Vassilis Palaiokostas letter to the media
31/01/2010 rioter.info

Vassilis Palaiokostas is on the run, after his escape with a helicopter from Korydallos prison, on Feb. 22/2009, accused for robbing banks and kidnapping industrialists. It is worth to say, he has never harmed human life, not even cop lives to avoid an arrest.

“On the occasion of the upcoming jury on the kidnapping of the industrialist G. Mylonas, that begins on Tuesday February 2, I would like to clarify certain issues.

Through different periods of my life I have been a first line fugitive, nearly 12 years in total an escapee (I hope there’s more of that coming) and 8 years a prisoner.

All those years that I had been and even now that Iam still hunted by the official state, there wasn’t found even one snitch to deliver me to the hands of my prosecutors. Even though, during my first escape, in August 1991, there was also a large reward for that, from the -generous to snitches- Greek state. On the contrary, I met people with troth, honor in their words, and dignity. People that opened their door for me, provided cover and help, often without even minding the risk they took for themselves. People that helped me in hard times for me (as in a prison escape) endangering their own lives, people that prove that in this country there aren’t only resigned, submissive fellows, but also many (so many I am surprised) people that honor the traditions of honor and solidarity to the hunted. Pride people that despise snitching, servitude and the constable.

I publicly express my gratitude to all those remarkable persons for their valuable help and for giving me the joy of having met them.

Two of them are Vaggelis Chrisohoides and Polys Georgiades, each one of them stood by me in his own way, at the time I needed them, without expecting personal gains, but only acted upon their conscience.

Declaring my solidarity to this two young men, the state strangles everyday knowing their only “crime” was their solidarity to the hunted, I would expect to see for once the magnitude the Republic of Greece takes prides in. Because for its petiness, I consider myself more than competent to describe: It’s an Abyss.

I will say nothing more. I only adress to those that care to retain some pleas of justice and dignity. And everyone should do what his sense of honor and his conscience tells him to do.

On 4/14/09, afternoon around 20:00 while driving on the central coastal road of Alepohori, suddenly three cars blocked my way and another two stuck on the back of my own car. Among them was a black Audi A4, a Peugot Rally and an Opel Athens Taxi. Each one of them with three persons (15 in total), all in plain clothes. All of them got instantaneously out, pointing at me, the drivers with H&K MP5 sub-machine guns with double cartridge, nad the other with Glock and H&K U.S.P semi-automatic handguns. I instantly understood these armed mercenaries of the Greek state where on a prowl for blood.

This same moment on my right, through an invisible from the main road, alley, comes another car with the driver standing aghast and stopping on the crossroad with the main road. Without second though I turned the wheels right and let it rip. Slightly hitting the other car (given the alley could barely take my jeap), I got right in the alley without knowing where it gets to. From my initial speeding to getting 20-30 meters in the alley, bullets where dancing on my car’s cabin. Those guys opened fire with their machine guns and handguns aiming right at me (the only thing undamaged was my car’s tires).

From my μeasurable experience in intense conditions, I am more than certain that they shot more than 150 bullets in 15 seconds (the whole scene didn’t last any longer). Most probably, some of them also found the unwary civilian’s car, while he was inside it.

These unscrupulous, blind shooters of EL.AS [transl: the Greek police] where determined to carry out fully the order they had take from their natural and political leaders. Find and kill.

In this case, they can blame their bad luck, since luck is female and cares for the daring. [transl. see latin: "Fortuna Favet Fortubus"]

The reason I refer to this incident is to show the contemptible way the Mass Media report such cases. The car I was riding and left 100 meters from the scene, because the alley was a dead-end, was full of bullets. This fact was not reported and the car never appeared anywhere, it magically disappeared. Just like the other car (hit and possibly with bullet holes), together with its misfortunate owner, the only witness that actually took part in the scene, withous his will ofcourse, watching the whole thing from the begining to the end.

So, instead of inquiring all these important facts to show what exactly happened in that scene, the daring and ingenious reporters of the Greek Mass Media gathered inside the room I was living in, and in exclusive reporting were waving around my unwashed underpants, informing screaming of tension the weak, ignorant, speachless tv-viewer.

This fact reveals clearly the “journalist community’s” compliance to keep silent, essentialy consenting to the criminal activity of EL.AS’ desperados and their head responsibles, in full cooperation with them. “We will allow you to enter the house for an exclusive report, but you ‘ll keep your mouth shut about everything else”. Such was the filthy deal between the two sides. The media would get their money, since underpants worth more in their stockmarket of values than the life of their owner. As long as he is “notorious”. And finally, who cares about how the police acts? If the police and their leadership believe a man just because he is wanted is to be killed, why should we disagree? Whenever we [the Media] needed some information, the police’s head officer provided it -they actually brag about it-. While, the hunted man has no phone. And even if he has one, it will be turned off or without a signal.

This is the way our daring and independant journalists think.

My congratulations, the future belongs to you. May I suggest the two organizations, police and media, could even integrate in own, for functional reasons. It’s both innovative and carries many advantages. Then, it won’t be for nothing that you elected a police correspondent as president of ESIEA (journalists-editors union).

If these ingenious reporters, with the same eagerness the show on mine and not only, underpants, cared to carry a constant control, denouncing to the Greek citizens that:

* 13.000 humans are in a state of captivity (under the pretext of illegality), living a total exploitation of themselves and their families, from the official state. That after passing the symplegades [transl: mythical deadly clashing rock of the argonaut campain] of a corrupt police and an even worst justice system, end up with heavy penalties in medieval conditions, by which this rotten system strives to control and then annihilate whatever dares to make a mockery of it.

* The armed guardians of the Greek state killing in cold-blood citizens (preferably the young) in the middle of the street, in front of the citizen’s own eyes. Humiliating and torturing to death people in the police stations. Setting up wilfully indictments sending “guilty” humans in jail for years. Setting a whole network of criminal activities not controlled by anyone.

* If they really cared to exercise some control over the modern Pirates of the political system, that helped by the gimmickery of the election system and the blessings of the Mass Media take over the Parliament, turning it into the headquarters of full domination on their voters citizens. Into a nest of intertwining interests, dealing transactions, bribes. Into a “terrorist hideout” where the loots from pillaging are divided around. A loot every citizen dares to question, becoming an obstacle in their plans will feel upon him the brutal democratic violence of a blood-thirsty repressive organization. He will feel the revengefulness, the revanchism, and the deep hatred the Greek state has for all those that rejected the status of an obidient citizen that understand his personal liberty as a necessity to do what he’s told to, but remain human with free will and claim an opinion on what’s going on around them with their own actions.

