China

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!

Greetings from the Mid-Ohio River Valley, where the excitement never stops.

Bunnie Huang, on China: “It’s also obvious (to an outsider) that the press is government controlled and biased. The writing style and headlining of the China Daily reminds me a lot of The Onion.”

The Parkersburg News isn’t government controlled, but it’s a lot like The Onion, too:

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WoMag blog? http://worcestermag.blogspot.com/ is listed in the blog log this week, but it doesn’t exist. In fact, the name worcestermag.blogspot.com is still available! What hoodlum will grab it first?

Update: Two seconds of sleuthing reveals it shoulda been http://worcesterma.blogspot.com/. Typos in URLs are serious things.

Next SMOC meeting: Monday, there’s another public meeting with SMOC about the June Street program. A judge will be the moderator.

You’ll recall that this June Street dispute prompted the classic line: “I will be the neighbor from hell.”

You gotta ask yourself: is being the neighbor from hell going to accomplish your goals, or just make your neighborhood more hellish?

Downtown Worcester: The Worcester Regional Research Bureau is sponsoring an online survey about Downtown Worcester.

Winslow Street Park: Note that the future Winslow Street Park is right next door to Ed Hyder’s market, one of the finest groceries food stores in the city.

It’ll be so sweet to grab some olives and baked goods and sit in the park with a young lady snacking and watching the passersby on Pleasant Street.

When Clive McFarlane sees this, he thinks:

. . . it is difficult to see how a park of leisure and peace can long endure in a neighborhood where many people live lives patched together by welfare, drugs and alcohol, and to which those who are lucky to escape with a college education seldom come back.

I think: “Picnic heaven.”

China slaughtering dogs over 35cm tall: Part of their one dog policy. Washington Post:

Keeping pets has been controversial in China for decades. Banned as a middle-class habit during the radical Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, dog-raising surged anew with the introduction of free-market reforms.

The government line is that this is about stopping rabies. Are bigger dogs bigger rabies risks?

Here’s the article.

It only applies to employers with over $1 billion in annual sales and stores of 90,000 square feet or more. It’s aimed at Wal-Mart, but I’m not sure who else would fall into that category; the article doesn’t say if it actually applies to any existing businesses in the city.

The wage under this ordinance is $10.00, plus $3.00 in fringe benefits. Much better than minimum wage, but still under the $15.00 (under the table, presumably) that day-laborers in Agoura Hills, California are getting.

Also, of course, it only applies within the city limits; the article notes that Wal-Mart recently opened a store just outside the boundary of the city.

Incidentally, I had no idea Chicago had 50 people on its City Council. Wow!

Rudi Cilibrasi recently came to visit me from Amsterdam. On a punt gently chauffeured by a budding political-economist, in the serene surroundings of Oxford, we had fun talking about hoarding gold and the imminent collapse of world economy, amongst other things; and I found myself saying radical things like “houses and land should not have prices”. But more practically:

In the last few years, I have found more and more affinity with Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese revolution of 1911. Read the rest of this entry »

Darfur on TV: An old interview with me about Darfur airs on WCCA‘s “Flipside” Monday, May 1 at 7:30pm. Reairs Tuesday, May 2 at 11am; Wednesday, May 3 at 9:30pm; and Thursday, May 4 at 1:30pm. This was taped a month ago, just before our last Darfur civil disobedience. Some parts of it, like my appeal to Jim McGovern to do more on Darfur, are a bit out of date.

Collapsing Iran: John Robb predicts that the US will use air power to destroy Iran’s infrastructure, with the goal of driving the country into chaos. This is different from terrorism how?

Saint Kermit: The Worcester County podcasters interview some of the candidates for Lieutenant Governor, including Worcester Mayor Tim Murray.

Zack in China: A “taxonomy” of vegetarian restaurants.

Rocketboom: This episode is downright Warholian. Right out of Warhol’s screen tests.
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Television: A few dozen people gathered outside the WCCA TV13 studios downtown this morning to watch Worcester’s first cablecast of Democracy Now on the TV in the window. It was pretty fun. Not surprisingly, there was an interview with Noam Chomsky.

Mark Dixon speaks: The Wal*Mart king clarifies some of the details around his 49 hours at Wal-Mart.

Holy Cross: Some Holy Cross students made a monument to American and Iraqi war dead. Of course, it was vandalized. Taryn Plumb:

Perpetrators pulled or kicked the green stakes from the ground and chucked them around the surrounding area. Signs signifying what the stakes represented were torn up and replaced with an American flag and a sign reading, “Freedom is not free.”

Worcester County college students: If you need 2,000 crosses for a war dead memorial, contact me at pieandcoffee@gmail.com.
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