00 DISCUSSION AND EXPERIENCE SHARING

    11.00 - 11.15 Tea Break


    SESSION SEVEN: BUSINESS ENTITIES AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND
    CULTURAL RIGHTS

    Session Chair: Elijah Munyuki

    11.15 - 11.45 Obligations of Business Entities in Respect of Economic, Social and Cultural ights: Professor Michelo Hansungule, Centre for Human Rights, UP

    11.45 - 12.15 International Law, National Sovereignty and Access Rights in Relation to Mineral esources in Southern Africa, Fui Tsikata, Faculty of Law, University of Ghana

    12.15 – 12.45 Ensuring a Greater Responsibility and Accountability in the Extractive Industry for Effective Protection of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the SADC Region - Claude Kabemba, Southern Africa Resources Watch

    12.45 – 13.45 DISCUSSION AND EXPERIENCE SHARING

    14.45 – 14.45 LUNCH BREAK



    SESSION EIGHT: WAY FORWARD



    14.45 - 16.45 Developing Common Strategies for Effective and Strategic Advocacy for and Litigation of Socio-economic Rights and Drafting a Declaration and Plan of Action on ‘Enforcement of Socio-economic Rights in the SADC Region’ Facilitator: Arnold Tsunga, Director, ICJ Africa Programme

    17.15 - 17.30 HOUSEKEEPING AND CLOSE OF DAY THREE




    DAY FOUR: 2 SEPTEMBER 2010




    SESSION NINE: CLOSING CEREMONY


    Session Chair: Martin Masiga, Senior Legal Adviser, International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)


    9.00 - 9.30 Guest speech 1: ‘The South African Foreign Policy and the Realisation of Socio- Economic Rights in Southern Africa: Advocacy opportunities for Civil Society Organisations’ By Mr Pitso Motswedi, Director, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, South African Department of International Affairs and Cooperation

    9.30 – 10.00 Guest Speech 2: “Effective Realisation of Socio-Economic Rights in the SADC Region: Bridging the Gap between Human Rights and Social Justice Advocates” By Dr Godfrey Kanyenze, Director of the Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe

    10.00 - 11.00 Adoption of a Declaration and Plan of Action on ‘Effective Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights in the Southern Africa’

    11.00 - 11.30 Closing Remarks & Certificates to Participants Deprose Muchena, OSISA Deputy Director Arnold Tsunga, ICJ Africa Programme Director

    11.30 - 13.00 Farewell Lunch

    13.00 Departure




    SOUTHERN AFRICA SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS CAMP: ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS ADVOCACY AND LITIGATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
    JOHANNESBURG, 30 AUGUST – 2 SEPTEMBER 2010


    1. Conceptual Background
    The evolution of international human rights law has revealed that civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights are two sides of the same coin of universal human rights. This was particularly evidenced during the 1963 World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna where the delegates reached the conclusion that, all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated.

    The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights particularly emphasises on the interdependence of human rights by recognising that the satisfaction of economic, social and cultural rights is a guarantee for the enjoyment of civil and political rights. Further, this African human rights instrument does not formulate socio-economic rights as rights that should be realised progressively as they are in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Such recognition provides the possibility to easily challenge SADC states’ reluctance or failure to protect, promote and fulfil socioeconomic rights. However, most challenges to human rights violations in the Southern African region have tended to focus on violations of civil and political rights even though economic and social rights are daily concerns of the people.

    This gap is particularly due to lack of capacity of the lawyers and human rights activists as well as social justice practitioners that are interested in socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation. Lawyers and human rights activists, who are key actors in domestic human rights advocacy and litigation processes, need to have their technical capabilities of the enforcement of socio- economic rights enhanced. Development activists and practitioners, workers’ unions, consumer rights organisations, and several others drawn from the economic justice movement need to have their capacity to engage with the challenges of realisation of socio-economic rights strengthened. Unless the gap between legal enforcement on the one hand and norms and public policy in socio-economic rights advocacy on the other, is reduced, the two communities of activists will miss the opportunity to mutually enrich and reinforce each other’s work towards realisation of socio-economic rights in equal standing and footing as civil and political rights. Reducing the gap in conceptual understanding of, and advocacy for, socio-economic rights enforcement is a primary contribution to the realisation of pro rights based, pro-poor driven socio-economic public policy, and therefore for economic justice in SADC countries.

    It therefore becomes worthwhile bringing together these actors to examine the different ways in which the substance and implications of socio-economic rights have been and should be articulated and implemented by policymakers and enforced by domestic courts and regional and international human rights bodies. It is also meaningful examining the content and the scope of the obligations that socio-economic rights impose on states and the various methods and strategies that can be used by human rights and social justice activists and NGOs to advocate for effective implementation of socio-economic rights and litigate violations committed by states and non-state actors.

    The Southern Africa Socio-Economic Rights Camp will provide the opportunity to empower SADC-based lawyers and human rights activists, development practitioners, as well as labour and consumer rights advocates to grow their skills, learn from each other and sharpen their understanding of socio-economic rights and how to effectively collaborate in enforcing them.

    2. Aim
    The aim of the Southern Africa Socio-Economic Rights Camp is three-fold. Firstly, it will serve to bring together various actors involved in human rights and economic justice advocacy and litigation across the SADC region in order to reflect on the various principles, methods and strategies concerning socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation before national, regional and international human rights bodies.

    Secondly, the camp will also constitute a privileged opportunity offered to the participants to share experiences in socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation in their respective countries, and to learn from each other’s strengths and challenges.

    Lastly, the camp will enable the participants to come up with common strategies for socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation before SADC and African human rights bodies and in their respective countries.

    This would allow for the development of shared values among the community of actors in the socio-economic justice movement in the SADC region around advancing, promoting and protecting socio-economic rights and standards regionally and domestically.

    3. Project objectives
    • To empower human rights and social justice lawyers and NGOs from the SADC region with the necessary knowledge and skills for socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation;
    • To foster greater collaboration and building of synergies between actors in the legal sector and those in the socio-economic justice movement;
    • To foster their capacity to effectively advocate for and litigate socio-economic rights regionally and domestically;
    • To provide them with the opportunity to adopt common strategies for the litigation of socio-economic rights domestically, regionally and internationally;
    • To allow participants to learn from each another’s experiences and challenges in socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation;
    • To enable participants to come up with a declaratory response and a plan of action regarding cross-cutting issues affecting the realisation of socio-economic rights in the SADC region;
    • To disseminate to the participants key materials on socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation;
    • To raise public awareness on major socio- economic rights issues affecting the SADC region and on the declaration to be adopted by participants.

    4. Project outputs and outcomes
    • At the closing of the camp, the participants will be sufficiently empowered with the necessary knowledge of content of socio-economic rights and strategies for effective advocacy including litigation.
    • The participants shall adopt a declaration and plan of action on the effective implementation of socio-economic rights in the SADC region.
    • The declaration and plan of action on the enforcement of socio-economic rights in Southern Africa will be published and widely disseminated amongst human rights practitioners and the policy community.
    • Creation of a network of socio-economic justice practitioners in the SADC region to allow participants to continue to share ideas and strategies from their respective countries.
    • A media brief will be made after the camp to raise awareness on socio-economic rights issues affecting the SADC region and on the declaration and plan of action to be adopted by participants.
    • Participants will also be expected to apply the knowledge acquired on socioeconomic rights litigation and other advocacy.
    • A workshop report will be produced and widely disseminated.

    5. Participants
    To provide ample time for substantial discussions, the maximum number of participants is limited to forty-five. The participants will come from various Southern African countries and represent judges, lawyers and human rights defenders currently involved in or interested in socio-economic rights litigation or advocacy. As the camp will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, a number of South African human rights and economic justice practitioners and other grassroots NGOs will have an opportunity to share their experience in socio-economic rights advocacy and litigation. The applicant's professional and working experience, as well as future work plans will be key factors in the selection process. Geographical and gender representation as well as fluency in English shall also be taken into account.

    6. Facilitators
    Lectures will be given and group discussions led by resource persons from different parts of the region with special experience and expertise in socio-economic rights gathered through their work in non-governmental and inter-governmental organisations, and in academia.

    7. Duration, Venue and Schedule
    The camp will be held from 30 August to 2 September 2010 at Birchwood Hotel, Johannesburg, South Africa


    Patrick Bond at Jubilee South Africa conference on ecological debt, 21 August

    Jubilee South Africa National Council
    Stay City, Johannesburg, 21 and 22 August 2010

    Ecological Debt: Extractive Industries and Climate Change
    Presentation by Patrick Bond




    Agenda

    Saturday, 21 August

    8.30 – 10.00 Opening Session: Ecological Debt as the Next Frontier of Global Justice

    Presentation by Patrick Bond, followed by Discussion

    10.00 – 10.30 Tea

    10.30 – 11.00 Introduction of the Independent Verification Committee

    Credentials

    Ratification of the Agenda

    11.00 – 1.00 Resolution to the Impasse in the Organisation

    Report on the May NEC Meeting and related developments

    Addressing the tensions within the National Executive Committee

    The Jubilee South Africa Bank Account

    Jubilee South Africa’s Office, Records, Resources, Assets

    Patrons, Affiliate and Associate Organisations, Membership

    1.00 –2.00 Lunch

    2.00 – 4.00 Areas of Work: Taking Our Campaigns Forward

    Apartheid Debt and Reparations

    Ecological Debt:

    The Mining Campaign at Regional and Provincial Levels

    4.00 – 4.30 Tea

    4.30 – 6.00 Ecological Debt continued:

    National Initiatives: Ianra South Africa; the World Bank and Eskom

    International Solidarity

    Debt, Finance, Macroeconomic Policy

    Sunday, 22 August

    8.30 – 10.00 International

    SAPSN

    Africa Jubilee South, Jubilee South Week of Action

    The World Bank Bond Boycott

    African Social Forum, World Social Forum

    10.00 – 10.30 Tea

    10.30 – 1.00 Strengthening the Organisation, its Governance and its Ability to Withstand Pressures

    Reports on the State of the Provinces

    Fundraising

    Raising the Profile of the Organisation

    1.00 Closure

    George Dor
    Jubilee South Africa
    t +27(0) 11 336 9190/4/5 x132
    f +27(0) 11 336 9196
    h +27(0) 11 648 7000
    c +27 (0) 76 460 9620
    george@mail.ngo.za


    Patrick Bond at the SA -Norway climate research seminar, 12 August 2010






    Conference Programme


    Climate change narratives, rights and the poor: Scientific knowledge, international political discourse, and local voices
    Research Building Workshop
    11-12 August 2010
    Bergen, Norway

    Tuesday, 10th August


    Arrivals and dinner for foreign guests at Hanne på Høyden
    (18:30 meeting at lobby Scandic Bergen City)

    Hotel: Scandic Bergen City

    Hakonsgaten 2 , 5015 Bergen
    Telefon: +47 55 30 90 80 Fax: +47 55 30 90 91
    E-post: bergencity@scandichotels.com




    Wednesday, 11 August
    Venue: Seminar room, Christian Michelsen Institute (CMI)
    Jekteviksbakken 31


    8:30 Meeting at the lobby of Scandic Hotel (walk to venue)

    9:00 Introduction and goals of the workshop
    Brief Presentation of research project, background paper and General Discussion

    10:00-12:00 (short 10 minutes presentations and discussion):

    Global narratives on poverty, climate and rights


  • Helge Drange, University of Bergen/Bjerknes, Norway
    “What type of problem is climate change”


  • Des Gasper, Institute for Social Studies (ISS). The Netherlands
    “Climate change and the narrative imagination: shortcomings of mainstream economic thinking and alternatives”


  • Trine Dahl, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and Kjersti Fløttum, University of Bergen, Norway
    “Climate change: from scientific papers to multivoiced narratives”


  • Kathryn Hochstetler, University of Waterloo, USA.
    “The Global Politics of Climate, Poverty, and Rights”


  • Petra Tschakert, Penn State, USA
    “Global narratives on adaptation”


  • Jill Johannessen, Bjerknes Centre, Norway
    “Media narratives of the climate crisis and responses to pro-poor development”


  • 12:00-13:00 Lunch at Law Faculty Cafeteria

    13:00-15:00 (short 10 minutes presentations and discussion):
    South Africa’s narratives on climate change and the poor


  • Richard Bellerby, Bjerknes Centre, Norway
    “Climate change and scientific discourse in South Africa”


  • Patrick Bond, U. of Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa
    “What are the key issues for a critical appraisal of South Africa’s perspectives on climate change and the poor?”


  • Camaren Peter, University of Stellenbosch School of Public Management,
    South Africa
    “South Africa’s narratives on social development and environmental change”


  • Thorvald Gran, University of Bergen, Norway
    “The role of South African Institutions”


  • Jan Froestad, University of Bergen, Norway
    “Insuring sustainable development”


  • 15:00-15:30 Coffee Break

    15:30-17:30 (short 10 minutes presentations and discussion):

    Climate change and the poor: Food and water security

  • David Battisti, University of Washington, USA
    “Narratives on climate variability and food security”


  • David Hall-Matthews, Leeds University, UK
    “Enforcing the right to food in the context of climate change. Democratic and constitutional possibilities”


  • Elisabeth Simelton, Leeds University, UK
    “Global to local perspectives on food security in the light of socio-economic vulnerability to drought”


  • Jackie Dugard, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
    “South Africa and the right to food and water”


  • Mercedes Biocca, University of Bergen, Norway
    “Lessons from Latin America: local impacts of global ideas”


  • 19:00 Dinner at Asun’s.
    We will depart by public transportation from hotel at 18:30




    Thursday, 12 August
    Venue: CMI


    9:00-11:30 (short 10 minutes presentations and discussion):

    Climate change discourse, rights and the poor – legal and activist perspectives

  • Siri Gloppen, University of Bergen/Christian Michelsens Institute, Norway “Human rights, constitutional rights and conflict between rights in the context of climate change”

  • Jackie Dugard “A rights-based narrative of attribution for global warming: Towards equitable mitigation and adaptation”


  • Keith Syrett, University of Bristol, UK
    “Climate Change and Human Rights: Building and Understanding of Legal and Discursive Strategies”


  • Pilar Domingo, Overseas Development Institute (ODI)
    “Rights discourses and mobilisation”


  • Jeni Barcelos, University of Washington, USA. “Strategies for harnessing the power of the academy and the law to promote fair and equitable adaptation strategies”


  • Brandon Derman, University of Washington, USA
    “Climate change, law, and political space: The geographic and legal politics of mobilization for 'climate justice'”


  • 11:30- 12:30 Lunch at Law Faculty

    12:30-14:30 (short 10 minutes presentations and discussion):

    Climate change and the poor: Between politics and scientific knowledge


  • Eystein Jansen, Bjerknes Centre, Norway
    “Key issues on the science-politics debate and the IPCC”


  • Kjersti Fløttum,
    “Science and politics in discourse”


  • Øyvind Gjerstad, University of Bergen, Norway
    “Rhetorical patterns in climate policy texts”


  • Patrick Bond “Activism and policy: lessons from past and current resistance to national and global institutions”


  • Asun St. Clair “The co-production of knowledge, epistemic power and institutional legitimacy”


  • 14:30-15:00 Coffee Break

    15:00-18:00 Debate about research design, outputs, strategies for moving forward, and next steps

    Dinner Reception at Bergen Resource Centre for International Development




    Trevor Ngwane at Solidarity Peace Trust report on Zimbabwe, 30 July

    Invitation to the Launch of a report and Video by the Solidarity Peace Trust, Friday 30 July 2010, 10.30 am- Devonshire Hotel -23 Jorisson Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg

    REPORT: A Fractured Nation
    The report is an assessment of the effects of Operation Murambatsvina five years on. It looks at the combined effects of OM and the economic meltdown in the years that followed on the livelihoods and movements of Zimbabweans both within the country and in the diaspora. The findings show the continuing devastation of that operation and the meltdown of the years that followed and indicates the extent of the damage that needs to be addressed in future development policies. With the renewed threats of xenophobic violence on foreign workers in SA, Zimbabwean and other foreigners are trapped in a desperate vice of violence, desperation and poverty.

    FILM: Poverty On Top Of Poverty

    Hopley Farm is a large tract of land on the outskirts of Harare where the government dumped thousands of Murambatsvina victims in 2005. They were promised new homes, a developed infrastructure and a better life. What has transpired in Hopley in the five years since Operation Murambatsvina rendered hundreds of thousands homeless, mirrors the fate of IDP's across the country. The film also looks at whether the new inclusive government has made an impact on the lives of this group of people, who were uprooted because of their real or perceived support of the Movement for Democratic Change.

    Speakers
    Prof. Brian Raftopoulos – Director of Research, Solidarity Peace Trust

    Tara Polzer – Forced Migration Project – Wits University - Johannesburg

    Braam Hanekom - People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) – Western Cape

    Trevor Ngwane – Centre for Civil Society – University of Kwa-Zulu Natal

    Please RSVP to Emily Wellman at info@sugaractivism.co.za or 072 236 2712

    Selvan Chetty
    Deputy Director
    Solidarity Peace Trust
    www.solidaritypecetrust.org
    0835561726


    Press Conference on Xenophobia 28 July

    PRESS RELEASE:Durban's Civil Society and Immigrants:The Xenophobic and Anti-Xenophobic Forces

    DATE:Wed, 28 July 2010
    TIME: 12:30-1:30pm
    PLACE: UKZN Howard College Campus
    Memorial Tower Building, Room #602

    Xenophobia has hit Durban once again. As in May 2008, when thousands
    were displaced from sites including Cato Manor, Bottlebrush, Umbilo and
    Albert Park, once again the immigrant community is fearful. As in
    January 2009, when a double-murder of immigrants occurred at Albert
    Park's Venture Africa building, under the alleged leadership of Durban
    city councillor Vusi Khosa, once again the city's leadership has been
    dubious, at best. Attempts by the Centre for Civil Society and many
    other groups in Durban to rally attention to the coming problem were
    repelled by metro police (and National Intelligence), and only after a
    long process was permission granted to hold an Anti-Xenophobia rally at
    City Hall on July 3.

    With the support of Atlantic Philanthropies and Strategy&Tactics, a
    dozen researchers at CCS carried out a major study of the 2008-09
    xenophobia in Durban, and the antidotes from civil society networks.
    However, our findings are sobering: many of the problems associated with
    xenophobia are structural. They can be solved with the cooperation of
    the state and business, but Durban civil society is ill prepared to
    address social crises such as unemployment, lack of affordable housing,
    excessive retail competition in townships, and regional foreign policy
    (especially in relation to Zimbabwe and the DRC). On Wednesday, a 105pp.
    study of Durban will be discussed in the context of more than 1000 pages
    of research findings by scholars associated with the Atlantic
    Philanthropies.

    We welcome you to join us for an hour, to get a better handle on
    questions associated with xenophobia, and anti-xenophobia. Numerous
    topics will be discussed, including the responsibility of civil society
    organisations, the media, academics, the state and business.

    For the Centre for Civil Society: Baruti Amisi, director of the CCS
    Anti-Xenophobia Project: 083 683 8297 Patrick Bond, director of the
    Centre: 083 425 1401



    Press Statement and Invitation to Media Briefings

    The South African Civil Society and Xenophobia study

    (Strategy & Tactics, Johannesburg, July 2010)

    Uprooting xenophobia in South Africa:

    Can civil society regain its drive and mount a sustained response?

    Will government face the facts and rise to the challenge?

    In May 2008, South Africa was gripped by an outbreak of xenophobic
    violence that spread from Alexandra, Johannesburg, across the country,
    leaving 62 people dead, more than 700 injured or raped and tens of
    thousands as homeless refugees.

    In possibly the largest mobilisation since the voter registration drives
    of 1994, civil society intervened to save lives, help the injured,
    provide food and shelter, collect funds, shame politicians into action
    and came out strongly against xenophobia in a series of marches,
    rallies, vigils and coalitions.

    In late 2008, the social research agency Strategy & Tactics (working in
    collaboration with social and political scientists from multiple
    universities and agencies, and migrants and their own civil society
    organisations) began to investigate the causes of the violence and
    whether the response to the crisis signalled a revival of South African
    civil society echoing the role played by community organisations,
    churches and other institutions in shaping democracy in the late 1980s
    and early 1990s. Or was it 'merely' a crisis response*

    The resulting and newly released 500-page report, South African Civil
    Society and Xenophobia, is the most comprehensive study of the state of
    civil society in over a decade.

    As South Africa is once again threatened by the reality of xenophobic
    violence, swift, informed and sustained responses to xenophobia are
    needed. All sectors of society, including civil society and government,
    must heed the learnings of May 2008. This study offers the following key
    findings and recommendations:

    * The xenophobic violence of May 2008 was caused by a combination of
    deep structural social, economic and spatial inequalities, an on-going
    reliance on cheap labour, housing shortages, township retail
    competition, racism, a history of the use of violence to advance
    sectional interests and a traumatically scarred national psyche. This
    coincided in early 2008 with a desperately low national mood as the
    economy seemed to be in freefall and the ruling party was in the midst
    of factional splitting. All these factors combined to create ripe
    conditions for the xenophobic outburst.

    * The violence also took place against a background of huge population
    shifts in the country as well as the region since the demise of
    apartheid. In response to rural poverty, millions of South Africans have
    moved to the cities. 'Desperation-based' migration caused by failed
    economies and political conflict in countries to the North of South
    Africa has increased dramatically.

    * The abuse of the human rights of migrants and refugees by state
    agencies in spite of a progressive Constitution and humane legislation
    provides ripe conditions for xenophobia to thrive, as does an exclusive
    nationalist political discourse.

    * South Africans of all races are deeply xenophobic. Some sections of
    government and the ANC are in denial about the extent of xenophobia in
    the population and this has obstructed a considered strategic response
    to the phenomenon.

    * In May 2008, this ambivalence resulted in a weak response by the state
    to the violence. It fell to civil society to deal with the crisis. Civil
    society rose to the challenge in the largest mobilisation of citizens
    since the early 1990s and caused some to question whether civil society
    might regain its strength as a critical agent of social change.

    * This was not to pass, however. While some strong regional coalitions
    emerged they lost impetus once the moment of crisis passed. Many NGOs
    returned to their core business once the crisis was over - to which
    migrants were marginal. Civil society proved exemplary in mounting a
    highly effective relief effort, but the effort did not translate into a
    sustainable political agenda to address xenophobia and advance social
    justice more generally. The moment was lost.

    * Since 2008 civil society has failed to address the issue of xenophobia
    systematically, neither through its programmes, nor by including
    migrants as part of its constituency. Civil society must rise to this
    challenge.

    * The authors of the study conclude that violence against African
    migrants will continue unless there are profound socio-economic and
    attitudinal changes:

    Business as usual cannot continue. The political rules have been
    re-written, the administrative and judicial systems have been re-wired,
    but at the social and economic levels South Africa has failed to move to
    a point where we can regard ourselves as post-transitional, as having
    arrived at the place envisioned by those struggling for freedom from
    apartheid. Moreover, the period since 1994 has been punctuated by
    sporadic calls for 'an RDP of the soul', or moral regeneration, based on
    an acceptance that psycho-social damage has been done to all. If all
    South Africans are to be liberated from their past, all South Africans
    need a new moral compass, just as the economic order needs to be
    fundamentally restructured and the social order re-imagined. Without
    this delayed phase of transition, South Africa remains in limbo -
    post-apartheid but not yet the non-racial, non-sexist democracy
    envisioned in the Constitution. And while that [takes hold], the fertile
    breeding ground remains in place for xenophobia, as it does for rape,
    for violent crime, for racism and the other social ills. - Prof David
    Everatt, South African Civil Society and Xenophobia

    * The recommendations of the report are a call to action, providing all
    stakeholders - civil society, political parties and the corporate sector
    - with a blueprint to address xenophobia, advance social justice and
    promote national cohesion and diversity in which foreigners are an
    integral part of South African society.

