1848+: Last and First Men

Published on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by Reuters
The Siren Call of Austerity
by David Cay Johnston
The World Economic Forum opened in Davos amid choruses of central bankers and economists calling for governments to cut spending.
This message of austerity is like the call of the ancient Sirens, whose music lured sailors to shipwreck.We should take a lesson from Odysseus, who poured wax into the ears of his crew and had himself lashed to the mast of his ship to resist the Siren call.

Austerity supporters are selling the idea that governments, like families, must cut back when income shrinks. But economically, governments are not like families.

Firing teachers, cops and government clerks will, for sure, reduce public spending. But budgets, like the song of the Sirens, are only part of the story. Listen only to the alluring lyrics and, like the many voyagers before Odysseus, we will suffer disastrous consequences – in our case falling incomes and worsening economies.

The full economic story begins with this principle taught to every economics student: spending equals income and income equals spending. Cut spending and incomes must fall; cut incomes and spending must fall.

Those who disagree with this say that only private spending can create wealth and that government spending is inefficient. I think the first argument is wrong, but the second is often true, which is why citizens need to pay close attention to their government.

When private spending shrinks, then either government spending must grow to make up for it or the other side of the equation, income, must shrink.

If we increase spending today by borrowing, we create a claim on future income. Families with debt must divert part of their future income to interest and principal to service that debt or go bankrupt. Governments are different, provided they have monopoly control of their currency. By definition, no sovereign government can ever go broke in its own currency.

NO TO AUSTERITY

The United States government, which has a monopoly on its currency, is $15.2 trillion in debt, roughly the same as the entire output of the economy for a year.

That figure has been sung in a refrain about massive debt threatening to bring down the economy and cause inflation. Facts, however, show otherwise.

In Japan, government debt is roughly twice annual economic output and yet the country continues to function because real interest rates are at or below zero.

To be sure, conditions can change and interest rates can rise sharply, though central banks have ways to limit that. But that is not the problem today. The problem today is shrinking incomes due to shrinking spending.

Austerity budgets, by reducing government spending, will only make incomes fall more. The only way to make incomes rise is to make spending rise, which in the short run means more borrowing by governments to enable more public sector spending.

After reading the news from Davos, ask yourself why we should listen to the Siren song of the financial elite. After all, the people who steered our financial ship into dangerous waters in the first place were at the very top of this group. We should listen more to those will suffer from austerity budgets: children who only get one chance at an education, the sick and disabled unable to support themselves and seniors too old to work.

If, like Odysseus, we wish to row past our current economic straits into a new sea of prosperity, the one thing we must not do is be driven to economic madness by the Siren call of austerity budgets.

© 2012 David Cay Johnston
David Cay Johnston is the author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

more David Cay Johnston

Published on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by Common Dreams
Occupying the Grounds of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
- Common Dreams staff
Japanese anti-nuclear protesters defied a government order Friday to vacate the area in front of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki. Protesters have been occupying the Ministry grounds since Sept. 11, 2011.
Antinuclear activists camping out at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry refused to take down their tents Friday despite an order to do so by 5 p.m.

Hundreds of people meanwhile came to see the three tents around the deadline, apparently to show their support for the protesters.

About 10 of the activists have regularly stayed in the tents since September.

METI on Wednesday handed the protesters an order to remove their tents by 5 p.m. Friday because they “continued to use fires even though we repeatedly told them not to,” official Hideyuki Maekawa said.

But shortly after 5 p.m., Maekawa told The Japan Times the ministry was not taking any action against the protesters and instead hopes they “will leave voluntarily.”

The protesters meanwhile argued they have the right to stay there to continue their demonstration calling for termination of all nuclear power plant operations.

“We feel we have the right to stay here. We understand it is unlawful to stay on somebody’s premises without authorization. But this space is a very public place, which gives us right to be here,” one of their leaders, restaurant owner Taro Fuchigami, told The Japan Times. [...]

The protesters began camping out at the corner of the ministry Sept. 11. They applied for permission Sept. 13 to pitch their tents there, but METI denied the request Sept. 29, both Maekawa and Fuchigami said. [...]

