New Left Review

Will the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali this week give us Contraction and Convergence? Then, will it be implemented as carbon rationing or personal carbon trading? Will the decresing annual ration give a form of demurrage (negative interest; with thanks to Cllr Dr Rupert Read)? By the way, the Joint Public Issues Team of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church, and the United Reformed Church urges Britons to write their Members of Parliament about the Climate Change Bill.

Following Clive Lord et al.’s idea about citizen’s income, in this issue of New Left Review, Robin Blackburn proposes a universal pension of 1 USD per day. Can we have a universal ‘human rights’ income, on the strength of Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? (Dream on.)

In this week, as European Union heads of governments signed the Lisbon Treaty, I read the draft constitution of Corsica by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with thanks to Dr Bob Purdie).

‘Home economics’ is a redundant phrase.

Recent books from Verso:

Slavoj Žižek (2000) The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting For? ISBN 978-1-85984-770-1.

Terry Eagleton (2007) Jesus Christ: The Gospels. ISBN 978-1-84467-176-2. This is the New Revised Standard Version of the Gospels introduced by Eagleton and edited by radical cleric Giles Fraser. It is pretty cool that Verso is following the Gideons. On this note, I might mention that recently, I bought the Revised English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version. My copies of both of these are with the Apocrypha (though the collection there is different), and the NRSV is the ‘Anglicized’ text; both are published by the Oxford University Press. I thought each of these represented very wide (as wide as allowed in the current climate) ecumenical English-language translation work in either side of the Atlantic.

I am assuming that the gentle readers of Pie and Coffee also get their news from the BBC and the Guardian so we don’t have to alert you to anything already reported there. Gentle readers might also already be subscribed to the free publications OSCE Magazine, and Finance and Development from the IMF.

But then gentle readers may want to spend some money and start receiving “the most intelligent political journal in the world”, the New Left Review, whose 160 punch-packed pages arrive neatly every two months. From this issue 44:

Sven Lütticken, Idolatry and its discontents:

[T]he veil has been hijacked by right-wing mouthpieces who routinely invoke the Enlightenment in a way that reduces critique to neatly packaged dogma for the age of the soundbite. One such Enlightenment fundamentalist is Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who during her years in Holland—she has since moved on to the US, to work at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute—wrote the script for a short film on the role of women in Islam. [...] Turning women wearing veils into the faceless face of otherness allows Hirsi Ali and her allies to ignore the questions raised by the rise of the veil in Europe—questions that can be uncomfortable for the heroic defenders of western liberal values. [...] Is the veil not effectively being used to unmask and lay bare the limits of Western liberalism—to reveal it as a sham, an ideology in the service of capitalist powers?

Stephen Graham, War and the city:

A hidden archipelago of mini-cities is now being constructed across the US sunbelt, presenting a jarring contrast to the surrounding strip-mall suburbia; other Third World cityscapes are rising out of the deserts of Kuwait and Israel, the downs of Southern England, the plains of Germany and the islands of Singapore. [...] In a mirror-image reversal of the more familiar global marketing contests in which cities parade their gentrification, cultural planning and boosterism, here the marks of success are decay and an architecture of collapse. Col. James Cashwell, a US squadron commander, reported after an exercise in an urban-warfare training city at George Air Force base in California that ‘the advantage of the base is that it is ugly, torn up, all the windows are broken [and trees] have fallen down in the street. It’s perfect for the replication of a war-torn city.’ [...] The ‘military–industrial–entertainment–media complex’ has played a central role in naturalizing the idea that American and allied forces should be pitched in battle against the inhabitants of Arab and Third World cities. The two most popular video game franchises in 2005 were Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army, developed respectively by the US Marines and the Army. Both games centre overwhelmingly on the task of occupying stylized Arab cities. Their immersive simulations work powerfully to equate these environments with ‘terrorism’ and to stress that they need ‘pacification’ or ‘cleansing’ by military means.

I have not read MLK’s autobiography; nor have I read M. K. Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth or Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom.

New Left Review 42 (November/December 2006) is out. Au Loong-Yu of Globalization Monitor said therein: “Chinese peasants can endure a tremendous amount. If they do become violent and burn your property, it is nearly always your fault.”; “Filipinos and Indonesians working in Hong Kong can mobilize in far greater numbers than local Chinese, which is rather shameful.”; and

In my view, supposed gains such as in the case of Wal-Mart are largely meaningless. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions pockets union dues without providing the workforce with any bargaining power. It presents a very convincing façade to organizations such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, but does not permit workers to speak freely to foreign delegates. The official unions are not run for the benefit of the workers. Their Western counterparts should really oppose recognition of the ACFTU, and refuse to talk to them unless they allow people independent trade union rights.

JoAnn Wypijewski’s review on Louis Uchitelle’s book Disposable Americans is one of the many articles worth reading, as readers can expect from any issue of NLR.

All this (and today’s committee meeting of the local of my trade union, the University and College Union) reminded me: Our esteemed regular contributor, Adam Neil Maximilian Villani, was in a band that wrote the hymn “God Bless the Labor Movement”. I wonder if I should get permission to reprint it here. I am not praying for the Movement nearly enough!

The L.A. Times today is chock-full of articles relevant to P&C.

• The lead story is on the massive demonstrations against proposed draconian laws against illegal immigration. They say it’s the biggest demonstration of any kind in L.A.’s history.
• Steve Lopez continues to write compelling columns about life on Skid Row and the issues surrounding it. Today he writes of single mother Elizabeth Brown and her two children and their struggle to find affordable housing. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of opposition to putting homeless shelters anywhere besides Skid Row.
• A obituary of the remarkable Desmond Doss, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor in WWII as a conscientious objector.
• A look at the controversy around erecting fields of crosses as war memorials/protests.
• The Hospital Association of Southern California is urging its members to revamp their policies for dealing with homeless patients in the wake of allegations of “dumping” the homeless on Skid Row.

Some of those links may require you to register for free at their site.

We are pretty rubbish as a species. We are not very good at passing on our genes or our bits (digital information). The longest-living legacy of ours is likely to be our crap, in the form of radioactive waste.
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The Revd Dr David Peel, Moderator of the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church, delivered the annual St Columba’s Lecture today (2005-10-31) on the topic of ‘In the world but not of the world: the challenge of being a counter-cultural church’. The lecture is planned for a collected volume of David’s thoughts. Here are 3 of my thoughts in response.
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