    Strategy & Tactics, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (a partnership
    between the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of
    Johannesburg and the Gauteng Provincial Government), The Atlantic
    Philanthropies, the Centre for Civil Society (University of
    KwaZulu-Natal), the University of the Western Cape and Amandla Forum
    hereby invite you to

    Media Briefings on the South African Civil Society and Xenophobia study

    Date: WEDNESDAY 28 JULY 2010
    Time: 12h30 to 13h30
    Venue: DURBAN - Centre for Civil Society, University of KZN, Howard
    College Campus, Memorial Tower Building, Room 602

    Contact persons/tel: Patrick Bond 083 425 1401 OR Baruti Amisi 083 683 8297

    Nationally, media enquires about the content of the study can be
    directed to the editor, Prof David Everatt: david.everatt@gcro.ac.za,
    083 455 9466.

    For media based in KwaZulu-Natal, media enquiries can also be directed
    to: Prof Patrick Bond (pbond@mail.ngo.za, 083 425 1401) or Baruti Amisi
    (amisi@ukzn.ac.za, 083 683 8297).

    The list of contents and the first two chapters of the Synthesis Report
    (Overview & Prospects and Summary of Findings & Recommendations) can be
    accessed on the Centre for Civil Society website:
    ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp*3,28,11,3658

    The list of contents and the full report can be accessed on the websites
    of Strategy & Tactics, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory and The
    Atlantic Philanthropies: www.s-and-t.co.za/downloads.php#xenophobia
    www.gcro.ac.za/news/xenophobia-reports-released

    www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/learning/report-south-african-civil-society-and-xenophobia
    (compressed files for easier download)

    The study can also be ordered on CD (free of charge) by completing the attached order form and forwarding it to:
    g.bayne@atlanticphilanthropies.org

    Warm regards
    The Atlantic Philanthropies


    Anti Xenophobia Rally 3 July 2010

    Flyers from the 3 July rally











    Pictures from the 3 July rally
















    Symposium: Water, Rights and Prices: Theory and practice, 28 June

    The Centre for Civil Society invites you to a symposium:

    TOPIC: Water, Rights and Prices: Theory and practice in Durban,
    Johannesburg and the world
    SPEAKERS: Daria Roithmayr, Kim Adonis, Mary Galvin, Patrick Bond,
    chaired by Dudu Khumalo
    DATE: Monday 28 June 2010
    TIME: 11am-2pm
    VENUE: Memorial Tower Building #602, Howard College, UKZN

    FIRST PAPER: “What’s Wrong with Rights? Rights, Race and Capital” by
    Daria Roithmayr


    TIME: 11am-noon

    This paper argues that rights discourse serves to legitimate the
    domination of capital over racial equality. The paper offers a weak form
    of the argument, which states that rights discourse cannot promote
    equality over capital, because rights discourse takes too much off the
    table and opens the door to the sort of cost/benefit analysis it is
    meant to suppress. The paper also offers a stronger form of the
    argument, which states that rights litigation is actually
    counterproductive, because it positions citizens as supplicants who are
    dependent on the state, and requires that petitioners surrender their
    most potent arguments.

    SPEAKER: A law professor at the University of Southern California, Daria
    Roithmayr writes and teaches in the area of critical race theory, with a
    particular emphasis on persistent racialized poverty. Her forthcoming
    book, entitled Them That’s Got Shall Get, argues that racial inequality
    will reproduce itself over time structurally, even in the absence of
    intentional discrimination. She has written several articles on the
    usefulness of rights discourse in eradicating persistent inequality, and
    has published in the South African Journal of Human Rights on whether
    the school fee system violates the right to education.

    SECOND PAPER: Developmental Pricing of Residential Water Use in South Africa: The Case of Gauteng, by Kim Adonis

    TIME: noon-1pm

    This paper outlines how it might be possible to construct a
    developmental pricing model for residential water use in Gauteng. The
    research will critically analyse the existing pricing model in order to
    assess the efficacy of the model in achieving the goals of equity,
    efficiency and sustainability. To date, little is known of the effects
    of water prices on household consumption behaviour, in particular, how
    households change their consumption in order to respond to the
    increasing block tariff model that is currently used. As such, the
    existing model does not set the block tariffs in line with expected
    consumer behaviour and therefore omits the impact of marginal price
    increases on the well being of households of different income groups.
    This research will therefore seek to quantify the effects of the
    existing block tariffs by estimating the price elasticity of demand for
    water for various income groups.

    SPEAKER: Kim Adonis, a PhD student in the UKZN School of Development Studies, works at KPMG and was formerly an official of the Economic Analysis Directorate at Gauteng Treasury. Her Wits University Masters dissertation investigated the paradigm shift in the management of water resources in South Africa since 1998, which essentially entailed the transition from supply to demand management of water resources. Her undergraduate education was at UCT.
    octorate of Philosophy – Development Studies Research Proposal

    Developmental Pricing of Residential Water Use in South Africa
    Slide Show

    Developmental Pricing of Residential Water Use in South Africa.
    Dctorate of Philosophy – Development Studies Research Proposal

    THIRD PAPER: Confrontational Municipal Hydropolitics in South Africa’s Developmental State Debate: Reactions to Durban’s Celebrated Innovations by Radical Social Movements, by Mary Galvin and Patrick Bond

    TIME: 1-2pm

    In this article, we aim to show how power relations in
    post-apartheid South Africa have been both affected and reproduced by
    contestations over water access, consumption costs and technologies
    ranging from bulk supplies to household water and sanitation systems.
    The confrontations came to a head during the 2000s at a time of
    oft-advertised (albeit controversial) shifts in ruling party policy
    philosophy from an emphasis on neoliberal macroeconomic constraints and
    micro-commercialization to a ‘developmental state’. In the urban water
    sector, these shifts have been led by the city of Durban (eThekwini
    Metro). The city is celebrated across the world for innovations in ‘Free
    Basic Water’ supply, water-less ‘Urinary Diversion’ (UD) toilets, and
    community consultation. However, such processes were all fraught with
    contradiction, and are better understood not simply as the success of
    celebrated municipal leaders, but as the ever evolving outcome of a
    Polanyian double-movement. Market-oriented state/corporate agents and
    anti-market social forces (a half-dozen leading community-based
    organizations) generated discourses during the 2000s that often ‘talked
    past each other’, but that sometimes reached a point of confrontation
    that shed both heat and light on water problems.

    SPEAKERS: Mary Galvin has worked in South Africa as a researcher, development practitioner, and social justice activist since 1992. Her University of California PhD focused on development interventions by social change and technical NGOs and their impact on local socio political change in rural South Africa. She recently concluded a three year, multistakeholder research project and dialogue process called The Water Dialogues.
    Presently, as Director of Umphilo waManzi (a non profit organisation),
    Mary is conducting research on power dynamics in the water sector, while
    planning a water quality campaign and projects related to climate change
    and water.

    Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society and has written many
    articles and book chapters on water politics.

    All are welcome; the seminar will be skypecast, so please contact
    Patrick Bond at pbond@mail.ngo.za and patricksouthafrica (on skype) to participate.



    (The World Cup makes the first paragraphs below appear as precise
    descriptions of Fifagrad - SA's nine host cities - and yet, is this the
    right language for the left, this urban rights-talk? Mark your calendars
    for 28 June when we do a skypecast colloquium at CCS on rights with
    specific reference to urban water. I think there will be doubts
    expressed, based on left crits from law and some of the recent practical
    experience in Joburg/Durban: running up against the hard edge of
    liberal-capitalist-democratic juristics and public policy. My gut
    feeling is that neoliberalism plus tokenist welfarism together cancel
    out all the excellent aspirations expressed below. And it may be better,
    therefore, to fast-forward to commons-talk instead.

    Rio de Janeiro Declaration - Social Urban Forum, March 2010

    In neighborhoods and in the world, fighting for the right to the city,
    for democracy and urban justice

    Preliminary draft for discussion
    Transnational corporations, multilateral agencies and their advocates
    have already foreseen the ideal XXIist century city: it is globalized,
    tied by flows and hierarchies to the global markets; a city tied to the
    few who control and rule the markets from their headquarters in the
    global cities. Conceived and managed as if it was a corporation, this
    city sails in the global competitive seas and its governance mirrors the
    corporative management: marketing, competitiveness, pragmatism,
    flexibility and decision-making processes centralization should be the
    virtues of urban government.

    Led by entrepreneurial mayors, free from public control and engaged in
    public-private partnerships, this city would be able to seize
    opportunities and secure its competitive advantages in the cities
    market, competing for foreign capital, investments, tourists and
    mega-events. This neo-liberal city, market oriented and market friendly,
    is simultaneously consequence and condition of the structural adjustment
    imposed by international consultants and by IMF, World Bank and other
    multilateral agencies diffused recipes.

    Perverse consequences
    Its perverse consequences are, however, evident: more inequality,
    increasing of unemployment and poverty levels, quality of life
    degradation for millions, violence increase, frustration, despair.
    Vulnerable groups, ethnic and cultural minorities, migrants and women
    suffer particularly, due to the discrimination added to their misery.
    The new standard, together with its characteristic urban scenarios,
    imposes itself all over the world. The urban fabric is progressively
    being decomposed. The city’s diversity and its encountering places, once
    built by working class neighborhoods within the modern tissue have been
    bulldozed or intentionally gentrified, and/or ethnically and socially
    ‘cleaned’. With them, the richness of a cultural and political life once
    the symbol of those communities, of downtown areas and docklands is also
    vanishing. It is a transfigured city, transformed into an agglomeration
    of citadels for the wealthy, enclaves for middle classes, vulnerable
    quarters for working classes, and ghettos for the poor and marginalized
    groups.

    New controlling tools have been developed resulting in the
    criminalization of those who, defying the neo-liberal creed, fight for
    social change and for an alternative urban scenario.

    Inherited inequalities, largely a result of the modern city built
    throughout the XXth century, get more and more acute. The calls on
    private and corporate philanthropy and on the moralization of public
    spaces do not hide the failure of policies focused at “alleviating
    poverty” any longer. New international reports and papers, rich in empty
    sentences and calls, but poor in poverty and inequality causal analyses,
    and, most importantly, needing substantial plans to eliminate wealth and
    power concentration – worldwide or inside regions and cities -, do not
    bring any surprises or hopes.

    Problems increasing with crisis
    The most recent world crisis uncovered the real neo-liberal’s traits:
    facing financial hardship – partly due to the city’s submission to
    financial markets -, its proponents “re-discovered” and celebrated state
    intervention! Bank owners and brokers lined up at the once slandered
    State’s door, begging for help… Within two months, States provided a
    larger amount of resources to the financial system than it had done for
    “poverty alleviation” in decades.

    Having its origins in the cities’ marketing and financial processes, the
    crisis reflects itself over the very cities: more unemployment, more
    homeless workers, more inequality.
    Despite this recent and gross failure of the neo-liberal city, global
    corpora ons and mul lateral agencies have nothing new to say. Real
    Estate brokers and the big capital demand di! erent and generous
    subsidies, as well as new forms of public-private partnerships. In
    exchange they promise the weary “poverty allevia on” formulae. In a
    number of countries, both in central and peripheral economies,
    programmed state Þ scal crisis Þ nance public debts with growing shares
    of their na onal budgets. In the context of a novel and even more
    perverse distribu on of costs, the city is rea# rmed as the locus of
    inequality and poverty produc on and reproduc on.

    Capital only aims more profits
    In a last and sorry effort, elites resort to systematic policies aimed
    at de-politicizing the city, seeking to transubstantiate citizens into
    consumers and shareholders or, else, into the “poor”. Citizens become
    audience to mega-events and city-spectacles, giving life to a world most
    cannot take part of, especially in peripheral countries.

    That is not the whole story, however. There is a lot more to it. A lot
    not shown or discussed in offcial conferences or in global reports.
    There are alternatives for the neo-liberal model springing worldwide.
    Not only in cities led by progressive, popular, and democratic local
    governments, but also in some neighborhoods within cities under the
    neo-liberal hegemony.

    It is not an alternative model, but alternatives to the model, rooted on
    different values and goals, different ideals of city, and on insurgent
    urbanity and urban planning processes. It is more resistance than
    revolution. Nevertheless, it is positive resistance.

    Universalize social struggles
    Despite its richness and universal character, it has been rarely
    possible to look at these experiences as qualitative encompassing
    processes, able to offer a way to challenge the current dominant urban
    agenda. There have been rare opportunities to gather urban activists,
    collective actors, movements and organizations who and which, in many
    cities and countries, are making the practical critique of the
    neo-liberal model, or researchers and progressive planners who are
    making the theoretical critique to the urban pensée unique. There have
    been even fewer opportunities to bring them altogether.

    As such, we, at this moment, feel challenged to take a further aimed at
    building and structuring a bold movement that can express our
    international solidarity that will help us collect, organize and diffuse
    our achievements, both concerning our daily struggles and concrete
    experiences and our cultural and theoretical contends, all assuring
    innovative planning canons and methodologies. It is time to give a
    stronger and more consistent repercussion to our common efforts towards
    building democratic, socially and environmentally just cities. Cities
    where all inhabitants are simultaneously compromised with an equal
    society and with the right to be equal in diversity.

    Movements, organizations and individuals, assembled at the 1st Social
    Urban Forum, in Rio de Janeiro, from March, 22nd through March, 26th,
    after a number of debates and a rich exchanging experience, call upon
    all those who struggle against the neoliberal city, at the markets’ and
    capital’s disposal, to unite, in solidarity, conforming an international
    movement for the right to the city, democracy and urban justice. In so
    doing, we hereby reafirm our principles and fundamental compromises.

    Our beliefs and hopes

    # We believe in the construction of different cities, receptive to its
    inhabitants instead of receptive to the capital, friendly to its
    population and its needs before cities are friendly to the market and
    its rules;

    # We believe that, under the auspices of organized and autonomous
    citizen participation through their organizations, it is possible to
    elaborate and to implement policies and plans that further the
    elimination of the great wealth and power inequalities in our societies;

    # We believe academic and professionals should contribute to the
    construction of collective action processes and should help workers and
    urban residents in general to take their destiny and the destiny of
    their cities into their own hands;

    # We are committed to the struggle for reassuring the right to the city,
    understood as a collective right of all to a city without discrimination
    based on race, gender, sex, age, health, income, nationality, ethnic and
    migrant conditions or on political, sexual and/ or religious
    orientation. We also compromise with the universal right to preserve
    group memories, heritage and cultural identity;

    # We are committed to oppose each and every discrimination based on
    race, gender or economic condition, and sexual or religious orientation;

    # We are committed to struggle for housing policies aimed at dignifying
    homes, in fully equipped urbanized areas close to the job market;

    # We are committed to struggle against relocations and forced evictions
    based on rhetoric environmental arguments, on calls for public order, on
    development and/or patriot discourses mostly associated with mega
    events, which favor real estate speculation, capital and status quo
    governments;

    # We are committed to struggle and ensure that social rights to the land
    take precedence over property rights to the land;

    # We are committed to struggle for land regularization and urbanization
    of poor and/ or vulnerable areas and informal settlements and for public
    policies encouraging the implementation of cooperative forms of work
    and/or enhancing solidarity economy;

    # We are committed to struggle for affordable and quality public
    transportation, at unified and integrated fees in metropolitan areas,
    and for public policies that encourage non-polluting transportation forms;

    # We are committed to struggle against all forms of criminalization of
    the poor, including street workers, homeless and in-migrants, especially
    when occupying empty real state in order to shelter their families or
    legal economic activities to support them. We also commit to struggle
    against all forms of social movements criminalization, both in the city
    and in rural areas.

    # We are committed to demand basic transportation, health, housing,
    educational, cultural, leisure and sports services, facilities and
    equipments from the State. We also commit to struggle for public and
    democratic control of such services, facilities and equipments.

    # We are committed to struggle for public management and universal
    coverage of sanitation systems, in as much as water services, which
    shall not be privatized.

    # We are committed to struggle against monopoly in mass media production
    and distribution, currently in big corporations’ hands, ensuring their
    democratiza on. In particular, we commit to struggle for community
    broadcasting freedom, for their communication channels express a
    diversity of opinions and cultures that constitute a major asset to our
    cities.

    # We are committed to struggle against all forms and manifestations of
    environmental injustice and for environmentally sustainable cities.

    # We believe that the construction of a just and egalitarian city is
    tied to the struggle for the democratization of rural land access, for
    the agrarian reform, for food production sovereignty, for
    environmentally responsible agricultural practices, for safeguarding
    family agriculture, traditional groups and indigenous populations modes
    and means of production.

    # We believe marketing practices and market friendly policies favor
    environmental degradation and we struggle for economic and efficient
    energy policies, for adequate treatment and recycling of solid, liquid
    and gas waste and for increasing and democratizing urban green and
    forested areas.

    # We believe the cornerstone of urban plans and policies should be to
    ensure universal access to dignifying housing, education, health care,
    food, clothing, multiple forms of cultural expression, safe and stable
    jobs and a healthy environment, instead of working for private
    speculation and capital valorization.

    # We advocate for public policies responsible for meeting these needs
    and we believe human beings are more important than commodities, social
    needs take precedence over the market logic, and cooperation and
    solidarity are the founding stones of a worthwhile social behavior.

    # We believe that National and Sub-national State structures are
    decisive to achieve these goals. We are convinced, however, that their
    agencies, tools and resources must be submitted and accountable to
    public control and to bottom-up participatory decision making processes,
    instead of being placed in the hands of bureaucrats, technocrats and all
    kinds of advocates of vested interests.

    To celebrate these collective principles and commitments:

    1) We declare March, 25th the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF THE STRUGGLE FOR THE
    RIGHT TO THE CITY, FOR DEMOCRACY AND URBAN JUSTICE.

    2) We set a new appointment, two years from now and paralleling the next
    UN-Habitat World Urban Forum, when we should all meet again, stronger
    and more numerous.

    In neighborhoods and in the world, Fighting for the right to the city,

    For democracy and urban justice
    Rio de Janeiro, 25 March, 2010

    Attention

    1) This proposal has been drafted by militants of movements and
    organizations participating in the construction of the Urban Social
    Forum in Rio de Janeiro.

    2) This proposal should receive suggestions and amendments, especially
    from organizations outside Rio, be them from Brazil or other countries.
    Suggestions and proposals should be sent to cartadorio@gmail.com.

    3) A final draft commission will be elected in the general assembly of
    the Forum. This commission will prepare the final version of the the Rio
    Declaration, taking upon suggestions and amendments sent to the email.


    Patrick Bond on the World Cup, Washington, 9 June 2010

    The 2010 World Cup, from sports to socio‑economics: with Briggs Bomba, Patrick Bond and Dave Zirin

    Wednesday 10:30am, Wallace Global Fund, 1990 M Street, NW, Suite 250,
    Washington, DC 20036



    Political Economy of the World Cup
    9 June 10:30 - 11:30

    Africa Action and the Wallace Global Fund cordially invite you to join us for a live webcast of our Political Economy of the World Cup Breakfast Discussion, to be broadcast on Wednesday, June 9 from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at the Wallace Global Fund with special guests Professor Patrick Bond and Mr. Dave Zirin. Bond and Zirin are leading thinkers, authors, and activists on socio-economic justice issues.

    To watch the event live please go here

    Patrick Bond is senior professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies and director of the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa. He has authored numerous books on political economy and works closely with social movements, trade unions and environmentalists. He compiles a daily World Cup Watch here

    Dave Zirin is a sports correspondent for the Nation Magazine. He has also authored numerous books such as Welcome to the Terrordome and A People's History of Sports in the United States. Zirin's column, Edge of Sports, appears on Sport's Illustrated's website and he is the host of XM satellite's weekly show, Edge of Sports Radio.

    South Africa will be the first African nation to host the International Federation of Football Association's World Cup set to kick off on June 11, 2010. While preparations for the event have contributed to a wave of opportunities for South Africa, there has been a wide range of controversies surrounding the event. The discussion will focus on the following six red cards:

    1. Dubious priorities, overspending
    2. Fifa profits, political corruption
    3. Debt & imports, economic crisis
    4. Trickle-down promises broken
    5. Democratic freedoms suspended
    6. Protest met by repression

    Don't miss what promises to be an exciting perspective on the political and socio-economic implications of the World Cup for South Africa.

    For further information, please go here



    GOAL!: Salon Event: Making its Mark - South Africa and the FIFA World Cup
    Date:June 9, 12:00PM-2:00PM
    VenueBusboys and Poets, 14th & V St NW, Washington, DC

    In June, the first coin of the 2010 FIFA World Cup will be tossed in host country, South Africa.

    Amidst the entire African continents' excitement over its hosting debut, South Africa will once again make its mark as the midfielder of the seamless intersection of soccer fever and government and corporate accountability. Join labor, gender, peace and justice activists and true fans of the sport to make South Africa's mark count. Midfielders, strikers, forwards and defenders: Let the games begin!

    Speakers:

    Dave Zirin is a national sports writer and the host of Edge of Sports on XM Radio, where sports and politics collide. He recently authored The South Africa World Cup: Invictus in Reverse.

    Emira Woods is the Co-Director of the Foreign Policy In Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies, where she sheds light on issues ranging from debt relief, gender equality, trade and development to U.S. military policy. For more, read her latest article.

    Tope Folarin is a Newman Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. His focus is on African politics, the racial-wealth divide in the United States and any intersections therein. His latest article is The World Cup And I.

    Patrick Bond is a political economist and a professor at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, where he teaches political economy and eco-social policy. He also directs the Centre for Civil Society and is involved in research on economic justice, energy and water.


    Patrick Bond at Grantmakers without Borders conference, 8 June 2010



    Lunchtime Briefing: Debates in Global Justice Movements, a Decade On 1:00 to 2:15 pm
    Location: Hawthorn

    Over the last decade, international coordination of social movements—global justice, anti-war, climate justice, and many sector-based networks—was reflected in converging activism, strategy and increasingly politicized narratives. Still, divergences remain along South-North, class, race and other cleavages. Taking global examples and South African lessons in international solidarity, the World Social Forum, grassroots ownership, protest waves, environmentalism, anti-privatization and reactions to economic crisis (including xenophobia), Professor Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies considers potentials for movement-building in coming years.

    Debates in and about Global Justice Movements, a decade on reflections on theory, history, scale politics, themes and narratives
    Slideshow from Patrick Bond's presentation

    Conference Programme
    Grantmakers without Borders Website


    Patrick Bond at the People's Dialogue 'Green Economy' seminar, 5 May



    Venue: The Cottages Gender-links, Innes Road, Observatory, Johannesburg. Date: 5-7th May 2012

    Background
    We are recommending that participants arrive on the Friday, 4th May so that we can begin the seminar first thing Saturday morning. On Friday we will circulate documents and participants will have a chance to prepare for the seminar. Also, Friday will be an opportunity for networking and sharing the work and campaigns of your organisation. It would be good if you could bring relevant publications and information from your organisation to share with others.

    Objectives
  • Develop a common understanding of the threat posed for communities and our common goods by the further commodification of nature and her services in the guise of the Green Economy.

  • Deepen our perspectives on alternative strategies and paradigms that can provide vision and hope.

  • Develop an action plan to guide the work of the People's Dialogue and its members towards the Rio + 20 Summit and beyond.


  • CONFERENCE PROGRAMME



    Rio+20 and the Green Economy: the need for a new paradigm
    By Trust for community outreach and education

    The People’s Dialogue invites your participation in an intercontinental seminar to be held in Johannesburg (5 –7 May 2012) on the green economy in preparation for the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. It takes forward discussions we have had as the People’s Dialogue in the context of the multi-dimensional crisis of civilisation. Specifically the seminar will focus on the need to develop alternative paradigms and development strategies capable of ensuring a decent life for all while guaranteeing the integrity of the planet.

    The depth of the crisis and the increasing threat to life requires not just the framing of these alternatives but the development of advocacy strategies to promote these alternatives. The Rio + 20 UN Summit where the future of humanity and the planet will be debated and the parallel civil society People’s Summit will provide critical opportunities for coming to terms with the depth and severity of the ecological, economic and social crises we face as well as the different alternatives that need to be mobilised around.

