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[1] From: "Aditya Mishra" <aditya11@sbcglobal.net> Date: Thu Sep 15, 2005 Subject: Re: [indiathinkersnet] Using reason and revelation intelligently It is all BS. I do not seek any guidance from any religious dogmata nor do I appreciate those who do. ----- Original Message ----- From: "P. Joseph Raju" <aa5756@...> > As far as my spiritual quests are concerned, I should look to the Quran > for guidance to help me make decisions. Also with regard to ethical > principles, I can choose those portions of the Quran which say that > killing one innocent human being is equivalent to murdering all humanity. > Making it the axiom of my worldview, I can then work out a vision which > can be for the good of all humanity ------------------------- [2] From: rkurian1@vsnl.com Date: Thu Sep 15, 2005 Subject: Unnatural Disaster: The Lessons of Katrina UNNATURAL DISASTER: THE LESSONS OF KATRINA Worldwatch Institute September 02, 2005 http://www.worldwatch.org/press/news/2005/09/02 Worldwatch Projects Catastrophe Will Be The Most Costly Weather-Related Disaster in History Washington, D. C. ??“ The overwhelming human and financial impacts of Hurricane Katrina are powerful evidence that political and economic decisions made in the United States and other countries have failed to account for our dependence on a healthy resource base, according to an assessment released today by the Worldwatch Institute. Alteration of the Mississippi River and the destruction of wetlands at its mouth have left the area around New Orleans abnormally vulnerable to the forces of nature. According to many scientists, the early results of global warming??”90 degree Fahrenheit water temperatures in the Gulf and rising sea levels??”may have exacerbated the destructive power of Katrina. ???The catastrophe now unfolding along the U. S. Gulf Coast is a wake-up call for decision makers around the globe,??? says Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin. ???If the world continues on its current course??”massively altering the natural world and further increasing fossil fuel consumption??”future generations may face a chain of disasters that make Katrina-scale catastrophes a common feature of life in the 21st century.??? ???The appalling images from New Orleans demonstrate that the world??™s richest country is not immune from the need to respect natural systems and to invest in their protection,??? continued Flavin. "This will likely be the most expensive weather-related disaster the world has ever faced." According to an assessment by Worldwatch researchers, the long-term lessons of Katrina include: 1. Maintaining the integrity of natural ecosystems should be a priority: Indiscriminate economic development and ecologically destructive policies have left many communities more vulnerable to disasters than they realize. This, together with rapid population growth in vulnerable areas, has contributed to worldwide economic losses from weather-related catastrophes totaling $567 billion over the last 10 years, exceeding the combined losses from 1950 through 1989. Losses in 2004 exceeded $100 billion for the second time ever, and a new record will almost certainly be set this year once Katrina??™s damages are totaled. 2. Short-term thinking is a dangerous approach to policy: During the past few years, the U. S government has diverted funding from disaster preparedness to help finance the Iraq War, and has reduced protections for wetlands in order to spur economic development. Both decisions are now exacting costs that far exceed the money saved. Natural ecosystems such as wetlands and forests are often more valuable when left intact so as to protect communities from floods, landslides, drought, and other natural occurrences. Failure to protect ecosystems contributed to the massive loss of life when the tsunamis swept across the Indian Ocean last year and when Hurricane Mitch killed 10,000 people in Central America in 1998. 3. The links between climate change and weather-related catastrophes need to be addressed by decision makers: Although no specific storm can be definitively link to climate change, scientists agree that warm water is the fuel that increases the intensity of such storms and that tropical seas have increased in temperature by up to 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. (Katrina transformed rapidly from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane when it passed from the Atlantic Ocean to the much warmer Gulf of Mexico.) In the next few decades, water temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise, greatly increasing the vulnerability of many communities. Global warming and its anticipated effects on the hydrological cycle will make some areas more vulnerable as storms, floods, and droughts increase in frequency and intensity. 4. There is an urgent need to diversify energy supplies: The national and global economic impact of Hurricane Katrina is growing by the day, with consumers around the world now paying significantly more for energy than they were a week ago. Decades of failure to invest in new energy options has left the world dependent on oil and natural gas that are concentrated in some of the world??