* If they revealed the great responsibility of this criminal organization for the establishment of a police state in Greece, through which they exercise an unbearable psychological violence to the citizen with hundreds of road blocks with cops armed-to-the-teeth with “survivor”-style weaponry, and the same menacing, numb look they had back in the junta days. The thousands of policemen one faces wherever he turns the eye (not to count the undercover ones). The dozens of head-hunters that prowl the mountains acting on their own taste, reminding of the begining of the 20th century, though with a modern name.

* If they denounce these and innumerable other things that de facto cancel the “social state” and “justice state” notions, as their role supposes, then today’s regime, they eagerly guard and name democracy, would be incomparably more humain, qualitative, and certainly more just.

You ‘d now say I am not the most adequate person to give recommendations, even less for matters of the regime.

That’s correct. In the place democracy was born, they can do whatever with her, even burry her if they wish so. It’s a good thing to die where in the place you where born. But, they shouldn’t go hard to the kids when they throw stones to her. They see her old and rotten, it’s stones she’s gonna get.

These insticts are primitive, though inerrable.

Because the kids are more honest and upstanding than the grown-ups.

Nobody would want to grow up just to find a dead body in the closed his parents have been hiding there to eat of her pension. They desire something more than a body in formol, and be sure they ‘re gonna get it, no matter how many dreads you put in their street.

On what concerns me, it is my absolute belief and surely of thousands others conscious people, that the damage caused to the social body by one shiny tv-presenter in one and only news bulletin (preferably the 8 o’ clock one), I can’t make it, even if they give me 10 lives to spare.

What’s the damage my drop-fire gun [transl. use of an old term for light arm guns of the mountain thieves and left-wing insurgents in Greece]. I have never turned it to an other human, much less to an other human’s mind.

Now, why am I with this drop-fire the prosecuted one that risks his life by any enraged death-squad, and those with their lucrative superweapons degenerate and devitalise the spirit of a whole people, leading them to mental necrosis, become my judges and my hunters, is my question too.

On second thoughts maybe the law on weapons should change. Whoever holds a fire-drop gun should be prosecuted for a capital offence!!!

Now, since it’s the first time I intervene with a public statement, I wouldn’t want it to end in a dispiriting way. So, let me add an allegoric enigma-quiz, I find it won’t trouble you much to solve.

What is the name, of a deputy sheriff of some mountainous and remote village of Utah, USA, overjoyed to his award winning by the FBI, for heroically and always risking his life arrested and gave to justice some dangerous elements to the order of his village? Who, apart of that precious award, also fed the ambition to have his triumphous achievement turn into a big Hollywood move, with George Clooney acting as him, something that pissed off his american patrons so that they exiled him, reducing him to the ranks of minister of “Citizens Protection” of some independent Balkan state. Who, to my exclusive information keeps fantacising about and anxiously sweeping for new “troublemakers”!

To make it even easier for you, I can also add some of his favorite words: Democracy, Revolutionary Fund, Ghetto, Communicating Vessels, Destabilization, Zero Tolerance, Organized Crime, They will be arrested and prosevuted.

He is also a devoted fan of snitching and loves “rats” and his hobbies include setting prices for the heads of wanted.

Keeping in mind though, that one of his many qualities is revanchism, I come to clarify that any similarity to real person or events is totally unintended.

Every police reporter that solves the quiz, enters a lottary for an exclusive interview.

My militant regards to all those that don’t surrender the weapons the chose to fight with, for the life they dream of.

PS. Some oil guys, they do rust.”

Vassilis Palaiokostas

Three Pussy Riot members are currently imprisoned and awaiting trial on hooliganism charges, after they performed wearing bright-colored homemade ski masks, inside Moscow's historic Christ the Savior Cathedral in late February and belted out a protest song against church leaders' support for then candidate Vladimir Putin.


Pussy Riot : Statement in Response to Patriarch's Speech on 24/03/2012
26/03/2012

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Your Holiness, Patriarch-

A fervent and sincere prayer can never be a mockery, no matter in what form it occurs, therefore it cannot be said that we jeered at, or mocked, the shrine.

We are plagued by the thought that the very shrine, which you consider so defiled, is inseparably linked to Putin, who in very words, brought it back to the Church. And because the of our prayer, asking our Holy Mother to drive out those who defile the brightest ideals of human life in Russia and all possible precepts of the Orthodox Faith, you are perceived as a mockery of the sacred.

In prayer it is evoked that , as millions of Christians were seriously grieved that you allowed the Church to become a weapon in a dirty campaign of dirty intrigues, urging the faithful to vote for a man whose crimes are infinitely far from God's Truth. We simply cannot believe the representative of the Heavenly Father if he acts contrary to the values for which Christ was crucified on the cross. As said by Pushkin, “ It is impossible to pray for King Herod; the Mother of God forbids it.”

You were endlessly wrong in saying in your sermon that we do not believe in the power of prayer. Without belief in the power of prayer and of words, we would never have offered our prayers so desperately and fervently, in anticipation of the serve persecution that could be dealt to us and our loved ones. The repressive powers that simply waited for the right moment to take revenge on our group for our tough Civic positions we have taken with our art. The power and truth of our prayer did not shame the Faithful, for surely the faith of a true believer, as the feelings of Christ, are too deep and universal -too filled with love- to be shamed. Our prayer shamed only Putin and his henchmen, and now three women have been thrown in prison, taken away from their young children, and now daily calls for arrests and punishments are issued forth from the higher bureaucracies. It It is Putin -not a believer- who, through domination and division, needs to keep the women in jail.

You say that we believe only in propaganda, the media, lies and slander, money and weapons, but we don't have faith in any of those things, as we have no faith in anything entity equal the brute powers of King Herod. You encouraged the Russian people to vote and pray for these powers, in whose name you have tried to link with prosperity of the Russian land.
First the pervasive and false propaganda on state television wrested from the people a victory for Putin. Now, through outright falsehood opposition and detractors at least is trying to assure the people that women with young children should be kept in the custody for "for violation of the laws of the Church.” On whose side are propaganda, media, lies and slander? On whose side is the belief in money? On which side are the performers of Pussy Riot, whose lives are close to the asceticism necessary for any creative thinking? Or is the belief in money on the side of those who invested the empty values of unprecedented governmental luxury in the code of conduct for any high-ranking man? Who has faith in weapons? Perhaps those who call for the killing in the name of religious feelings? On whose side were the dozens of armed men who, shouting and wielding their weapons, commanded a raid on March 3rd, having been sent to arrest two women suspected to have been in the temple- suspected of having asked Mother of God, loudly, get rid of Putin?