    The tortured and tiring outcomes of COP 17 and other recent global Summits that promised much yet delivered little should caution anyone that hopes that the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit, the so-called Rio + 20Summit will provide real solutions to our planetary crisis. The fact that the global elite have only allocated 2 and half days of discussions to the official Summit suggests there is nothing like the expectations that accompanied the initial ’92 Earth Summit. Almost twenty years on, hundreds of Summits and meetings later and thousands of pages of resolutions, declarations and protocols, the situation is much worse. The issues of unsustainability in respect of global warming, eco-system degradation biodiversity, ocean acidification, inequality, food insecurity are becoming dire.

    One of the main issues for discussion at Rio+20 is the green economy. The real danger for civil society is that just as the concept sustainable development, the green economy proposals are extremely seductive while providing a cover for continued neoliberal policies.

    The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the lead agency preparing the Rio Summit is pushing for nature to be precisely measured and valued, according to the ‘services’ it provides (cleaning water, capturing carbon and so on). This way nature’s services can be costed, offset and traded on markets, via credits, similar to carbon trading. Giving nature a monetary value or putting a price tag on it, is the best way to protect it, UNEP argues.

    The approach has been heavily criticised by social movements and other civil society organisations as it would mean assigning private property rights to nature, commodifying and privatising nature. Leaving nature to the market would undermine the opportunities of communities and states to protect the commons. The proposed seminar would need to engage with this approach, especially in light of the carbon trading debacle.

    As the People’s Dialogue bringing together popular organisations from Southern East and West Africa and Latin America we see Rio + 20 as an opportunity to deepen our critique, extend our common analysis as well as consolidating our exchanges on alternative paradigms based on a cross-sectional (feminist, indigenous, faith-based, labour, peasant, NGOs, etc.) cross-continental dialogue. Important and relevant people’s alternative processes and campaigns such as the Rural Women’s Assembly, the Million Climate Jobs and many others will be promoted in the seminar as concrete steps towards building alternative paradigms and strategies. In this way we will contribute to strengthening and building greater unity of the various platforms movements linked to the People’s Dialogue are already involved in. Here lies the greatest possibility for outreaching and advancing popular demands, struggles and alternatives.

    A range of powerful social movements in Brazil, Latin America and across the world have come together to prepare a parallel People’s Summit to the UN’s Rio + 20 Summit. It is critical that African social movements and civil society are mobilised to intervene in these discussions at their country level, regionally and globally to ensure that the specificities of the multi-dimensional crises of Africa are integrated into global civil society’s platforms.
    http://rio20.net

    PHOTO'S




    Alter-globalization Movements Conference 28 May

    International Conference on Alter-globalization movements and the alternative ideas of Korea. Gyeongsang University Institute for Social Sciences (Jinju), Seoul, 28 May 2010

    A political-economic perspective on climate justice within the alter-globalization movements Resistance to ‘shifting, stealing and stalling’ from Kyoto to Copenhagen to Cancun.
    By Patrick Bond

    A political-economic perspective on climate justice within the alter-globalization movements Resistance to ‘shifting, stealing and stalling’ from Kyoto to Copenhagen to Cancun
    Slideshow for Patrick's presentation

    Conference Programme



    Osisa conference on climate and development in Africa, Pretoria, 21 May

    Innovation, climate change, state and development
    Slideshow from Patrick Bond's presentation




    AGENDA

    RETHINKING GOVERNANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA: PROSPECTS AND POSSIBILITIES FOR A DEVELOPMENTAL STATE?

    DAY ONE: 20 MAY 2010

    SESSION 1: 09H00 – 11H00

    THE BIG DEBATES

    Democracy, Delivery and Innovation: Whither the Developmental State?
    A number of scholars have noted that State intervention in the economy
    is a universal feature common to all of the successful economies at an
    early stage of their industrialisation, including the UK and the USA
    which are today hailed as free market advocates. Yet there are still
    many fundamental questions about how much State intervention is
    appropriate in the African context. At this particular moment, where the
    US and UK have been forced to accept that the market is not always
    self‑correcting, and indeed have had to bail out major financial
    institutions, many would argue that the global financial crisis has
    precipitated a significant rethink in the role of the State and the ways
    in which the Bretton Woods institutions function. Is such optimism well
    placed? Has there been a real challenge to the Washington Consensus?
    Panellists will look at whether the prospects for the Developmental
    State in Africa are better today than it was before October 2008. They
    will also address definitional issues: What do we mean when we speak of
    a Developmental State and what are the roles of different actors in
    bringing about such a State?

    Welcome Remarks: Sisonke Msimang, Executive Director, OSISA

    Facilitator: Bheki Moyo: Programme Director, Trust Africa

    Panel:
  • Thomas Salomao: Executive Secretary, SADC Secretariat

  • Dr Rwakeza Mukandala: Vice Chancellor, University of Dar es Salaam

  • Dr Kojo Busia: Chief of the Africa Peer Review Mechanism Support
    Section, Governance and Public Administration, Economic Commission for
    Africa

  • Sisonke Msimang, Executive Director, OSISA


  • DISCUSSION

    TEA BREAK 11H00 – 11H30

    SESSION 2: 11H30 ‑ 13H00

    Attractive Autocracies: Developmental States and Democracy
    Many argue that Africa’s poor need economic growth and not democracy.
    Indeed a number of States – feted by the West for their economic growth
    – exhibit worrying tendencies on the democracy front. Does the
    definintion of a Developmental State of necessity include civil and
    political rights? Where do socio‑economic rights fit within this
    framework? Is the dichotomy between development and democracy, a false
    one in a Developmental State?

    Facilitator: Professor Adele Liasu Jinadu, Lecturer, University of
    Lagos, Nigeria

    Panel:
  • Dr Chris Landsberg: Chair and Professor of Politics, and
    Co‑Director of the Centre for African and European Studies (CAES),
    University of Johannesburg

  • Godfrey Kanyenze: Executive Director, LEDRIZ

  • Dr Adebayo Olukoshi: Director, UN African Institute for Economic
    Development and Planning (UNIDEP).


  • DISCUSSION

    LUNCH 13H00‑ 14H00

    SESSION 3: 14H15‑ 16H30

    Developmental States: Lessons from Afar?

    Facilitator: Joel Netshitenzhe, Policy Expert

    Panel:
  • Prof Pamela Mbabazi: Dean of Development Studies, MUST, Uganda

  • Professor Xiao Lian: Executive Director, Chinese Centre for
    International Economics, Beijing

  • Ambassador Han Soo Kim, South Korean Ambassador to South Africa


  • BOOK LAUNCH 16H30 – 17H30

    Constructing a Democratic Developmental State in South Africa:
    Potentials and Challenges
    ‑ Professor Omano Edigheji (Ed), Research
    Director in the Policy Analysis Unit of the Human Sciences Research
    Council (HSRC).

    DINNER 18H30

    DAY 2: 21 MAY 2010

    SESSION 4: 09H00 ‑ 10H30

    Natural Resources: Blessing or Curse?
    There are numerous examples in Southern Africa, of States rich in
    natural resources, but with abysmal development indicators. In the last
    decade, economic growth in many Southern African countries has topped
    the 10% mark: Angola, Mozambique and the DRC, growth fuelled by natural
    resource exploitation have been siginificant. This panel looks at the
    lessons learned about State intervention in Zambia, DRC & Botswana.

    Chair: Facilitator: Claude Kabemba: Director, Southern African Resource Watch

    Panel:
  • Dr Emmanuel Botlhale: Lecturer, University of Botswana

  • Dr Fernando Heitor Francisco: International Development, Consultant, Angola

  • Dr Charity Musamba: Executive Director, Foundation for Democratic
    Process (FODEP), Zambia

  • Father Ferdinand Muhigirwa: Director, CEPAS


  • DISCUSSION

    TEA BREAK 11H00 – 11H30

    SESSION 5: 11H30 – 13H00

    Diamonds are a Country’s Best Friend?
    In a facilitated conversation, radio host John Perleman of Kaya FM, will
    talk to key leaders in civil society, government and the private sector
    in the region, about diamonds and the ways in which they have been used
    to promote and undermine the notion of a Developmental State. The
    discussants will look at positive and negative examples, with a view to
    discussing the ways in which developmental states can and should be
    managing the extraction and trade of diamonds.

    Facilitator: John Perleman

    Panel:
  • Farai Maguwu: Director, Centre for Research and Development,
    Mutare, Zimbabwe

  • Tendai Biti: Minister of Finance, Government of Zimbabwe (tbc)

  • Georgette Biebie Songo: President, Caucus des Femmes Congolaises

  • Claude Kabemba: Director, Southern African Resource Watch


  • LUNCH 13H00‑ 14H00

    SESSION 6: 14H00 – 16H00

    Innovation, Climate Change, State and Development
    Given the diminishing natural resources available to fuel industrial and
    economic growth, what alternatives pathways are there? Is Southern
    Africa in a position to leapfrog using technology, and what is the role
    of policy and regulation around the environment, in fuelling growth? How
    are we configuring thinking about the ‘green collar economy’?

    Panel:
  • Thuli Makama: 2010 Global Goldman Environmental Prize Winner (Green
    Nobel Prize), Executive Director, Yonge Nawe, Swaziland

  • Jonathan Neale: Green Collar Economy Activist Advocate and Leader, London

  • Patrick Bond: Director, Centre for Civil Society, University of Kwazulu
    Natal, RSA

  • Muna Lakhani: Director, Institute for Zero Waste in Africa


  • DISCUSSION

    TEA BREAK 16H00 – 16H30

    SESSION 7: 16H30 – 17H00

    Closure: Rapporteur: Key Conclusions and Next Steps


    Patrick Bond on SA climate policy on TEDxUKZN, 14 May

    South Africa and the Politics of Global Warming: From market destruction to climate justice
    Paper presented by Patrick Bond

    The School of Information Systems and Technology of University of KwaZulu-Natal is hosting a full day TEDxUKZN conference on 14 May 2010, under the theme “Africa,Change,the World, you can join the discussion on facebook. For more information please contact Prof. Manoj Maharaj.

    The School of Information Systems and Technology is based within the Faculty of Management Studies and is currently headed by Professor Manoj Maharaj. The school operates on two sites, Pietermaritzburg and Durban (Westville) , with head office on the Westville Campus.
    tedx.ukzn.ac.za

    Live streaming of TEDxUKZN Conference



    Memorial Tribute to Professor Fatima Meer 23 April 2010



    MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR FATIMA MEER

    In celebration of her academic and intellectual contributions

    Speakers include:
    Professor Paulus Zulu
    Judge Thembile Skweyiya
    Professor Ashwin Desai
    Other former colleagues

    FRIDAY 23 APRIL 2010
    5 FOR 5:30PM
    HOWARD COLLEGE THEATRE
    HOWARD COLLEGE CAMPUS, UNIVERSITY OF KWA ZULU-NATAL


    Patrick Bond on South Africa, the World Bank, and Climate Justice, 9 April 2010

    Patrick Bond and William Moomaw Debate on Climate Justice, South Africa and the World Bank

    by Jason Pramas (Staff), Apr-13-10
    Debate
    Speech
    Over 30 people attended an informal lunchtime debate on Climate Justice, South Africa and the World Bank last Friday between Prof. Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa and Prof. William Moomaw of Tufts University and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The event took place at the encuentro 5 movement space in Chinatown, and was chaired by Jason Pramas of Open Media Boston.

    A 1 hour and 33 minute audio recording of the debate can be played below, and can also be downloaded in a variety of formats for non-commercial use at archive.org.



    When: Friday, April 9, 2010, 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm
    Where: Encuentro 5 • 33 Harrison Ave, 5th Floor • Chinatown T Stop • Boston
    Start: 2010 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
    End: 2010 Apr 9 - 2:00pm

    South Africa now has its 4th post-Apartheid president... But the country is more unequal than ever! It is also under consideration for a World Bank loan to “modernize” it ailing electrical power generation and distribution infrastructure. Revamping its grid would normally be a decisive opportunity to set a new course, redress inequalities and deveop a green strategy. But activist-intellectual Patrick Bond warns that the opposite seems likely with the Bank loan. It will strengthen the private sector and sharpen the gap between rich and poor: urban residents prepay their electricity at 4 times the rate of large transnational corporations. Further, the proposed loan will finance the world's 4th largest coal-fired plant and raise rates on working people.

    On April 8, 2010, the World Bank will make its decision. Patrick Bond will reflect on the outcome.

    Also invited to the conversation is Tufts University professor, William Moomaw who consulted with the World Bank and who is in support of the loan.

    This Bank critic meets Bank supporter discussion allows for a reasoned engagement of ideas.

    For Patrick Bond's biography, see:
    http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?10,24,8,55
    For William Moomaw's biography, see: http://fletcher.tufts.edu/faculty/Moomaw/

    See http://www.encuentro5.org for more directions. Also check website for updates before coming to the event.

    http://www.justicewithpeace.org/node/1243



    Manchester conference on environment and finance 15-16 April 2010





    Hallsworth Conference on Financialisation and Environment: The Implications for Environmental Governance of the Global Financial Crisis
    15-16 April, 2010, University of Manchester
    Board Room, Arthur Lewis Building, 2nd floor

    Please register at:
    www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk

    Financialisation and environment: the implications for environmental
    governance of the global financial crisis


    Finance capital has always, to some degree, played a role in
    environmental management. However, over the last quarter century that
    role has altered: finance has played a much more direct role in the
    delivery of environmental policy in a range of issue-areas. That is,
    there has been an intensification and extensification of the linkages
    between the financial sector and the provision of environmental goods
    and services. Whether it is the de-regulation of energy, the provision
    of urban services such as water and sewerage, or the restoration of
    wetland habitats, the rate, extent and conditions under which
    environmental goods and services are made available have been
    increasingly tied to the circulation and expansion of money capital in
    its various forms. Marketised modes of governance in areas such as CO2
    emissions have been increasingly linked to financial markets. The
    environment, in short, has been one of the primary arenas through which
    ‘financialisation’ – that is, the expansion of financial products and
    services into whole new domains – has played out in the last decade or
    so. National and international environmental policy has sought to
    marketise environmental services, privatise resource ownership, and
    introduce commercial principles into resource and environmental
    management. Central to these ‘neoliberal’ modes of environmental
    governance are the monetisation of environmental goods and services, the
    creation of new opportunities to produce and capture value by ‘making
    nature pay’, and an expanded role in nature conservation and the
    management of resources for private finance: in short, the
    ‘financialisation of nature’.

    The current financial crisis has brought these new modes of governance
    into question. The finance sector is currently under close scrutiny,
    within and without, heralding a period of regulatory reform within the
    sector as we look ahead. We are currently experiencing a moment of
    profound questioning about the financial sector, a questioning that has
    both an empirical component – how does it work, how can it be reformed –
    and a normative one – who should the finance sector be for? Those
    questions have particular relevance for a variety of different sectors
    and services. The conference will examine the promiscuity of finance
    (its capacity to enter a whole range of areas of environmental
    governance), and also the variable extent to which finance dominates
    over other concerns. In other words, we have a range of natural
    experiments in leaving the provision of environmental goods and services
    to the ‘logics’ money capital. The conference will open up a new
    research agenda that has been under-explored. To date, ecological
    modernisation has focused on production processes and, to a lesser
    extent, on consumption: it has not thematised finance capital. At the
    same time the literature on finance and financialisation has not paid
    much attention to environment, except perhaps in regard to thinking
    about the blockages/obstacles to financialisation. The questions the
    conference will address include the following:

  • How, to what extent and in what ways has money capital has come to drive environmental outcomes in different economic and social sectors?

  • What are the implications of financial crisis for these modes of market-led environmental governance?

  • What role can and should the financial sector play in the provision of
    environmental goods?

  • What are the implications for global justice and environmental
    sustainability of different financial regimes in environmental governance?


  • Confirmed speakers at the conference include:
    Ulrich Brand (University of Vienna), Patrick Bond (Centre for Civil Society, Durban), Larry Lohmann (Cornerhouse), Joan Martínez Alier (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Sam Randalls (University College London), Leonardo Sakamoto (Member of Brazilian Comission for the Eradication of Slave Labour and NGO Repórter Brasil), Christian Zeller (University of Salzburg)

    www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk



    Conference Program

    Thursday, 15 April 2010

    10:30 Welcome and Registration

    11:00 Introduction – Erik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester

    11:30 Debates on Economic Valuation and Payment for Environmental Services - Joan Martinez Allier, Autonomous University of Barcelona

    12:30 Lunch

    13:30 Carbon trading, new enclosures and eco-social contestation - Patrick Bond, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

    14:30 The Financialisation of the 'Good Environment' and 'Good Environmental Citizen' – Samuel Randalls, University College London

    15:30 Coffee

    16:00 The Domination of Finance capital over Nature - Claude Serfati, University of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

    17:00 Discussion

    17:30 Close

    Friday, 16 April 2010

    10:00 The Role of Finance in the Ambiguous Post-Neoliberalising of Nature: A Research Program for the Agro-fuels Project -
    Ulrich Brand, University of Vienna

    11:00 Sugarcane in Brazil: Finance capital, Slave Labour and Deforestation
    Leonardo Sakamoto, Brazilian Comission for the Eradication of Slave Labour and NGO Repórter Brasil -

    12:00 Carbon Markets and Climate Change Larry Lohman, The Corner House

    13:00 Lunch

    13:30 Carbon Emissions as New Fields for (Finance) Capital - Christian Zeller, University of Salzburg

    14:30 Processes of Exchange in the Carbon Credit Industry – John Broderick, University of Manchester

    15:30 Coffee

    15.45 Round Table: Financialisation of the Environment: What Governance?

    17:00 Close


    Patrick Bond speaks on climate debt, 5 May
    Climate Debt Owed to Africa:
    What to Demand and How to Collect?


    by Patrick Bond, Director, Centre for Civil Society and
    Senior Professor, School of Development Studies
    University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
    For presentation to the Economic Justice Network
    Post Copenhagen Climate Justice Conference, 5 May 2010, Johannesburg


    Conference Programme



    North Should Pay South Reparations for Climate Change
    Stanley Kwenda (IPS) 14 May 2010

    The North should pay reparations to the South for the effects of climate change.

    This is the position of Professor Patrick Bond arguing the case for
    ecological compensation that he believes the North owes to the South for
    causing climate change.

    He told IPS that, once a climate obligation debt is established, it’s a
    simple question of how the funds should be delivered. Bond is director
    of the University of Kwazulu Natal’s Centre for Civic Society (CCS) in
    Durban, South Africa.

    The CCS works with academics, researchers, civic society organisations
    and grassroots organisations to find solutions to societal problems.

    Citing a pilot project where Germany is paying reparations to a
    community in Namibia, Bond said the reparations should be paid directly
    to women because they suffer the burden of looking after the family and
    therefore of climate change. Men often choose to squander whatever
    little money is left or made available to the family.

    Under the pilot project, the German government is paying people living
    in a community in northern Namibia monthly allowances as compensation
    for the privations of the colonial period when Germany controlled the
    territory.

    Bond's view was echoed at the climate justice conference where he was
    speaking. It was hosted by the Economic Justice Network (EJN) of the
    Fellowship of Christian Councils in Southern Africa (FOCCISA) on May 5‑6
    in Johannesburg. The Christian Councils are church‑based organisations
    that work in the southern African region to solve societal problems such
    as climate change.

    EJN specifically works to further economic justice in Southern African
    Development Community (SADC) countries.

    We are experiencing unusual drop in crop yields in many LDCs in SADC
    which cannot be ascribed to anything other than climate change, Mithika
    Mwenda, coordinator of the Nairobi‑based Pan African Climate Justice
    Alliance (PACJA), told IPS. PACJA works to promote sustainable
    development and environmental justice.

    Another example is Mozambique which has suffered from either floods or
    periodic droughts caused by little rain since 2001. As a result, its
    government has been forced to spend money to bail out struggling
    citizens and to finance adaptation strategies rather than development
    initiatives.

    We can’t blame the governments because the shift away from, for example
    rain‑fed agriculture, costs huge sums. That is where we call upon the
    international community which caused climate change to come to the
    party, said Mwenda.

    Regarding the recurring floods in Mozambique, Bond said, we expect to
    see more of these. Shrinking coastlines cause the physical displacement
    of people, typically the poor and most vulnerable. In this case it would
    be women and peasant farmers (frequently the same people) who are on the
    frontline because they lack the capacity to adapt.

    In Zambia poor people face more than just the effects of climate change
    but also have to deal with a government in denial. We are experiencing
    floods even in (the capital) Lusaka but the government has deaf ears.
    They claim that the floods are caused by bad drainage systems, George
    Chibwana, advocacy officer of the Zambia Christian Council (ZCC), told IPS.

    In all this, women suffer the most because traditionally they are the
    ones who take care of the children, ensure that food is available and
    prepared for the family, till the land and are often the ones to gather
    firewood, said Chibwana.

    Apart from this, cholera is on the rise and there is also a significant
    rise in malaria which has always been the number one killer disease in
    Zambia, he added.

    Christian Aid estimates that 182 million people in sub‑Saharan African
    countries, where three quarters of the world’s LDCs are located, could
    die of diseases directly attributable to climate change by the end of
    this century.

    In Zimbabwe, a country which has registered negative economic growth for
    the past 10 years, effects of climate change are a new threat to an
    otherwise overburdened population. For the past five years, the
    country’s low‑lying areas, such as the Lowveld, Zambezi Valley,
    Muzarabani and those areas close to Mozambique, have witnessed recurring
    floods.

    This has forced many communities to move to higher ground and then
    losing their pastoral and agricultural land and assets in the form of
    livestock and crops.

    Recent events in the SADC region, such as poor rains, have resulted in
    low yield harvests in countries such as Malawi, Swaziland, Zambia,
    Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

    Michelle Pressend, coordinator of the Cape Town‑based Trade Strategy
    Group (TSG), explained to IPS that poverty goes hand in hand with
    reliance on natural resources, which are often depleted by climate
    change effects. The TSG is an informal network of trade activists
    interested in developing strategies for orienting trade towards
    sustainable development.

    According to a PACJA’s 2009 climate change report, titled The Economic
    Cost of Climate Change in Africa, climate change will combine with
    social, economic and environmental factors to exacerbate Africa’s
    vulnerabilities in the future, including water, food security, diseases,
    conflict and degradation of natural resources. (END)

    Patrick Bond at Clark University 8 April 2010

    Patrick Bond speaks on Development, Environment and Social Struggle at
    Clark University, 8 April

    10.25‑11.30am: Development Policy class, Geog104:
    RDP, GEAR and South African Development Policy”

    12.00 noon “Carbon Trading: A Critique” and “Dennis Brutus: A Tribute”

    3pm Worcester State College
    Dennis Brutus Memorial


    Global Day of Protest Against Proposed World Bank Loan for Coal 7 April 2010

    When: Wednesday, April 7th, 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
    Where: The park across from World Bank headquarters (1818 H Street NW).
    Who: Friends of the Earth‑US, Africa Action, Avaaz and 350.org

    CONTACT: Michael Stulman, Africa Action, (202) 546‑7961,
    michael.stulman@africaaction.org
    Kelly Trout, Friends of the Earth‑US, (202) 222‑0722, ktrout@foe.org
    www.africaaction.org

    Washington, DC ‑ The World Bank is scheduled to vote April 8 on whether
    to approve a highly controversial $3.75 billion loan that would help
    South African utility company Eskom build one of the largest and
    dirtiest coal‑fired power plants in the world. The Eskom loan flies in
    the face of the World Bank’s claims of alleviating poverty and
    supporting sustainable development.

    A global campaign against the World Bank and Eskom has been endorsed by
    hundreds of organizations that represent millions of concerned citizens,
    community, environmental, labor and academic constituencies, in South
    Africa, the rest of the African continent and the world at large.

    The protest comes just one day after residents located in the Waterberg
    area of South Africa’s Limpopo Province filed a complaint with the World
    Bank’s independent complaint body, the Inspection Panel. For more
    information, click here.

    What: “World Bankers” wearing black suits and flaunting sooty faces and
    medical masks will converge around large smoke stacks and distribute
    “coal dollars” to the public and World Bank employees, which will have
    information about the loan and why the Bank should vote “no.”