™s most vulnerable regions??”the U. S. Gulf Coast, the Persian Gulf, and the Niger Delta in Africa. Biofuels and other renewable resources now represent viable alternatives to fossil fuels, which are not only vulnerable to natural disasters but could have a big impact on the severity of future disasters. - END - ---------------------------------- [3] From: rkurian1@vsnl.com Date: Thu Sep 15, 2005 Subject: No War But Class War! (To those who have a problem with this kind of articles being posted..) Articles like these are written by Americans, mainly White, to highlight the conditions in some parts of the US, particularly in the lives of the poor and non-white citizens of that country. They are meant to bring the attention of the rest of that country to that huge problem. Many people in the rest of the world did not know the truth about these conditions in the US. Posting these articles doesn't mean that one is happy about the horrors of Hurricane Katrina at all. There is no gloating about any of the suffering that poor people on the Golf Coast have been undergoing. Yet, it doesn't hurt for us to know and see that even superpowers have problems of various kinds. I wonder how many people of the developed world thought about the needless and enormous suffering of innocent civilians that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq unleashed on those countries.When horrible things happen to us personally, we might think about others who may have been helpless in front of man-made calamities like wars and the inaction of authorities in New Orleans after Katrina. Everybody who reads the newspapers or watches TV knows that it was the levees breaking that caused the flooding. Nobody is finding fault with a natural calamity hitting any country but the lack of co-ordination and a sense of urgency that the US govt exhibited was surprising/shocking to the rest of the world. Please note that nobody is comparing apples and oranges..Nobody is laughing either. India is a developing Third World country and if the leaders or the govt claims that we are capable of handling everything in India without any help from outside, we know that they are wrong. We don't call ourselves Developed or a Superpower. The whole world is shocked because nobody expected the US to exhibit this kind of a delayed response and most Americans are shocked beyond belief. Surely those who read American newspapers and watch American TV channels know that by now! Articles posted on these fora are quoted, not written by members. Let's not become defensive whenever we read something that we do not want to agree with.. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10273.htm No War But Class War! By Beth Moore 09/14/05 "ICH" -- -- Look upon the city of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast now, and you see the true face of capitalism. Look upon the tens of thousands of people who were abandoned, displaced, and then even disparaged by our government and its media minions for being trapped there by poverty, age, youth, or disability. They lived for days on end with no food, water, or shelter. They lived amidst corpses and raw sewage, seeing the ill and elderly die with nothing but the odd blanket or sheet with which to cover their bodies, watching babies being born with only contaminated water in which to wash their tiny bodies, and being promised that help would come tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until tomorrow never came for thousands. What you see, in the majority of those people, is the productive labor force that kept that city alive before Hurricane Katrina. You see the people who rang up the sales of goods they could never, in their wildest dreams, afford, who waited and bussed tables, cleaned houses, cared for the children of the wealthy, and generally did all the work of a service industry that keeps a tourist city alive. These are the people whose work produced the wealth of those who were able to leave the city in safety. When, after days without food, water, or adequate shelter, they attempted to appropriate the goods they had generated the capital to produce, property abandoned by those whom they had supported by their labor, they were shot at, vilified, and defined as criminals. Yes, look at New Orleans, and you see the cold and cynical face of capitalism. Our right-wing ruling class condemns the teaching of evolution, because it seems to contradict the "Holy Bible" and the words of Jesus Christ, in whom they profess to believe, but their brand of capitalism embodies the most cruel and soulless application of Social Darwinism. For whom does that process favorably select? It selects for the survival of those who produce nothing of substance. It favors those who, by inclination and aptitude, take from society, and from those whom they rule more than they ever return. It selects favorably for those whose bottomless appetites, ruthless will to power, and insatiable greed, threaten the survival of our entire planet. I grew up in Texas, and have lived in the Southern United States all my life. I immediately understood what the footage shown, and the reports of violence, looting, and lawlessness were meant to communicate, and the effect they were meant to have. Yes, the vast majority of faces I saw on the news coverage were black, and although few in this country would openly admit to racism, I understood very well the "spin" that the ruling class that