Pussy Riot




Pussy Riot, offshoot of Russian anarchist art group Voina, pisses off both church and state
--deathandtaxesmag.com--
By DJ Pangburn 4 days ago


Over the last few years, Voina, a Russian anarchist art collective, has been rather busy. They’ve painted a cock on a draw bridge; thrown cats inside a Moscow McDonald’s; had an un-simulated “fuck action” in a Russian museum; and overturned cop cars. Such is their reputation that the mysterious street artist Banksy himself bailed out members Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev.

More recently, an all-female Riot Grrrl offshoot of Voina, Pussy Riot, has been playing impromptu, Dada-esque punk rock shows in various public locations: Red Square, subway stations, a ritzy boutique, amongst others. But it is Pussy Riot’s most recent stunt that is attracting the most attention for the feminist group, recalling the type of response that could only come from heathen-hating Christians.

The group played inside Moscow’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral, in an area usually reserved for priests, calling on the Virgin Mary to chase Vladimir Putin away. Deacon Andrei Kurayev, whose response to the group was at once enlightened and condescending, drew the wrath of the more radical, reactionary strains of Christendom, with one member of a Christian foundation calling for “those bitches” to burn in hell. Divine.

Pussy Riot’s response? They called the church “a tool in dirty electoral intrigues,” while member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova allegedly invited the Orthodox Church spokesman Vsyevolod Chaplin to visit her in jail to debate the group’s actions.

One, of course, has to situate Voina and Pussy Riot within the context of Russia’s so-called democracy. While many artists are politically-neutered or spade, so to speak, Voina and Pussy Riot put their lives on the line with their radical art and calls for liberty. Their work preceded both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, and one could seriously argue they helped give birth to a new radical sentiment in Russia. It’s art at it’s finest: something worthy of early 20th century art movements like Dada, Surrealism and Futurism.

Meanwhile, the group’s supporters are protesting the detainment of and possible charges against two group members, Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, with signs emblazoned with the beautiful double-entendre, “Free Pussy Riot.”

For radical art and politics, the means of communication could not be any more sublime. And I’ll be damned if Pussy Riot isn’t the most interesting band in all the world. Not one American band would have the, well… ovaries to do this work.

Two men set themselves on fire protesting Italian economy
Friday, March 30, 2012 1:33:10 AM
--iolnews.com--

Italy was in shock on Thursday after an Italian builder on trial for tax evasion and a Moroccan man who had not been paid for months set themselves on fire in separate incidents.

Giuseppe C, 58, wrote suicide notes to the tax agency, friends and his wife before setting himself alight in Bologna on Wednesday. He was saved by a traffic warden and is in a critical condition in a severe burns unit.

“It's a terrible sign of desperation, a single case of distress which sums up a moment of great difficulty,” former premier Romano Prodi said Thursday.

“I hope he survives, but he is in a very serious state,” he said.

The Moroccan, a 27-year-old resident of Verona who is also a builder, set his arms and head on fire in a street on Thursday in an apparent copycat protest after yelling that he had not be paid for four months, police said.

“He shouted out that he hadn't been paid for four months and poured petrol over himself before setting himself alight. Police raced to put the flames out and he has been taken to hospital,” Pasquale d'Antonio from Verona police said.

Giuseppe C. had been due to attend the first hearing of a court case against him for 104 000 euros ($138 000) in unpaid tax and fines dating from 2007.

“On fire for tax: the taxman is killing the country,” read the front page headline of the right-wing Il Giornale daily, while the Repubblica wrote of “the tragedy of a handyman strangled by the economic crisis.”

Prime Minister Mario Monti's government has launched a wide-ranging crackdown on tax evasion as Italy struggles under a vast debt mountain.

The builder had set himself alight in his Fiat Punto in the car park of a former tax agency office. In his note, extracts of which were published in the Corriere della Sera newspaper, he told the agency “I've always paid my taxes.”

He asked for forgiveness and told them to “leave my wife alone.”

His wife Tiziana told the Corriere that she “had never seen any sign of money problems. He didn't want to trouble me with it.”

In his letter to her, Giuseppe C. had written: “I wanted to say goodbye, but you were sleeping so peacefully. Today is a terrible day.” - AFP



Italians shocked by self-immolation protests Continue
29 March 2012 Last updated at 16:54 ET
--bbc.co.uk--

Italians have been left shocked by two cases of men setting themselves on fire in the past two days in protest at their financial hardship.

A 58-year-old builder accused of tax evasion set himself alight in his car in Bologna on Wednesday.

Another builder, a 27-year-old Moroccan, set himself on fire outside the town hall in Verona on Thursday, saying that he had not been paid for four months.

Both men are being treated in hospital.

The man in the first incident had reportedly left a suicide note to the tax agency, protesting his innocence.

With Italy in such serious economic trouble, there is now a much more rigorous pursuit of those who do not pay what they owe the state, the BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome reports.

There has been much sympathy in the Italian media for the man in Verona, with one newspaper describing him as a man who had been crushed by the economic crisis, he adds.

The same paper listed several people in Italy who it said had recently been driven to suicide by their money worries.

Particularly on the political left, stories like these are seen as symptomatic of the growing pressure and desperation felt by many as Italy's economic climate worsens, our correspondent adds.

Tibetan Protest

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Chinese See Communist Land Sales Hurting Mao’s Poor to Pay Rich
November 02, 2011, 5:34 AM EDT - Bloomberg.com

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Bulldozers razed Li Liguang’s farmhouse four years ago after officials in the Chinese city of Loudi told him the land was needed for a 30,000-seat stadium.

What Li, 28, says they didn’t tell him is that he would be paid a fraction of what his plot was worth and get stuck living in a cinder-block home, looking on as officials do what he never could: Grow rich off his family’s land.

It’s a reversal of one of the core principles of the Communist Revolution. Mao Zedong won the hearts of the masses by redistributing land from rich landlords to penniless peasants. Now, powerful local officials are snatching it back, sometimes violently, to make way for luxury apartment blocks, malls and sports complexes in a debt-fueled building binge.

City governments rely on land sales for much of their revenue because they have few sources of income such as property taxes. They’re increasingly seeking to cash in on real estate prices that have risen 140 percent since 1998 by appropriating land and flipping it to developers for huge profits.

“The high price of land leads to local governments being predatory,” said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai who was formerly Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist. “China’s land policy is really screwed up.”

The evictions are alarming the nation’s leaders, who have taken steps to tackle the problem and are concerned about social stability. Land disputes are the leading cause of surging unrest across China, according to an official study published in June. The number of so-called mass incidents -- protests, riots, strikes and other disturbances -- doubled in five years to almost 500 a day in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a sociology professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

Final Insult

There’s more to come. Some 60 million farmers will be uprooted over the next two decades as the urbanization that propelled China to the world’s second-largest economy gathers pace, according to an estimate by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. In many cases, officials take land they don’t use, an August report from the academy said.