    More than 10,000 petition signatures from South Africans urging the
    World Bank to reject this dirty coal loan will also be presented via a
    giant voided check.


    'Climate Politics or Carbon Trading?: The Story of Cap and Trade' 6 April 2010



    CLIMATE POLITICS OR CARBON TRADING?
    The Story of Cap and Trade

    Film screening and discussion with Patrick Bond


    Where: City University of New York Graduate Centre, Center for Politics, Culture and Place, THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS * CUNY GRADUATE CENTER * 365 Fifth Avenue @ 34th Street
    Room C198,
    When:April 6, 6:30‑9pm

    The Story of Cap and Trade (http://www.storyofcapandtrade.org, featuring Annie Leonard), launched on December 1, 2009 and was seen 400,000 times before the end of the (failed) Copenhagen Climate Summit. The nine-minute film helped open a global and US debate about the core modus operandi for top-down climate governance: commodification of the air. Patrick Bond, an advisor to the film, will address social, spatial and temporal features of climate politics in an era of fading financialization but durable neoliberalism.

    PATRICK BOND is senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in Durban, South Africa, where since 2004 he has directed the Centre for Civil Society: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za. He has written or edited numerous books including Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society (2009); and Looting Africa (2006). He was a founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice and is active in Climate Justice Now!’s South Africa branch.

    Moderated by ASHLEY DAWSON, Faculty Fellow, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics


    Seminar: Patrick Bond on South African political economy, 5 April 2010

    Seminar: South African Urban Protest and Political Economy ahead of the
    2010 World Cup
    Place: New York University Department of Sociology, 295 Lafayette St.,
    4th Floor
    Date: Monday, April 5
    Time: 6:30‑8pm

    What is the basis for apparently endless protests in South Africa's
    cities, ranging from radical social movements to xenophobic eruptions?
    Given worsening urban poverty, massive unemployment and rising
    inequality, will deep‑rooted economic contradictions be amplified by the
    World Cup in June‑July 2010, and can the state keep a lid on social
    unrest? Patrick Bond presents a paper on the political economy of urban
    crisis and resistance.

    Patrick Bond is senior professor at the University of KwaZulu‑Natal
    School of Development Studies in Durban, South Africa, where since 2004
    he has directed the Centre for Civil Society. His work presently covers
    environment (energy, water and climate change), economic crisis, social
    mobilization, public policy and geopolitics. Amongst fifteen authored or
    coedited books are: Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society
    (2009); Looting Africa (2006); Talk Left, Walk Right (2006); and Elite
    Transition (2005). Patrick earned his doctorate in economic geography
    under the supervision of David Harvey at Johns Hopkins in 1993. He was
    born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1961 and has lived in South Africa
    since 1990.



    South Africa’s bubble meets boiling urban social protest
    By Patrick Bond

    As the June‑July 2010 World Cup draws attention to South Africa, the
    country’s poor and working‑class people will continue protesting at what
    is now amongst the highest rates per person in the world. Since 2005,
    the police have conservatively measured an annual average of more than
    8000 ‘Gatherings Act’ incidents by an angry urban populace unintimidated
    by the year‑old government of Jacob Zuma (Freedom of Expression
    Institute 2009). In part the anger reflects the distorted character of
    ‘growth’ that South Africa has witnessed after adopting neoliberal
    macroeconomic and microdevelopment policies after apartheid ended in
    1994, and the logical resistance to commodification and of life (Polanyi
    1957) and rising inequality playing out in the country’s slums. The
    impact of the ongoing global/national economic crisis amplifies and
    extends the existing, inherited contradictions. Social and labour
    movements whose goals have been somewhat localist and corporatist,
    respectively, may have to unite with environmentalists to pose much more
    radical ways forwards in this context, although labour/communist
    influence within the ruling African National Congress makes it difficult
    for a united left front to emerge in civil society in the short or even
    medium term.

    A post‑apartheid urban cauldron of capitalist contradictions
    As just one reflection of extreme uneven development, South Africa’s
    cities have hosted the world’s most speculative residential real estate
    bubble, with an inflation‑adjusted price rise of 389% from 1997‑2008,
    more than double the second biggest bubble, Ireland’s at 193%, according
    to The Economist (20 March 2009), with Spain, France and Britain also
    above 150%. (The US Case‑Shiller national index was only 66% over the
    same period.) Although there were many more houses built annually with
    state subsidies in the post‑apartheid period for lower‑income people,
    compared to the last decade of apartheid, World Bank advice in 1994
    meant that these were typically half as large, and constructed with
    flimsier materials than during apartheid; located even further from jobs
    and community amenities; characterized by disconnections of water and
    electricity; with lower‑grade state services including rare rubbish
    collection, inhumane sanitation, dirt roads and inadequate storm‑water
    drainage (Bond 2005).

    In most provinces, the majority of the Gatherings Act incidents were
    ‘service delivery protests’ over low‑quality provision and the rising
    cost of water, sanitation and electricity (Freedom of Expression
    Institute 2009). Even after ‘Free Basic Services’ – a tokenistic 6000
    liters per household per month of water and 50 kWh of electricity (with
    small increases anticipated in 2010) ‑ were provided, the sharply convex
    shape of water/electricity tariffs meant the rise in the second block of
    consumption had the impact of raising the entire amount, resulting in
    higher non‑payment rates, higher disconnection levels (1.5 million/year
    for water, according to officials) and lower consumption levels by poor
    people (Bond and Dugard 2008).

    How did this happen, in a society that boasted one of the world’s
    greatest urban social movements during the 1980s (Seekings 2000,
    Mayekiso 1996), which in turn generated a powerful urban reform project
    in the early 1990s, culminating in an African National Congress (ANC)
    1994 campaign platform ‑ the ‘Reconstruction and Development Programme’
    ‑ which had insisted upon various forms of decommodified real estate,
    especially housing finance? It turns out that these promises were
    another case of ‘talk left, walk right’, because notwithstanding a
    housing minister ‑ Joe Slovo ‑ who was also chair of the SA Communist
    Party at the time (just prior to his death due to cancer in early 1995),
    the December 1994 Housing White Paper set as a main task restoring ‘the
    fundamental pre condition for attracting [private] investment, which is
    that housing must be provided within a normalized market’. In practice
    this entailed huge concessions to banks, alongside a drive to
    commercialize municipal utilities (Bond 2000).

    This was not merely the fault of a dying Slovo and his director‑general,
    Billy Cobbett (subsequently director of the World Bank’s Cities
    Alliance), for the dye was cast when neoliberalism was adopted in the
    early 1990s by the late apartheid regime. The period was marked by
    several policy shifts away from 1980s‑era sanctions‑induced dirigisme
    carried out by ‘verligte’ (enlightened) Afrikaner ‘econocrats’ in
    Pretoria, once the influence of ‘securocrats’ faded and the power of
    white English‑speaking business rose during the 1990‑94 negotiations.
    That period included South Africa’s longest depression (1989‑93) and
    required Nelson Mandela’s ANC to periodically demobilize protest, until
    in late 1993 the final touches were put on the ‘elite transition’ to
    democracy (Bond 2005).

    In the meantime, long‑standing ANC promises to nationalize the banks,
    mines and monopoly capital were dropped; Mandela agreed to repay $25
    billion of inherited apartheid‑era foreign debt; the central bank was
    granted formal independence in an interim constitution; South Africa
    joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on disadvantageous
    terms; and the International Monetary Fund provided a $850 million loan
    with standard Washington Consensus conditionality. Soon after the first
    free and fair democratic elections, won overwhelmingly by the ANC,
    privatization began in earnest; financial liberalization took the form
    of relaxed exchange controls; and interest rates were raised to a record
    high (often double‑digit after inflation is discounted). By 1996 a
    neoliberal macroeconomic policy was formally adopted and from 1998‑2001,
    the ANC government granted permission to South Africa’s biggest
    companies to move their financial headquarters and primary stock market
    listings to London (Bond 2005).

    The basis for sustaining the subsequent property and financial bubble
    came from two sources: residual exchange controls which limit
    institutional investors to 15% offshore investments and which still
    restrict offshore wealth transfers by local elites; and a false sense of
    confidence in macroeconomic management. The oft‑repeated notion is that
    under Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, ‘macroeconomic stability’ was
    achieved since apartheid ended in 1994. Yet no emerging market had as
    many currency crashes (15% in nominal terms) over that period: SA’s were
    in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2006 and 2008. By early 2009, The Economist (25
    February 2009) ranked South Africa as the most ‘risky’ of 17 emerging
    markets, in large part because corporate/white power had generated an
    enormous balance of payments deficit thanks to outflows of
    profits/dividends to London/Melbourne financial headquarters.

    Moreover, consumer credit had drawn in East Asian imports at a rate
    greater than SA exports even during the 2002‑08 commodity price bubble.
    If there was a factor most responsible for the 5% GDP growth recorded
    during most of the 2000s, by all accounts, it was consumer credit
    expansion, with household debt to disposable income ratios soaring from
    50% to 80% from 2005‑08, while at the same time overall bank lending
    rose from 100% to 135% of GDP. But this overexposure began to become an
    albatross, with non‑performing loans rising from 2007 by 80% on credit
    cards and 100% on mortgages compared to the year before, and full credit
    defaults as a percentage of bank net interest income rising from 30% at
    the outset of 2008 to 55% by year’s end (SARB 2009).

    Overaccumulation, financialization and social inequality
    In early 2009 at the World Social Forum, David Harvey (2009) specified
    how these processes of financial‑speculative accumulation intersect with
    class struggles in cities:

    Since 1970 there have been 378 financial crises in the world.
    Between 1945 and 1970 there were only 56 financial crises… My guess
    is that half of the financial crises over the last 30 years are
    urban property based… Since 1970, more and more money has gone into
    financial assets and when the capitalist class starts buying assets
    the value of the assets increases. So they start to make money out
    of the increase in the value of their assets. So property prices go
    up and up and up… So more and more low income people were brought
    into the debt environment. But then about two years ago property
    prices started to come down. The gap between what working class
    people could afford and what the debt was too big. Suddenly you had
    a foreclosure wave going through many American cities. But as
    usually happens with something of this kind there is an uneven
    geographical development of that wave.

    ‘Overaccumulation of capital’ at the global scale is the root process
    behind the recent crisis, coming on the heels of a period of 35 years of
    world capitalist stagnation, extreme financial volatility and
    internecine competition that has had ruinous impacts (Foster and Magdoff
    2009). The huge bubble in commodities ‑ petroleum, minerals, cash crops,
    land ‑ disguised how much countries like South Africa stood exposed, and
    indeed the early 2000s witnessed increasing optimism that the late 1990s
    emerging markets currency crises could be overcome within the context of
    the system. Moreover, even before the resources boom, by 2001 the rate
    of profit for large South African capital was restored from an earlier
    downturn from the 1970s‑90s, to ninth highest amongst the world’s major
    national economies (far ahead of the US and China), according to one
    British government study (Citron and Walton 2002).

    Uneven geographical development is the basis for race/class segregation
    in South Africa’s extraordinary built environment. In spite of greater
    access to housing mortgage bonds and other forms of consumer credit for
    working‑class people during the 2000s, the overarching process of
    property speculation amplified that unevenness. In the US, leading
    mainstream economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (2009) have said
    much the same, though they root the crisis in a distorted psychology of
    individual investors (rather than in overaccumulated capital as does
    Harvey):

    [Speculative financial] events ‑ in particular the recent housing
    bubble ‑ are driven by what John Maynard Keynes called animal
    spirits, a naïve optimism at the intersection of overconfidence,
    corruption, storytelling, and money illusion (another Keynesian
    term, for views warped by currency’s nominal value instead of its
    purchasing value). For some reason, in the late 1990s and early
    2000s, the idea that homes and apartments were spectacular
    investments gained a stronghold in the public imagination in the
    United States, and in many other countries as well… Home prices have
    fallen before. For instance, land prices fell 68 percent in real
    terms in major Japanese cities from 1991 to 2006. But investors
    didn’t want to hear that sort of talk… For evidence of the effect of
    subprime lenders on the housing boom of the 2000s, consider that
    low‑price homes appreciated faster than high‑price homes. And then
    after 2006, when prices fell, the prices of low‑price homes fell
    faster.

    The South African version is still playing itself out, because after the
    late 2004 peak year‑on‑year 30% increase in the most cited House Price
    Index (Amalgamated Banks of South Africa 2009), five years later there
    were steady declines in the year‑on‑year average house price at more
    than 10% each month during 2009 (there is insufficient data available on
    the distributional impact of a worsening real estate crisis).

    Moreover, although the decline in corporate tax revenue drove the budget
    deficit to a near‑record 7.6% of GDP estimated for 2009 and more than 7%
    in 2010, South Africa was not pursuing a classical Keynesian strategy.
    The state was simply carrying through massive construction projects
    contracted earlier. Anticipated increases in state spending based upon
    ruling party promises – especially for job creation (500,000 new jobs
    were promised but in reality 2009 would see a million job losses) and
    the launch of a National Health Insurance – were deferred by the new
    finance minister, Pravin Gordhan (2009), in his maiden budget speech in
    October 2009 and the follow‑up in February 2010.

    The reality, though, was that high corporate profits were not a
    harbinger of sustainable economic development in South Africa, as a
    result of persistent deep‑rooted contradictions (Bond 2009, Republic of
    South Africa Department of Trade and Industry 2009, Legassick 2009,
    Loewald 2009):

    • with respect to stability, the value of the rand in fact crashed
    (against a basket of trading currencies) by more than 15% in real
    effective terms in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2006 and 2008, the worst record of
    any major economy, which in turn reflects how vulnerable SA became to
    international financial markets thanks to steady exchange control
    liberalization (26 separate loosenings of currency controls) starting in
    1995;

    • SA witnessed GDP growth during the 2000s, but this does not take into
    account the depletion of non‑renewable resources ‑ if this factor plus
    pollution were considered, SA would have a net negative per person rate
    of national wealth accumulation (of at least US$ 2 per year), according
    to even the World Bank (2006, 66);

    • SA’s economy became much more oriented to profit‑taking from financial
    markets than production of real products, in part because of extremely
    high real interest rates;

    • the two most successful major sectors from 1994‑2004 were
    communications (12.2 per cent growth per year) and finance (7.6 per
    cent) while labor‑intensive sectors such as textiles, footwear and gold
    mining shrunk by 1‑5 per cent per year, and overall, manufacturing as a
    percentage of GDP also declined;

    • the Gini coefficient measuring inequality rose during the
    post‑apartheid period, with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa
    (2009 citing Statistics South Africa) measuring the increase from 0.56
    in 1995 to 0.73 in 2006, while Bhorat, van der Westhuizen and Jacobs
    (2009, 80) calculated a rise from 0.64 to 0.69, and the SA Presidency
    (2008, 96) conceded an increase from 0.67 to 0.70 over nearly the same
    period;

    • black households lost 1.8% of their income from 1995‑2005, while white
    households gained 40.5% (Bhorat et al 2009, 8);

    • unemployment doubled to a rate of around 40% at peak (if those who
    have given up looking for work are counted, around 25% otherwise) ‑ but
    state figures underestimate the problem, given that the official
    definition of employment includes such work as ‘begging’ and ‘hunting
    wild animals for food’ and ‘growing own food’;

    • overall, the problem of ‘capital strike’ ‑ large‑scale firms’ failure
    to invest ‑ continues, as gross fixed capital formation hovered around
    15‑17 per cent from 1994‑2004, hardly enough to cover wear‑and‑tear on
    equipment;

    • businesses did invest their SA profits, but not mainly in SA: dating
    from the time of political and economic liberalization, most of the
    largest Johannesburg Stock Exchange firms ‑ Anglo American, DeBeers, Old
    Mutual, Investec, SA Breweries, Liberty Life, Gencor (now the core of
    BHP Billiton), Didata, Mondi and others ‑ shifted their funding flows
    and even their primary share listings to overseas stock markets mainly
    in 2000‑01;

    • the outflow of profits and dividends due these firms is one of two
    crucial reasons SA’s current account deficit has soared to amongst the
    highest in the world (in mid‑2008 exceeded only by New Zealand) and is
    hence a major danger in the event of currency instability, as was
    Thailand’s (around 5 per cent) in mid‑1997;

    • the other cause of the current account deficit is the negative trade
    balance during most of the recent period, which can be blamed upon a
    vast inflow of imports after trade liberalization, which export growth
    could not keep up with;

    • another reason for capital strike is SA’s sustained overproduction
    problem in existing (highly‑monopolized) industry, as manufacturing
    capacity utilization fell substantially from the 1970s to the early
    2000s; and

    • corporate profits avoided reinvestment in plant, equipment and
    factories, and instead sought returns from speculative real estate and
    the Johannesburg Stock Exchange: there was a 50 per cent increase in
    share prices during the first half of the 2000s, and the property boom
    was unprecedented.

    From burst bubbles to economic policy struggles
    With this sort of fragile economic growth, subject to extreme capital
    flight, it is no surprise that in the second week of October 2008, the
    Johannesburg stock market crashed 10 per cent (on the worst day, shares
    worth US$ 35 billion went up in smoke) and the currency declined by 9
    per cent, while the second week witnessed a further 10 per cent crash.
    Even the apparent death of South Africa’s neoliberal project in
    September 2008, personified by former president Thabo Mbeki, whose
    pro‑corporate managerialism was one reason for an unceremonious removal
    from power, is misleading. The ‘populist’ ruling party leader Jacob Zuma
    was intent on not only retaining Manuel as long as possible but
    preparing a collision course with his primary internal support base,
    trade unionists and communists. As Zuma put it to the American Chamber
    of Commerce in November 2008, ‘We are proud of the fiscal discipline,
    sound macroeconomic management and general manner in which the economy has been managed. That calls for continuity’ (Chilwane 2008).

    A few days earlier, Manuel was asked by The Financial Times (Lapper and
    Burgis 2008) about the impact of the world crisis on South Africa, and
    told his constituents to tighten their belts:

    We need to disabuse people of the notion that we will have a mighty
    powerful developmental state capable of planning and creating all
    manner of employment. It may have been on the horizon in 1994 [when
    the governing African National Congress first came to office] but it
    could not be delivered now. The next period is likely to see a lot
    more competitiveness in the global economy. As consumer demand falls
    off there will be a huge battle between firms and countries to
    secure access to markets.

    At the same time, the International Monetary Fund’s Article 4
    consultation with South Africa confirmed the external pressures.
    Ironically, the institution’s managing director, Dominique Strauss‑Kahn
    (2008), proclaimed the same month that the IMF now supported a 2% budget
    stimulus ‘everywhere where it’s possible. Everywhere were you have some
    room concerning debt sustainability. Everywhere where inflation is low
    enough not to risk having some kind of return of inflation, this effort
    has to be made’. Pretoria should have qualified for such a Keynesian
    seal of approval, but no, according to IMF (2008, 3‑12) staff who
    prepared the annual Article IV Consultation paper, Manuel should instead:

    • run a budget surplus, i.e., ‘an increase in public saving so as to
    bring the structural public sector borrowing requirement to zero over
    the next few years’, but bearing in mind that ‘cuts in the corporate
    income tax could boost growth’;

    • adopt privatization for ‘infrastructure and social needs’, including
    electricity and transport by ‘relying more widely on public‑private
    partnerships’;

    • maintain existing inflation‑targeting (i.e. in the 3‑6% target range,
    although inflation was more than 12% in 2008) and ‘raise interest rates
    further if supply shocks resume or domestic demand pressures do not
    dampen’;

    • ‘open the economy to greater international competition’ by removing
    protections against international economic volatility, especially
    ‘further liberalization and simplification of the trade regime’; and

    • remove worker rights in labor markets, including ‘backward‑looking
    wage indexation’ to protect against inflation.

    To be sure, Manuel did not follow this advice; the Alliance left (the SA
    Communist Party and Congress of SA Trade Unions) is powerful enough to
    prevent it if he tried any one of the five, especially just before a
    national election in 2009. Indeed, just as in the West, the SA central
    bank came under heavy pressure to reduce interest rates ‑ by 5% from
    late 2008 through mid‑2009 ‑ and the real prime rate fell to the 2%
    range, down from a peak of 15% a decade earlier.

    Surprisingly, the IMF’s 2009 Article IV agreement had a very different
    tone, conceding that South Africa’s strategy was acceptable:

    The expansionary fiscal stance is appropriate given the weak
    economic outlook, and strikes the right balance between supporting
    demand and preserving medium‑term sustainability. If output turns
    out weaker than staff projects, the automatic stabilizers should be
    allowed to operate in 2009/10 and 2010/11… The monetary policy
    stance has been appropriate. The scope for easing may have been
    exhausted if inflation is to be brought within the target range by
    end‑2010, as the authorities intend (IMF 2009, 1).

    Although as late as February 2009, Manuel claimed such moves would
    prevent a recession, he was proven badly wrong in May when government
    data showed a 6.4% quarterly GDP decline, the worst since 1984 during
    anti‑apartheid protests, the gold price’s plummet and the tightening of
    sanctions. Even in late 2008 it was apparent that labor would suffer
    vast retrenchments, with a 67% reduction in average work hours per
    factory worker, the worst decline since 1970. The economy is likely to
    have shed a million jobs in 2009, especially in manufacturing and
    mining. January 2009 alone witnessed a 36% crash in new car sales and
    50% production cut, the worst ever recorded, according to the National
    Association of Auto Manufacturers. The anticipated rise in port activity
    has also reversed, with a 29% annualized fall in early 2009.

    Repossessed houses increased by 52% in early 2009 from a year earlier.
    The first quarter 2009 crash was, however, mitigated by the construction
    industry, which grew 9.4% thanks to white elephant state infrastructural
    investments: 2010 World Cup stadiums (hugely over budget and not
    anticipated to cover operating costs after the soccer matches), an elite
    rapid train service for Johannesburg‑Pretoria, a failing albeit
    generously subsidized industrial complex (Coega),
    port/airport/road/pipeline expansions, a vast new coal‑fired electricity
    generator, and mega‑dams. But these big projects aside, the number of
    building plans registered in 2008 was already 40% lower than in 2007.

    Strategic implications for social resistance and the ‘right to the city’
    What the contraction, relatively durable power relationships and
    economic policy continuity together imply, is that social protests will
    need to intensify and ratchet up to force concessions that help remake
    South Africa’s built environment. As Harvey (2009) puts it, ‘My argument
    is that if this crisis is basically a crisis of urbanization then the
    solution should be urbanization of a different sort and this is where
    the struggle for the right to the city becomes crucial because we have
    the opportunity to do something different.’

    One of the first strategies, however, is defense. Memories remain of the
    prior downturn in South Africa’s Kuznets Cycle of roughly 15‑year ups
    and downs in real estate prices. The resulting negative equity generated
    early‑1990s housing ‘bonds boycotts’ in South Africa’s black townships,
    in the wake of the granting of 200,000 mortgage bonds to first‑time
    black borrowers during the late 1980s, once apartheid urban restrictions
    were eased. The long 1989‑93 recession left 500,000 freshly unemployed
    workers and their families unable to pay for housing. This in turn
    helped generate a collective refusal to repay housing bonds until
    certain conditions were met. The tactic moved from the site of the
    Uitenhage Volkswagen auto strike in the Eastern Cape to the Johannesburg
    area in 1990, as a consequence of two factors: shoddy housing
    construction (for which the homebuyers had no other means of recourse
    than boycotting the housing bond) and the rise in interest rates from
    12.5 per cent (‑6 per cent in real terms) in 1988 to 21 per cent (+7 per
    cent in real terms) in late 1989, which in most cases doubled monthly
    bond repayments (Bond 2000).

    As a result of the resistance, township housing foreclosures which could
    not be consummated due to refusal of the defaulting borrowers (supported
    by the community) to vacate their houses, and the leading financier’s
    US$700 million black housing bond exposure in September 1992 was the
    reason that its holding company (Nedcor) lost 20 per cent of its
    Johannesburg Stock Exchange share value (in excess of US$150 million
    lost) in a single week, following a threat of a national bond boycott
    from the national civic organization. Locally, if a bank did bring in a
    sheriff to foreclose and evict defaulters, it was not uncommon for a
    street committee of activists to burn the house down before the new
    owners completed the purchase and moved in. Such power, in turn, allowed
    both the national and local civic associations to negotiate concessions
    from the banks (Mayekiso 1996).