controls the news media intended to communicate, even subliminally. The majority of the faces I saw on the streets of New Orleans were African American. Their ancestors, as slaves, built this country, even as its original inhabitants, Native Americans (whose only sin was not having a strict enough immigration policy) were nearly eradicated by the divine imperative known as Manifest Destiny. But I did not see "black people (I know the word that many used, whether they spoke it or not) out of control," looting and lawless. I did not see people undeserving of our compassion because they foolishly "chose" not to flee to safety, or because they are somehow inferior in their sentience and humanity. No. Many of us saw ourselves -- working people of all races, who live from week to week, month to month, often on far less than a living wage. We saw ourselves, and our mothers and fathers and grandparents and helpless children, abandoned by those who profit from our labor, but who return barely enough of what we produce for us to afford shelter, medical care, and food. I am not African American. Neither are most of my friends and coworkers. It may then surprise our ruling class, of both parties, that we saw our own faces, our own children, our own unburied, bloating, dead loved ones in the streets of New Orleans. It may surprise them that someone like me, a white woman with a college degree, would see, in those thousands of stranded, desperate people, my sisters and brothers, and that my heart would break and that I would be enraged. It has obviously come as a shock to George W. Bush and his insulated cadre of neoconservative imperialists that nearly everyone I know shares those feelings. We have spoken by phone, communicated by email, talked in the break room where I work, in tears and trembling with helpless outrage, over what appears to have been criminal negligence approaching genocide. We have known, at some level, for quite some time, that we are all expendable to this government, this ruling class, the oligarchy that covets our productivity, our taxes, and even the blood of our children for its wars for profit. Yes, we have known this, but the images and reports from New Orleans wrenched our guts and left us breathless with shock at this blatant and ruthless demonstration of that fact. The question we've asked among ourselves over the past week, then, is "What more will it take?" Yes, what more will it take for those of us who support the ruling class in this country with our labor, our taxes, and even the lives of our children, to say "No more!" When I have spoken and written of a revolution of the working class against those who live from the products of our work, and who rule us by propaganda, lethal force, and murderous negligence, many have objected. Revolution is equated with violence, and often for good reason. If the ruling class resists when the people demand the power due them, and reasonable rewards for their labor, in the form, at least, of living wages, it is in the nature of that ruling class to resist with lethal force. Lethal force, in self-defense, then, has often, historically, been the only recourse for those who would demand that the power reside in the people. Even now, those who did not leave New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast are characterized as products of a "welfare state," and as people who depended upon the government to their own deadly detriment. What the smug, right-wing pundits do not, or pretend not to understand, is the fact that resources for evacuation were not available to tens of thousands in that city. They do not understand what it means to work for the minimum wage, or even for a few meager dollars above it. A wage of $8/hour cannot pay rent on safe living quarters, provide health insurance, provide adequate food for a family of two or three, or pay for a vehicle, or even for the commercial public transportation out of a city in the face of certain disaster. The fact is that casualties have already been sustained in this class war. The dead in New Orleans are only the most dramatic, and most recent, of those casualties. We cannot doubt that there will be more natural disasters, for which our government, if it continues in its imperial wars for corporate profit, will still be unprepared. And in the guise of a "war on terror," there will surely be more war, more resources diverted from the protection our own people, even though we pay our taxes, in faith, for that protection. This is not the last assault upon us. It is also not the last in which the casualties will be "low-balled," by the corporate media, in which the dead and dying will be held accountable, and their lives regarded as necessary "culling" in the scheme of global corporate Social Darwinism. There will be more. There are, in fact, more being inflicted on a daily basis - silently, without media attention. The shameful infant mortality rate in this country. The incidence of homelessness. The fact that racism is one of the several "elephants under the carpet" that can then be used to divide working people along class lines, gender and race lines, and dissolve the solidarity against the ruling class that would be essential to mounting resistance toward those who practically deny us even the privilege of existence, while profiting off our labor. It