'If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything'

In August-September 2005, during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the worst flooded area of “Central City” was, at 4,687 km², [inhabitants / sq km] the city’s largest population density and on the site of a former lake at 1.5 metres below sea level (New Orleans Community Data Center, 2005). The majority of inhabitants were low-income and black, an ethnic minority in the USA with a long history of disadvantage, which added to an already rich melting pot of vulnerability. Social, including political and economic, forces had obliged disadvantaged communities to occupy the most vulnerable areas of a vulnerable city. Those same forces created and perpetuated poverty, which enmeshed in this vulnerability and led to characteristics of place that were, to some degree, defined not just by the people and their poverty, but also by the fact that the people and their poverty developed according to the characteristics of the place. These characteristics of place were further defined by people in other, less poor places, who enjoyed the national advantages of New Orleans’ port and culture without concern for the consequences for other people living in the same city.

from here.

I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up.

- Adolf Hitler.

Fuck that. Turn the music back up.

RIP Jordan Davis, 1995-2012.

Colin Ward died four years ago today. There's a short interview with libcom's Rob Ray here in Colin's home village of Debenham, Suffolk. (via Will.)

SMH environment editor Peter Hannam writes "2013 Australia's hottest year on record"

Professor Pitman said 2013's likely rank as the world's fourth hottest year is more remarkable because the most significant driver of climate variation - the El Nino-Southern Oscillation in the Pacific - remains in neutral mode.

here

23 degrees Celsius in Melbourne in July

(h/t Bill McKibben on Twitter.)

Like the discipline of slavery, the murders and assaults of the postemancipation South convinced most African Americans to follow racial etiquette most of the time. They accommodated whites' expectations at least enough to stay alive in a hair-trigger environment, an environment in which black life remained cheap and unprotected despite economic development and other changes in the region between Reconstruction and World War II. But accommodation was not the same thing as acquiescence.

- p.47, Growing up Jim Crow (2006), Jennifer Ritterhouse

once childhood is seen as a racialized, gendered and classed position, the notion of childhood as having the possibility of being innocent, in the sense of existing outside of the symbolic and material nexus of political economy, has to be abandoned entirely.

- Karen Wells, 2009

"Exploiting tax-increment financing, City Hall ratified the same principle for Downtown: fiscal windfalls from the appreciation of publicly-subsidized real-estate were ploughed right back into further redevelopment. These fiscal closed circuits sustained high levels of public investment in container docks, terminal buildings, and downtown bank skyscrapers that, in turn, kept happy a huge constituency of pro-globalization interests, including airlines, stevedoring companies, railroads, aerospace exporters, hotels, construction unions, downtown landowners, the Los Angeles Times, Japanese banks, Westside movie studios, big law firms, and the politicians dependent upon the largesse of all of the above.

But the city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce."

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz 2nd edn. preface (2006)

Fortress Europe, 2013.

In infinite varieties, another day on earth.

"a concept of monumental emptiness"

- Wolfgang Sachs on development

"a past of struggle against slavery"

Montserratians now reside with uncertainty as a way of life...the vulnerability they experience, as a result of the natural disaster, is to some degree compounded by wider international and global processes. Montserrat is not alone in this, as Possekel points out: 'development achievements of the SIDS (small island developing states) in the Caribbean are also constantly crushed by natural disasters' (1999: 3).

[...]

All of the countries of the Caribbean, with the exception of the French Caribbean, which are politically and economically part of mainland France, and Cuba, which has followed a distinctive path to a different type of development, are in extremely vulnerable positions vis-à-vis globalization.
- Tracey Skelton, 'Globalizing Forces and Natural Disaster' in Globalization: Theory and Practice, edited by Kofman and Youngs (2003 edition)

- A.K. Possekel Living with the Unexpected: Linking Disaster Recovery to Sustainable Development in Montserrat (Springer, 1999).

Article 26
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Means-tested benefits, confined to the poor, isolate them so that the rest of society no longer has a real stake in defending and improving what is becoming an increasingly stigmatized system associated with failure

- Ruth Lister, 'Assessment of the Fowler Review' (1989)

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

The underlying reason for the emergence of chaos and Islamist violence in Afghanistan in the 1990s was that the West had, after forcing the Russians to leave in 1989, abandoned interest in or activities related to that country.

Nothing could be further from the truth: far from 'forgetting' or 'abandoning' Afghanistan, the West, in violation of the April 1988 UN agreement on a Soviet withdrawal, continued to arm and finance the rebels and in the end brought down the reforming communist regime. In April 1988 the 'West', i.e. the US, Britain and its allies, Egypt and Pakistan, signed an agreement to stop supplying the Islamist guerrillas in Afghanistan in return for a withdrawal of Soviet forces.
The Soviets left by February 1989, but aid to the guerrillas continued with the intention of forcing a collapse of the communist regime in Kabul. The US at the same time pressed hard for a cutoff in Soviet support for the Afghan regime after their troop withdrawal, but this was not successful until the change of government in Moscow following the failed coup of August 1991; then, in a deal brokered by US Secretary of State James Baker, Moscow cut off all aid to its former ally in Kabul.
The regime of President Najibullah, who had held power since 1987, fell the following April.
-number 54 from Fred Halliday's 100 Myths about the Middle East (SAQI, 2005)