Dec 18

Womens Liberation Struggle in Islamic Society

by SHUBHASHISA AC.

Avt. Shubhashisa Ac.

  The Shariat law did not do justice to muslim  women. Talibanisation was its extreme form. Many  moderate muslims claim that such extreme form is a distortion to real essence of Islamic religion.

Whatever is written in Koran Sharif and  Hadish becomes a theoretical proposition if in practice women are pushed in a corner and forced to obey the dictum of all powerful priest class. Except some  isolated effort by Kamal Pasha in Turkey, Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia and  Ayub Khan in Pakistan no serious effort was made to reform Islamic religion synthesising with  science, technology, art literature, socio-economic ideas that evolved in last four hundred years. The famous book of Edward Gibbon,  ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’  strongly exposed  blind prejudice of Islamic society.

Recently women in many Islamic countries are revolting against the unjust laws and forcing the governments to change those. In Islamic society also struggle for women’s liberation is a long painful chapter. The social scientist

Fatima Mernissi - Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist

of Morokko, Fatima Marnissi  narrated the struggle in  her books, ‘The Veil and the Male elite’, ‘ A Feminist Interpretation  of Women’s Rights in Islam’; Islam and Democracy and ‘Beyond the Veil’. After the second world war women sneaked into the universities in the Middle East countries. According to Marnissi, ‘Only the university and education provided a legitimate way out  of mediocrity.’ In Tunisia, in Egypt, a big number of women struggled to enter the university. In Egypt, the rise of the  fundamentalist and the rise of feminist movement happened simultaneously. How feminism became so strong in that environment? They declared,’ Opposition taught us to practise the politics of the ‘tireless pen’… that is the more police ban, the more must be written.’ That means if one writing is banned seven more should be written within 24 hours. Even facing mass imprisonment and torture they declared ‘The mosque and the Koran belong to women as much as to heavenly bodies. We have a right to all that, to all its riches for constructing our modern identity.’

The Egyptian jurist and one of the founders of the Egyptian national movement and Cairo University (Wikipedia)

      The modern movement of Islamic feminism began in the late nineteenth century. Egyptian jurist  Qasim Amin, the author of the 1899 pioneering book Women’s Liberation (Tahrir al-Mar’a), is often described as the father of the Egyptian feminist movement. In his work, Amin criticized some of the practices prevalent in his society at the time, such as Polygamy, the veil and purdah, i.e: sex segregation in Islam.  He condemned them as un-Islamic and contradictory to the true spirit of Islam. His work had an enormous influence on women’s political movements throughout the Islamic and Arab world.

In recent times the concept of Islamic feminism has grown further, with Islamic groups looking to mobilise support from as many aspects of society as possible, and educated Muslim women striving to articulate their role in society.  It has been, however, mainly upper-middle-class women , that have been able to vocalise the Islamic feminist movement, as they have the economic power to violate widely held beliefs.

Margot Badran - Historian of the Middle East and Islamic societies

Exploring Islamic Feminism, Margot Badran, writes: “Islamic feminism, a phenomenon that became increasingly discernable in the 1990s, continues to spread following the turn of the new century. At this still early stage, it is useful to map the contours of emergent Islamic feminism”.

It is a global phenomenon that is not restricted to any geographical region. Its bravest campaigns have been conducted in Asia and Africa, while some of the boldest discursive articulations of Islamic feminism have appeared in the diaspora and convert communities in the West.

If Islamic feminism is a recent phenomenon, Islam and feminism have an association dating back to the 1890s. At that time, Egypt was an important pioneering site of feminism in the Muslim world, where what would later be recognized as a “feminist consciousness” arose in the context of encounters with modernity. Muslim women and men used Islamic reformist arguments to break the linkage of Islam with repressive practices imposed in the name of religion. This paved the way for changes in women’s lives and in the relations between sexes. Soon feminism became enmeshed in the rising discourse of secular nationalism which called for equal rights of all Egyptians, be they Muslim or Christian, in a free and independent nation. In short, feminism and Islam were allies.

Islamic feminism, like the secular nationalist feminism of its day, is a product of its time. Islamic feminism appeared on the scene in the wake of the spread of Islamism, or political Islam, and with the broader ascendancy of an Islamic religious and cultural revival. An examination of popular and scholarly literature leads to a basic definition of Islamic feminism as a feminism anchored in the discourse of Islam with the Qur’an as its central text, and exegesis as its main methodology. The core idea of Islamic feminism is the full equality of all Muslims, male and female alike, in both the public and private spheres.

Abaya dress

      Islamic feminism is more radical than secular feminism which called for equal rights in the public sphere but complimentary rights in the private sphere. Concerning the public sphere, Islamic feminists argue that women may be heads of state and imams, a claim that secular feminists never advanced. In the private sphere, Islamic feminists are challenging the conventional notion of male authority over females in marriage and the family. Islamic feminists also call upon all Muslims, including men, to live by the egalitarianism of Islam, something secular feminism side-stepped.

Although research and general observation indicate that the term “Islamic feminism” is coming into increasing use, its circulation is still limited and both the term and the idea remain controversial. It is also important to make a distinction therefore between Islamic feminism as a discourse, a mode of gender analysis, or an ideology, and Islamic feminist as an identity. Most of those who participate in the shaping of what can be viewed as “Islamic feminism” do not claim an Islamic feminist identity. There are indications, however, that there is some movement towards explicit acknowledgement of Islamic feminism. The shapers of Islamic feminism include the following three groups: those who are more fully oriented towards Islam (sometimes called “committed Muslims”), secular feminists, and former leftists.

Islamic feminism is manifested both as a global or universalist core set of ideas and as specific local forms of activism with their own particular needs and priorities. The Internet facilitates the dissemination of Islamic feminism’s core ideas and the spread of information about local forms of activism. Examples of local forms of Islamic feminist activism include demands for women to hold the positions of judge, mufti (officials who issues religious rulings), and ma`dhun (an official who register marriages) in Egypt. Another example is the demand by both men and women in South Africa that women be permitted to share the main mosque space in parallel groups rather than being relegated to the back or an upper floor during congregational prayer. As the intellectual discourse of Islamic Feminism spreads, so too will these localized forms of activism.”

Burka Complete dress

Another side to modern Islamic feminism is the activism of Muslim women born and brought up within Western societies. Often those born to immigrant families face racism from the host community and sexism within their own communities. Young Muslim women in France fought back against the issues facing them, ranging from endemic sexual violenceto the forced wearing of the  hijab, by creating Ni Putes Ni Soumises (usually translated “Neither Whores Nor Submissives”). This movement has spread to other countries.

     Islamic feminist like their western counterpart also demanding universal suffrage, human rights and access to education and medical care.

Muslim Personal Law (also known as Muslim Family Law) that includes the areas of law: marriage. divorce, and testation has also been challenged by the Islamic feminists.

Muslim majority countries that have promulgated some form of MPL include Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, Senegal, Tunisia, Egypt, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Muslim minority countries that already have operating MPL regimes or are considering passing legislation on aspects of MPL include India and South Africa.  Islamic feminists in these countries have serious objection in such legislation in those countries.

Many Islamic feminists demand that MPL should not just be reformed but should be rejected and that Muslim women should seek redress, instead, from the civil laws of those states.