    However, there are few links between the early 1990s civics which used
    these micro‑Polanyian tactics successfully, and the 2000s generation of
    ‘new social movements’ which shifted to decommodification of water and
    electricity through illegal reconnections (Desai 2002). The differences
    partly reflect how little of the late 2000s mobilizing opportunities
    came from formal sector housing, and instead related to higher utility
    bills or forced removals of shack settlements. Still, there are profound
    lessons from the recent upsurge of social activism for resistance not
    only to the implications of world capitalist crisis in South Africa, but
    elsewhere.

    The lessons come from deglobalization and decommodification strategies
    used to acquire basic needs goods, as exemplified in South Africa by the
    national Treatment Action Campaign and Johannesburg Anti‑Privatization
    Forum which have won, respectively, antiretroviral medicines needed to
    fight AIDS and publicly‑provided water (Bond 2006). The drugs are now
    made locally in Africa ‑ in Johannesburg, Kampala, Harare, and so on ‑
    and on a generic not a branded basis, and generally provided free of
    charge, a great advance upon the US$ 15,000/patient/year cost of branded
    AIDS medicines a decade earlier (in South Africa, half a million people
    receive them).

    The water in Johannesburg is now produced and distributed by public
    agencies (Suez was sent back to Paris after its controversial 2001‑06
    protest‑ridden management of municipal water). In April 2008 a major
    constitutional lawsuit in the High Court resulted in a doubling of free
    water to 50 litres per person per day and the prohibition of pre‑payment
    water meters (Bond and Dugard 2008), but the Constitutional Court
    reversed this decision in September 2009 on grounds that judges should
    not make such detailed policy, leading activists to commit to illegal
    reconnections if required (Coalition Against Water Privatization 2009).

    The ability of social movements such as in the health, water and housing
    sectors to win major concessions from the capitalist state’s courts
    under conditions of crisis is hotly contested, and will have further
    implications for movement strategies in the months ahead. Huchzermeyer
    (2009, 3‑4) argues that the Constitution mandates ‘an equal right to the
    city’. However,

    It was only in 2000 that the Bill of Rights was evoked by a
    marginalized and violated urban community (represented by Irene
    Grootboom) in the Constitutional Court. In what was received as a
    landmark ruling, the Court interfered with the Executive,
    instructing the Ministry of Housing to amend its housing policy to
    better cater for those living in intolerable conditions. It took 4
    further years for the policy changes to be adopted into housing
    policy. Chapters 12 and 13 were added to the national Housing Code:
    Housing in Emergency Circumstances and Upgrading of Informal
    Settlements. In the following 5 years, these two policies have not
    been properly implemented, if at all. Unnecessary violations have
    continued and marginalized communities have had to resort to the
    courts. However, the landscape has changed significantly. Whereas
    the Grootboom case involved an isolated community with only a loose
    network of support through the Legal Resources Centre which acted as
    ‘Friends of the Court’, today cases reach the Constitutional Court
    through social movements such as Landless People’s Movement, Inner
    City Tenant Forum, Abahlali base Mjondolo, Anti‑Privatization Forum
    and the Anti‑Eviction Campaign. These movements coordinate,
    exchange, and take an interest in one another’s legal struggles.

    Huchzermeyer (2009, 4) suggests this strategy fills a ‘gap in left
    thinking about the city (the gap derived from the Marxist ideology of
    nothing but a revolution)’ and that the ‘Right to the City’ movement
    articulated by Henry Lefebvre and David Harvey should include marginal
    gains through courts: ‘Urban Reform in this sense is a pragmatic
    commitment to gradual but radical change towards grassroots autonomy as
    a basis for equal rights.’ After all, ‘three components of the right to
    the city ‑ equal participation in decision‑making, equal access to and
    use of the city and equal access to basic services ‑ have all been
    brought before the Constitutional Court through a coalition between
    grassroots social movements and a sympathetic middle class


    Civil society tackles finance for global warming and energy underdevelopment, 4 April 2010


    Slide Show: Eskom & the World Bank Sowing the Seeds of Destruction

    Should the World Bank lend South Africa’s electricity company
    Eskom $3.75 billion to build the world’s fourth-largest coalfired
    power plant?

    Who wins and loses?
    Media statements, press coverage and commentary from
    15 February - May 2010

    STATEMENT FROM SA AND AFRICA CIVIL SOCIETY ON ESKOM’S PROPOSED $3.75 BILLION WORLD BANK LOAN.



  • Patrick Bond in Washington at Busboys&Poets Bookshop (5th & K Sts), 6pm

  • Patrick Bond in Boston v WB-Eskom loan, 9 April, noon - debate with Prof William Moomaw of Tufts University

  • Patrick Bond at Clark University, 8 April, noon - talk on climate politics

  • World Bank protest, 7 April, Washington

  • Patrick Bond seminar on climate politics, City Univ of NY, 6 April, 6:30pm

  • Patrick Bond at NYU on South African political economy, 5 April, 6:30pm

  • Patrick Bond in Berkeley, 4 April, 7pm



  • Trevor Ngwane at MARXISM 2010: Ideas to challenge capitalism, 1- 4 April 2010

    Date and Time: Thursday , 01 April 2010 - 6:30pm to Sunday 4 April - 7:00pm
    Location: University of Melbourne Student Union, Parkville (just north of the CBD)
    Contact Name:Tessie
    Contact Phone: 0410 861 093
    Contact Email: tickets@marxism2010.com
    Website: www.marxism2010.com

    Marxism 2010 is a 4 day conference hosted by Socialist Alternative over the Easter weekend.

    It will be bringing together hundreds of socialists and other left-wing activists from across Australia and the world. Marxism 2010 features international guest speakers from the US, Palestine, China, South Africa and elsewhere. But that is only a part of the event. There will be more than 60 sessions over the weekend, on topics ranging from radical history to the fight for women's and LGBTI liberation, imperialism and the Middle East, the global economic crisis and workers' struggles today.

    Some of the International speakers and special events that will be featured at this year's conference are:

    Renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker John Pilger.

    Sameh Akram Habeeb. Palestinian journalist based in Gaza and founder of the Palestinian Telegraph - one of the first websites and electronic resources to operate directly out of Gaza.

    Alyawarr spokesperson and leader Richard Downs, from Ampilatwatja community in the Northern Territory, who will speak on opposing the ongoing rollout of the NT Emergency Response (NTER) Measures and gather support for the community protest camp established in the middle of 2009 on his traditional country.

    Trevor Ngwane. Veteran anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee which led the fight against electricity and water cut-offs in South Africa's urban working class townships.

    Ashley Smith. Ashley Smith is an American Marxist activist, journalist and editor. He is an organizer for the International Socialist Organization. He is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and has written for numerous left-wing publications such as CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Socialist Worker, and ZNet.

    Ignatius Mahendra Kusumawardhana. Vice Chairperson of the International Department, Working Peoples Association. Has previously been involved in struggles against the Soeharto dictatorship and more recently involved in campaigns to defend working class living standards against Government attacks.

  • From the Lower East Side to the Warsaw Ghetto: the Jewish radical tradition, given by long term Socialist Janey Stone


  • Did Lenin lead to Stalin? A debate between Adrian Jones a lecturer in Russian history at LaTrobe University and Diane Fields from Socialist Alternative


  • How real was the threat of fascism in Australia during the 1930s? Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Sydney Andrew Moore


  • Amongst the 60 sessions we will be having over the weekend, we will be holding two specialty streams, including: The Marxist foundations Stream and Women, Sexuality and Oppression. These streams in particular are devoted to addressing some of the core questions to do with Marxist politics, for all those who are coming into contact with Marxist ideas for the first time or are wanting deepen their understanding of revolutionary politics.

    To find out more about these particular sessions or purchase tickets please click on the link marxism2010.com


    Patrick Bond at the Conference on the right to water, 29- 30 March 2010

    Maxwell School to host international conference on water rights

    Dates: March 29-30, 2010
    Locations:
    Monday March 29 – Maxwell Auditorium (4pm - 7pm)
    Tuesday March 30 – Maxwell Public Events Room (9am - 6pm)

    Fighting for the Right to the City: Discursive and Political Lessons from the Right to Water
    By Patrick Bond University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies and Centre for Civil Society, Durban, South Africa Presented to the Right to Water Conference 2010 Syracuse University, New York, 29 March 2010




    The Maxwell School will host an international conference on “The Right to Water” on March 29-30. Lectures and discussions on local, national and global struggles for the right to water in communities around the world will be delivered by leading figures from the academic, policy and activist communities. Speakers will include experts from Central New York, such as Onondaga Nation Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, as well as internationally renowned experts such as Patrick Bond from South Africa.

    According to SU geography professor Farhana Sultana, the conference chair and organizer, speakers will bring significant new insights into how to understand, recognize and apply a human right to water in differing geographical contexts. In recent years, struggles over the right to water have emerged as a focal point for political mobilization in a range of locations around the world.

    This conference will look at various strategic possibilities for ensuring equitable access to water worldwide, including: How important is the human right to water and how is it mobilized in different regions? How influential are international discourses on rights in shaping access to water? How do broader international discourses relate to historical struggles for local water rights? Specific lectures by national and international experts will focus on water rights, governance and struggles in a number of countries around the world, as well as on legal and philosophical perspectives on the right to water.

    The conference runs Monday, March 29, from 4-7 p.m. in Maxwell Auditorium and Tuesday, March 30, from 8:30 a.m.-6 p.m. in the Public Events Room, Room 220 in Eggers Hall. All sessions are free and open to the public, but registration via the conference website or in person at the event is requested. For more information about the conference, speakers and the full conference program, visit www.maxwell.syr.edu/waterconference.

    The conference has been generously supported by several sponsors across Syracuse University.

    For details, contact Sultana at (315) 443-5633.
    insidesu.syr.edu/2010/03/16/water-rights/



    Conference Programme

    [Monday, March 29, 2010
    Maxwell Auditorium, Maxwell School]


    4:00 PM Welcome Message: Mitchell B. Wallerstein, Dean of Maxwell School, Syracuse University, USA

    Introduction to Conference and to Speakers: Farhana Sultana, Assistant Professor of Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, USA

    4:30-6:00 PM Keynote Lectures in Plenary Session:
    David Getches, Dean, Law School, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA – “Water Rights: A Matter of Natural Law, International Law, or Property Law?”

    Bill Derman, Professor, Norwegian University of the Life Sciences, Norway – “The Right to Water in Africa: Some Considerations for the Future”

    Patrick Bond, Director of the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal , South Africa – “South Africa’s ‘rights culture’ of Water Consumption: Breaking out of the Liberal Box and into the Commons?”

    Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper, Onondaga Nation, NY, USA – “Indigenous Rights to Water in the USA”

    Darcey O’Callaghan, International Policy Coordinator, Food and Water Watch, USA – “Perspective from Practice: Current and Coming Trends in the Global Water Justice Movement”

    Anil Naidoo, Coordinator, Blue Planet Project, Canada – “The Human Right to Water: Exploring the Challenges, Opportunities and Implications for Water Justice”

    6:00-6:30 PM Question and Answer Session:
    Discussion Moderators:
    Farhana Sultana, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, USA
    Alex Loftus, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

    6:30-7:00 PM Closing Remarks - Farhana Sultana, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, USA



    Tuesday, March 30, 2010
    [Public Events Room, 220 Eggers Hall, Maxwell School]


    8:30 AM Opening Remarks and Introduction to Presenters:

    Farhana Sultana, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, USA
    Alex Loftus, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

    9:00-10:30 AM Paper Session 1 – Philosophical Perspectives

    Presenters:

    Jamie Linton, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, Queen's University, Canada – “The Human Right to What? Water, Rights, Humans, and the Relation of Things”

    Chad Staddon & Tom Appleby, Senior Lecturers in Geography and Law, University of the West of England, United Kingdom – “A Right to Water? Geographico- Legal Perspectives”

    Kyle Mitchell, PhD Candidate, University of Strathclyde, Scotland – “Liberal Democracy and the Contestation for Rights Over the Freshwater Commons: Reinvigorating the Question of Property Within the Political Economy of Freshwater”

    Philip P. Arnold, Professor, Department of Religion, Syracuse University, USA- “The Significance of Clean Water: A Haudenosaunee Perspective”

    Sarah J. Halvorson, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of Montana, USA – “The Right to Rename: Removing ‘Squaw’ from Montana’s Waterscape”

    Chair: Alex Loftus

    10:30-10:45 AM Break

    10:45–12:15 PM Paper Session 2 - Struggles

    Presenters:

    Ilaria Giglioli, Graduate Student, University of Toronto, Canada – “Water Politics in Palestine between Privatisation and Military/Strategic Expropriation”

    Krista Bywater, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, Grinnell College, USA – “‘Water for Life, Not for Profit’: Successful Anti-privatization Water Struggles in India”

    Malini Ranganathan, PhD Candidate, Energy and Resources Group, University of California at Berkeley, USA – “The Right to Water as the Right to the City: Spatial Politics and Citizenship Struggles at Bangalore’s Urban Periphery”

    Veronica Perera, Assistant Professor, Purchase College, State University of New York, USA – “Traveling Repertoires and Expanding Water Struggles in Latin America”

    Rocío Magaña, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, USA- “Criminalizing Water: The Predicament of Humanitarian Aid and Unauthorized Migration in the Sonoran Desert”

    Chair: Farhana Sultana

    12:15–1:15 PM Lunch Break

    1:15–2:45 PM Paper Session 3 - Governance

    Presenters:

    Jeremy Schmidt, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, University of Western Ontario, Canada – “Scarce or Insecure? The Changing Ethics of Global Water Governance”

    Cristy Clark, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia – “The Centrality of Participation to the Content of the Emerging Right to Water”

    Andrea Keessen & Marleen van Rijswick, Professors, Law Faculty, Utrecht University, The Netherlands – “The Distribution of Water Rights and Water Duties within River Basins in European Water Law”

    Daniel Marcovitch & Sylvain Rotillon, Vice President & Project Manager, Water National Comittee/ONEMA, Paris, France – “The right to water in France: a new preventive approach”

    Jack P. Manno, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, USA – “Who Has a Right to Great Lakes Water?”

    Chair: Alex Loftus

    2:45–3:00 PM Break

    3:00–4:30 PM Paper Session 4 - Legal Perspectives

    Presenters:

    Rachael Paschal Osborn, Executive Director, Center for Environmental Law & Policy, Washington, USA – “Columbia River Conflicts: Will Treaty Renegotiations Recognize the Right to Ecosystem Waters?”

    Imran Khalid & Sharon Moran, Graduate Student & Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, USA – “Ethical Foundations for Water Management: The Applicability of ‘Restorative Justice’ Ideas to Water Problems”

    Rachel Ordu Dan-Harry, Associate for Environmental Justice, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, USA – “Legislating the Right to Water in Africa: A Review of the Implementation of National Constitutions”

    Jacinta Ruru, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Otago, New Zealand – “The Indigenous Right to Water: the hot debate in New Zealand”

    Chair: Farhana Sultana

    4:30–4:45 PM Break

    4:45–6:00 PM Concluding Workshop Session

    Moderators: Farhana Sultana & Alex Loftus

    9:00 AM -6:00 PM Posters (All day in conference room)

    Joseph Holler, PhD Student, Department of Geography, University of Buffalo, USA - “Water Rights in the Coupled Human/Environment Systems of Mount Kilimanjaro”

    Lisa Seyfried, MA Student, Women’s Studies, George Washington University, USA – “Women, Water and Sustainable Solutions: A Feminist Theory Analysis of Sustainability”

    Peter Stein, BA Student, International Relations, Colgate University, USA – “A Thirst for Neo-Liberalization: The Causes and Consequences of Water Privatization in Cochabamba”

    Daniela Vizcarra, PhD Student, Department of Forest Resources, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, USA – “Water policy in Chile and the Southern Atacama Desert Situation”

    Flavia Rey de Castro Pastor, MA Student, Department of Geography, Syracuse University, USA – “Water Vulnerabilities: Climate Change and Campesino Rights in the Peruvian Andes”

    Full Programme in PDF format


    Trevor Ngwane seminar on activism and global campaigns, 26 March

    Date: Friday, March 26, 2010
    Time: 12:00pm ‑ 2:00pm
    Location: Valtiotieteellinen kirjasto (Helsingin yliopisto)
    Street: Unioninkatu 35
    City/Town: Helsinki, Finland

    The seminar focuses on roles of and relations between local activism and
    global campaigns in the context of poverty reduction and human rights.
    Two activist speakers from Kenya and South‑Africa reflect on their
    organizing experiences, and two academic researchers present their
    comments.

    Speakers:
  • Naomi Barasa Githii. Campaign co‑ordinator of Amnesty International
    Kenya, will talk about Amnesty's campaign to support slumdwellers in
    Nairobi.

  • Trevor Ngwane. Organiser of Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, also
    affiliated with University of KwaZulu/Natal, will talk about anti‑privatisation campaigns in South Africa.

  • Ruth Reitan, University of Miami, author of the books Global Activism (Routledge, 2007) and The Rise and Decline of an Alliance (Michigan State University Press, 1999)

  • Ranabir Samaddar, Calcutta Research Group, author of the books Politics of Autonomy (Sage, 2005) Politics of Dialogue (Ashgate, 2005).


  • The seminar is held in English and chaired by Frank Johansson, director of Amnesty International Finnish Section and Teivo Teivainen, professor of World Politics.

    The seminar is organized by Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research (University of Helsinki) and Amnesty International, Finnish Section.

    www.facebook.com


    Panel discussion: 'What is Arts and what is not?', March 25 2010

    Please join us for a lunch-time arts seminar

    Centre for Civil Society, UKZN & VANSA KZN Visual Arts Network of SA, KZN chapter Present

    “What is art and what is not?”


    Venue: The Centre for Civil Society, MTB 6th Floor Howard College Campus - UKZN.
    Date: March 25
    Time: 12h30-14h00

    Panel includes:
    Prof Cheryl Potgieter - Dean of Research / Professor of Psychology, UKZN
    Peter Machen – artist / writer / critic / designer
    Carol Brown – independent art curator
    Themba Shibase – visual arts practioner / lecturer
    Angie Buckland - photographer

    Join us as we set aside the dictionary to grapple with meaning, definition, role and purpose of art in a contemporary South Africa.


    This debate has been triggered by a multitude of recent instances where politics has bulldozed art. In particular the much-publicised reaction of the Minister of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana to the Innovative Women Exhibition, featuring photographs by Zanele Muholi, at Constitution Hill last year.

    “To place yourself before a work of art is a complex and potentially transformative experience. Sometimes that means looking at something you'd rather not see. But as the Minister of Arts and Culture, you preside over a realm in which that line between what you'd rather not see and what you need to look at is an ever-present factor, and a theme of much art,” Gabeba Baderoon in an open letter to the Minister of Arts and Culture: Minister Lulu Xingwana.

    “This misconception of the mandate of a state arts and culture portfolio and the Minister’s squeamishness at same-sex love, or perhaps even at female sexuality regardless of its orientation, is bizarre. Female sexuality has, particularly in this country, endured remarkably more censorship in the arts than male sexuality.

    Penises we seem to be able to deal with. Vaginas, if we must concede that they have something to do with female anatomy, we want at least to pretend that they are superfluous to issues of women’s rights and well-being,” considers Oliver Meth from the UKZN Centre for Civil Society.

    Entry is free and all are welcome!


    For more information:
    Oliver Meth on Metho@ukzn.ac.za
    079 584 4313

    TO PROVIDE FURTHER CONTEXT:

    Mike van Graan spoke about these issues in his opening address at The Time of The Writer in Durban recently. To listen to his speech, go to:

    http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/bookcase/2010/03/10/13th-time-of-the-writer-opening-night/
    A copy of his speech is attached

    Gabeba Baderoon’s open letter to the Minister: A response to Minister Lulu Xingwana's comments about the Innovative Women Exhibition, is also attached.

    VANSA is the national umbrella civic networking organisations serving the visual arts community made up of industry volunteers who campaign, lobby and network on behalf of the performers and artists in KZN and facilitate projects and initiatives to improve the arts industry.

    To find out more: VANSA Organiser: Domy Cortes
    Tel/Fax: +27 31 208 9430
    Cell: +27 73 719 0444
    KZNadmin@vansa.co.za
    www.vansa.co.za

    Arts Savvy is an initiative of VANSA KZN (and its sister organisation, PANSA). During the year there will be various workshops / lectures / master-classes and seminars. There will also be lectures prior to select productions and gallery exhibitions during the course of the year.


    Patrick Bond on 'Organising for Climate Justice', Left Forum, NYC, 21 March

    Programme

    FRIDAY, MARCH 19

    OPENING PLENARY
    The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination


    Chair: Lorraine Minnite, Left Forum Board of Directors

    Welcome: Jeoffrey Brackett, Provost of Pace University
    Theme and Introduction: Bill Fletcher, Jr., BlackCommentator.com
    Dialogue: Rev. Jesse Jackson

    Discussant: Max Fraad Wolff, New School University Graduate Program, International Affairs

    SATURDAY, MARCH 20
    Session 1: SATURDAY, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM


    Power From Below
    Schimmel Auditorium

    Frances Fox Piven (Chair) - The Graduate Center, CUNY
    Max Fraad Wolff - New School University Graduate Program, International Affairs
    Max Rameau - Take Back the Land
    Frank Morales - Picture the Homeless
    Robert Meister - UC Santa Cruz, Council of University of California Faculty Associations

    Experiments in Popular Democracy: Is it Really Possible to Democratize the Capitalist State?
    Student Union

    Johanna Brenner (Chair) - Solidarity
    Hilary Wainwright - Research Director, Transnational Institute New Politics Program; Sr. Research Associate, International Centre for Participation Studies, University of Bradford Dept. of Peace Studies
    Sujatha Fernandes - Sociology, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
    Erik Olin Wright - Director, Series Editor of Verso's Real Utopias Project; Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

    Capitalism, Crisis and Alternative Possibilities
    Multi Purpose Room
    Critical Sociology
    Walda Katz-Fishman (Chair) - Sociology and Anthropology, Howard University; US Social Forum; Board Chair, Project South
    Lauren Langman - Global Studies Association, Loyola University of Chicago
    David Schweikert - Loyola University of Chicago
    Peter Hudis - Socialist Humanists of America, Loyola University of Chicago
    Richard Wolff - Economics, UMass (Emeritus); International Affairs, New School University; Rethinking Marxism

    Alternative Labor Organizations: Worker Councils and Rank and File Control
    W613

    Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society
    Immanuel Ness (Chair) - Brooklyn College, CUNY
    Dario Azzellini - Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat, Germany Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla
    Maurizio Atzeni - Loughborough University
    Peter Ranis - Peter Ranis, Emeritus, The Graduate Center, CUNY
    Alan Tuckman - University of Nottingham
    Victor Wallis - Socialism and Democracy Berklee College of Music

    Clean Energy Transition: Decentralized Worker/Community Control vs. Centralized Corporate/State Control
    W614

    Bill Resnick (Chair) - KBOO Radio, 90.7fm; Portland Jobs with Justice
    Howie Hawkins - Green Party of New York, Teamsters for a Democratic Union
    Megan Finn - International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 3 Solidarity

    Post-Identity Politcs
    W-615

    Todd May (Chair) - Clemson, Philosophy and Religion
    Harmony Goldberg - New York Study Group; Doctoral student, CUNY Graduate Center
    Linda Alcoff - Hunter College, Philosophy
    Kevin Alexander Grey - Author, Waiting for Lightening to Strike: the fundamental of Black Politics

    Socialism in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Past
    W510

    Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation
    Robert Capistrano (Chair) - Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation
    Fred Magdoff - Monthly Review
    Barbara Garson - Board Member, Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation
    Leo Panitch - York University; Socialist Review
    Salvador Aguilar Sole - University of Barcelona

    Lessons from Latin American Social Movements for a US in Crisis
    W612

    Toward Freedom, Between The Lines Radio
    Scott Harris (Chair) - Between The Lines Radio
    Ben Dangl - Toward Freedom
    Marina Sitrin - Author, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina
    Mario Murillo - Author, Voices of Resistance: Indigenous Radio and the Struggle for Social Justice in Colombia

    Latin America: Moving Beyond Neoliberalism
    W507

    Hobart Spaulding (Chair) - History, CUNY (Emeritus); Left Forum Board Member; Editorial Board Member, Socialism and Democracy
    Carlos Vilas - Universidad Nacional Lanus
    Margarita Lopez Maya - Universidad Central de Venezuela
    Gerardo Renique - City College, CUNY
    Emelio Betances - Gettysburg College

    Race and Recession: Will a Rising Tide Lift All Boats?
    W626

    Rod Bush (Chair) - Author, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line
    Glen Ford - Co-founder and Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report
    Algernon Austin - Director, Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program, Economic Policy Institute
    Dedrick Muhammad - Sr. Organizer and Research Associate, Inequality and the Common Good program, Institute for Policy Studies

    The Chinese Proletariat and the State
    W605

    Ellen Rosen (Chair) - Research Associate, Center for Research on Women, Brandeis University
    Dongping Han - History and Political Science, Woodrow Wilson College
    Li Qiang - Director, China Labor Watch
    Marc Blecher - History, Oberlin College

    US Imperialism and Oil Politics: The Middle East, South Asia, and Africa
    W608

    Deepa Kumar (Chair) - Rutgers University
    Michael Schwartz - SUNY, Stony Brook
    Saadia Toor - College of Staten Island, CUNY; Action for a Progressive Pakistan
    Lee Wengraf - International Socialist Organization
    Deepa Kumar - Rutgers University

    Nuclear Revival?
    E326

    Capitalism Nature Socialism
    Karen Charman (Chair) - Managing Editor, Capitalism Nature Socialism
    Mary Olson - Director, Southeast Office, Nuclear Information and Resource Service
    Edwin Lyman - Sr. Scientist, Global Security, Union of Concerned Scientists
    Deb Katz - Executive Director, Citizens Awareness Network.