is time, sisters and brothers, for a revolution. How can we not look at the city of New Orleans and see that it is time for those of us who work and support the Bush administration, the Democrats who play polite political games with them for a chance at the same hegemony they now exercise, for us to band together and demand a new nation, an new government. How can we not understand that we are expendable? That we are merely resources that represent the capital they covet, and for which they produce nothing, but demand everything from us? New Orleans is now up for grabs by the corporate empire, and Halliburton has been one of the first to start counting its money before the people of that city can even begin to count t heir dead. How much more do we have to suffer? How many lives? How many lies? Give me a number. Please. Give me a number. Tell me, please, how many lives do we, the working people of this country, have to give up. How many lives, in countries throughout the world, will it take? One life is precious beyond accounting, but we live in a culture in which numbers of lives apparently define our response, and can be manipulated by the news media and government and corporate entities. However many figures they present to us is simply too many for me, and for many others, who know exactly why those people are dead, and then there are the numbers of the displaced, who have lost everything - hundreds of thousands. Is that not a relevant number, as well? Give me a number. Tell me what that number will be, tell me what it will take before we will all arise and shout, with a thunder that will be heard across the world, "NO MORE!" This class war has been waged since the first African American slave took flight from bondage, to be hunted down and killed like a worthless beast.. It has been waged since the first Native American realized the need to stop the incursion of the European invaders, and saw entire villages of women and children and elderly destroyed by the "righteous" wrath of European invaders. This war has been waged from the first strike by workers who valued their own lives, and believed that their humanity was worth more than corporate gain, and then found themselves in the sites of the guns of the corporate empire of the robber barons. It has been waged from the first time, in all those cases, that those people were injured, killed, and even set against one another by the ruling class, who hoped they would do the dirty work of culling the compliant from the defiant for them. So it seems there are two questions here, that must be answered. How much more slaughter and mendacity and patronizing platitudes will we endure before we rise up and take the power that is ours? The power and productivity that support these parasites, is ours. What will it take for us to force them to face that fact? The second question, and one that must be answered even by those on the so-called left in this country, who have been on vacation this summer, and who now seem primed to dialectic, but not truly visceral and decisive action, is this: "Which side are you on?" Beth Moore lives on the Gulf Coast of Texas with her two children. She knows which side she is on. You can reach her at bhenry1@... . ------------------------------------------------------------------- [3] From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com> Date: Thu Sep 15, 2005 Subject: Church, Left cannot escape blame for Dalits' plight, says Sarah Joseph Church, Left cannot escape blame for Dalits' plight, says Sarah Joseph Staff Reporter http://www.hindu.com/2005/09/15/stories/2005091507750400.htm `A similar tendency seen in church, Left movements' --------------------------- [4] Activists, writers join protest against dress code J. Malarvizhi http://www.hindu.com/2005/09/16/stories/2005091607890100.htm DISCUSSION: Educationist, S.S. Rajagopalan (left), writer Kanimozhi and State secretary of the All-India Democratic Women's Association, U. Vasugi, at a meeting on dress code in Anna University. ??” Photo: Vino John CHENNAI: Anna University Vice-Chancellor does not have the legal power to decide what students should wear to college, said S.S. Rajagopalan, educationist. The Vice-Chancellor, chief executive of university, could only execute what the Syndicate and the Senate decided on, he said addressing a meeting organised by the All-India Democratic Women's Association and Students Federation of India here on Thursday. "As education increasingly becomes the prerogative of the privileged, it is necessary for the under-privileged to pay close attention to the issues surrounding education,'' he said. U. Vasugi, State secretary, AIDWA; Kanimozhi, poet and writer; and G. Selva, State leader of the SFI, said enforcing a dress code and banning cell phones was unjustified and authoritarian. "The SFI and AIDWA have condemned obscenity in films and oppose the dress code because it betrays an ignorance of the reasons for women's social subjugation,'' said Ms. Vasugi. Writer Kanimozhi expressed surprise that students who were deemed old enough to vote and select governments could not be trusted to choose their attire. Mr. Selva criticised self-financing engineering colleges for fining students for talking to the opposite sex. --------------------------------- |
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