Maekawa said the protesters have been technically breaking the law since Sept. 29, but METI effectively allowed them to stay because “people can have different opinions.”

However, the ministry changed its attitude because the protesters kept using open flames to cook and keep warm despite METI’s admonishments.

# # #

Published on Friday, January 27, 2012 by In These Times
Liberals’ Inequality Narrative Ignores Role of Free Trade, Unionbusting
by Roger Bybee
The Occupy movement forcefully injected a long-taboo topic—America’s appalling “banana republic”-level economic disparities—into the mainstream political debate.
That inequality has immense implications, from falling wages, to deteriorating healthcare coverage, the overgrown financial sector, and the decline of America’s productive base. Such sweeping inequality, deeply rooted in our economic and political system of legal payoffs and policy paybacks, has been intensified by union-busting and globalization.

But even many of America’s most liberal mainstream politicians and pundits have narrowed the debate over inequality, perhaps out of a desire to shield President Obama from any pressure coming from his left. The issue of tax inequities has soared in importance, exposing the privileged status enjoyed by CEOs and hedge fund and private equity executives like Mitt Romney. But other crucial dimensions of inequality painfully experienced by ordinary Americans have been crowded out.

For example, the liberal and likable Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word, declares in a TV ad that all the talk about “class war” amounts to a battle over a proposed 4 percent increase in tax rates for the super-rich. Really, Lawrence?

The richest 1 percent did not triple their share of the nation’s income during the last three decades—to the current 24 percent—simply through the tax system alone. Nor did the tax system allow the wealthiest 1 percent to capture nearly 9/10 of productivity gains in recent years, representing a $3 billion upward shift in income.

American media employ a disproportionately large share of pundits who either deny or defend the riches accruing to America’s “job creators”—ranging from the outraged George Will to the sly discounting of the problem by NPR’s Adam Davidson. They are accompanied by a chorus of leading voices—Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria, to name just two, who gloss over the inequities caused by global corporate supremacy.

Even the supposedly liberal pundits—E.J. Dionne, Howard Fineman, Jonathan Alter, Ezra Klein and Richard Wolffe, among others—are remarkably confined in their discussions of inequality. They almost never refer to the 35-year campaign of union-busting by Corporate America, in which 90 percent of union organizing drives are greeted with high-pressure resistance from management, according to Christopher Martin’s 2003 book on media coverage of labor, Framed!.

The crucial fact that 31,358 workers get fired in a typical year while trying to unionize their workplace, according to author Philip Dine, is almost uniformly omitted from liberal pundits’ explanations of U.S. inequality. Only in their coverage of public-employee battles in Wisconsin did MSNBC hosts like Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz discuss union-busting and its role in pushing down wages and eliminating workers’ voice on the job.

The other central weapon in the class war against workers—the threat or actual relocation of production to brutal low-wage conditions found in Mexico and China—has been almost entirely absent from the comments of MSNBC hosts and guests.

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s and author of the superb 2000 book on NAFTA,“The Selling of Free Trade, believes that too many liberal and progressive commentators and pundits have been afraid of criticizing President Obama on a fundamental issue of loyalty to working-class interests. “The so-called liberal media and even its leftish fringe are almost all in the bag for Obama,” said MacArthur, whose book extensively details the almost-unanimous endorsement of NAFTA by the US press corps in 1992 and 1993.

“Obama has been terrible on these issues of globalization,” says MacArthur, pointing to his abandonment of his promise to re-negotiate NAFTA. (The President has even failed to enforce the weak side agreements on labor and environmental issues, following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush).

Yet the liberal politicians and media voices who should be challenging the role of free-trade and union-busting in driving down wages and increasing inequality have almost uniformly remained silent. While liberal on a wide variety of issues, pundits like Dionne and Wolffe continue to adhere to the free-trade faith without examining its consequences in lost jobs, depressed wages and devastated factory towns.

Others seem to be operating from the notion that any criticism of Obama will weaken his chances for re-election. “Meanwhile, Obama’s raising money from all the corporate interests who benefit [from free trade],” MacArthur notes. “People who should be speaking out—like Sen. Sherrod Brown [D-Ohio]—are just not doing it.”