    Playwrights Rekindle the Radical Imagination
    W606

    Karen Malpede (Chair) - Theater Three Collaborative
    Najla Said - Twilight Theater Company, Theater Three Collaborative
    Catherine Filloux - Watson Arts
    Lydia Stryk - Berilla Kerr Award-winning playwright, Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center Member

    Cooperatives, Class, and Value theory
    E328

    Rethinking Marxism
    Maliha Safri (Chair) - Economics, Drew University; Associate Editor, Rethinking Marxism; Center for Popular Economics
    David Kristjanson-Gural - Spilling Ink Writers' Collective, Bucknell University
    David Ruccio - Rethinking Marxism
    Ian Seda - Western Massachusetts Copwatch and Association for Economic and Social Analysis
    Stephen Healy - Physical and Earth Sciences, Worcester State College; Contributor, Rethinking Marxism
    Bruce Roberts - University of Southern Maine

    Criminology and Social Justice: Establishing a Strong Theoretical Foundation
    W504

    Dr. William Calathes (Chair) - Criminal Justice, New Jersey City University; independent human rights attorney
    Jason WIlliams - New Jersey City University
    Christine Bell - New Jersey City University

    The Crisis and Capital Accumulation: Is the Role of the State Changing?
    W602

    Union for Radical Political Economics
    Rina Garst (Chair) - Union for Radical Political Economics
    Jerry Joffe - St. John's University
    Armagan Gezici - Keene State College
    Terrence McDonough - Economics, National University of Ireland Galway

    Race to the Top - Millions of Children Left Behind
    W610

    Radical Teacher
    Susan O'Malley (Chair) - English, Kingsborough, CUNY; Liberal Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
    Jean Anyon - Social and Educational Policy, CUNY Graduate School
    Tara Buhl - Annenberg Institute for School Reform
    Stan Karp - Editorial Board member and frequent contributor, Rethinking Schools

    Organizing Strategies to Combat the Radical Right
    W616

    David Sprintzen (Chair) - Founder/Officer, Long Island Progressive Coalition, Citizen Action on Long Island; President of Long Island Jobs with Justice
    Alan Charney - Political Director, US Action
    Ed Ott - Former Executive Director, New York City Central Labor Council; Distinguished Lecturer, Murphy Institute, CUNY
    Peter Sikora - Communications Workers of America, Working Families Party

    How Things Change As They Stay The Same: Talking Through Racial Categories, Politics, and Organizing in the 21st Century
    W621

    Matthew Birkhold (Chair) - Heavy Thinkers, Binghamton University
    Kazembe Balagun - Heavy Thinkers, Brecht Forum
    Melanie Bush - Adelphi University
    Jill Humphries - Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education, Queens College

    Teaching About Palestine
    E323

    Radical Teacher
    Richard Ohmann (Chair) - Wesleyan University (Emeritus); Author, English in America, Politics of Letters, and Making and Selling Culture
    Ammiel Alcalay - Queens College; CUNY Graduate Center
    Anthony Alessandrini - Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
    Ellen Cantarow - Independent journalist

    The Fight for Public Higher Education in New York City
    E329

    (Chair) - Larry Hales - Students for Educational Rights, CUNY Campaign to Defend Education
    Claudia O'Brien - CUNY Campaign to Defend Education
    Conor Reed - City College Student Union, International Socialist Organization

    Neo-Liberalism, State Repression and the Crisis of Indian Democracy
    W601

    Biju Mathew (Chair) - South Asia Solidarity Initiative
    Mohammed Junaid - CUNY Graduate Center
    Lalit Batra - CUNY Graduate Center
    Sangay Mishra - Drew University
    Preeti Sampat - Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan, Workers and Peasants Solidarity Forum
    Ahilan Kadirgamar - South Asian Solidarity Initiative

    Undermining Capitalism: The Stella D’oro Strike, Committed Art, and Revolutionary Change
    W617

    John Maerhofer (Chair) - English, Queens College, CUNY
    Greg Nuñez and Priscilla Aviles - Independent filmmakers
    Tony O’Brien - International Committee, Professional Staff Congress, CUNY
    Mike Filippou - Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, Shop Steward, Local 50

    Revisiting the Legacy of Women's Liberation in Maoist China
    W618

    Di Bai (Chair) - Drew University
    Tao Qingmei - Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
    Xurong Kong - Kean University
    Xueping Zhong - Tufts University
    Li Onesto - Revolution newspaper

    Conducting Critical Social Science Research
    W609

    Critical Sociology
    George Sanders (Chair) - Oakland University
    Ishay Landa - The Open University, Ra'anana, Israel
    Paul Paolucci - Eastern Kentucky University
    Ricardo Dello Buono - Manhattan College

    The Empire Strikes Back: Obama and the Teabaggers - (R)evolution and Counter(R)evolution
    W622

    John Kim (Chair) - Culture Clash
    Vanessa Nisperos - Culture Clash
    Calvin Williams - Culture Clash

    The Crisis That Gives the Capitalist Class Nightmares
    W511

    Critique
    Suzi Weisman (Chair)
    Michael Hudson
    Hillel Ticktin
    Lea Haro
    Jack Rasmus

    From Roman Gospels to Jewish Shakespeare: Rethinking Our Cultural Paradigms
    W619

    Jenny Greeman (Chair) - Resident Director, Dark Lady Players; Program Manager, New Perspectives Theater
    Kathleen Potts - Theatre and Speech, CUNY City College; Playwright-in-residence, Monarch Theater Company
    John Hudson - Dramaturg, Dark Lady Players

    Exporting the Culture Wars: Who is Spreading Neocolonial Homophobia to Africa and Why
    E325

    The Public Eye
    Pam Chamberlain (Chair) -
    Kapya Kaoma - Project Director, Political Research Associates; Episcopal Priest
    Frank Mugisha - Leading member, Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG)

    Beyond Fair Trade and Micro-Finance: Gift and Solidarity Economies
    W623

    otherworldsareposssible.org
    Andy Lin (Chair) - Coordinating Committee Member and Artistic Coordinator, Other Worlds
    Cheyenna Weber - Organizing Director, Responsible Endowments Coalition
    Rachel Wallis - Media and Education Coordinator, Other Worlds
    Jessie Reilly - Co-Administrator, Time Interchange New York (T.I.N.Y.) Timebank

    Developmental Terrorism in India Today
    W503

    Sanhati
    Panayiotis T. Manolakos (Chair) - Sanhati
    Svati Shah - Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, UMass-Amherst
    Sirisha C. Naidu - Sanhati; Economics, Wright State University
    Siddhartha Mitra - Sanhati

    Rethinking Historical Materialism : Scottish Origins and Engelsistic Revisions
    W604

    Prof. Norman Levine (Chair) - Executive Director, Institute for International Policy
    Frieder Otto Wolf - Free University of Berlin; European Parliament member since 1984
    Danga Vileisis - Free University of Berlin

    Session 2: SATURDAY, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

    Reimagining Society: The Nature of the Task
    Schimmel

    Z Communications
    Chris Spannos (Chair) - ZNet
    Barbara Epstein - Socialist Review; History, UC Santa Cruz.
    Bill Fletcher Jr. - BlackCommentator.com; Co-Author, Solidarity Divided
    Michael Albert - Co-founder, Z Magazine and ZNet

    The Fiscal Crises of the States
    Student Union

    Democratic Left
    Michael Hirsch (Chair) - Democratic Socialists of America; New Politics Magazine
    James Parrott - Associate Director and Chief Economist, Fiscal Policy Institute
    Katie Romich - Organizer, Communications Workers of America
    John Cameron - Organizer, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees

    Economic Democracy as an alternative to capitalism
    Multi Purpose Room

    Costas Panayotakis (Chair) - New York City College of Technology, CUNY; Capitalism Nature Socialism
    David Schweickart - Loyola University
    Cathy Mulder - John Jay College, CUNY
    Michael Menser - Brooklyn College, Brooklyn Food Coalition

    Lessons from Venezuela: Achievements and Failures
    W613

    Venezuela Analysis
    Gregory Wilpert (Chair) - Editor, Venezuelanalysis.com; Sociology, Brandeis University
    Daniel Hellinger - Webster University
    Steve Ellner - Universidad del Oriente
    Carlos Martinez - AuthorVenezuela Speaks!

    What Does it Mean to be a Revolutionary in Our Times?
    W615

    Walda Katz-Fishman (Chair) - Sociology and Anthropology, Howard University; US Social Forum; Board Chair, Project South
    Jerome Scott - League of Revolutionaries for a New America; U.S. Social Forum
    Lenina Nadal - New York Study Group
    Manju Rajendran - Left Turn
    Johanna Brenner - Solidarity

    Transnational Labor Movements
    W510

    Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society
    Jamie McCallum (Chair) - CUNY Graduate Center
    Beverly Silver - Johns Hopkins University
    Verity Burgmann - University of Melbourne
    Robyn Rodriguez - Rutgers University
    Saket Soni - New Orleans Center for Racial Justice

    Obama's Militarized Status Quo in Latin America W612
    NACLA Report on the Americas
    Christy Thornton (Chair) - History, NYU
    Mark Weisbrot - Center for Economic and Policy Research
    Suzanna Reiss - University of Hawaii
    Joseph Nevins - Vassar College

    Strategizing to Build Real Self-Governance
    W507

    Capitalism Nature Socialism
    Karen Charman (Chair) - Managing Editor, Capitalism Nature Socialism
    Robert Parry - Publisher and Editor, Consortiumnews.com
    Richard Grossman - Independent historian
    Joel Kovel - Editor in Chief, Capitalism Nature Socialism

    Capitalism and Toxics Pollution: The Fight for Public Health
    W511

    (Chair) - Lois Gibbs - Center for Health, Environment & Justice
    Joel Shufro - New York Committee for Occupational Health and Safety

    Progressive Religion and the Fight for Democracy
    W626

    Religious Socialism, Journal of DSA Religion and Socialism Commission
    Rev. Peter Laarman (Chair) - Executive Director, Progressive Christians; Contributing Editor, Religion Dispatches
    Rev. Luis Barrios - John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Associate Priest, St. Mary's Episcopal Church in West Harlem
    Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou - Sr. Minister, Lemuel Haynes Congregational Church; Fellow-in-residence, Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture
    Tricia Sheffield - Assistant Minister for Administration, Middle Collegiate Church

    Capitalism, Economy, and Religion: A Christian-Marxist Dialogue
    W605

    Charlene Sinclair (Chair) - Union Theological Seminary, Poverty Initiative
    Brigitte Kahl - Union Theological Seminary
    Jan Rehmann - Union Theological Seminary, Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
    Richard Wolff - Economics, UMass (Emeritus); International Affairs, New School University; Rethinking Marxism

    Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen: Obama's New War
    W608

    International Socialist Review
    Aaron Amaral (Chair) -
    Richard Seymour - Lenin's Tomb
    Saadia Toor - Action for a Progressive Pakistan, College of Staten Island
    Ashley Smith - International Socialist Review

    AIDS, Sex and Culture : Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa -Author Meets Critics
    E326

    (Chair) - Hylton White - New School for Social Research
    Zolani Ngwane - Haverford College
    Mandisa Mbali - Yale University
    Ida Susser - Anthropology, Hunter College; CUNY Graduate Center

    America's Two Depressions: One Economic, One Psychological
    W606

    Harriet Fraad (Chair) - Manifesto Group; International Psychohistory Association
    Andres Ramirez - Education, Rhode Island College
    Khalil Saucier - Sociology and Africana Studies, Rhode Island College
    Richard Greeman - English translator of Victor Serge

    Can Obama Be Moved? Movement Strategies to Pressure Party Politics
    Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
    E328

    Margit Mayer (Chair) - Free University, Berlin
    Jenny Brown - Co-chair, Alachua County Labor Party, National Women's Liberation
    Pete Sikora - Working Families Party, Communication Workers of America
    Ethan Young - Portside, Brecht Forum
    Eric Mann - Labor/Community Strategy Center, Los Angeles

    Telling The Story of Working Class Life, Work, and Organization - In Non-Fiction and Fiction
    W504

    Monthly Review Press and Cornell ILR Press
    Steve Early (Chair) - Former Communications Workers of America organizer, Author, Embedded With Organized Labor
    Manny Ness (Chair) - Editor, WorkingUSA; Political Science, Brooklyn College, CUNY
    Suzanne Gordon - National Writers Union, United Auto Workers
    Jane Latour - Associate Editor, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 37’s Public Employee Press
    Michael Yates - Associate Editor, Monthly Review
    Tim Sheard, - Critical Care Nurse
    Gregory A. Butler - Interior Systems Carpenter; Shop Steward in local 608, United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America; GANG BOX: Construction Workers News Service
    Alternative Perspectives on Marxist Crisis
    Theory and the Current Economic Crisis
    W602

    Union for Radical Political Economics; Science and Society
    Paddy Quick (Chair) - St. Francis College
    Julio Huato - St. Francis College
    David Kotz - Economics, UMass-Amherst
    David Laibman - Science and Society
    Fred Magdoff - Monthly Review

    The Honduran Coup and Its Aftermath
    W610

    NACLA Report on the Americas
    Greg Grandin (Tentative Chair); Chris London (Backup Chair) - Alexander Main - Center for Economic and Policy Research
    Adrienne Pine - American University
    Rodolfo Pastor - Embassy of Honduras

    Social -Security Systems in Comparison: Europe and the US
    W610

    (Chair) Robin Blackburn, New Left Review, New School University
    Lucy apRoberts, University of Paris-Nanterre, European Institute of Wage Workers
    Daniel Ankarloo, Malmö University, Sweden
    Ruurik Holm, coordinator, Left Forum, Finland

    The Crisis of Black Politics and Left Wing Opportunism
    W621

    Nellie Bailey (Chair) - Co-founder, Harlem Tenants Council
    Glen Ford - Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report
    Anthony Monteiro - Associate Director, The Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, Temple University

    The Black Internationale
    E323

    Rod Bush (Chair) - Sociology and Antropology, St. John's University
    Komozi Woodard - Sarah Lawrence College
    Charles Pinderhughes - Boston College
    Michael Simanga - Author, In the Shadow of the Sun

    Recent Transformations in Chinese Marxism
    E330

    Norman Levine (Chair) - Executive Director, Institute for International Policy
    Duan Zhongqiao - School of Philosophy, Remnin University of China
    Feng Ziyi - Philosophy, Beijing University
    Wei Xiaoping - Director, History of Marxist Philosophy; Philosophy Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
    Yang Haifeng - Philosophy, Beijing University

    No More Affordable Housing Scams: Community Control of Land in New York City
    W601

    Progressive Planning
    Tom Angotti (Chair) - Hunter College, CUNY; Planners Network
    Frank Morales - Picture the Homeless
    Francesca Manning - CUNY Graduate Center

    Puerto Rico Can't Wait To Be Free
    W617

    Ana M. Lopez (Chair) - Tulane University
    Elma Beatriz Rosado -
    Aleida Centeno Rodriguez -
    Julio Rosado Ayala -

    Left Out: Building Social Movements in a Culture of Isolation
    W618

    Jonathan Matas (Chair) - Painter/muralist, teaching artist
    Jason Farbman - NYU; former Green Party candidate for State Rep.; antiwar organizer
    Karina Claudio - Make the Road NY’s LGBTQ Justice Project; poet and performance artist

    Organizing against Budget Cuts and Austerity in New York City
    W609

    (Chair) - Megan Behrent - Teachers for a Just Contract; International Socialist Organization
    David Hoskins - Students for Educational Rights; CUNY Campaign to Defend Education
    PSC-CUNY member, TBA - Take Back Our Union member, TBA -

    Solidarity in Latin America: Solidarity Economy and Bolivarian Socialism in Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela
    W622

    Mark Rego-Monteiro (Chair) - Park Slope Food Co-op member/Co-owner; International Community Sustainable Development, NYU
    Ike Nahem - Coordinator, Cuba Solidarity NY; Teamsters Union Member
    William Camacaro - Chairperson, Bolivarian Circle NY

    Can the White Left Organize Against Racism in the White Community
    W619

    Bok-Keem Nyerere (Chair)- National Association of Kawaida Organizations
    John Garvey - Dean, CUNY
    Geert Dhondt - Political Economics/Economic History, John Jay College

    The Materiality of Nations
    E325

    Neil Davidson (Chair) - Geography and Sociology, University of Strathclyde
    Radhika Desai - Politics, University of Manitoba Visiting Fellow, DESTIN, London School of Economics
    John Riddell -

    Stand Alone Slide Presentation/Talk on Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918
    W623

    Jeffrey B. Perry (Chair) - Independent scholar

    Parents, Teachers & Students Unite: Health, Sustainability and Social Justice Through the School Food movement
    W503

    Nancy Romer (Chair) - Psychology, Brooklyn College, General Coordinator, Brooklyn Food Coalition
    Jan Poppendieck - author, Free For All: Fixing School Food In America, Hunter College, Sociology
    Kristen Mancinelli - City Harvest policy analyst
    Roxanne Henry - Food Bank For New York City
    Kristen Schoonacker - Wellness in the Schools, parent PS 295 Brooklyn
    Jeralyn Beach - School Food Coordinator, Brooklyn

    Indigenous Mobilization and Resistance in the Andean Nations
    W604

    World War 4 Report
    Bill Weinberg (Chair) - WBAI Radio, World War 4 Report
    Gerardo Renique - CUNY
    Mario Murillo - WBAI Radio, Hofstra University

    False Alternatives to Capitalism: Proudhonism and its Progeny
    W628

    Marxist-Humanist Initiative
    Mike Dola (Chair) - Marxist-Humanist Initiative; student at Hunter College
    Anne Jaclard - Marxist-Humanist Initiative; the New SPACE
    Andrew Kliman - Pace University
    Greg Meyerson - North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
    Michael Joseph Roberto - North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

    Session 3: SATURDAY, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

    Going Undercover: The Yes Men and Gumshoe Journalists Discuss Subterfuge and Satire in Activism and Investigative Journalism
    Schimmel

    TBD (Chair) -
    Andy Bichlbaum - Co-founder, The Yes Men; Co-director, The Yes Men Fix the World
    Mike Bonanno - Co-founder, The Yes Men; Co-director, The Yes Men Fix the World
    Ken Silverstein - Investigative reporter and DC editor, Harper's magazine
    Imagining Our Way from Here to There
    Student Union
    Barbara Epstein (Chair) - Socialist Review; History, UC Santa Cruz.
    Leo Panitch - Socialist Review; Canada Research Chair, Comparative Political Economy; Political Science, York University
    Greg Wilpert - Sociology, Brandeis University; ZNet; Editor, Venezuelanalysis.com
    Stanley Aronowitz - Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center

    Roundtable on Left Strategies in the Core Capitalist Countries
    Multi Purpose Room

    Transform!
    Walter Baier (Chair) - Coordinator, Transform Network
    Patrice Cohen-Séat - French Communist Party, Espaces Marx
    Ruurik Holm - Left Forum, Finland
    Sam Gindin - Socialist Project, Toronto
    João Romão - Bloco de Esquerda and Cultra, Portugal
    Greg Albo - Socialist Register
    Richard Wolff - Economics, UMass (Emeritus); International Affairs, New School University; Rethinking Marxism
    Cornelia Hildebrandt - Die LINKE; Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

    The 'PIIGS,' Baltics, and Hungary: Economic Crisis on the EU’s Internal Periphery
    W613

    Left Business Observer
    Doug Henwood (Chair) - Editor, Left Business Observer; Contributing Editor, The Nation
    Jeffrey Sommers - Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (Faculty and Curator of the Andre Gunder Frank Memorial Library)
    Mark Weisbrot - Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
    Salvatore DiMauro - Geography, SUNY New Paltz; Co-Editor, Human Geography

    How Should Friends of Labor on the Left Respond To Conflicts Within and Between Unions?”
    W614

    WorkingUSA
    Manny Ness (Chair) - Editor, WorkingUSA; Political Science, Brooklyn College, CUNY
    Steve Early (Chair) - Former Communications Workers of America organizer, Author, Embedded With Organized Labor
    Sal Rosselli - Interim president, National Union of Health Care Workers
    Andrea van den Heever - UNITE HERE Local 34, Yale University
    Cal Winslow - Fellow, UC-Berkeley; Co-Director, Mendocino Institute
    Stephanie Luce - School of Professional Studies, The Murphy Institute, CUNY
    TBA - Representative of SEIU/Workers United

    The US Social Forum and US Social Movements: The Road from Atlanta to Detroit 2010
    W615

    Walda Katz-Fishman (Chair) -Sociology and Anthropology, Howard University; US Social Forum; Board Chair, Project South
    Jerome Scott - League of Revolutionaries for a New America; USSF National Planning Committee
    Rose Brewer - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; USSF Gender Justice Working Group
    Harmony Goldberg - New York Study Group; Graduate Center of the CUNY

    A Panel Discussion on Anarchism and Marxism
    W510

    Andrej Grubacic (Chair) - San Francisco Art Institute, International Workers of the World
    Cindy Milstein - Institute for Anarchist Studies; Renewing the Anarchist Tradition
    Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz - Historian/writer

    Envisioning Real Utopias
    W612

    Verso Books
    (Chair) - Erik Olin Wright - Director and Series Editor of Verso's Real Utopias Project; Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    David Ruccio - Economics, University of Notre Dame
    Peter Staudenmaier - Cornell University

    Pro Sports Without Owners
    W507?

    edgeofsports.com
    Spring Super (Chair) - Queer Rising and International Socialist Organization
    Mark Naison - Fordham University; Author, Communists in Harlem During the Depression
    Dr. Walter Beach - Former Cleveland Brown; Amer-I-Can.
    Dave Zirin - Sports Correspondent, The Nation; Author, A People's History of Sports in the United States

    Social Movements And Everyday Life
    W511

    Critical Sociology
    Ricardo Dello Buono (Chair) - Manhattan College
    George Sanders - Oakland University
    James Russell - Eastern Connecticut State University
    Graham Cassano - Oakland University
    Troy Rondinone - Southern Connecticut State University

    More than a Year into the Health Reform Debacle: What Direction for Real Health Care Justice?
    W626