For most Islamic feminists, some of the thorny issues regarding the way in which MPL has thus far been formulated include: polygamy, divorce, custody of children, maintenance and marital property. In addition, there are also more macro issues regarding the underlying assumptions of such legislation, for example, the assumption of the man as head of the household.

Taslima Nasrin

     Another issue that concerns Muslim women is the dress code expected of them. In some cultures such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia they are expected to wear the all-covering burqa or abaya; in others, such as Tunisia and Turkey they are forbidden to wear even the headscarf (often known as the hijab) in public buildings. Muslim feminists resist both extremes of externally imposed control. But in non Muslim countries many women wears hijab as political jesture against the critical view of such use by non Muslims and as a show of solidarity with Islam.

It should be commented here that whatever interpretation one can make, Islam had framed a secondary role for women whether in family matter, or religious and social matter. Without transcending religious dogma itself to a humanistic religion, women’s freedom will remain a  distant dream. Feminist leaders like Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh and similar counterpart in other Islamic countries will have to live under threat or persecution.

Nov 22

We Are All Occupiers

By Arundhati Roy

People the world over salute the Occupy movement for standing up
to injustice and fighting for equality at the heart of empire

This is the text of a speech given by Arundhati Roy at the People’s University
in Washington Square, NYC on November 16th, 2011.

Tuesday morning, the police cleared Zuccotti Park, but today the people are back. The police should know that this protest is not a battle for territory We’re not fighting for the right to occupy a park here or there. We are fighting for justice. Justice, not just for the people of the United States, but for everybody.

What you have achieved since September 17th, when the Occupy movement began in the United States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language into the heart of empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerized into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfillment.
As a writer, let me tell you, this is an immense achievement. And I cannot thank you enough.

We were talking about justice. Today, as we speak, the army of the United States is waging a war of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. US drones are killing civilians in Pakistan and beyond. Tens of thousands of US troops and death squads are moving into Africa. If spending trillions of dollars of your money to administer occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not enough, a war against Iran is being talked up.

Ever since the Great Depression, the manufacture of weapons and the export of war have been key ways in which the United States has stimulated its economy. Just recently, under President Obama, the United States made a $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia – moderate Muslims, right? It hopes to sell thousands of bunker busters to the UAE. It has sold $5 billion-worth of military aircraft to my country, India, which has more poor people than all the poorest countries of Africa put together. All these wars, from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, have
claimed millions of lives all of them fought to secure the “American way of life”.

Today, we know that the “American way of life” the model that the rest of the world is meant to aspire towards has resulted in 400 people owning the wealth of half of the population of the United States. It has meant thousands of people being turned out of their homes and their jobs while the US government bailed out banks and corporations American International Group (AIG) alone was given $182 billion.

The Indian government worships US economic policy. As a result of 20 years of the free market economy, today, 100 of India’s richest business houses own assets worth one-quarter of the country’s GDP while more than 80% of the people live on less than 2$( 40% people less than 1$)  a day; 250,000 farmers, driven into a spiral of death, have committed suicide. We call this progress, and now think of ourselves as a superpower. Like you, we are well-qualified: we have nuclear bombs and obscene inequality.

Support for the protests is breaking out everywhere.

The good news is that people have had enough and are not going to take it any more. The Occupy movement has joined thousands of other resistance movements all over the world in which the poorest of people are standing up and stopping the richest corporations in their tracks. Few of us dreamed that we would see you, the people of the United States on our side, trying to do this in the heart of Empire. I don’t know how to communicate the enormity of what this means.

They (the 1%) say that we don’t have demands perhaps they don’t know, that our anger alone would be enough to destroy them. But here are some things a few “pre-revolutionary” thoughts I had for us to think about together: We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality. We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations. As “cap-ists” and “lid-ites”,

we demand:

  • An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons
    manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run
    newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot
    control public health funds. 
  • Two natural resources and essential infrastructure water supply, electricity, health, and education cannot be privatized.
  • Tree everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare. 
  • Four, the children of the rich cannot inherit their parents’ wealth.

This struggle has re-awakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way,
capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights”, and the
idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to just
tinking with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

As a cap-ist and a lid-ite, I salute your struggle. Salaam and Zindabad.

Nov 14

Targeting Syria – The ‘Bad News’ For The Guardian

…mainstream journalists are appalled that a double Russian and Chinese veto at the UN has thwarted Western efforts to do more good in Syria.

Ian Black - the Guardian's Middle East editor.

Afghanistan and Iraq may still be in flames. A bloodbath may continue to flow from Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Libya. No matter, mainstream journalists are appalled that a double Russian and Chinese veto at the UN has thwarted Western efforts to do more good in Syria. The two powers rejected the latest draft of a UN Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government and preparing the way for international sanctions.

In the Guardian, Middle East editor Ian Black wrote last week:

‘Bashar al-Assad can certainly feel satisfied that powerful allies have stood by him and prevented international action that might – just – have given him pause for thought as he pursues his vicious crackdown on Syria’s protest movement.’

This is the standard media version of events, repeated endlessly, for example, by the BBC and ITV. We are to understand that the Syrian government is responsible for a vicious repression of peaceful protestors along the lines of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen. But is it an accurate depiction of the conflict?

Michel Chossudovsky

In May, Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, commented on the first outbreaks of violence in Syria:

‘What is clear from these initial reports is that many of the demonstrators were not demonstrators but terrorists involved in premeditated acts of killing and arson. The title of [an] Israeli news report summarizes what happened: ‘Syria: Seven Police Killed, Buildings Torched in Protests.’

The initial conflict, Chossudovsky noted, ‘had all the appearances of a staged event involving, in all likelihood, covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Government sources point to the role of radical Salafist groups (supported by Israel). Other reports have pointed to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing the protest movement.’ Jeremy Salt, associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University, Ankara, wrote this month:

‘The armed groups are well armed and well organised. Large shipments of weapons have been smuggled into Syria from Lebanon and Turkey. They include pump action shotguns, machine guns, Kalashnikovs, RPG launchers, Israeli-made hand grenades and numerous other explosives. It is not clear who is providing these weapons but someone is, and someone is paying for them.’

So why do Western media keep referring to a ‘vicious crackdown on Syria’s protest movement’? Chossudovsky explained:

‘The existence of an armed insurrection is not mentioned by the Western media. If it were to be acknowledged and analysed, our understanding of unfolding events would be entirely different. What is mentioned profusely is that the armed forces and the police are involved in the indiscriminate killing of protesters.’

He added some background:

‘Since the Soviet-Afghan war, Western intelligence agencies as well as Israel’s Mossad have consistently used various Islamic terrorist organizations as “intelligence assets”. Both Washington and its indefectible British ally have provided covert support to “Islamic terrorists” in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya, etc. as a means to triggering ethnic strife, sectarian violence and political instability… The ultimate objective of the Syria protest movement, through media lies and fabrications, is to create divisions within Syrian society as well as justify an eventual “humanitarian intervention’.

As Chossudovsky observed, Syria is on the US list of ‘rogue states.’ In 2004, in an interview with Democracy Now!, former Nato chief General Wesley Clark recalled a conversation with a Pentagon general in 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attacks:

‘He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”’

The Guardian’s Morality Play

Ian Black continued in the Guardian:‘The veto by Russia and China of a binding UN security council resolution threatening unspecified measures against Syria caps months of feverish diplomatic action at the UN. Britain, France and Portugal knew they were facing an uphill struggle, so they diluted and qualified the text of what they were proposing in order to avoid failure. But they failed anyway.