That was the final insult for Li. The rice and bean plot his family farmed for generations still lies empty, weeds sprouting from the red earth. Villagers are convinced that the city has sold it to developers, even though they can’t point to any documentation to prove it.

“They flattened the land and still haven’t used it,” says Li, a wiry man with short-cropped hair, sitting inside the hut he built in a garbage-strewn alleyway across a main road from the stadium. “They sold it for I don’t know how many millions of yuan.”

Officials in Loudi, located in central China in Mao’s home province of Hunan, wouldn’t answer questions about whether plots in Li’s village were sold or what they will be used for.

50 Million Evicted

Li is among 50 million farmers who’ve lost their homes over the past three decades since Deng Xiaoping began breaking up Mao’s collectivized farms to make way for factories, roads and airports, according to numbers from the academy. Turning people like him into more economically active citizens is part of an urbanization policy that has swelled city dwellers to about 50 percent of the population, from 21 percent in 1982, according to official census data.

Termed “chaiqian” in Chinese, the demolition and relocation of communities has become increasingly controversial. Cities have been grabbing land to finance operations and pay back or restructure mushrooming debt that reached at least 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.68 trillion) by the end of 2010. Almost a quarter of that is backed by land, according to China’s National Audit Office.

The money paid for the building spree that was designed to maintain China’s economic growth in the wake of the global recession. Loans were obtained through more than 10,000 financing vehicles cities created to get around laws prohibiting them from borrowing, according to a central bank count.

Low Compensation

Cities may have to accelerate land sales as they struggle to repay the debt, said Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies China’s local- government finances. There’s also an incentive for officials to keep payments to farmers as low as possible, he said.

“Without suppressing land compensation, local governments can’t make the margins to pay back the banks,” Shih said. “In essence, they are the engines of inequality in China. Land development is the redistribution of income from average households to rich households.”

Loudi is one of 186 local authorities from Guangxi on the Vietnamese frontier in the south to Heilongjiang on the Russian border in the north that issued bonds or short-term notes through financing vehicles in the first nine months of this year. Some 105 of them said they engage in “chaiqian,” according to their prospectuses.

Rights Violated

The seizures frequently lead to local officials violating farmers’ rights that the national government has sought to improve since 1998 when it gave them 30-year tenure over their land, said Gao Yu, China director for Landesa, a Seattle-based group formerly known as the Rural Development Institute that studies global land issues.

Rules that prohibit authorities leaving land like Li’s idle for more than two years are also often broken, Gao said. Across China, compensation given to farmers is at least 15 times lower than prices for land sold to development, according to Landesa.

“The local governments earn a lot of money from the price difference between what they compensate farmers and villagers for their land and what they sell to developers,” said Wang Erping, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who studies social unrest. “This is really objectionable, but these governments don’t have any alternative to raise money.”

Collision Course

Land sales make up 30 percent of total local government revenue and in some cities account for more than half, according to Wang Tao, a Hong Kong-based economist for UBS AG.

That’s putting city bosses on a collision course with national leaders who were already struggling to contain lending to local governments and reverse rising property prices. A central government circular in April said some local governments took excessive land for property development, resulting in the forced eviction of farmers. Such evictions are considered a “gross violation of human rights” by the United Nations.

President Hu Jintao said in August that developers should stop using arable land for building new projects, while Premier Wen Jiabao in September criticized the role local officials are playing in land grabs, according to state media.

Premier’s Criticism

“Right now, some areas just brutally destroy farmers’ homes without paying attention to their rights, and put the farmers in apartment blocks,” Wen, 69, said at a symposium in Beijing to discuss the safeguarding of China’s cultural traditions, according to the account in the state media. In March, Wen called for urbanization to be accelerated.

A crackdown has led to 57 officials being punished for 11 demolitions that resulted in deaths of residents so far this year, the government said on Sept. 25.

Videos of people being forced out of their homes, sometimes by gangs wielding sticks, have caused public outrage when posted online on websites.

One farmer from the city of Fuzhou in Jiangxi province, first took his anger out on weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Qian Mingqi wrote that he had lost 2 million yuan because of inadequate compensation after he said officials illegally demolished his home to make way for a highway.

Then, on May 26, he detonated three bombs by government buildings killing himself and two others, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Fuzhou’s investment vehicle went to the country’s bond market this year for the first time, raising 800 million yuan to build sewage treatment works and flood control works. In its prospectus, the company said its main business included construction, land development and “resettlement.”

‘Avalanche of Demolitions’

“Forced evictions are one of the biggest sources of public unrest and public dissatisfaction with the government because they are unstoppable,” said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch. “We’ve seen an avalanche of forced evictions and illegal demolitions.”

The trend is also exacerbating rural-urban wealth disparity that Landesa’s Gao says is the greatest challenge confronting China’s leaders today. Incomes in cities are now more than three times those in rural areas, wider than at any time since Deng started economic reforms.

The government is working on ways to increase farmers’ income, Zhou Qiang, the Communist Party secretary in Hunan Province where Loudi is located, said in an interview in Beijing on Oct. 19. That includes providing skills training to make them employable in cities and ensuring farmers are adequately covered by social security, he said.

Land acquisition and relocation must be done according to law and there are “clear policy and legal provisions” to protect farmers’ interests, he said.

Artificially High prices

One problem is that the value of urban land is artificially inflated because it’s kept scarce by China’s quota of maintaining 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) of arable land, says analyst Xie.

Officials in Loudi have run up more than 4 billion yuan in debt, expanding a provincial town into a city of 4 million people with a new railway station, six-lane expressway and a white colonnaded government building.

Where Li and about 70 other villagers for generations tended plots in Dawu village, now sits the freshly built stadium, a bulb-shaped gymnasium and a wavy-glass-covered aquatic center where kids line up to swim.

Family of Nine

Li’s family of nine -- including his wife, first child, parents and brother’s family -- had lived in a 400-square-meter two-story farmhouse on almost a half-acre of land. He said he didn’t worry about feeding them, and he was able to pay for extras by selling his vegetables a couple times a month in the city and doing odd jobs.

“It was a reliable income,” said Li. “Before we had food to eat. Now if I don’t work as a laborer, we don’t have anything.”

Then came the evictions. The sports bureau took about 47 acres of land in Dawu and another village, issuing notices -- and verbal threats -- in 2006 saying it was needed for the stadium.

“They told us that if we didn’t move, they would send a lot of people to destroy our house,” Li said. “If you didn’t agree they would detain you.”

Villagers were initially relocated to the alleyway where they built shanties with tarp and corrugated-tin roofs. The only bright notes are the red scrolls bearing the Chinese characters for good fortune that adorn some front doors.