    Physicians for a National Health Program
    Martha Livingston (Chair) - SUNY College at Old Westbury; Vice-chair, Physicians for a National Health Program, New York-Metro chapter
    Oliver Fein - Dean, Weill-Cornell Medical College; National President and local Chair, Physicians for a National Health Program
    Leonard Rodberg - Urban Studies, Queens College; Research Director, New York-Metro chapter, Physicians for a National Health Program
    Katie Robbins - National Coordinator, Healthcare-NOW
    Laurie Wen - Healthcare-NOW, Private Health Insurance Must Go Coalition
    Bill Henning - Communications Workers of America, Local 1180

    Is Climate Change Hot Enough to Rekindle the Imagination of the Left? (Part I of II)
    W605

    New Politics
    Jenny Greeman (Chair) - Resident Director, Dark Lady Players; Program Manager, New Perspectives Theater
    Richard Greeman - Secretary, Victor Serge Foundation; Co-Founder; Praxis Research and Education Center
    David Schwartzman - Geochemical Society; American Geophysical Union
    Brian Tokar - Institute for Social Ecology Climate SOS

    Radicals and NYC Politics
    W608

    Charles Barron (Chair) - Operation Power
    Paul Washington -
    Inez Barron - State Assemblywoman, New York's 40th District

    We Must Be Good at Learning: Brecht Forum at 35
    E326

    Kazembe Balagun (Chair) -Brecht Forum
    Max Uhlenbeck - Left Turn, Brecht Forum
    Liz Mestres - Brecht Forum
    Lisa Maya Knauer - Sociology/Anthropology. UMass Dartmouth

    After the Earthquake: Who's Killing Haiti?
    W606

    International Socialist Review
    Edna Bonhomme (Chair) -
    Peter Hallward - Middlesex University
    Roger Leduc - Haiti Liberte
    Ashley Smith - International Socialist Review
    Ray LaForest -American Federation of State, Country and and Municipal Employees, District Council 1707; WBAI Radio; Pacifica Radio Network

    Dirty Gas, Oil, and Coal: The Fossil Fuel Problematic and Some Solutions
    W504

    Capitalism Nature Socialism
    Karen Charman (Chair) - Managing Editor, Capitalism Nature Socialism
    Julian Rodriguez-Drix - ShaleShock Alliance and Alliance for Climate Education
    Mike Roselle - Climate Ground Zero
    Terisa Turner - University of Guelph
    Richard Grossman - Independent historian

    The Right to the City: Global Perspectives
    E328

    Peter Marcuse (Chair) -
    Tatiana Schor -
    Fiona Jeffries -
    Vinay Gidwani -

    Rescuing the Concept of Internal Colonialism from the Dustbin of History
    W602

    Charles Pinderhughes (Chair) - Boston College
    Davarian Baldwin - Trinity College
    Komozi Woodard - Sarah Lawrence College
    Michael Simanga - Author, In the Shadow of the Sun

    The American Left and the “Black Question”: From Politics to Protest to the Post-Political
    W610

    Platypus
    Benjamin Blumberg (Chair) - Platypus Affiliated Society
    Tim Barker - Columbia University Student
    Pamala Nogales - Platypus Affiliated Society
    Christopher Cutrone - Platypus Affiliated Society

    Exonerate The Rosenbergs? Robert & Michael Meeropol React to Morton Sobell and Other New Developments
    W616

    National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case
    Gerald Markowitz (Chair) - Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Grad Cente
    Robert Meeropol - Youngest son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; Founder/Executive Director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children; Board of Directors, NCRRC.
    Michael Meeropol - Oldest son of the Rosenbergs; John Jay College Interdisciplinary Studies Program
    Miriam Schneir - Co-author, Invitation to an Inquest
    David Alman - President of the NCRRC; Founding Member with Emily Alman of the original Rosenberg defense committee.

    Iran: Current State of Affairs
    W621

    Reza Ghorashi (Chair) - Richard Stockton College of NJ
    Thomas O'Donnell - The New School, Graduate International Affairs
    Hamid Zangeneh - Economics Widener University, Editor of JIRA
    Hamideh Sedghi; PhD - Harvard university

    The Awesome Power of Union Democracy and its Implications for Dramatic Social Change
    E329

    Daniel Gross (Chair) - Executive Director, Brandworkers International Executive Committee Member, National Lawyers Guild Labor & Employment Committee
    Kevin Harry Harrington - Vice President, Transport Workers Union Local 100 Member, Take Back Our Union
    Sandy Pope - President, Teamsters Local 805 Former International Rep, IBT, during legendary UPS Strike
    Vance Hinton - Member, Industrial Workers of the World, Starbucks Workers Union; Henry George School

    Revolution in Nepal
    E323

    Fanshen Wong (Chair) - Kasama Project
    Mike Ely - The Kasama Project
    Eric Ribellarsi - The FIRE Collective

    Direct Action, Self-Determination and the Housing Crisis
    E330



    Dennis Brutus memorial, 11 March 2010


    DENNIS BRUTUS (1924-2009)
    Poetry and Protest Colloquium, 11 March

    SCHEDULE OF SPEAKERS


    HOWARD COLLEGE AUDITORIUM, 9am-5pm

  • POEMS (throughout): Vonani Bila, Mphutlane wa Bofelo, Comrade Fatso, Faith ka Manzi, Deena Padayachee, King Zorro, Shepherd Zvavanhu


  • 9-9:30am – WELCOME, BRUTUS FILMCLIPS
    Vishnu Padayachee, Patrick Bond, Faith Manzi

  • 9:30-10:30am - ANTI-APARTHEID POLITICS

  • Oliver Meth (chair), Tony Brutus, Phyllis Naidoo

  • 10:30am-12pm – LITERARY & POETIC LIFE
  • Shauna Mottiar (chair), Monika Idehen, Andrew Martin, Priya Narismulu, Sandile Ngidi, Ron Singer, Claudia Wegener

  • 12-1pm - RACIAL JUSTICE, SPORTS
  • Molefi Ndlovu (chair), Tor Sellstrom, David Zirin

  • 1-2pm - INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY Dudu Khumalo(chair), Joseph Ayee, MP Giyose, Hopewell Gumbo, Julian Kunnie, Lubna Nadvi


  • 2-5pm – SA PROGRESSIVE POLITICS Percy Ngonyama (chair)Roy Chetty, Ashwin Desai, Desmond D'Sa, Rico Euripidou, MP Giyose, Claudia Martinez-Mullen, Andile Mngxitama, Alan Murphy, Orlean Naidoo, Molefi Ndlovu, Trevor Ngwane, Alice Thomson


  • 5pm - African drums, walk to Sneddon Theatre

    SNEDDON THEATRE, 5-9pm

  • 5:30pm: BRUTUS FILM: ‘I am a Rebel’


  • 5:30-7pm: BRUTUS' POLITICAL TRADITIONS Poetry by Vonani Bila, panel with Ashwin Desai, Ela Gandhi, Trevor Ngwane, David Zirin


  • 7-7:30pm: intermission


  • 7:30-9pm: FIGHTING GLOBAL APARTHEID Music/poetry by Madala Kunene, Cde Fatso Harold Wolpe Lecture in honour of Brutus, by Yash Tandon




  • Dennis Brutus

    Dennis Brutus, who has died aged 85, was a noted poet and father of the
    movement to isolate apartheid South Africa from international sport. He
    was a highly effective protester against the racist regime, first within
    South Africa and then, after 18 months in prison, in exile, travelling
    constantly to campaign for sports sanctions.

    Published: 05 Mar 2010

    Best known as founder of Sanroc, the South African Non‑Racial Olympic
    Committee, as a rival to the official committee Sanoc, he became a
    familiar figure in the corridors of Olympic power. Sanroc's
    brilliantly‑conducted campaign persuaded individuals and international
    sports federations that to compete in South Africa, or even against
    South Africans, was to condone apartheid.

    After the historic transition from rule by the National Party (NP) to
    the African National Congress (ANC), Brutus was virtually written out of
    the history of the period, because he had only for a time, while living
    in England, been a paid‑up member of the ANC. Though he had worked
    closely with Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders, he prided himself on
    his independent base in Sanroc.

    Born in Southern Rhodesia, Brutus was entitled to British citizenship;
    this was revoked at the time of Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. He
    struggled to gain asylum in the United States, where he had made his
    career in university teaching, until 1983, when a judge ruled that he
    would be in serious danger in South Africa.

    When Brutus returned to South Africa in 1991 for the first time in 25
    years, he was still travelling on a United Nations document. He was
    reluctant to apply for his citizenship to be returned, as he did not
    believe he had ever lost it.

    Much of Brutus's poetry belonged to the literature of protest, though he
    acknowledged John Donne as the greatest influence on his early work,
    before his prison term: afterwards his style became more sparse. He saw
    no tension between the two sides of his life, noting that many poets had
    been men of action. He published 12 volumes, the first in Nigeria in
    1962, which were for many years banned in South Africa. The best known
    is probably Letters to Martha and other Poems from a South African Prison.

    Dennis Vincent Brutus was born at Salisbury – now Harare – on November
    28 1924 of coloured (mixed race) South African parents. He studied
    English at Fort Hare University College in South Africa, gaining a BA
    with distinction, and started an LLB at Witwatersrand – interrupted by a
    banning order forbidding him to publish, teach or attend gatherings.

    In 1963 he was arrested for defying the ban, but escaped to Swaziland
    while on bail. He was rearrested by the Portuguese in Mozambique and
    handed over to the South African police, who shot him in the back when
    he made a further attempt to escape.

    After serving 18 months on Robben Island he made his home in London,
    where his wife and children remained, then became a professor of English
    at Northwestern University in Chicago. He taught at numerous American
    universities, latterly at the University of Pittsburgh.

    Brutus founded the South African Sports Association (SASA) in Port
    Elizabeth in 1958, to persuade international sports federations to
    derecognise their South African affiliates. For him the policy of
    multiracialism adopted by some South African sports bodies, whereby
    non‑whites were allowed representation through a separate branch, was
    not adequate. His goal was non‑racialism, with no distinction of race,
    in a sport's ruling body or in its branches.

    His ultimate purpose was to persuade the International Olympic Committee
    (IOC) to withdraw recognition from the National Olympic Committee of
    South Africa, and to this end in 1962 SASA spawned Sanroc. Brutus's
    memorandum of May 4 1959 to the IOC, setting out the situation in South
    African sport, was the founding document in the struggle to isolate the
    apartheid state.

    The IOC, which has always aspired to universality, was in no hurry to
    exclude South Africa; instead it urged the official Olympic committee,
    Sanoc, to conform with the Olympic Charter, which allows no racial
    distinctions in sport. Sanoc could do little to influence the National
    Party government, and despite some concessions, its invitation to the
    1964 Tokyo Olympics was withdrawn; none was sent for Mexico City in
    1968, and in 1970 the IOC withdrew recognition from Sanoc. No South
    Africans competed in the Olympics under that nation's colours until
    Barcelona in 1992.

    Brutus was largely responsible for Rhodesia's exclusion from the 1972
    Munich Olympics. In 1976 there was a dispute within Sanroc, which he
    won, about boycotting the Montreal Games, if the IOC did not punish New
    Zealand for having played rugby against South Africa. Twenty‑nine
    nations, all of them African except Iraq, did boycott, but Sam Ramsamy
    and Jean‑Claude Ganga (president of the Supreme Council for Sport in
    Africa), both later to be IOC members, opposed his action.

    He had a great gift for influencing newspapers, calling out protesters
    and persuading people and organisations to drop contact with South
    African sport, but lost control of the organisation he had created. At
    the time of the Montreal games, Brutus nominated Ramsamy to chair
    Sanroc, as he was living mostly in America and it was based in London.

    In 1984, at the Los Angeles Olympics, they again disagreed. Brutus had
    heard that the IOC's executive board was planning to readmit South
    Africa; he persuaded The New York Times to run the story, then arranged
    a demonstration outside the IOC's hotel, against Ramsamy's wishes.

    Brutus became marginalised from Sanroc, and in 1988 Ramsamy expelled
    him. Sanroc split, with Brutus still president of one faction, and in
    South Africa the National Sports Congress, aligned with the ANC, was set
    up in competition with the South African Council of Sport (Sacos), which
    had been the only umbrella organisation for non‑racial sport since 1973.
    The NSC favoured an early return to world sport; Sacos believed it
    should be delayed until apartheid had been demolished.

    When Brutus returned to South Africa in July 1991 he was marginalised
    because of his identification with Sacos, whose patron he had become. He
    was convinced South Africa should not have rushed back into the
    Olympics, and had tried so to persuade Mandela shortly before South
    Africa's readmission. He believed this hasty action had caused sport to
    be even more controlled by whites than before, and that some grassroots
    interracial sport had disappeared in the pursuit of excellence and
    commercial advantage.

    He received numerous political and literary awards, and honorary
    doctorates from several American universities. In the United States he
    campaigned against the death penalty, and in 1997 was elected to the US
    committee of Amnesty International. He deposited his papers at the
    National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown.

    Dennis Brutus, who died on December 26, married, in 1950, May Jagger.

    They had four sons and four daughters.

    The Telegraph, UK


    Patrick Bond on SA economic policy, 2 March 2010

    DURBAN SINGS is a pilot project collaboratively initiated and collectively developed by Molefi Mafareka Ndlovu, community research scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS, UKZN), and Dr. Claudia Wegener, a visiting scholar from the University of the Arts London (UAL), together with 50 young people from 12 Durban community organizations, many of them now trained and networked as editorial collectives of audio producers for micro-media hubs in their local organizations and areas.

    The project has a base at the university as a CCS outreach initiative - it includes training and workshops for recording, interview, audio-editing, oral history and IT skills; oral history data-collection, on-line and off-line archiving, project management, public presentations, networking, blog-editing, and broadcasts. An extensive on-line audio archive is uploaded at www.archive.org and collections of oral history interviews from Clermont, Folweni, Inanda, Ntuzuma, Marianridge, Mzinyathi, Umlazi and the inner city are networked via their own blogs, the 'switch-board' blog at www.durbansings.wordpress.com and a 'community portal' at the CCS web-site: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?11,62

    DURBAN SINGS is funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

    Editors presenting the project for discussion at the City Cultures Seminar:
    Bewerley Webster (Mariann Coordinating Committee, Mariannridge)
    Bongisipho (Malungisa Youth Development, Mzinyathi)
    Peter Shea (Ubuntu Babasha, Clermont)
    Nokulunga Mthethwa (Abasha, Inanda Newtown A)
    Claudia Wegener (radio continental drift, CCS Visiting Scholar)

    Date: Tuesday, 2 March 2010
    Time: 12:30-14:00
    Venue: ccrri seminar room, 2nd floor George Campbell building, South Campus, Howard College Campus. Use the south entrance into the building; and Entrance 3 on Rick Turner (Francois) Road if driving.

    Enquiries: ccrri@ukzn.ac.za or 031 260 1599/3904/3902


    CCS anti-xenophobia research workshop, 27 February 2010



    ANTI-XENOPHOBIA RESEARCH/ACTION WORKSHOP CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY, STRATEGY&TACTICS and DURBAN CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS

    DATE: 27 FEBRUARY 2010
    TIME: 9AM-3:30PM
    VENUE: MEMORIAL TOWER BUILDING L2 (in tallest building at Howard College)

    Research papers
    Xenophobia in Bottlebrush: An investigation into the reasons behind the attacks on African immigrants in an informal settlement in Durban.

    Xenophobia and Civil Society: Durban’s Structured Social Divisions



    Agenda
    9:00-09:30 Tea with muffin + film screening
    9:30-09:45 Welcome: Patrick Bond, Introduction to Durban Case Study: Baruti Amisi, Faith ka Manzi, Sheperd Zvavanhu, Orlean Naidoo, Nokuthula Cele, Trevor Ngwane

    9:40-10:30 Presentation of Durban Case Study
    (1) Patrick Bond: Overview of Durban Case Study
    (2) Trevor Ngwane: Bottlebrush
    (3) Baruti Amisi: Migrant Voices

    10:30-11:00 Presentation by Nobi Dube, Ramaphosa Case study and
    Summary of recommendations from national case studies by Jenny Parsley

    11:00-12:00 Discussion

    12:00-12:15 Presentation of themes from research and ways forward, with Trevor

    12:15-13:00 Breakaway Groups (geographic areas and interests) with Amisi and Trevor

    13:00-14:00 Lunch

    14:00-14:30 Presentations by Breakaway Groups

    14:30-15:00 Discussion and anti-xenophobia strategies facilitated by Amisi and Trevor

    15:00-15:15 Concluding Remarks: Patrick Bond

    15:15 Vote of thanks: Baruti Amisi

    Workshop Themes:
    1) Civil society, social movements, and the state
    Explore where we stand in relation to state-society relations in the post-Polokwane period, as more grassroots and union opposition to the state emerges

    2) Refugees and migrants, xenophobia, civil society and social movements
    Explore how social movements integrate issues facing migrants and refugees, and how to strengthen refugee and migrant organisations

    3) Access to funding, capacity building, civil society and migrant organisations
    Explore access to funding/ capacity building for migrant, SA and integrated organisations, and strategies in relation to funders (especially for CBOs)

    4) Fragmentation of the urban poor, social movements, and civic literacy.
    Explore the nature of political education and consciousness, and the interrelationships of protest, advocacy and political awareness during an era of welfarist/humanitarian interventions

    5) Xenophobia, local strategies, national coalitions and transnational/interregional networks.
    Explore how people move across racial, socio-economic and political denominations, including in the provision of political solidarity (e.g. Zimbabwe, Swaziland, DRC)


    Press Conference: Keep our South African Coal in the Hole! 22 February 2010

    Critics of World Bank financing for Eskom announce global “No Coal Loan” campaign

    LOCATION: (simultaneous)
    Durban: International Convention Centre, 45 Bram Fischer Road
    Washington: Sierra Club headquarters, 408 C St NE
    DATE: Monday, 22nd February 2010
    TIME: 4pm South Africa time, 9am EST (Washington)
    SPEAKERS: South Durban Community Environmental Alliance: Desmond
    D’Sa groundWork, FoE SA: Siziwe Khanyile
    Earthlife Africa eThekwini: Alice Thomson
    Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee: Trevor Ngwane
    Climate Justice Now! SA: Rehana Dada
    Centre for Civil Society Environmental Justice Project: Patrick Bond
    Sierra Club International: Mark Kresowik

    These and dozens of other civil society organisations will announce a
    global campaign against the World Bank and Eskom, with the intention of
    preventing a $3.75 billion loan (possibly $4 billion) that would
    dramatically raise South Africa’s world-leading carbon emissions and the
    price of electricity to ordinary people. The organisations represent
    millions of concerned citizens, community, environmental, labour and
    academic constituencies, in South Africa, the rest of the African
    continent and the world at large.

    For more information:
    Bobby Peek
    +27-82-464 1383 (cell)
    +27-33-342 5662 (landline)
    bobby@groundwork.org.za

    BACKGROUND
    The World Bank is trying to lend $4 billion to the Johannesburg-based
    parastatal Eskom, the world’s fourth largest power company and Africa’s
    largest carbon emitter (with 40% of South Africa’s total emissions). The
    loan is mainly to finance the world’s fourth most CO2-intensive power
    plant (Medupi, in the Waterburg).

    The Bank also aims to finance privatised power generation,
    notwithstanding the abject failure of public-private partnerships in
    South African infrastructure, including electricity and water.

    The loan would fly in the face of the Bank’s attempt to portray itself
    as climate-friendly financing, and will generate a vast, unnecessary
    debt – both a financial debt to South Africa’s poor and also an expanded
    climate debt owed by South Africa to the rest of Africa, for overusing
    its fair proportion of the continent’s CO2 carrying capacity.

    For communities near the coal fields (40 new mines are requested by
    Eskom to supply its new generators) and coal-fired stations, the
    externalised costs imposed by Eskom are extremely high, including the
    complete degradation of water sources, air pollution, a frightening rise
    in mercury associated with coal, and other health burdens.

    The loan is being pursued at a time of intense controversy surrounding
    Eskom mismanagement. In its last annual reporting period, the company
    lost R9.7 billion ($1.3 bn) mainly due to miscalculations associated
    with hedging aluminium prices and the SA currency.

    Both the chairman and chief executive office lost their jobs late last
    year amidst unprecedented acrimony.

    Meanwhile, Eskom continues its giveaway prices - the world’s cheapest
    electricity, heavily subsidised by all other users - to several large
    export-oriented metals/mining multinational corporations (headquartered
    in London, Melbourne, Luxembourg and Zurich, where profits flow, thus
    exacerbating SA’s dangerously high international payments deficit),
    dating to scandalous late-apartheid-era, multi-decade ‘Special Pricing
    Agreements’ deals.

    These deals should be rejected as odious, and as recently as August
    2009, Eskom leaders publicly admitted that they would have to be
    reconsidered – but they haven’t been. In early 2008, repeated national
    blackouts finally led to cuts in supply to some of these firms, showing
    that the deals could legitimately be violated. Moreover, the crash of
    metals and minerals prices dramatically lowered demand.

    Demand-side management – a tried and tested alternative which the World
    Bank claims to endorse (but hasn’t considered in this case) - would
    mitigate the need for new power plants. Moreover, South Africa’s massive
    renewable energy potential has not even begun to be tapped. Eskom was
    given responsibility for rolling out more than a million solar-powered
    hot water heaters over three years, and after two years, can claim only
    a thousand.

    Having lost the vast majority of South Africans’ trust, Eskom began
    raising prices by more than triple the inflation rate in 2008. From 2009
    to 2012, the price of a month’s normal electricity use in an ‘average
    township household’ is anticipated to rise from R360 ($47) to R1000
    ($132), according to Eskom. These price increases will have an extreme
    adverse impact, leading to a major increase in disconnections (and
    illegal reconnections, hence electrocutions) of poor households, that
    can best be described as ‘underdevelopment’.

    Ironically, the World Bank and its hired-gun ‘Expert Panel’ (which
    reported on February 18th) insist that the proposed Eskom loan will have
    a ‘developmental’ impact. The civil society coalition vigorously object
    that the core problems listed above were downplayed or simply ignored in
    Bank staff and Panel research, and we therefore question both their
    competence and climate/poverty commitments.

    The Bank is in an untenable position, as it soon releases a new Energy
    Policy and also campaigns to take on additional responsibilities for
    channeling finance related to climate change. The proposed Eskom loan
    should disqualify the Bank from any further role in climate-related
    activities.

    Critics insist that if the Bank intends to raise $180 billion in new
    capital from member groups prior to the Bank/IMF Spring meetings in late
    April, it will have to shelve this loan, because the world’s citizens
    will object that this represents business as usual financing at a time
    energy transformation is increasingly urgent.

    In turn, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa - which is due to
    issue its statement on the proposed Eskom tariff hikes on Wednesday,
    February 24th - will have to go back to the drawing board and
    recalculate a fair rates increase for Eskom - without its expensive and
    unnecessary World Bank loan.

    In addition, the national budget announced by Finance Minister Pravin
    Gordhan on February 17th will have to be rejigged, because a large
    proportion of it is reliant upon foreign financing; of South Africa’s
    2010 anticipated inflows, a substantial amount was expected from the Bank.

    Critics are gaining momentum:
    * Communities and environmentalists have begun to protest the Eskom
    loan, including at the firm’s Durban headquarters on February the 16th.

    * The main metal manufacturing trade union, the National Union of
    Metalworkers of South Africa, announced opposition to the loan on
    February the 18th. Other unions threatened strikes against the price
    hikes and Eskom labour practices.

    * The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, which had the highest
    African profile at the December 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, has
    endorsed the no-loan demand, on grounds of environmental damage.

    * The South African Council of Churches, which played a key role in
    criticising the World Bank due to its apartheid financing, has also
    expressed opposition to the loan.

    * Eskom is suffering an upsurge of illegal electricity connections in
    communities, as their prices become prohibitive.

    In sum, this is a company that can be fairly described as a poor credit
    risk.