‘Since military action was explicitly excluded in the final “blue” draft of the resolution, the optimists thought, or hoped, that Russia might comply.’

But the dilutions and qualifications did not rule out more aggressive action later. The final resolution allowed for the Security Council to consider unspecified measures against Syria after a 30-day period. Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook responded to our request for comment:

‘Black mentions the exclusion of “military action” but this is not in itself a guarantee that the US won’t find other ways to bring about regime change. There was plenty of evidence during Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006 that the US and Israel were trying to widen the attack to Syria. Israel is very concerned about Syria’s stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that nearly match its own. It isn’t too far-fetched to see the US using this resolution as a prelude to a variation of the Iraq strategy: demanding Syria destroy its WMD; upping world fury; isolating Damascus; and then allowing/enabling an Israeli attack.’ (Email to Media Lens, October 6, 2011)

 ‘The US tries to shape the world in ways that are beneficial to its strategic and commercial interests, and does so through arm-twisting and threats to those countries that object but are not strong enough to stand up to its power…

‘This is so obvious it should not even need to be stated. And yet Black’s analysis totally ignores this reality, turning the Security Council vote into some kind of morality play. He is positively misty-eyed about Western interests, as though they were informed solely by a resolute determination to stand up for human rights and the oppressed. His approach is typified by this weasely line:

‘”Beijing, as ever, dutifully followed suit.”

 ‘As though Britain, France, Portugal and co don’t also “dutifully follow suit” when the US demands it.’

Abandoning any pretense of neutrality, Black continued:

‘This is bad news for protesters in Syria, where at least 2,700 have been killed since March, and bad news for those who yearn for a UN that can prove effective, if not in tackling all the world’s ills at once, then at least in responding to one of its most glaring and urgent injustices.

‘The chorus of condemnation from western capitals sounded genuine.’

The resiliance of Black’s faith in Western moral concern is impressive. This year, the West has supported dictators in Tunisia and Egypt to the bitter end, before dumping the tyrants, hailing a triumph for democracy, and then working for a restoration of the status quo. It continues to support tyrants killing their own people in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. It has criminally exploited a UN resolution to achieve regime change in Libya. It has also promised to veto the Palestinian bid for statehood and membership of the UN. In fact, the West has again shown itself to be a fierce opponent of the cause it claims to be defending in Syria.

Black wrote: ‘Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the UN, expressed outrage. “This will be seen in the region as a decision to side with a brutal regime rather than with the people of Syria,” complained William Hague, “and will be a bitter blow to all those Syrians who have implored the international community to take a stand.”… Privately, but fairly openly, the Russians were accused of being hypocritical and cynical.’

On the World Socialist Web Site, Peter Symonds noted the breathtaking hypocrisy of Rice’s walk-out: the US having, after all, vetoed numerous UN resolutions condemning Israeli crimes.

Source: Media Lens

——————————–
Ian Black is the Guardian’s Middle East editor. In more than 25 years on the paper he has also been its European editor, diplomatic editor, foreign leader writer and Middle East correspondent.

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, President and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Editor of GlobalResearch.ca – Email: crgeditor@yahoo.com 

Oct 27

Publicly-owned Banks as an Instrument of Economic Development: The German Model

By Ellen Brown
Global Research, October 13, 2011

Ellen Hodgson Brown

Publicly-owned banks were instrumental in funding Germany?s ?economic miracle? after the devastation of World War II.  Although the German public banks have been targeted in the last decade for takedown by their private competitors, the model remains a viable alternative to the private profiteering being protested on Wall Street today.

One of the demands voiced by protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement is for a ?public option? in banking.  What that means was explained by Dr. Michael Hudson, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, in an interview by Paul Jay of the Real News Network on October 6:

[T]he demand isn?t simply to make a public bank but is to treat the banks generally as a public utility, just as you treat electric companies as a public utility. . . . Just as there was pressure for a public option in health care, there should be a public option in banking.  There should be a government bank that offers credit card rates without punitive 30% interest rates, without penalties, without raising the rate if you don?t pay your electric bill. This is how America got strong in the 19th and early 20th century, by essentially having public infrastructure, just like you?d have roads and bridges. . . . The idea of public infrastructure was to lower the cost of living and to lower the cost of doing business.

We don?t hear much about a public banking option in the United States, but a number of countries already have a resilient public banking sector.  A May 2010 article in The Economist noted that the strong and stable publicly-owned banks of India, China and Brazil helped those countries weather the banking crisis afflicting most of the world in the last few years.

In the U.S., North Dakota is the only state to own its own bank.  It is also the only state that has sported a budget surplus every year since the 2008 credit crisis.  It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the lowest default rate on loans.  It also has oil, but so do other states that are not doing so well.  Still, the media tend to attribute North Dakota?s success to its oil fields.  

However, there are other Western public banking models that are successful without oil booms.  Europe has a strong public banking sector; and leading it is Germany, with eleven regional public banks and thousands of municipally-owned savings banks.   Germany emerged from World War II with a collapsed economy that had degenerated into barter.  Today it is the largest and most robust economy in the Eurozone.  Manufacturing in Germany contributes 25% of GDP, more than twice that in the UK.  Despite the recession, Germany?s unemployment rate, at 6.8%, is the lowest in 20 years.  Underlying the economy?s strength is its Mittelstand?small to medium sized enterprises?supported by a strong regional banking system that is willing to lend to fund research and development.

In 1999, public banks dominated German domestic lending, with private banks accounting for less than 20% of the market, compared to more than 40% in France, Spain, the Nordic countries, and Benelux.  Since then, Germany?s public banks have come under fire; but local observers say it is due to rivalry from private competitors rather than a sign of real weakness in the sector.

As precedent for a public option in banking, then, the German model deserves a closer look.

From the Ashes of Defeat to World Leader in Manufacturing

Germany emerged Phoenix-like from its disastrous defeat in two world wars to become Europe?s economic powerhouse in the second half of the 20th century.  In 1947, German industrial output was only one-third its 1938 level, and a large percentage of its working-age men were dead.  Less than ten years after the war, people were already talking about the German economic miracle; and twenty years later, its economy was the envy of most of the world.  By 2003, a country half the size of Texas had become the world?s leading exporter, producing high quality automobiles, machinery, electrical equipment, and chemicals.  Only in 2009 was Germany surpassed in exports by China, which has a population of over 1.3 billion to Germany?s 82 million.  In 2010, while much of the world was still reeling from the 2008 financial collapse, Germany reported 3.6% economic growth.

The country?s economic miracle has been attributed to a variety of factors, including debt forgiveness by the Allies, currency reform, the elimination of price controls, and the reduction of tax rates.  But while those factors freed the economy from its shackles, they don?t explain its phenomenal rise from a war-torn battlefield to world leader in manufacturing and trade.

One overlooked key to the country?s economic dynamism is its strong public banking system, which focuses on serving the public interest rather than on maximizing private profits.  After the Second World War, it was the publicly-owned Landesbanks that helped family-run provincial companies get a foothold in world markets. As Peter Dorman describes the Landesbanks in a July 2011 blog:

They are publicly owned entities that rest on top of a pyramid of thousands of municipally owned savings banks. If you add in the specialized publicly owned real estate lenders, about half the total assets of the German banking system are in the public sector. (Another substantial chunk is in cooperative savings banks.) They are key tools of German industrial policy, specializing in loans to the Mittelstand, the small-to-medium size businesses that are at the core of that country?s export engine. Because of the landesbanken, small firms in Germany have as much access to capital as large firms; there are no economies of scale in finance. This also means that workers in the small business sector earn the same wages as those in big corporations, have the same skills and training, and are just as productive. [Emphasis added.]