Auto bailout far from ideal

To be a bit more specific: Obama’s “bailout” of the auto industry has been portrayed by liberals, especially Ed Schultz, as an unalloyed success. Led by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, the program caused tens of thousands of GM and Chrysler workers to lose their jobs; federal funds allowed a Chrysler engine-production unit to be shifted from Kenosha, Wis. to Saltillo, Mexico; the number of GM cars imported into the country from Mexico, China, and elsewhere is almost doubled; and no vacant plants were converted to the domestic manufacturing of mass transit equipment.

The valid criticisms of the bailout, raised by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, auto industry expert Prof. Harley Shaiken and others have been borne out, but nonetheless almost entirely forgotten. In his State of the Union address this week, President Obama highlighted the auto industry bailout as one of his signature achievements.

MacArthur notes that when Obama aide David Axelrod was interviewed by CNN’s Candy Crowley, she asked him how the auto bailout was different from what Mitt Romney had done at Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that laid off workers and shut down plants. “Axelrod was really left fumbling for an answer,” he said.

The point is not to sink Obama with a fusillade of criticism about the off-shoring of jobs promoted by the free trade agreements he pushed through Congress, but to hold him at least minimally accountable on issues that are crucial to workers so that we do not see an electoral re-run of 2010 this year, when alienated blue-collar workers stay at home, and some vote Republican.

“Here we have the right wing attacking Romney about Bain Capital plundering companies and shutting down plants and moving jobs overseas. The left wing ought to be making a similar critique of Obama,” MacArthur says.

Without any audible and visible pressure to aggressively move to lift wages and control the export of jobs, Obama will simply fall back on pleading with executives to engage in “insourcing” jobs, and then exaggerate the importance of a minor, perhaps inconsequential, trend.

But most of the public, wary of free-trade agreements, knows that the trickle of jobs returning to the U.S. is far smaller than the torrent headed to China and Mexico, a torrent that continues to decimate the families and communities that were once part of the nation’s strong industrial base.

© 2012 In These Times
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites, including Z magazine, Common Dreams, Dollars & Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus.

Published on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Heroes of Wall Street: How Democrats Got Their Pockets Picked
by Kevin Horrigan
It’s hard to read Thomas Frank’s new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” without being astonished at what utter nincompoops Democrats are.

This surely was not Frank’s primary intent. The book is subtitled, “The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right,” so it’s pretty clear where Frank coming from. But the obvious subtext is how, in a two-party system, Democrats allowed Republicans to pull off the greatest cross-dressing scam since RuPaul became America’s Drag Queen.

Frank is a journalist and polemicist best known for his 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” that explored how Republicans in his home state had used social issues to persuade people to vote against their own economic best interests.

In “Pity the Billionaire,” he examines how Republicans — with help from some Democrats –created policies that led to the financial collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, massive income inequality and the gutting of the middle class. And then the Democrats sat back as the GOP reinvented itself as populist defenders of free-market capitalism.

“Now there is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom,” Frank writes. “What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.”

For Frank, a key moment in this bizarre turn of events came on Feb. 19, 2009, less than a month after President Barack Obama’s inauguration. The TARP bailout bill proposed by President George W. Bush and endorsed by candidate Obama had been passed the previous fall. The new president had just signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill.

On that day, CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and began ranting about the unfairness of it all. Not the bank bailout, mind you, but the 6.3 percent of the TARP program intended to help people modify their underwater mortgages.

As it turned out, this program hasn’t been particularly successful because banks refused to go along. But on that Feb. 19, Santelli was incensed at the unfairness of it all — that “losers” with bad mortgages might be helped and that the salt-of-the-earth traders who were cheering him on were being punished for being successful and prudent.

Santelli’s rant went viral on the Internet. So-called Tea Party rallies began to be held. “Your mortgage is not my problem,” read a sign at one of them.

Self-promoters seized them as a way to cash in — a fine conservative tradition, Frank writes — and the right-wing foundations funneled money to them. What could have been, and should have been, populist outrage against the people whose greed brought the house down was subtly turned into protests against “elitists” (i.e., Democrats) who were attacking “free markets” (i.e., cracking down on banks and health care costs).