From the lane, Li can see the stadium gleaming at one end and new luxury high-rise buildings to the other.

Temporary Home

Li’s shelter was supposed to be a temporary home while he builds a house on the 70-square-meter (754 sq. ft) plot the city gave him about 100 meters further south. He said his family of nine received 280,000 yuan in compensation, not enough to finish construction of their new home. Unable to get bank loans, he borrowed 100,000 yuan from family and friends.

That still wasn’t enough, putting Li in a Catch 22: without a loan he can’t finish his house, and without a house he has no collateral for a loan.

Most of Li’s income is spent on groceries, he said. Food inflation in China was running at 13.4 percent in September.

“The renminbi is appreciating everywhere in the world, but in China it’s depreciating,” Li said one late August evening, smoking a White Sand cigarette and sipping bootleg liquor in a restaurant overlooking paddy fields.

Putrid Stream

The only beans the family grows now are cultivated by Li’s mother on a four-square meter plot behind the temporary home, where the stench of a putrid bright green stream hangs in the air. Stooped, with gray hair, she recalls the well water they had access to before that was so clean she could wash with it.

Officials say the development is benefitting Loudi residents as it seeks to cash in on its location on a major high-speed rail route linking Shanghai in the east to Kunming in the west. The stadium was partly funded by a 1.2 billion yuan bond issue in March by the city’s financing vehicle -- Loudi City Construction Investment Group Co. -- that pledged to repay with proceeds from selling land.

“People’s lives have improved,” Yang Haibo, an official at the city’s financing vehicle, said during an interview at his office in June. Yang wouldn’t talk in follow-up calls and the company didn’t respond to faxed requests for comment. The city government also didn’t respond to calls and faxes.

‘Hoarding Land’

Some Dawu villagers say their lives have gotten worse, not better.

Wu Zifei, 27 and a father of two, takes out a compact disc with pictures of his old house one July afternoon in his family’s store in the new Dawu village. Li likes to play cards there with friends on days when they can’t find work.

“The older place was much better,” said Wu, a thin man who waves his arms as he talks. Wu continued to use the old family plot -- which like Li’s has been left unused behind a mound of earth at the edge of the stadium construction site -- until June, when a mudslide killed his crop of corn.

“They are hoarding land, waiting for the prices to rise,” he said. “I really can’t stand the way authorities do things.”

Other Dawu residents say they were left homeless because they weren’t allocated any city land. Zou Fuqiu’s home was demolished in 2010, following an eviction order in August 2009.

“It breaks my heart that they demolished my home,” said Zou, 59, a stout man who rolls his white shirt up above his stomach to cool himself from Hunan’s mid-summer heat. “It was the best house in the village, but they didn’t compensate us accordingly.”

Wife Cried

He went to see the village cadre at his office to plead for land, where he says his wife sat crying beside him for three hours. It was no use. Instead, Zou built a shack on unoccupied wasteland where he hangs two old black and white photos of his parents in revolutionary jackets and a portrait of Mao, near a small Buddhist shrine.

“They tore my house down with no regard for where I would live, but they themselves live in high-class homes,” said Zou of the officials. Behind him in the dusk, a chandelier turns on inside one of the stadium buildings.

Loudi city officials work in a building with five white domes and an archway entrance, nicknamed “the White House” by locals. There have been two separate purges for corruption in the past five years, including the removal of 16 officials in August, according to the official Hunan Daily newspaper.

Hundreds of meters from the main entrance to the building, a small door has a gold plaque that says petitioners can be received there. Petitioning is the practice dating from imperial times by which people take their complaints either to local officials or directly to the capital.

Low Compensation

The compensation that Dawu villagers say they received works out at about 6 percent of what the city was selling land for in 2008, a year after they were evicted. Dawu natives said they received 38,000 yuan per mu, a Chinese measure of land that is about one-sixth of an acre. That’s less than half the average of 85,420 yuan the Loudi city government says it paid, according to a notice on the website of its land resources bureau.

The land is worth many times even the higher figure. Loudi city in 2008 sold its land to developers for 600,000 yuan per mu, according to the bond prospectus. A similar plot to Li’s near the stadium sold in March for 1.2 million yuan per mu, according to the website of the city’s State Land Resources Bureau.

It would take Li 92 years to earn enough to buy back his still-vacant plot at that price based on his present wage rate as a day laborer.

Daily Struggle

Li’s focus is on the daily struggle to feed his family and finish his new home. He wishes officials would start building on his land, giving him the chance to pick up some work. Ultimately, he hopes to use the home as collateral to borrow money to buy a digger so he can earn more money at construction sites.

In his hut, where the only decoration is a vase of yellow plastic flowers and a 2009 calendar celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Communist state, he laments the loss of his old, simpler way of life.

“Our house was not like this before,” he said. “Five years ago I had my own house, and everything surrounding it was mine.”

--Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe. With assistance from Bob Ivry in New York and Neil Western in Hong Kong. Editors: Neil Western, Melissa Pozsgay.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Henry Sanderson in Beijing at hsanderson@bloomberg.net. Michael Forsythe in Beijing at mforsythe@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.net. Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net Shelley Smith at ssmith118@bloomberg.net

The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed'

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau's more ethically murky practices


Paul Harris in Irvine, California

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 March 2012 12.50 EDT



Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

"They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did," Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.

Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of "confidential informants" in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist "attacks" at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.

In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.

In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant's criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.

Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. "The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It's such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It's fixed," he said.

But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine, near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County, though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. "They don't have the humility to admit a mistake," he said.

Monteilh's story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian altar ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.

He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.

Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.

Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of southern California. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.

By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent checks.

It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a nasty divorce. "It was a bad time in my life," he said. He and the cops got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on undercover drug and organised crime cases.

Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.

Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic groups around Orange County. "Paul Allen said: 'Craig, you are going to be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim community in America'," Monteilh said.

The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted to Islam.

Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.

"Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four months later, [my FBI handlers] said: 'OK, now start to ask questions'."

Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American foreign policy.

He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls. It was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. "The skill is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to say "jihad"," he said.

Of course, the chats were recorded.

In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated an audio recorder on his key rings.

Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he was not here. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.

He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships among Orange County's Muslim population.

He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information Monteilh discovered – like an affair or someone being gay – to turn targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.

None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.

At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex – and any concerns over civil rights – by saying simply: "Kevin is God."

Monteilh's own attitude evolved into something very similar. "I was untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me: 'You are an untouchable'," he said.

But it was not always easy. "I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm. Really, it was a lot of work … Farouk took over. Craig did not exist," he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex, Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.

But he was wrong about being untouchable.

Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a potentially dangerous extremist.

A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.