The Landesbanks function as “universal banks” operating in all sectors of the financial services market.  All are controlled by state governments and operate as central administrators for the municipally-owned savings banks, or Sparkassen, in their area.

The Sparkassen were instituted in Germany in the late 18th century as nonprofit organizations to aid the poor. The intent was to help people with low incomes save small sums of money, and to support business start-ups. The first savings bank was set up by academics and philanthropically-minded merchants in Hamburg in 1778, and the first savings bank with a local government guarantor was founded in Goettingen in 1801.  The municipal savings banks were so effective and popular that they spread rapidly, increasing from 630 in 1850 to 2,834 in 1903.  Today the savings banks operate a network of over 15,600 branches and offices and employ over 250,000 people, and they have a strong record of investing wisely in local businesses.

Targeted for Privatization

The reputation and standing of the German public banks were challenged, however, when they emerged as competitors in international markets.  Peter Dorman writes:

[T]he EU doesn?t like the landesbanken. They denounce the explicit and implicit public subsidies that state ownership entails, saying they violate the rules of competition policy. For over a decade they have fought to have the system privatized. In the end, the dispute is simply ideological: if you think that public ownership should only be an exception, narrowly crafted to address specific market failures, you want to see the landesbanken put on the auction block. If you think an economy should be organized to meet socially defined needs, you would want a large part of capital allocation to be responsive to public input, and you?d fight to keep the landesbanken the way they are. (There is a movement afoot in the US to promote public banking.)

The vicissitudes of German banking in the last decade were traced in a July 2011 article by Ralph Niemeyer, editor-in-chief of EUchronicle, titled ?Commission?s Dirty Task: WESTLB Devoured by Private Banks.?  He notes that after 1999, the major private banks left the path of sustainable traditional banking to gamble in collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and derivatives.  Private German banks accumulated an estimated 600 billion euros in toxic assets through their investment banking branches, for which German taxpayers wound up providing guarantees.  Deutsche Bank AG was feeding its record profits almost exclusively through its investment banking division, which made a fortune trading credit default swaps on Greek state obligations.  When this investment turned sour, the German government had to bail out the financial institution into which Deutsche Bank AG dumped these toxic assets.

While the large private banks were betting on the casinos of the financial markets, lending to businesses and the ?real? economy was left to the public Sparkassen, which were more efficient in serving average citizens and local business because they were not stock companies that had to satisfy shareholders? hunger for ever-larger dividends.  Today the market share of private banks in Germany is only 28.4%, and Deutsche Bank AG dominates the segment.  But with its 7% market share, it is still well behind the public banks owned by municipalities and communities.

Neimeyer says the private banks wanted to break up the market dominance of the public banks to get a bigger piece of the pie themselves, and they used the European Commission to do it.  The Commission had been lobbied since the early 1990s by German private banks and by Deutsche Bank AG in particular to attack the German government over the country?s ?inflexible? public banking sector.

The IMF, too, had long demanded that any competing public monopolies in the German banking market be broken up, citing their ?inefficiencies.?  When the German public Sparkassen and Landesbanken were reluctant to turn to investment banking with its skyrocketing profits, they were branded as bureaucratic and ?unsexy.?  When they were pressured to increase their returns for their government owners, the German Landesbanken did get sucked to some extent into derivatives and CDOs (fraudulently rated triple A).  But while they ?lost billions in the Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers Ponzi scheme,? Niemeyer says the extent to which they became involved in highly speculative transactions was ?laughable in comparison with the damage done by private banks, for whom taxpayers are now providing guarantees.?

It was the public banks and Sparkassen that supplied the real economy with liquidity, and that stepped in for the private banks when they withdrew to bet in the financial casino; but it was on the failings of the Landesbanken and Sparkassen that the media focused their attention.  The real motive, says Niemeyer, was that the large private banks wanted the public banks? market share themselves:

In order to win back this important market share, it has become a prerogative to destroy public banking in Germany completely. This unpopular move could never come from the German government itself, so that?s why the [European] Commission is being employed for this dirty job.

The Price of Success

The German public banks were brought down by knocking their public legs out from under them.  Previously, they had enjoyed state guarantees that allowed them to acquire and lend funds at substantially better rates than private banks were able to do.  But in 2001, the European Commission ruled to strip the Landesbanks of their explicit state credit guarantees, forcing them to compete on the same terms as private banks.  And today the European Banking Authority is refusing to count the banks? implicit state guarantees in their ?stress tests? for banking solvency.

The upshot is that the German public banks are being stripped of what has made them stable, secure, and able to lend at low interest rates: they have had the full faith and credit of the government and the public behind them.  By eliminating the profit motive, focusing on the public interest, and relying on government guarantees, the German public banks were able to turn bank credit into the sort of public utility described by Prof. Hudson.

The example of Germany shows that even success is no guarantee in the face of a relentless onslaught of propaganda by large privately-owned banks interested only in making money for their CEOs, wealthiest clients and shareholders. But peering behind the propaganda, the public banking model that helped underwrite Germany?s economic success might be the fast track to a U.S. banking system that serves Main Street rather than Wall Street.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites arehttp://webofdebt.com and http://ellenbrown.com.

Oct 10

The Best Among Us

by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed
Friday 30 September 2011

Christopher Lynn Hedges

An activist from the Occupy Wall Street movement is shown being arrested by police in New York on September 24, 2011. (Photo: Brennan Cavanaugh / Flickr)

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

The crowds have been getting progressively larger throughout the week.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

Support for the protests is breaking out everywhere.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

THe Transit Workers Union marched to the Plaza today

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sep 26

One Day Seminar at Salsomaggiore Terme – Italia

Public One Day Seminar

A one-day seminar organised by Istituto di Ricerca Prout (IRP) at Parma, Italy, was addressed by Ac Krtashivananda director of Global Prout Research Institute.

In the light of the harmful consequences of Globalization of Economy for every single country, the agenda of the seminar has been centered on the neccessity to develope the local economy.

Is has been explained by Ac. Krtashivananda to around 20 participants, belonging to different organizations, what are the ways and the features of the local economy.

The main purpose to emphasise on local economy was to increase the purchasing power of the people and to counter drainage of economy.

Ac. Krtashivananda Avt. touched certain features of centralised economy:

  • Effects of Globalisation on local economy, local production, marketing etc.
  • How local economy, in present set up, is influenced by the economic policy of the State and Global economic policy that emphasises on free flow of goods and money.
  • What can we do locally: in the fields of Agriculture, small scale industries and marketing and trade.

Tarcisio Bonotto, president of IRP Italia, has underlined the damages resulted, in the local and national fabric of farm, industrial production and commerce, by the globalization policies (WTO, IMF, WB).

Some counter measures based on  PROUT economic policy were forwarded: 

  • Development of local projects, in the fields of agriculture, small scale industries, and local trade to counter the influence of big industries, multistores and monopolized businesses.
  • One venture could be taken up by local farmers: to organize their own whole sale market on cooperative basis to counter the monopoly of big businesses.
  • A discussion was held in this regard and the participants also agreed to explore the possibility of developing small scale industries and the possibility of availability of fund for such projects.