The Tea Party, Frank says, became defenders of a Darwinian version of free markets intended to “trample the weak.”

Frank spends a great deal of attention on the various absurdities peddled at the time by Glenn Beck on Fox News — “bogus populism shores up ironclad elitism and … bogus enlightenment serves the most grotesque form of dupery.”

But Beck and his ilk could not have gotten away with it had (a) people been more discerning about what they were hearing and (b) had Democrats mounted some kind of response.

As to (a), Frank quotes from one of the Tea Party’s favorite movies, “Network,” where the mad-as-hell-not-going-to-take-it-any-more newscaster Howard Beale explains, “We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day … we’re all you know.”

As to (b), the question of where the Democratic response was, that’s still a mystery. Aside from perhaps Elizabeth Warren, architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now a U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts, no Democrat has been particularly successful in articulating where the blame belongs.

Until recently, Obama floated above it all, finding common cause with Wall Street and health insurance firms, trying to compromise with people who were elected not to compromise, playing his preferred “long game,” avoiding intemperate language.

This allowed the GOP to retake control of the House and pass themselves off as defenders of the average guy. And anyone who has the temerity to point out how stupid you’d be to fall for that is labeled an “elitist.” As the British political scientists David Runciman has noted, “There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.”

Republicans understand that. Democrats aren’t very good at it. If they hope to avoid catastrophe in November, they’d better figure it out.

Don’t Let Occupy Be Occupied: 6 Ways to Fight the Creep to Institutionalize
Crucial movements of the past with clear and radical demands suffered a diminished voice when traditional organizational standards took hold. Hopefully not Occupy.
It’s worth a long night’s conversation over your beverage of choice to explore the history of how becoming institutionalized affected the course of the civil rights and women’s movements, among others. Was the radical spirit of each distracted or stifled? Each of those movements came out of the gate with a powerful set of demands. Yet, once organizational dynamics took hold and divisions were confirmed by structure (think SCLC vis-à-vis SNCC, or NOW vis-à-vis NARAL) the chance of maintaining one strong voice committed to radical change diminished.

Radicals became captive to a mindset dominated by the imperatives of competitive fundraising and institutions, rather than movement building. There were paydays to be met, auditors to be satisfied, board members and donors to be placated. To be clear, there is a stage when that evolution is inevitable in order to make the shift from fostering outrage to changing policy. At their best, strong, transparent and accountable formal organizations are essential building blocks for social change. But is this the appropriate role for Occupy? My eloquent colleague Alexa Bradley wrote:

The beauty of Occupy is that it is popular, wild, free. I don’t mean that in a romantic sense, although there is that appeal too and it is part of its magnetism in an all-too-cynical time. I mean it in a political and social sense — it exists outside the non-profit framework that is all too captive to a set of assumptions, norms, limits and needs. The resonance globally of Occupy is its clear roots in popular sentiment and movement, not a professionalized advocacy staff or agenda. Its power rests in the fact that it is un-circumscribed and therefore perhaps infinite in its circumference. We are all part of its we if we agree.

Paolo Freire said that all strategies are either domesticating or liberating. I see the institutionalization of Occupy as likely to be domesticating. It will become a creature of foundation funding and of the need to become “legitimate” in the eyes of other NGOs and political players. It will also lose contact with its base, people who do not want to come in from the cold, because they believe this is a position of power and integrity. Without them and the “we don’t play by your rules” attitude, what power can OWS actually muster, whether moral, popular or otherwise?

Assuming that we don’t want to see any diminution of the spirit of Occupy, here are six thoughts about what could neutralize the impact of Occupy; consider them for that long comradely conversation about the tensions between movement- and institution-building.

1. Don’t put the IRS in charge.

…

I have always enjoyed the stories about speculative insanity in
Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I
was surprised to read the New York Times reporting that nothing has
changed in the last century and a half. First, here is a famous
snippet from the book:

Mackay, Charles. 1852. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness
of Crowds (NY: Noonday, 1932).