But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they abandoned him once the operation was over.

He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims those actions were carried out as part of another secret string operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)

What is not in doubt is that Monteilh's identity later became public. In 2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in Orange County.

The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden "an angel". That was Monteilh's work and he outed himself to the press to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised that Farouk Aziz – the radical they had reported to the FBI two years earlier – had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.

Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail the Afghani into being an informant. "I built the whole relationship with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot," he said. The FBI's charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.

Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil liberties.

That has now put Monteilh's testimony about his year undercover is at the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling on civil rights in the name of national security.

The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error of his ways.

But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the FBI, Monteilh's lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was let down by his superiors.

In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.

Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI's use of such confidential informants in investigating Muslim communities.

FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh's – of a lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the truth – have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have shocked civil rights groups across America.

In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover activities: "Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the FBI again."

Fear The Radical Right and witness its assault on freedom

The Tea Party Doctrine - Kings of Patrimonialism
and Mujahideen Jihadist Theology

- Anders Brevik
- Jared Lee Loughner
- English Defense League
- Hutaree
- Christian Terrorism
- Lionheart (EDL expatriate)

*Big men, that is politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters- are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, including the U.S. congress. If political development implied movement beyond patrimonial relationships and paternalistic politics, one also had to explain why these practices survived in many places and seemingly modern systems often reverted to them. (pXIII)

*The conservatism of societies with regard to rules is then a source of political decay. Rules of institutions created in response to one set of environmental circumstances become dysfunctional under later conditions, but they cannot be changed due to people heavy emotional investments in them. This means that social change is often not linear- but rather follows constant small adjustments to shifting conditions- a pattern of prolonged stasis followed by catastrophic change. (p44)

*...the struggle to replace "tribal" politics with more impersonal form of political relationship continues in the twenty-first century (p50)

* the reciprocal exchange of favors between leaders and followers, whose leadership is won rather than inherited based on the leaders ability to advance the interest of the group; i.e. patron politics, political machines (p78)

*But of all the ways to make distinctions between people and classes, inequality of taxation is the most pernicious and most apt to add isolation to inequality. Tax exemption was (is) the most hated of all privileges.(p351)

*Democratic public's do not necessarily always resist high taxes, as long as they think they are necessary for an important public purpose like the defense of the nation. What they dislike is taxes being taken from them illegally, or public monies that are wasted, or that go to corrupt purposes. (p419)

*The idea of the equality of recognition- The rise of modern democracy gives all people the opportunity of ruling themselves, on the basis of the mutual recognition of the dignity and rights of their fellow humans. (p445)

*Two types of political decay- institutional rigidity and repatrimonilization- oftentimes come together as patrimonial officials with a large personal stake in the existing system seek to defend it against reform. And if the system breaks down altogether, it is often only patrimonial actors with their patronage networks that are left to pick up the pieces. (p454)

*The ability of societies to innovate instiutionally thus depends on wherther they can neurtralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform. Sometimes economic change weakens the position of existing elites in favor of new ones, who push for new institutions. (p456)

Quotes from Francis Fukuyama arguablu Neo-Conservative book The Origins of Political Order

Boycotting fascism?

Policies that have frustrated Palestinians for years are now being applied to middle-class Israelis, too.
Mark LeVine
--aljazeera--
During the last week angry young residents of Tel Aviv have been staging a sit-in, or, more accurately, a tent-in, along fashionable Rothschild Boulevard to protest their being priced out of the housing market in Israel's cultural and economic capital. The protests have drawn the attention of the Israeli and international media, with The Guardian even comparing the protesters to the pro-democracy revolutionaries in Egypt and other Arab countries.

The protests might be new, but the process against which the tent-dwellers are protesting has been going on in Tel Aviv, like other world cities, for at least two decades. But until recently, the main victims of high housing prices weren't young middle-class Israeli Jews no longer able to afford to live close to the cultural and economic action in Tel Aviv, but poor Palestinian residents of Jaffa who were being pushed out by gentrification and had nowhere else to go.

In the wake of the 1948 war, when Jaffa, like most other Palestinian towns and villages, was emptied of the vast majority of its population, the once-proud city turned poor and decrepit neighbourhood of Tel Aviv underwent a process of Judaisation, with only around 5,000 of the former population of at least 70,000 Palestinians remaining. That population increased several-fold in later decades, but when Jaffa suddenly became a fashionable neighbourhood for Israel's emerging yuppie Jewish class beginning in the late 1980s, prices began to rise.

By a variety of legal and economic mechanisms the growing Palestinian population was squeezed out of Jaffa's remaining neighbourhoods like Ajami and Jebaliya, which were quite desirable because of their seaside location. Residents complained of a clear policy of Judaisation through planning and other mechanisms, but were rebuffed when they took their case to the Tel Aviv municipality.

"What can we do; the market is the market," more than one official would declare. In other words, it wasn't the explicit policy of the state, but rather natural market forces that were pushing working-class Palestinians, and their Jewish neighbours, out of these neighbourhoods.

Of course, this argument was nonsense. The Israeli state has been deeply involved in the neoliberalisation of the country's economy, of which Tel Aviv was the natural epicentre. As part of this process it was quite adept at using so-called "market forces" as part of its toolbox for enabling greater Jewish penetration of Palestinian towns and neighbourhoods that were deemed priorities for Judaisation. That Jews were also victims was not relevant, as they were being replaced by even more Jews, and those pushed out always had "somewhere else" to go.

Young Jews could "pioneer" neighbouring towns like Bat Yam - the equivalent of moving from Manhattan to less-desirable but soon-to-be-gentrifying parts of Brooklyn or Queens in the 1980s. Palestinians, however, had literally nowhere to move to except a few Palestinian cities which themselves were experiencing housing shortages.

Resistance was largely futile; more than one Palestinian family set up tents to live in Jaffa's ill-kept parks after being evicted from their homes, both as a protest against their eviction and because they couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The tents became part of the landscape after a while, and ultimately disappeared.

In the meantime, gentrification continued apace, whether faux-Ottoman-era monstrosities like the Andromeda Hill development or the even more perverse Peres Centre for Peace, built - tellingly - on land expropriated from Jaffan refugees including the neighbourhood's cemetery, whose remaining gravestones teeter on the hill along the Centre's southern border.

Meanwhile, late last year the Israeli Supreme Court okayed the construction of a housing development for a religious Zionist group in the heart of Ajami, on refugee land leased to them by the Municipality and Israeli Lands Administration, despite strong protests by local Palestinian residents and Israeli human rights groups.

And while this process plays out, the remaining Arab parts of Ajami suffer from drugs, violence and government neglect (as illustrated in the 2010 film "Ajami"), while activists who press too hard against the situation can be assured of receiving various grades of the "Shabak education" that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have always experienced when they challenged the basic premises of Israeli rule.