Workshop

Franco Bressanin, secretary of IRP Italia, has guided the workshop, an exercise about the economic and people organization.
Different proposals have emerged:

  • Education in the schools about coordinate cooperation and not subordinate cooperation.
  • Promotion of small collective production activities in agriculture and developing cooperative market by the farmers.
  • Vocational training for the new arts and crafts, promote youth centers for socialisation and integration.
  • Development of cultural activities, and to promote training centers for developing artistic capabilities.
  • Other ideas have emerged from the participants to be explored in subsequent seminars.

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Paper Clip:

17/04/2011 Salsomaggiore terme


 

Sep 11

Arundhati Roy Disturbs Democratic Daydreaming

Trond Øverland

By Trond Øverland

Arundhati Roy is an unusual Indian woman. Instead of acting the graceful upholder of traditional values, she goes on challenging the hard core of establishment thinking. Roy is India’s leading commentator on such evils as militaristic imperialist capitalism, genocide of Muslims, and dam disasters. In her latest book, Listening to Grasshoppers; Field Notes on Democracy, she hammers at perhaps the most central of all contemporary sacred pillars, i.e. that of democracy, which in her words “have metastasized into something dangerous”.

Grasshoppers is a collection of essays on such recent events as the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, the 2006 visit to India by “the war criminal” U.S. President George W. Bush, the 2002 Gujarat carnage (between 2000-4000 Muslims slaughtered), the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament by “so-called” Pakistan-based terrorists, and the growing inequality in India (“the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream – and a lot of water …”).

A.Roy: Listening to Grasshoppers

A radical analysis of democracy runs through the book’s fiery chapters, like a river running from its mountainous source towards the ocean. Roy’s conclusion is disquieting: she is forced by the rationale of her facts and arguments to approve of violence as a means of people’s resistance to injustice. She observes with understanding that many of the poor are “crossing over … to another side; the side of armed struggle.”

While reviewers across India are busy assuring their readership of their being in wonderful agreement with the greater part of Roy’s information and reflections, they uniformly disagree with her basic take on the rising violence amongst India’s poor. The world-wide success of Roy’s novel The God of Small Things would not be the only reason why they have to agree at least somewhat. The documented material is just too true and persuasive. As readers we are forcefully moved to wish that things would be very different – and this reviewer is left to ponder how such a critique of the world’s largest democracy may produce such a fundamental clash between the radical author and her educated audience, the newspapers columnists, the upholders of status quo.

The key appears to be capitalism and communal unrest, or communal fascism as Roy calls it. She eloquently argues that democracy in India is not for, by and of the people but for, by and of capitalism – “designed to uphold the consensus of the elite for market growth”. Here are two quotes from the book:

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

“Dangerous levels of malnutrition and permanent hunger are the preferred model these days. Forty-seven per cent of India’s children below three suffer from malnutrition, 46 per cent are stunted … Today an average rural family eats about hundred kilograms less food in a year than it did in the early 1990s. But in urban India, wherever you go – shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports, gymnasiums, hospitals – you have TV monitors in which election promises have already become true. India’s Shining, Feeling Good. You only have to close your ears to the sickening crunch of the policeman’s boot on someone’s ribs, you only have to raise your eyes from the squalor, the slums, the ragged broken people on the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor and you will be in that other beautiful world. The singing-dancing world of Bollywood’s permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, permanently happy Indians waving the tricolor flag and Feeling Good. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell which one’s the real world and which one’s the virtual.”

“Personally I don’t believe that entering the electoral fray is a path to alternative politics … because I believe that strategically battles must be waged from positions of strength, not weakness. The target of the dual assault of neo-liberalism and communal fascism are the poor and the minority communities. As liberalism drives its wedge between the rich and the poor, between India Shining and India, it becomes increasingly absurd for any mainstream political party to pretend to represent the interests of both the rich and the poor, because the interests of one can only be represented at the cost of the other … A political party that represents the poor will be a poor party. A party with very meagre funds. Today it isn’t possible to fight an election without funds. Putting a couple of well-known social activists into Parliament is interesting, but not really politically meaningful. Individual charisma, personality politics, cannot effect radical change.”

Hardly the stuff that middle-class democratic daydreaming is made of. More like a real nightmare, actually.

So, by providing a proper perspective on the role of the world’s largest democracy as a mechanism and mouthpiece for market forces, Roy stimulates debate on a question of global importance: Democracy for, by and of what? It seems that democracy can never be for democracy’s sake, it has to serve some purpose. In other words, what kind of values and fundamental mentality are needed for democracy to be really successful and well functioning?

Democracy can never be successful unless the majority of the population are moralists. In other words, there needs to be a leading trend that supports humanistic values and spiritual growth. Capitalism on the contrary serves to break down whatever remains of those very values. In its relentless quest for individual material acquisitions and selfish comfort it makes us all insensitive to the suffering of others and prone to divisive tendencies. It is in this contemporary reality, in the late phase of mature capitalism, that Roy keeps haunting the lazy, unimaginative and selfish middle class with her vision of a capitalistic system headed for hell.

Grasshoppers may not provide all or any answers at all to Roy’s ongoing inquiry. Also, Roy is not God and there may be more complex causes as to Muslim genocides and other of her pet themes than what she chooses to emphasize. However, her writing most definitely raises some very important questions — and reactions. Roy’s concrete, bold way of measuring the pulse and temperature of the sick body of democracy leaves no one undisturbed it seems. We would not be surprised if irrational, defensive reactions continue to hound her noble inquiry into contemporary leadership and official thinking.

Listening to Grasshoppers; Field Notes on Democracy, Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton, Penguin, India 2009, 240 pages, 499 rupees.

Trond Øverland writes on progressive socio-economics and is editor on www.proutglobe.org 

Aug 27

Please help Mongolian to save their beautiful unspoiled nature!

With 3500 lakes, located in the western and northern parts of the country,  1194 of these lakes do not dry all the year around, with around 3000 rivers in total with a combined length of 67,000 kilometers, 6900 springs, 250 mineral water springs. 187 glaciers which covers 540 square km, it seems absurd to think of it as a place for nuclear waste dump.

Stop the U.S. from creating a nuclear waste dump in Mongolia

The Obama administration has held informal talks with Mongolia about the possibility that the Central Asian nation might host an international repository for nuclear waste. Mongolia contains some of the largest expanses of unspoiled nature on Earth, and does not have any ambitions to develop a nuclear program of its own.

To litter its pristine environment with toxic, radioactive waste would be an humanitarian and enviromental crime.

Please urge the U.S. Energy Department to abandon its goal to persuade the Mongolian government to accept an atomic waste dump on its sovereign soil.

Signe the petition now. The petition to U.S. Energy Department, sponsored by The Clean Environment NGO for stopping the U.S. from creating a nuclear waste dump in Mongolia is available at globalsecuritynewswire.org/

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The Petition:

We the undersigned call upon you to abandon the plan to create a repository for spent nuclear fuel in Mongolia.  The people of  Mongolia are proud of their country’s unspoiled nature and concerned citizens all over the world do not approve of your idea to dump atomic waste there.  We strongly oppose the import of any nuclear material into Mongolia.

Please do not consider this peaceful and beautiful nation in your quest for a nuclear dump site.

We sincerely thank you for taking the time to read our very serious request.