55: One projector set up a company to profit from a wheel for
perpetual motion. Another projector proposed “A company for carrying
on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
“Next morning, at nine o’clock, this great man opened an office in
Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when be shut up at
three o’clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been
subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours,
the winner of 2000 pounds. He set off the same evening for the
Continent. He was never heard of again.”

Bilton, Nick. 2012. “Disruptions: Tech Valuations Defy the Restraints
of Reality.” New York Times (23 January): p. B 4.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/disruptions-the-sloshing-sound-of-tech-valuations/

“Some investors no longer even need to hear about a company to hand
out money. Jakob Lodwick, an entrepreneur and co-founder of Vimeo,
recently raised $2 million simply on the promise that he might have a
good idea for a company in the near future.”

–
Michael Perelman

http://www.marxmail.org/msg99474.html

An interesting piece here < http://tinyurl.com/7qs6lvt > thanks to
Moshé Machover.

Paul F

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By: Yassine Temlali

Published Wednesday, 25 January 2012

The working class in the Arab world has accomplished a lot in the
course of one year of uprisings. Some of these accomplishments are
material, including higher wages and improvements in working
conditions. Others are political, such as the right to democratic
representation (the rise of Egyptian independent unions and changing
the leadership of the Tunisian general workers’ union, among others).

There is no doubt that these achievements are important. However,
whether dictators left or became ‘reformers’, such advances have not
yet been accompanied by changes in economic policy. This was the case
even in Egypt and Tunisia, where the revolutionary tide overthrew two
symbols of authoritarian rule and liberal looting.

In Egypt, the military council acts as though Hosni Mubarak gave up
power peacefully and voluntarily, not under popular pressure in which
labor strikes played no small part. There is hardly any difference
between the budget that the first Egyptian prime minister after the
revolution, Essam Sharaf, prepared for the council in July 2011 and
that which Mubarak’s last Prime Minister Ahmad Nadif proposed in July
2010.

Even worse, after a ‘careful reading’ by the military council of
Sharaf’s proposals — and under the pretext of ‘protecting the
revolution’ from itself — the council ordered him to reduce some
public expenditures on social programs, which he reluctantly tried to
avoid (particularly in the fields of health, housing, wages, and
unemployment benefits).

The current Prime Minister, Kamal Ganzouri, is just as bad as his
predecessor. Despite the ongoing popular protests in all their forms
(labor strikes, protests demanding the supply of gas, etc.), no
differences can be detected between the economic policy that is to be
implemented under the military’s rule and those implemented under
Mubarak’s governments.

The current government’s plan appears to continue to place the
economic burden on the poor. This will be done by increasing taxes on
the poor and borrowing massive amounts from abroad, which ordinary
people and their children will spend their lives paying back.

There is no better indication of the continuity between past and
present, and between civil tyranny and military democracy, than
reports today about ending subsidies on certain commodities, including
fuel. Also, Egypt has accepted a US$3.2 billion loan from the
International Monetary Fund. This loan, of course, comes with IMF
conditions to be allowed to oversee the government’s economic policy
(especially public expenditure on social programs).

One year since January 25, there appears to be no retreat from
Mubarak’s economic policy (its disadvantages can be summed up in
‘corruption’ and ‘illegal profits’), and from the privatization of
dozens of governmental institutions. The military council has not even
thought about requiring businessmen to contribute to resolving Egypt’s
financial crisis.

According to Ganzouri, their contribution should not exceed the
generosity of paying for the energy that their factories consume. It
does not seem that the Muslim Brotherhood, who will form the next
government, intends to change the direction of the country’s economic
policy. On the contrary, the Brotherhood have made promises — to both
the military and the US — to respect the laws of investment and
encourage investors.

Despite sweeping political change in Tunisia (including heads of the
state, parliament, government, and a large number of the old
opposition ministers), the economic scene there does not differ much
from that in Egypt. As soon as the Islamist government of Hamadi
Jebali came to office, it was quick to reassure the business sector
(both local and the European) by promising to respect the current
investment laws and to encourage investors. Thus, it took the same
course as that of Beji Caid el Sebsi’s government before it, which in
turn was a mere continuation of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s approach.