From markets to boycotts?

As long as this process was confined to Jaffa, most Israelis, including residents of Tel Aviv, didn't think too much about it. After all, what was happening in Jaffa was the same thing that happened across the country for decades; it was the modus operandi for how the State of Israel was built.

What's different today? Today it's middle-class Israelis who are being pushed out and have nowhere to go; at least not anywhere they want to go. Rich Israeli expats and Diaspora Jews who've bought up much of Ajami's housing stock are now also among the most important buyers of apartments in Tel Aviv, while the young Ashkenazi Jews who are currently living in tents are being told that they should move to the "periphery" and pioneer far less desirable parts of the country than Tel Aviv's satellite towns.

Gay activists complain that they only feel at home in Tel Aviv, while would-be cultural creatives have little desire to move to development towns populated by working-class Mizrahi Jews or recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Ethiopia.

This is a fascinating story, you might be saying to yourself. But what does it have to do with a story about "boycotting fascism," as this column is titled? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The suffering of young Israelis at the hands of the Tel Aviv housing market illustrates a larger phenomenon which is presently affecting the fabric of Israeli society as a whole: Processes and policies which for years or even decades have been deployed on or affected the Palestinian community, on both sides of the Green Line, are now affecting mainstream Jewish Israelis negatively as well. But hardly anyone understands the genesis of the problem, and so the anger is either misdirected or dissipates because, after all, the market is the market: what can you do?

Another example of this process is the debate surrounding the passing last week by the Knesset of the so-called "Anti-Boycott" bill that has now made it illegal for Israelis to call for or engage in boycotting Israel or even the settlements or settlement-made products, allowing the boycott's targets to sue boycott supporters for damages without having to prove actual harm from the action.

The new law has caused a firestorm of protest in and outside Israel, with left-wing critics claiming it will lead outsiders to wonder if "there is actually a democracy here", and, even more damaging, to argue that its
passage heralds the arrival of fascism in Israel, whether "quiet" or "purposeful and palpable".

Among the arguments that this law reflects such a move is that it restricts freedom of expression, reflects a clear tyranny of the majority within Israeli politics, erases the distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories, will cripple efforts of various peace groups to help resuscitate the moribund peace process, and is part of a larger process to strip the Supreme Court of its independence. More broadly, in the words of
the usually conservative Maariv columnist Ben Caspit, it represents a right wing that "is running amok" and threatening the supposedly democratic fabric of Israel.

But just as with the housing problem in Tel Aviv, these claims hold true only if one is considering Israeli Jewish society. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, and much more so for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel has always been - to use the word presently in play - fascist.

Fascism or nationalism the problem?

The basic formula for fascism, that of a highly militarised, corporatist state that manages relations between labour and capital in the name of a mythically defined "people" to the exclusion of all those deemed outside the collective, well defines the kind of ethnonationalism that has long dominated Zionist ideology.

Moreover, the kind of exclusivism that is at the heart of all nationalist identities is ramped up on ideological steroids in the authoritarian nationalist discourses that underlay fascism, as the Italian and German experiences have tragically shown. Ethnonationalisms, and particularly those that emerge in settler colonial settings such as Israel, South Africa, the United States, Australia and French Algeria, are also based on extreme forms of exclusivism and territorial expansionism that must deny basic rights and even humanity to indigenous populations in order to achieve the goal of securing control and/or sovereignty over the "homeland".

Israeli geographer Juval Portugali defines nationalism as the "generative social order" of Zionism, cementing the relationship between the Jewish/Israeli people and the territory it reclaimed. This generative order has historically been exclusivist far more often than it has been open to plural identities, which is why the (re)emergence of nationalisms have so often brought war in their wake - especially when they have been joined with a colonial settler project.

In Israel this process is evidenced in the powerful role of the Israeli state and army in all aspects of the life of the country, from the socialist Labour-dominated pre-1948 period through the neoliberal present. It has shaped a political reality in which Palestinians, whether citizens of the Israeli state or occupied inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, have always been accorded lesser rights, by law and custom, than Jews.

Political theorists might reasonably argue that Israel doesn't fit the classic mode of a fascist society, particularly since its ruling parties and ideologies do not self identify as such. But if you're Palestinian, the fact that the fascist tendencies have been "silent" to Israeli Jewish or much of the world's ears has not lessened their painful impact.

And so it is not surprising, to recall the complaints of those criticising the new anti-boycott law, that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have long been deprived of the basic civil and political rights of equal citizenship. Their freedom of expression has long been curtailed to varying degrees, they have always suffered from the tyranny of the Jewish majority, there has never been a distinction between the Occupied Territories and Israel (thus the massive expansion of the settlement enterprise even during Oslo), and the Supreme Court has never stepped outside the mainstream Israeli political consensus supporting the occupation - whether of Jaffa or East Jerusalem.

Put simply, the Left has "run amok" in the territories as much as the Right. Indeed, the whole notion that there is a basic difference between the Zionist Left and Right has historically been little more than a "good cop-bad cop" rhetorical strategy to confuse foreigners about their basic agreement on core issues surrounding control over the territory of Mandate Palestine.

Of course, Palestinians have long understood this, even if Americans and Europeans have chosen to remain more or less wilfully ignorant. Labour, Likud or Kadima: the occupation just keeps grinding on. (As I write these lines, Haaretz is reporting the the IDF Civil Administration is engaged in yet another major land grab in the heart of the West Bank, trying to have large tracts of land, including those containing "illegal" outposts, declared state land so they can be permanently taken over by Israel in advance of any peace agreement.)

The future of boycotts

Against this long-term level of institutionalised domination and discrimination, Palestinians have tried many means of resistance, none of which have proved very successful to date. In a recent column I have discussed some of the culturally-grounded, non-violent means of resistance that might achieve a measure of success against the power of the Israeli state.

As Yousef Munayyer points out in his recent op-ed, the new anti-boycott law has at least had the salutory effect of stimulating more interest in the boycott and larger BDS movement. He also points out, quite rightly, that since the occupation cannot exist without the massive support of the Israeli state, the whole premise of most of the movements against whom the law is intended - left-wing Israeli groups seeking to boycott settlement products or cultural/educational institutions - is deeply flawed, since only by taking on the entire apparatus of the Israeli state can a boycott movement hope to stop the occupation juggernaut.

The challenge confronting such a movement, however, is that ideologies sharing the DNA of fascism are genetically predisposed to believing that the world is against them and that their existence is constantly in peril from within and without. In the Israeli case, the more successful a boycott movement becomes, the more the Israeli state, with the support of a large share of the public, will feel justified in using any means at its disposal - from shooting unarmed protesters to launching massive propaganda campaigns - to fight back.