About Mongolia:

line at about mongolia
nature of mongolia                 http://www.selenatravel.com/about-mongolia.html

Geography of Mongolia

geagraphy mongolia, mountainsLocated in the landlocked plateau of Central Asia between China and Russia, Mongolia covers an entire area of 1.566.500 km- it takes the 15th place with its size in the world. Mongolia stretches about 2.400 km form the west to the east and about 1.260 km from the north to the south. The total length of the country’s border is 8.156 km. The total area of Mongolia is larger than the combined areas of Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

The northern part of the country is covered by forest mountain geagraphy mongolia, forestranges and the southern part by desert, desert steppe, and steppe areas with low mountains. High snow-capped mountains and glaciers and the eastern part by vast plains and wild heaths dominate the western part. The Mongolian environment has a large variety of features. Mongolia can be divided into six zones; desert, mountain, mountain taiga, mountain forest steppe, arid steppe and taiga.

The mountain belt of the Mongol Altai, Khangai and Khentii mountainous regions, with their perpetual snow, glaciers, traces and signs of ancient ice covers, has been well preserved due to a constantly cold climate and strong winds. The area is inhabited by some endangered animals (such as the Argali sheep, Ibex, Snow Leopard, Rock Ptarmigan and Altai Snowcock) and plants (such as the Dwarf Siberian Pine and White Gentiana). About 81% of the country is higher than 1000 meters above sea level and the average elevation is 1580 meters. The highest mountain is Tavan Bogd in Bayan Ulgii Aimag at 4374 meters and the lowest point is Khukh Nuur in the east at 560 meters.

geagraphy mongolia, gobi desert, sand dunesMountains and dense forests predominate central and northern Mongolia and grasslands cover large areas of this region. Across the eastern part of the country stretches the vast land grasslands of the Asian steppe. The steppe grades into Gobi Desert, which extends throughout southern Mongolia from the east to the west of the country. The Gobi Desert, which extends throughout southern Mongolia from the east to the west of the country. The Gobi is mostly gravelly, but also contains large areas of sand dunes in the dries areas of Gobi near the southern border. The country has numerous saltwater and freshwater lakes. Although it boasts over 260 sunny days a year and is known as the “Land of the blue sky”, Mongolia’s climate is extreme. Long subarctic winters are harsh with average tempratures dropping to -34’C (-88’F) in January and early February. So some rivers remain frozen until June. The general landscape of the country is concerned its natural origin, which is comparatively less destroyed by human activities and remained keeping its original nature.

Great Lakes Water of Mongolia:

geagraphy mongolia, rivers and springAccording to long term studies, Mongolia gets a 230 mm or 361 km.qube water of average annual precipitation . The most of it evaporates and only 10% or 36 km.qube stays on the surface and 37% of which waters the soils and 63% or 22 km.qube supplies the surface water-rivers and streams.
6898 springs are currently in use. Most of Mongolian 3500 lakes are located in the western and northern parts of th country- biggest lakes like Uvs, Khovsgul, Khyargas, Khar, Boon Tsagaan, Orog, Achit and many more. 1194 lakes of Mongolia do not dry all the year around.

geagraphy mongolia, lakes, great lakesMongolia has comparatively high levels of surface and ground water resources. The rivers of Mongolia belong to the inland drainage basins of the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and Central Asia. The water network is of a greater density in the north of the country. The longest river is the Orkhon at 1124 kilometers in length. There are some 3000 rivers in total with a combined length of 67,000 kilometers.

There are also over 3000 big and small lakes, 6,900 springs, 190 glaciers and 250 mineral water springs. 187 glaciers are in mongolia, which covers 540 square km. The biggest glacier of the country Potanin is in the Altai Mountains and has a total area of 107.9 square km.

Winter-Spring-Summer-Autumn Climate of Mongolia

climate and seasons of MongoliaThe main characteristics of the climate of Mongolia are sunny days, long and cold winters, low precipitation and large annual, seasonal, monthly and diurnal fluctuations in air temperature. The average mean temperature recorded in January is -34’C in the plateau and depressions, but extreme temperatures have been recorded between -50 and -56 degrees centigrade. In the northern mountains the average mean temperature in the warmest warmth is between +35’C and +41’C, depending on the area.

The total annual precipitation in mountainous regions averages to about 400 mm, in the steppe from 150-200 mm and in the desert-steppe less that 100 mm, About 75-85% of the precipitation falls during the three summer months. The spring season is often very windy and dust storms are common in the desert regions.

Fauna of Mongolia

 

wild animals in mongolia, fauna of MongoliaThe science study of Mongolian fauna was started in the second half of the 19th century. Everyone traveling in Mongolia may find it difficult to distinguish between wild and domesticated animals as both roam freely on the open, vast steppe. Though Mongolia does not have the large games such lion, elephant that attract visitors to Africa, it has many rare and endangered species such as the snow leaopard, Argali and Ibex. So our company no longer offering our hunting tours for some rare species like Argali, Ibex, Deer, Elk, Bear, Gazelles and Roe Deer.

Mammals in Mongolia: Currently 136 species of mammals concerning 8 classes, 22 families, 70 types of mammals have been registered in Mongolia, most of them are endemic in Central Asia. 60 species of them are hunted as they are game animals.

Birds of Mongolia: Mongolia has a rich composition of bird species due to the migratory routes from the Pasific ana Indian Oceans to the wild animals in mongolia, fauna of MongoliaMediterranean Sea and to Arctic Ocean and Northern Tundra.. 426 species of birds have been observed in Mongolia- 322 species or 78% are migrated. 30 species of birds are included in the “Red book of Mongolia” as they are concerned as rare and endangered.And some lakes as Khovsgul, Uvs, Khar Us, Dayan, Dorgon, Terkhiin Tsagaan and also some rivers where high density of birds is observed have been strictly protected partially. Birds such as Grus leucogeranus, Grus vipio, Chlamydotis undulata, ciconia migra, Pelecanus crispus, Platalea leucorodia, Anas formosa, Limnodromus semipalmatus, Larus relictus have been protected.

wild animals in mongolia, fauna of MongoliaReptiles in Mongolia: Currently 22 species of reptiles have been registered in the country such as alsophylax pipiens, teratoscincus przwalskii, cyrtopodion elongatus, laudakia stoliczkana, phrynocephalus versicolor, phrynocephalus helioscopus, lacerta agilis, lacerta vivipara, eryx tataricus, elaphe dione, coluber spinalis, elaphe schrenckii, natrix natrix, vipera berus, qkistrodon halys… most of these reptiles are endemic.Amphibians in Mongolia: In the world currently, 3 types, 29 families, 3000 species of insects have been registered, of which 2 types, 4 families of 8 species of amphibians have been observed in Mongolia such as Bufo danatensis, Salamandrella keyserlingii, Rana chensinensis, Hyla japonica, bufo raddei, …some of the amphibians are endemic.

birds of mongoliaFish of Mongolia: Mongolia has 75 species of fishes. Fish that are not listed in the “Red book of Mongolia” are sport fish. Common fish in Mongolia: taimen, great kalyga, strugeons, arctis cisco, siberian whitefish, pikes- amur pike, northern pike, cyprinid fish, carp, roach, dwaft altai osman, mongolian grayling, mongolian redfin, look up, haitej sculpin…
Insects in Mongolia: Insect life is the richest in the wild life of Mongolia as 13000 species of insects are observed in the country.