    Dozens of organisations across the world have committed to oppose the
    World Bank’s proposed Eskom loan. They are contacting the Executive
    Directors of the World Bank from each country to demand a ‘no coal loan’
    vote at any director’s meeting at which the loan is tabled. In advance
    of the Bank’s recapitalisation efforts, the critics are ready to take
    even more vigorous action against the Bank itself - including revival of
    the “World Bank Boycott“ which cost the Bank support from many major
    bondholders over the past decade (including the world’s largest pension
    fund, the city of San Francisco, the Calvert Group, and university and
    church endowment funds).

    For the sake of environmental justice, the surrounding communities, the
    citizenry, the workers, Eskom customers and the continent of Africa (and
    all other sites affected by climate change), the Bank will have no
    choice but to withdraw this loan. Eskom will then have no other choice
    but to negotiate an appropriate energy mix and financing strategy with
    constituencies they have so far ignored.

    CURRENT LIST OF ENDORSEMENTS: (21 February 2010)

    South African Organizations
    Airport Farmers Association;
    Alternative Information Development Centre;
    Anti Privatization Forum;
    Austerville Clinic Committee;
    Buhlebuyeza
    Centre for Civil Society Environmental Justice Project;
    Clairwood Ratepayers Association;
    Diakonia - Durban;
    Earthlife Africa Durban;
    Eastern Cape Environmental Network;
    Environmental Monitoring Group;
    ESGIG
    groundWork, Friends of the Earth, South Africa;
    Federation for a Sustainable Environment;
    General Industries Workers Union of SA
    Greater Edendale Environmental Network;
    Isipingo Environmental Committee;
    Isipingo Ratepayers Association;
    Joint Action Committee of Isipingo;
    KwaZulu Natal Subsistence Forum;
    Merebank Clinic Committee;
    Merebank Residents Association;
    Noordhoek Environmental Action Group;
    Pietermaritzburg Association for Christian Social Awareness;
    Socialist Group
    South African Council of Churches;
    Southern African Faith Communities' Environment Institute;
    South Durban Community Environmental Alliance;
    Southern Cape Land Committee;
    The Workers World Media Production;
    Timberwatch;
    Trust for Community Outreach and Education;
    Umphili waManzi;
    Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance;
    Wentworth Development Forum;
    350.org
    Climate Justice Now! Gauteng representing:
    Boitshoko Home Based Care;
    Ceasefire Campaign;
    Citizens United for Renewable Energy and Sustainability;
    Displaced Rates Payers Association;
    Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg;
    Ecumenical Women’s Prayer in Action;
    Ecumenical Service for Socio-Economic Transformation;
    Inner City Resource Centre;
    Kathorus Concerned Residents;
    Off the Ground;
    The Benchmarks Foundation;
    Tsogang Youth Group;
    South African Chemical Workers Union (Gauteng);
    South African Council of Churches (Gauteng);
    Soweto Concerned Residents;
    Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee;
    Springs Eco Friends;
    Well Worn Theatre;
    Youth Agriculture Ambassadors;
    Wildlife and Environmental Society of South Africa (Gauteng)

    African organisations:
    Citizens for Justice (Malawi);
    Environmental Rights Action (Nigeria);
    Friends of the Earth Ghana (Ghana);
    Justice Ambiental (Mozambique)
    Pan African Climate Justice Alliance;
    Yonge Nawe (Swaziland).

    Global:
    Bangladesh: Solidarity Workshop
    France: Pres.Noe21
    Germany: Urgewald
    India: Community Environmental Monitoring - A Project of The Other Media
    India: National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers
    Italy: Campagna per la riforma della Banca mondiale
    Namibia: Earthlife Africa
    The Netherlands: Both Ends
    United Kingdom: ClientEarth
    United Kingdom: World Development Movement
    United States: Africa Action
    Unites States: Concerned Residents of Portland, NY + People Like Us
    Unites States: Friends of the Earth, US
    Unites States: Bank Information Center
    Unites States: Green Delaware
    Unites States: Global Exchange
    Unites States: International Forum on Globalization
    Unites States: Oil Change International
    United States: Pacific Environment
    United States: Sierra Club
    United States: Sustainable Energy and Economy Network
    United States: Valley Watch, Inc.


    Workshop on Private Public Partnerships 22 February

    PPP – PRIVATE PUBLIC PARTNERSHIPS
    A One-Day Workshop POWER INDABA
    22 February 2010 Durban International Convention Centre

    Facilitator: Peter METCALFE

    Part One - Introduction

    09:00 Defining PPP - Private Public Partnerships
    Infrastructure Privatisation?
    Why PPP - Private Public Partnerships
    Peter METCALFE
    Chairman The Foundation for the Development of Africa

    Part Two – The Government and PPP

    10:00 The Role of the National Treasury in PPP
    Presenting guidance provided by National Treasury in PPP
    Presenting National Treasury expectations in PPP
    Presenting a Step by Step process in structuring a PPP
    Karen BREYTENBACH
    Senior Project Advisor: PPP Unit
    South African Treasury

    11:00 Open Discussion

    11:30 Refreshments

    Part Three – The Financial Implications of PPP

    12:00 Financial Implications – The Risks?
    Paul EARDLEY-TAYLOR
    Standard Bank

    13:00 LUNCH

    Part Four – The Legal Aspects

    14:00 Legal Considerations for a PPP - Private Public Partnerships
    Concessions
    Service Contract
    Lease Contracts
    Management Contracts
    Build – Operate - Transfer
    Other
    TBA

    15:00 Case Study – Civil Society and PPP
    PPPs from a civil society perspective: What stakeholder engagement will have to grapple with
    Patrick BOND (Prof)
    (Director Centre for Civil Society)
    University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN)

    15:45 Refreshments

    16:00 Case Study – Project Management and PPP
    Rwandan Government case study on managing Public- Private partnerships, through entrenchment of a National Project Management Process
    Michael SIME
    Business Development & Facilitator
    TenStep SA & Sub-Sahara Africa

    16:45 The Triple Bottom Line
    Economics
    Social
    Environment
    Peter METCALFE
    Chairman
    The Foundation for the Development of Africa

    17:00
    Open Discussion
    Close of Workshop


    Economic Justice Course 20 February 29 May 2010



    ALI ABUNIMAH, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA FOUNDER, JOURNALIST AT UKZN

    As part of the CCS Economic Justice series, we will host a guest speaker
    from 10am‑11am in Memorial Tower Building, room L2 (second floor):

    ALL WELCOME!


    Ali Abunimah, a writer and commentator on Middle East and Arab‑American
    affairs, lives in Chicago. His articles have appeared in The New York
    Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times,
    The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Jordan Times, Lebanon's Daily Star and
    Ha'aretz, among others. He is frequent guest on local, national and
    international radio and television, including public radio and
    television, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, the BBC and many others. Abunimah lectures
    frequently at colleges in the United States. He was born in the United
    States and grew up in Europe. Both of his parents are originally from
    Palestine. He received his BA from Princeton University and MA from the
    University of Chicago. Abunimah travels often to the Middle East and is
    a full‑time researcher in social policy at the University of Chicago.
    Recent book contributions include No Justice, No Peace, in The
    Anti‑Capitalism Reader, edited by Joel Schalit. New York: Akashic
    Books, 2002; The US Media and the New Intifada (with Hussein Ibish) in
    The New Intifada, edited by Roane Carey. New York: Verso Books, 2001;
    The Palestinian Right of Return (with Hussein Ibish), Washington, DC:
    ADC, 2001; The Media's Deadly Spin on Iraq (with Rania Masri) in Iraq
    Under Siege edited by Anthony Arnove. Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
    2002 (Updated Edition).


    Durban renewable energy site visits 10 February 2010

    Durban renewable energy site visits by Minnesh Bipath, SA National Energy Research Institute with Muna Lakhani and Patrick Bond
    10 February 2010

  • 7:45am – meet at petrol station, corner Rick Turner and Belair Rds

  • 8-9am – site visit to Cato Manor biodigester, with Faith Manzi and
    Joe Grant

  • 9-11am – Durban University of Technology biodiesel from algae with Prof Faizal Bux

  • (9am – Patrick in staff selection committee meeting at UKZN)

  • 11am-1pm – Bisasar Road methane-electricity conversion with Rehana
    Dada, Khadija Sharife and Durban Solid Waste representative

  • 1-2pm – lunch (Davenport Road) with Trevor Ngwane and Baruti Amisi

  • 2-4pm – Kingsborough biodiesel algae site visit



  • Socialist Register Workshop on Crisis 6 February 2010

    South Africa’s financial bubble and boiling social protest
    by Patrick Bond (pbond@mail.ngo.za)

    Senior Professor, School of Development Studies and Director, Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
    Presented in absentia to the Socialist Register Workshop on Crisis, Toronto, 6 February 2010



    Socialist Register Workshop
    Preliminary Public Sessions

    Friday, Feb 5, 1:30-3:30pm, Verney Room, 6th Floor, York University
    'The Subsumption of Labour to Finance'
    Riccardo Bellofiore, Dick Bryan, Susanne Soederberg

    Friday, Feb 5, 7:30-9:30pm, Koffler Auditorium, Spadina Circle, University of Toronto
    'China, Japan and the USA: Together in Crisis?'
    Ho-fung Hung, R. Taggart Murphy, Johanna Brenner, Sam Gindin

    Workshop Sessions for Register Contributors
    Verney Room, 6th Floor, York University

    Saturday, Feb 6

    9:30am-10:00am, Opening Remarks
    Greg Albo, Vivek Chibber, Leo Panitch

    10:00am-12:00pm, Nature of the Crisis
    Dick Bryan, David McNally, Alfredo Saad-Filho

    1:00pm-3:00pm, Global Dimensions
    Ben Fine, Jan Toporowski, Patrick Bond

    3:00pm-5:00pm, Eastern Promises?
    Adam Hanieh, Ho-fung Hung, R. Taggart Murphy

    8:00pm, Dinner

    Sunday, Feb 7

    9:30am-12:30pm, Financial Markets
    Riccardo Bellofiore, Doug Henwood, Susanne Soederberg

    1:30pm-3:30pm, Social Impacts
    Johanna Brenner, Ursula Huws, Sam Gindin & Nicole Aschoff

    3:30pm-4:30pm, Concluding Session: Planning the Volumes


    Patrick Bond on climate change & Brutus Memorial at WorldSocial Forum 28 January 2010



    MEMORIAL FOR DENNIS BRUTUS
    Thursday, 28 January, 19-20:00h
    (in conjunction with Daniel Bensaid memorial)
    Next to Gazometro, Armazém 06 Cais do Porto

    On 28 January from 7-8pm, the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society invites you to share your memories of Dennis.

    Dennis died on 26 December, aged 85. We join with comrades celebrating the life of Daniel Bensaid, to explore Dennis’ political and literary legacy, with a forward emphasis on how his life guides our own, today and in future. Dennis was a leading presence in the World Social Forum from 2001-08. We will discuss his poems and prose, youth and apartheid incarceration, lifelong independent-left positioning, humanitarian style, commitment to nonviolence, non-racial sporting accomplishments, anti-racist/capitalist politics, contributions to the global justice movement and internationalism, no-compromise environmentalism and never-ending community/labour solidarity. We welcome your inputs, and will add these to the book we anticipate publishing in his honour in mid-2010.

    For more information contact Patrick Bond: bondp@ukzn.ac.za or +27 83 425 1401.



    Seminar:Novo Ordenamento Mundial / New World Order Planning New World / New World Order


    Local: (venue) Cais 7. Location: Pier 7.
    Participantes: Walden Bello, Taoufik Ben Abdallah, Patrick Bond, Antônio
    Martins, Socorro Gomes

    Para mais informações: For more information:

    Fórum Social 10 Anos Grande Porto Alegre: http://www.fsm10.org

    Seminário internacional Dez anos depois: desafios e propostas para um outro mundo possível: http://seminario10anosdepois.wordpress.com/

    International seminar Ten years on:challenges and proposals for another possible world: http://seminario10anosdepois.wordpress.com/

    www.ecoagencia.com.br

    Planning a New World Climate Order: ‘Seal the Deal’ or ‘Seattle the Deal’?
    by Patrick Bond Centre for Civil Society, Durban

    Presented at the 10th World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 28 January (9am-noon, Pier 7)

    The Copenhagen Accord that US President Barack Obama persuaded leaders of the BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China - to sign at literally the climate summit’s last minute on December 18 is a telling reflection of the limits to top-down ‘global governance’, and suggests the potential instead for bottom-up transformation. The deal followed extremely harsh police repression against nonviolent protesters outside the Bella Centre, and inside, a ‘Green Room’ process in which Denmark’s conservative ruling party leaders cherry-picked 26 countries to represent the world. When even that small group deadlocked, allegedly due to Chinese intransigence and the overall weak parameters set by the US, the five leaders – Obama, Lula da Silva, Jacob Zuma Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao - attempted a face-saving last gasp at planetary hygiene.

    Not only did the Accord fail on its own terms, missing even its first January 31 deadline for signing on and declaring cuts. The UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, then conceded no binding deal was likely even at the Mexican meetings in November 2010. Moreover, Obama’s strategy meant the World Trade Organisation’s divide-and-conquer political style would become the norm for UN climate negotiations - if indeed the UN remains a site of negotiation, instead of the more likely G20, starting with the expected G8 decommissioning near Toronto in June 2010 - to the obvious detriment of climate victims, especially in Africa and small islands.
    READ FULL PAPER


    Social forum leftists decry climate talks failure
    By Alan Clendenning (The Associated Press)

    PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil ‑‑ Activists at the World Social forum say world
    leaders' failure to forge a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen
    shows the planet's most powerful nations are incapable of setting
    important global policy.

    Patrick Bond of South Africa's Centre for Civil Society says the outcome
    of December's climate change talks means that people cannot trust the
    elites to generate a new world order for the climate.

    Bond spoke Thursday, on the fourth day of the forum. The gathering is an
    annual countercultural demonstration against the World Economic Forum
    now under way in Davos, Switzerland.

    He also said rich countries and big emerging‑market nations want to
    promote and expand fossil fuel industries that contribute to global
    warming.
    www.miamiherald.com




    Sul‑africano propõe nova ordem climática mundial: Patrick Bond sugere uma pressão social contra o uso de combustíveis fósseis
    Sandro Schreiner

    A perspectiva de um Novo Ordenamento Global foi um dos quatro temas de
    debates, ontem, dentro do módulo Elementos da Nova Agenda II, do
    Seminário Internacional. A discussão foi realizada no Armazém 6, do Cais
    do Porto. Dentro desse tema, chamou a atenção a defesa feita pelo
    professor sul‑africano, da Universidade de KwaZulu‑Natal, Patrick Bond,
    para a constituição de uma nova ordem climática mundial. Segundo ele, é
    necessário que os movimentos sociais organizados pressionem os governos
    nacionais contra o uso indiscriminado dos combustíveis fósseis,
    principalmente o carvão e o petróleo. Não podemos esperar que as elites
    dominantes nos ajudem. É necessário que esse novo ordenamento climático
    venha de baixo, forçando controles regulatórios nacionais mais rígidos,
    sustentou.

    Para Bond, os integrantes de movimentos sociais devem, ainda, intervir
    nas agências nacionais de planejamento. É importante, pois são elas que
    estabelecem condições para que empreendimentos econômicos, entre eles a
    exploração mineral, possam ser implantados, disse.

    Outro destaque ficou por conta do presidente do Comitê para a Anulação
    da Dívida do Terceiro Mundo (CADTM), o belga Eric Toussaint. Ele
    questionou a ideia de manter o modelo atual do FSM apenas como um espaço de debate e troca de ideias. Para Toussaint, é preciso um instrumento internacional para determinar prioridades em termos de demandas e objetivos. Ele crê que a formatação de um calendário comum de ação, ou seja, um elemento de estratégia universal seria imprescindível. Se o fórum não permite isso, deve‑se construir outro instrumento, que não elimine tudo aquilo que já conquistamos, mas que tenha também a capacidade de tomar iniciativas práticas de discussão para um novo ordenamento, enfatizou.

    Toussaint avaliou que, entre as perspectivas, está a ideia do presidente
    da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, de criação de uma Quinta Internacional
    Socialista. Ela reuniria movimentos sociais e partidos de esquerda.
    Pode ser uma proposta interessante, desde que haja um diálogo entre
    partidos e movimentos sociais que a torne um instrumento de convergência
    para a ação e a elaboração de modelo alternativo, disse.

    Ainda foram discutidos ontem, no módulo Elementos da Nova Agenda II, A
    Organização do Estado e do Poder Político, Direitos e
    Responsabilidades Coletivas e Como Construir a Hegemonia Política.
    sandro@correiodopovo.com.br
    http://www.redportiamerica.com/sulafricano_propoe_nova_ordem.html


    Dennis Brutus tribute, with SMI & Durban community groups 23 January 2010



    A tribute to Dennis Brutus will be held by Durban civil society on 23
    January, noon‑2pm, at Howard College Auditorium. An additional
    colloquium on Brutus' political/literary life will be held in mid‑March.

    Programme

    13:30 ‑ Photos

    14:00 – Introduction and Welcome

    14:05 ‑ Poetry Reading

    14:10 ‑ Address

    14:25 ‑ Cultural Item

    14:30 ‑ Tributes from Organisational Representatives

    15:00 ‑ Poetry Reading

    15:05 ‑ Further Tributes

    15:30 ‑ Poetry Reading

    15:40 ‑ Film Screening : I am a Rebel

    16:40 ‑ Vote of Thanks and Closing Comments

    17:00 – Close of Programme

    A common hate enriched our love and us....
    Dennis Brutus

    Escape to parasitic ease disgusts;
    discreet expensive hushes stifled us
    the plangent wines became acidulous

    Rich foods knotted to revolting clots
    of guilt and anger in our queasy guts
    remembering the hungry comfortless.

    In draughty angles of the concrete stairs
    or seared by salt winds under brittle stars
    we found a poignant edge to tenderness,

    And, sharper than our strain, the passion
    against our land’s disfigurement and tension;
    hate gouged out deeper levels for our passion

    a common hate enriched our love and us.


    (Hosted by the CCS, SMI and UCAF)



    Friends gather to pay tribute to Brutus
    Noelene Barbeau Daily News 25 January 2010

    The Howard College Auditorium at the University of KwaZulu-Natal was
    filled to capacity on Saturday as friends and colleagues paid tribute to
    people's champion and anti-apartheid activist, Professor Dennis Brutus.

    A man often described as a poet of the people, Brutus, 85, was
    diagnosed with prostate cancer last year and died last month at his
    son's home in Cape Town.

    Dr Deena Padayachee, a friend and his doctor, said yesterday was a
    fitting farewell because a roving microphone allowed for feedback from
    the audience about a man who had influenced their lives. An audio-
    visual presentation on Brutus's life was also part of the programme.

    Dennis was very humble, unassuming and highly intelligent. He was very
    approachable and could explain the most complicated of matters very
    simply whether he was talking about Shakespeare or racism, Padayachee said.

    Dennis wasn't bitter, angry or remorseful at the time of his death,
    despite there being no medical aid for veterans and not receiving a
    state pension.

    Many of the doctors and specialists went the extra mile for him and
    didn't charge him a fee. Even hospital fees were reduced.

    Dennis was an old-world gentleman, who lived with dignity and always
    respected other people even when he criticised them. I learnt a great
    deal from him, said Padayachee who also praised Brutus's friends and
    fellow UKZN colleagues Professor Patrick Bond and Claudia Martinez
    Mullen who were with Brutus every day and took him to his appointments.

    Mullen described Brutus as her best friend. She had known him for five
    years and had met him at the university.

    Dennis and I shared the struggle together for students to have better
    education and a dignified life, she said.

    The worst day of her life was when she heard Brutus had cancer. It was
    a shocking and emotional moment. We shared beautiful memories together
    and I will always remember his clear, limpid eyes, she said.

    Desmond D'Sa, South Durban Community and Environment Alliance
    co-ordinator, re-called on Saturday that Brutus would always attend a
    protest, be it against war, to chase an Israeli ship out of the Durban
    Docks in support of the people of Palestine,to support of the Niger
    Delta people fighting for their land, or the protest in support of the
    Early Morning Market and the poor traders.

    To me it's clear Comrade Dennis knew the past, could see the present
    and could predict the future.

    Never before has there been a man who has a touched me and many of the
    people of South Durban and Durban, not only with their presence but
    their commitment, drive and passion to stand up for the downtrodden,
    oppressed and marginalised, he said.
    noelene.barbeau@inl.co.za


    CCS cohosts Climate Justice Now! on electricity hearings strategy, 15 January 2010

    Climate Justice Now! on electricity hearings strategy

    From South Durban Community Environmental Alliance:

    In December 2009 NERSA announced public hearings on Eskom’s proposed
    revenue application – the multi‑year price determination 2010/11 to 2012.
    These hearings are to be held in different centres and on account of this many organizations registered to make verbal submissions on the 18th January 2010 at the ICC Durban Exhibition Centre starting at
    09.00am until 15.00pm .

    Climate Justice Now! SA (CJN!SA) in conjunction with the Centre for Civil Society will be hosting a public meeting on the NERSA hearings on 15th January 2010 at 09h30 at Howard College, UKZN.

    Bobby Peek from groundWork will be speaking on Eskom's application to NERSA and David Hallowes from groundWork will be speaking on The World Bank and Eskom. There will be time for input, discussion and questions.
    All are invited to attend.

    Any queries about the UKZN meeting should be directed to Alice Thomson
    on 0314659038


    Patrick Bond debates NHI at Idasa, CT, 19 January 2010

    Idasa Roundtable: National Health Insurance in South Africa: Exploring Some Key Questions

    Date: 19 January, 2010
    Time: 08h30 – 13h30
    Venue: Town House Hotel, 60 Corporation Street, Cape Town

    Introduction
    Access to quality health care for all remains a key challenge facing democratic South Africa. Debates concerning the optimal ways of addressing this challenge have acquired an increased urgency given the possibility of the introduction of a system of National Health Insurance (NHI).

    The roundtable aims to foster healthy debate amongst a range of stakeholders on some of the key questions relating to such a proposed system. The focus is firstly on the likely financing risks and opportunities of such a system, and secondly on the potential roles of the private and public health sectors in its implementation.

    The roundtable will be divided into two 90 minute sessions. Each session will commence with two brief presentations, followed by open discussion.

    The roundtable will be chaired by Ivor Jenkins of Idasa.

    Roundtable Programme

    09h00 – 09h30 Registration and Welcoming Tea

    09h30 – 11h00 Session 1: Financing National Health Insurance: Some Risks and
    Opportunities
    Speakers:
  • Mr. Alex van den Heever - Independent Economist

  • Prof. Patrick Bond - Director of the Centre for Civil Society and Senior Professor of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal


  • 11h00 – 11h30 Tea Break

    11h30 – 13h00 Session 2: The Role of the Public and Private Sector in NHI
    Implementation
    Speakers:
  • Dr. Clarence Mini - Director: Board of Healthcare Funders of Southern
    Africa

  • Mr. Tebogo Phadu – Policy Research Coordinator, ANC Policy Unit


  • 13h00 – 14h00 Closing, followed by lunch


    CCS cohosts Climate Justice Now! on electricity hearings strategy, 15 January 2010

    Climate Justice Now! on electricity hearings strategy

    From South Durban Community Environmental Alliance:

    In December 2009 NERSA announced public hearings on Eskom’s proposed
    revenue application – the multi-year price determination 2010/11 to 2012.
    These hearings are to be held in different centres and on account of this many organizations registered to make verbal submissions on the 18th January 2010 at the ICC Durban Exhibition Centre starting at
    09.00am until 15.00pm .

    Climate Justice Now! SA (CJN!SA) in conjunction with the Centre for Civil Society will be hosting a public meeting on the NERSA hearings on 15th January 2010 at 09h30 at Howard College, UKZN.

    Bobby Peek from groundWork will be speaking on Eskom's application to NERSA and David Hallowes from groundWork will be speaking on The World Bank and Eskom. There will be time for input, discussion and questions.
    All are invited to attend.

    Any queries about the UKZN meeting should be directed to Alice Thomson
    on 0314659038




    |  Contact Information  |  Terms of Use  |  Privacy