Moreover, its leaders and their foot-soldiers are becoming more willing to demonise and act against even members of the collective who challenge official ideology and policies. This is of course not unique to Israel today, nor to the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, as William Cook's July 21 op-ed describing similarities between Israeli and American government subversions of freedom of expression makes clear. And the rabid hatred of left-of-center Norwegians by mass murderer Behring Breivik attests to the ease with which this disease can spread to even the most seemingly stable and democratic societies.

Against such a powerful adversary, Palestinians and their supporters in the BDS movement will need to craft an extremely creative and persuasive set of arguments, and the strategies to spread them globally, in order to have a chance of overcoming the overwhelming advantages possessed by the Israeli government and its supporters. In my next column, I'll look at some of the key principles, strategies and tactics of the movement today and explore how their strengths and weaknesses bode for the near future of the struggle against the Occupation.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at the University of California: Irvine, and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the soul of Islam (Random House 2008) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

"Dispatches: Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola" a British Channel 4 documentary. Political activist and journalist Mark Thomas travels to South America, India and the US to investigate the way in which Coca-Cola and its suppliers operate and the extent to which they upholds moral and ethical obligations.

"The Cost of a Coke Revisited" a documentary by Matt Beard. Since 1990, 8 Colombian union workers have been murdered in Coca-Cola bottling plants. This film investigates why schools around the world have kicked Coke off of their campuses and labeled Coke as the drink of the death squads. Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus.


--Coca Cola uses Death Squads--

Conservative doctrine continues to plague the poor.

With Humala's win, Peru turns to the left

With a former army officer winning the presidency, Peru joins Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela in tilting to the left.
Greg Grandin Last Modified: 07 Jun 2011 18:43
--thenation--


Add Peru to the list of Latin American countries that have turned left. On Sunday, Peruvians voted in a second-round run-off ballot and elected Ollanta Humala, a 48-year old former army officer, president. This is Humala’s second try for the office. In 2006, he came close to winning, but WikiLeaks cables reveal that Peru's establishment politicians put aside their differences and beat a path to the US embassy, asking for help smearing Humala as a Peruvian Hugo Chávez.

WikiLeaks also reveals that that same year the Mexican right and the US State Department worked together to defeat the populist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leading many in the US to gloat that the "left turn" in Latin America had run its course.

Humala's victory suggests otherwise. Here's just some of what has happened since 2006: In Bolivia, Evo Morales presided over the ratification of a new social-democratic constitution and was re-elected as president in 2009 with 64 per cent of the vote. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa also easily won reelection and ratified a new constitution that guarantees social rights and puts tight limits on privatization. Recently, Ecuadorians likewise voted on ten progressive ballot initiatives, passing them all. They included the strict regulation of two blood sports: banks are now banned from speculation and bulls can no longer be killed in bull fights.

And last year in Brazil, the trade unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left office the most popular politician on the planet, handing over the presidency of one of the world's largest economies to Dilma Rousseff, a former urban guerrilla and economist who vows to continue to try to make Brazil a more humane and equal nation.

All of these national left political projects—from Venezuela to Uruguay—have their problems and shortcomings, and are open to criticism on any number of issues by progressive folk. But combined, the Latin American left can claim a remarkable achievement: It has snatched the concept of democracy away from neoliberals and the corporate privateers who came close to convincing the world that democracy equals deregulated capitalism and returned the term to its more humane, sustainable definition. In Latin America, democracy means social democracy. So considering the otherwise bleak global landscape, the return of the Latin American left, now well into its second decade, is cause for great cheer.

What does Humala's victory mean for Peru? Most importantly in the short run, it has halted the return of Alberto Fujimori's style of death-squad neoliberalism. Humala's opponent was Fujimori's daughter, Keiko, who pledged to free her jailed father, who was convicted of murder, kidnapping and corruption.

In the long run, many Peruvians, particularly those outside of Lima, voted for Humala because they have seen little benefits from the country's celebrated macroeconomic performance over the last decade, driven by the high price of silver, zinc, copper, tin, lead and gold—which comprise sixty per cent of the country's exports.

Over thirty per cent of Peru's thirty million people live in poverty and eight per cent in extreme poverty. In rural areas, particularly in indigenous communities, more than half of all families are poor, many desperately so. Humala has promised to address this inequity with a series of pragmatic measures—a guaranteed pension to people over 65; expanding health care in rural areas, including the construction of more provincial hospitals; an increase in public sector salaries, to be paid for with a windfall profit tax on the mining sector.

In terms of foreign policy, Humala's election is another victory for Brazil in its contest with Washington for regional influence. If Fujimori had won, she would have aligned Peru politically with Washington and economically with US and Canadian corporations.

Humala, in contrast, will tilt toward Brazilian economic interests. Indeed, the Peruvian historian Gerardo Rénique said that the election, while representing an important victory for democratic forces, could also be understood in part as a contest between Brazil and the US over Peruvian energy and mineral resources. In this perspective, one could say that it didn't matter who won the Peruvian election: the Amazon lost.

Here then might be the question that determines the success of Humala's presidency: As he tries to put into place his "growth with social inclusion" agenda, will he be able to balance the conflicting interests of his Brazilian allies and the social movements that elected him, many of which are fighting for sustainable development and local control of resources?

In addition to reviving social democracy, the other major accomplishment of the renewed Latin American left has been to dilute the entrenched racism that has defined the continent for centuries. In Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela and other countries, Native Americans and peoples of African descent have led a remarkable, if still incomplete, democratization of politics and culture. Peru, with its 45 per cent Amerindian population, has largely been left out of this process. In fact, some say that racism has deepened over the last decade, with the mining boom wreaking havoc on the dark-skinned Andean countryside and Amazonian lowlands while financing the rise of luxury condos and malls in white, middle-class Lima.

So however hard it might be for Humala to take on international capital—Peru's stock market plunged 12 per cent the day after his election—an equally difficult challenge will be to tackle Peruvian racism. "El Indio Humala" lost Lima by a wide margin, driven mostly not by fears he would turn Peru into Chávez's Venezuela but into neighboring Indian-governed Bolivia. Candidate Humala did his best to deflect these concerns.

President Humala, however, will have to confront this racism directly if he is to succeed in democratising Peru. After all, even before all the votes where in, tens of thousands of his supporters began to fill the country's plazas, including Lima's. They raised high the rainbow wiphala flag that became ubiquitous in Bolivia, during the rise of the social movements that brought Evo Morales to power. Today, it is waved throughout the Andes as a symbol of indigenous pride and sovereignty.

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including most recently, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan 2009), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.