Flora of Mongolia

 

There can be said to be three distinct types of ecosystem related flora of mongoliato flora- grassland and shrubs, forests and desert vegetation. Crop cultivation and human settlements make up less than 1% of Mongolia’s territory. Although there is so much grassland here, used for grazing, overgrazing is a problem in some areas.

Forests: The natural regeneration of Mongolian forests is slow, fires and insects due to the harsh climate often damage the forests. 8.1% of the total territory is covered by forest, totaling 140 species of trees, shrubs and woody flora of Mongoliaplants.Trees are used as a source of fuel, whether it is the larch, pine or birch in the north, the saxaul in Gobi Desert.
Vascular and Lower Plants: There are 2823 species of vascular plants, 445 species of moss, 930 species of lichen, 900 species of fungi and 1236 species of algae. 845 species of plants are used in traditional Mongolian Medicine, 1000 species of fodder, 173 for food and 64 for industry. There are now 128 species of plants listed as endangered and thraetened in the Mongolian Red Book 1997.

culture of mongolia

Nomadic Civilization and Culture of Mongolianomadic culture of mongoliaMongolia is totally landlocked country so that its climate is sharp continental and dry with 4 seasons, the geographical location is diverse. Influenced by these, Mongolians have developed unique nomadic civilization since Neolite. They have run animal husbandry in their vast land and move for the best pasture and water frequently. But it does not mean that Mongols are all nomads living in their gers (traditional dwelling), also they have developed their own urban civilization and architecture. The first Mongolian Empire the Khunnu had its capital city on the bank of the River Orkhon. Each Empire of Mongolia had capital cities. Mongolian Architecture was influenced by Buddhism a lot like many other Buddhist Countries. You can see it from number of monasteries.

National Holidays of Mongolianational holidays of mongolia

 

Tsagaan Sar – Lunar New Year: Although winter is long in Mongolia and it may be very cold in March and April, it is an accepted practice to mark the advent of Spring in February. It coincides with the New Year celebrations according to the oriental lunar calendar. Some researchers believe that the lunar calendar was invented by the nomadic tribes of Central Asia. Living in contact with nature and noticing the natural cycles, the nomads had long organised their life according the lunar phases.

festivals and tourism events in mongoliaNaadam Festival: The sports most popular with the Mongols since ancient times are wrestling, horse racing and archery. Together they form Eriin Gurvan Naadam – the three manly sports.

The three manly sports make up the core program of the National Day festivity which has been held annually for the past two centuries. Earlier, Naadam was often associated with religious ceremonies (worshipping the spirit of the mountains, the rocks and the rivers). At present it is a national holiday held 11-13th July each year to commemorate the Mongol People’s Revolution.

TRADITIONAL DWELLING- “the Mongolian Ger”
mongolian ger, traditional dwelling -gerGer has been used since the Mongols started nomadic life with animal husbandry. A ger consists of felt covers (deever, tuurga), wooden columns(bagana), and a toono (a square window) and uni or thin wooden poles and floor, khana or wall (wooden lattice attached together with animal’s hide ropes) and ropes. Most of gher materials are made of animals like felt- sheep wool, ropes- camel or sheep wool, horse or yak’s tail, and of course wood. A ger size depends on the owner’s wealth, khana numbers decide the size, the biggest gher in Mongolia or in the world was called Bat-Olziit and its diameter was 40 m and it had 32 khanas. A usual Mongol gher has 5 khanas and 88 unis.

TRADITIONAL COSTUME OF MONGOLIA – “the Deel”
The main costume of the Mongols is the deel. It is usually made of silk and cotton. The Mongols have wearing this costume for centuries, it is perhaps as old as the gher. A deel design varies in different ethnic groups, and the materials also differ in different seasons. For example: in winter they wear sheepskin, their warmest deels, in summers they wear their lightest deels.

Religions of Mongoliareligion of mongolia, shamanism

By now Mongolia’s main religion is Buddism, with 90% of the whole population are Buddhists. The rest are Muslims, Shamanist and few Christians. Mongolans’ first religion was shamanism, it arose during the Clan structure. At that time it was simple, just magic. According to archeological findings, about 100000-40000 years before the people lived on the land of today’s Mongolia had this religion. On the ancient earth, every clan had a belief about their origin that they were descended from an animal or a plant, and they called it tutelary genius. The Mongols adored deer or wolf.

Shamanism in Mongoliareligion of mongolia: buddhism

The clans lived on the land of today’s Mongolia passed to class society. From clan structure people believed that there was an external force of the nature and they understood that they were poor and weak under it. So they worshipped to the force, and it was the base of Shamanism.According to it there are 99 heavens, 55 of which are the heavens of the west and influence good to human beings, and the rest 44 are the heavens of the east and considered as bad. The Mongols worship the good 55 heavens once a year by worshipping a sacred mountain or an ovoo. religion of mongolia: buddhist monasteriesDuring the ceremony of ovoo worship, shamans offer fire and food to the spirits of the mountains nd the waters. And once a year shamans perform a special deed to abuse the bad heavens. According to Shamanism, after a death of someone his spirit goes to the heavens and his body stays under the ground. Today there are number of ethnic groups-Shamanists live in the north western part of the country.

Buddhism in Mongolia

People say that Buddhism first came to Mongolia 3rd cenruty BC, but the historical resources date Modun Shanyu’s reign 209-171 BC. After that till now over 2000 years, Buddhism has been being developed in Mongolia. By 1937, there were over 700 active monasteries in the country but after the communist destroy only 5 of them were left. After the democratic revolution of 1990, people have started reconstruction of many monasteries.

history of mongolia: great mongol empirehistory of mongolia
History of the warriors started 7500 years ago from now on, and that is subdivided into 8 parts according to historians:

  1. Clan Structure- This generation covers the time of from t he first men lived on the current land of the Mongols till the 3rd Century BC.
  2. Ancient Empires of the Mongols- The first Mongol and the first nomadic empire Khunnu was established 209 BC on the vast land of Central history of mongolia: great mongol empireAsia for the first time- till the 13th Century AD.
  3. Great Mongolian Empire and Mongol Empire- 13th Century- 14th Century
  4. Political Splitting of the Empire- 15th Century to the 17th Century
  5. Colony of Manchu Qing- 18th Century to the 19th Century
  6. The Authonomy of Mongolia- 1911-1919
  7. The Communist Revolution and the communist regime- 1921-1990
  8. Democratic Revolution and Democratic Rules- 1990-till now on

Aug 22

Global Economic Downturn – Europe and China

by George Friedman

George Friedman - Stratfor

The Crisis in Europe

The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe. While the American financial crisis certainly affected Europe, the European political crisis was deepened by the resulting recession. There had long been a minority in Europe who felt that the European Union had been constructed either to support the financial elite at the expense of the broader population or to strengthen Northern Europe, particularly France and Germany, at the expense of the periphery — or both. What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.

The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks but instead worked on a national basis, with each nation focused on its own banks and the European Central Bank seeming to favor Northern Europe in general and Germany in particular. This became the theme particularly when the recession generated disproportionate crises in peripheral countries like Greece.

There are two narratives to the story. One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government in maintaining social welfare programs in excess of what it could fund, and now the Greeks were expecting others, particularly the Germans, to bail them out.