President Moncef Marzouki will not stand in the way of the
government’s promises. On December 23, he called for a ‘social truce’,
by threatening action on the part of ‘law enforcement’ if strikes and
protests continue to disrupt production (this statement made in a
speech that he delivered before Tunisian employers).

The new Tunisian authorities have done nothing to suggest that they
plan to abandon the ‘Tunisian model’, which has been associated with
Ben Ali’s name. It is a model that is based on investment in the
coastal areas (near the commercial ports) at the expense of the
country’s interior. This model directs production towards exports
while assisting economic sectors that do not require a highly skilled
workforce, such as textiles and services (which explains the high rate
of unemployment among university graduates).

If it were not for the ongoing protests in the northwestern and
central provinces, we would have forgotten that the Tunisian
revolution, before turning into a gentle romantic ‘jasmine
revolution’, erupted in Sidi Bouzid as a result of Ben Ali’s ‘economic
miracles’.

Such a grim description of the current scene is not intended to blame
the working class for its inability to play a role in the political
developments unfolding in the region.

Revolution is not as simple as a genie that springs from a bottle to
fulfill all the people’s aspirations in the blink of an eye. The
intent of the above account is rather to serve as a reminder that the
Arab uprisings are still awaiting their social spring, and that
capitalist forces, which are terrified of the shift in class forces
locally and regionally, have adapted completely to the new Arab
situation. What is becoming abundantly clear in this new situation is
that religious party leaders have replaced part of the old ruling
elite.

The dominant forces in society have shown a considerable amount
flexibility. Just as they supported Mubarak’s and Ben Ali’s
governments in the past, today they support the government appointed
by the ‘spiritual guides’, including Mohammad Badie, Rachid
Ghannouchi, and others, as long as they keep the radical social and
political movements at bay.

For this reason, the coming period is extremely sensitive in countries
that experienced revolutions. Today, working class and poor people in
Tunis and Egypt find themselves for the first time confronting Muslim
Brotherhood governments, draped in the cloth of revolutionary
legitimacy. Yet, these governments are, to some extent, products of
the dominant classes and fully represent their interests.

It may be more difficult now for workers to fight for their rights
than when the ‘Muslim Brothers’ were among the opposition. However,
they will be spared the mirage of a ‘religious solution’ as they watch
the Islamists attempt to distract them with proclamations to uphold
their ‘identity’. They will in fact be trying to divert workers’
attention from the ‘public interest’ that Islamist claims to defend.
In reality, these are the ‘interests of the rich’ — those with or
without beards.

Yassine Temlali is an Algerian writer.

http://www.marxmail.org/msg99479.html

**by Baba Aye
Introduction

Few in Nigeria would have the feeling that 2012 is barely a month old. The
past few weeks have been filled with events of historic proportions. First,
in response to the unpopular 120% hike in petrol price, the people
spontaneously took to the streets across the country in stiff resistance
and with an 8-day general strike and mass protests, won a stunted victory.
After this, the fundamentalist sect known as Boko Haram, which has killed
no less than 935 persons in barely two years according to Human Rights
Watch carried out is most deadly attacks on state institutions killing over
200 persons in the northern city of Kano, as it freed 100 of its
incarcerated members.

It is pertinent in reviewing this situation which *Tell* a leading liberal
weekly in the country describes as “A Revolution Postponed”, to put in
perspective the contradictions and convergence of crisis which the Nigerian
society is now embroiled in and make projections about the turbulent road
that lies ahead.

The main focus of this review is on the anti-fuel hike struggle, which is
distinct from the Boko Haram mayhem. There are however inter-linkages which
deepen with the announcement of the sect on January 24, that it would bomb
the headquarters of the Nigeria Labour Congress because organised labour
“accepted” just a partial reduction of petrol price instead of the full
reversal demanded by Nigerians.

*continues:*

http://socialistbulletin.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-january-awakening-in-nigeria-by-baba-aye/

In solidarity,
Baba Aye
——————————————–
Labour House, Abuja
blog:http://solidarityandstruggle.blogspot.com
skype name: iron1lion