The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods. During the prosperity of the first 20 years or so, this was hidden beneath general growth. But once a crisis hit, the inability of Greece to devalue its money — which, as the euro, was controlled by the European Central Bank — and the ability of Germany to continue exporting without any ability of Greece to control those exports exacerbated Greece’s recession, leading to a sovereign debt crisis. Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.

Which narrative is true is not the point. The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.

The Crisis in China

The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe. When the United States and Europe went into recession, the Chinese government faced an unemployment crisis. If factories closed, workers would be unemployed, and unemployment in China could lead to massive social instability. The Chinese government had two responses. The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated. The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.

The strategy worked, of course, but only at the cost of substantial inflation. This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes. The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.

China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both. The Chinese government couldn’t afford this, so it began to intrude more and more into the economy. The political elite sought to stabilize the situation — and their own positions — by increasing controls on the financial and other corporate elites.

In different ways, that is what happened in all three places — the United States, Europe and China — at least as first steps. In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy. In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more. In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased. In all three cases, the first impulse was to use political controls.

In all three, this generated resistance. In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance. It went beyond them. In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists (and anti-immigration forces that blamed the European Union’s open border policies for uncontrolled immigration). It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries. In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation, both consumers and business interests whose exports are less competitive and profitable.

Not every significant economy is caught in this crisis. Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy. Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China. But when the United States, Europe and China go into a crisis of this sort, it can reasonably be said that the center of gravity of the world’s economy and most of its military power is in crisis. It is not a trivial moment.

Crisis does not mean collapse. The United States has substantial political legitimacy to draw on. Europe has less but its constituent nations are strong. China’s Communist Party is a formidable entity but it is no longer dealing with a financial crisis. It is dealing with a political crisis over the manner in which the political elite has managed the financial crisis. It is this political crisis that is most dangerous, because as the political elite weakens it loses the ability to manage and control other elites.

It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge. Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites. Nor is it simply a class issue. The challenge emanates from many areas. The challengers are not yet the majority, but they are not so far away from it as to be discounted. The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.

The Crisis of Legitimacy

This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own. In the United States this would lead to paralysis. In Europe it would lead to a devolution to the nation-state. In China it would lead to regional fragmentation and conflict.

These are all extreme outcomes and there are many arrestors. But we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things. The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis. The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.

The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.

STRATFOR

Aug 14

Global Economic Downturn: A Crisis of Political Economy

by George Friedman.
formerly economic advisor of Roland Reagan.

George Friedman

Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term “economy” by itself. They always used the term “political economy.” For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked. The use of the term “economy” by itself did not begin until the late 19th century. Smith understood that while an efficient market would emerge from individual choices, those choices were framed by the political system in which they were made, just as the political system was shaped by economic realities. For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.

The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy. Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life. On a global scale, or at least for most of the world’s major economies, there is a crisis of political economy. Let’s consider how it evolved.

Origin of the Crisis

As we all know, the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States. To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing. It assumed that the price of homes would always rise and, at the very least, if the price fluctuated the value of the paper could still be determined. Neither proved to be true. The price of housing declined and, worse, the value of the paper assets became indeterminate. This placed the entire American financial system in a state of gridlock and the crisis spilled over into Europe, where many financial institutions had purchased the paper as well.

From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much. From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite. Think of a national system as a series of subsystems — political, economic, military and so on. Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system. Obviously, this oversimplifies the situation, but I’m doing that to make a point. One of the systems, the financial system, failed, and this failure was due to decisions made by the financial elite. This created a massive political problem centered not so much on confidence in any particular financial instrument but on the competence and honesty of the financial elite itself. A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both. The idea was that the financial elite had violated all principles of fiduciary, social and moral responsibility in seeking its own personal gain at the expense of society as a whole.

Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis. This was the true systemic crisis, compared to which the crisis of the financial institutions was trivial. The question was whether the political system was capable not merely of fixing the crisis but also of holding the perpetrators responsible. Alternatively, if the financial crisis did not involve criminality, how could the political system not have created laws to render such actions criminal? Was the political elite in collusion with the financial elite?

There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened. Indeed, the perception is that having spent large sums of money to stabilize the financial system, the political elite allowed the financial elite to manage the system to its benefit.

This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite. The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt. The Tea Party’s perception was extreme, but the idea was that the political elite had solved the financial problem both by generating massive debt and by accumulating excessive state power. Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.

( By May 2011 US have 14.2 Trillion public and  intergovernmental debt of which China, Japan. United Kingdom and Brazil have highest stake.)

Source: Stratfor

Next: Europe and China

Aug 08

Structural Adjustment Programmes: Official Aims vs Actual Experience

by Ac. Krtashivananda.

The Structural Adjustment Programme(SAP) do vary from country to country, but the main policies demanded by IMF; WB and WTO are the same.An attempt has been made to find out why SAP do not work well, and contrary to official claims.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has been found out that most of the private industries are financed by the govt. financing agencies. More emphasis are given on capital intensive mega industries  and ignores small and medium scale labour intensive industries. This creates imbalance in economic growth. After the formation of WTO treaty in 1994, the world income distribution shows:

20% richest people enjoys 85% of the world income and 20% poorest people share 1.5% of the world income.

Related Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_adjustment
http://www.whirledbank.org/development/sap.html

 

www.whirledbank.org

 

 

Aug 02

The Heresay of Greece Offers Hope

 

John Pilger

The economic collapse that happened in Greece in 2008 and whose effect is still continued, described by John Pilger, as a microcosm for the developed world, where class war are the words seldom used because they are the truth.
John Pilger

The crisis that has led to the “rescue” of Greece by the European banks and the International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system which itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war that is rarely reported as such and is waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich.

What makes Greece different is that within its living memory is invasion, foreign occupation, betrayal by the West, military dictatorship and popular resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou, was described by sociologist Jean Ziegler as “a machine for systematic pillaging the country’s resources”.

The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal reserve Board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs and other American hedge fund operators which gambled on the bankruptcy of Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited 360 billion Euros in Swiss banks. The largest Greek ship-owners transferred their companies abroad. This haemorrhage of capital continues with the approval of the European central banks and governments.

At 11 per cent, Greece’s deficit is no higher than America’s. However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international capital market, it was effectively blocked by the American corporate ratings agencies, which “downgraded” Greece to “junk”. These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.
In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred the debts. Jobs, pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers in charge. For the European Union and the IMF, the opportunity presents to “change the culture” and dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF and the World Bank have “structurally adjusted” (impoverished and controlled) countries across the developing world.

Greece is hated for the same reason Yugoslavia had to be physically destroyed behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks are employed by the state, and the young and the unions comprise a popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels’ tanks on the campus of Athens University remain a political spectre.

In the developing world, a system of triage imposed by the World Bank and the IMF has long determined whether people live or die. Whenever tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated by IMF diktat, small farmers know they have been declared expendable. The World Resources Institute estimates that the toll reaches 13-18 million child deaths every year. “This,” wrote the economist Lester C. Thurow, “is neither metaphor nor simile of war, but war itself.”

The same imperial forces have used horrific military weapons against stricken countries whose majorities are children, and approved torture as an instrument of foreign policy. It is a phenomenon of denial that none of these assaults on humanity, in which Britain is actively engaged, was allowed to intrude on the British election.
The people on the streets of Athens do not suffer this malaise. They are clear who the enemy is and they regard themselves as once again under foreign occupation. And once again, they are rising up, with courage.

Source: New Statesman