Class Antagonism and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement

from ULTRA

NOTE: Thanks to all the friends in Hong Kong who provided first-hand information and photos for this article.

PART 1: The History

Global City
Itinerant shoppers pose for selfies as the skyline of the finance district across the bay bursts into a kaleidoscope of green and yellow lights. Below them, the waters of Victoria Harbor stir quietly, foreboding a typhoon. Despite the churning water, the nearby cruise ship hardly seems to move. It is docked to the pier at Tsim Sha Tsui, its gangplank descending into one of the most luxurious shopping malls in East Asia, a convenience allowing wealthy visitors from all across the world the ability to disembark from one climate-controlled environment to another without ever leaving the safety of AC and well-trained security. Once off the ship, they can spend money tax-free at the city's most fashionable restaurants and retail outlets, eating Japanese BBQ and then gliding over polished floors to browse retro British outfits at a boutique marketing 20s-style colonial chic.

Outside on the dock, rain starts to splatter down on the selfie-takers’'outstretched iPhones. A young girl sings old Cantonese pop songs, even though everyone listens to K-pop now, accompanied by her boyfriend's out-of-tune guitar. People drop a few serrated Hong Kong coins into their donation jar. The wind begins to pick up, washing away the Cantonese tones as it sweeps static across the microphone. Behind her, the cruise ship sits white and motionless.

This is the battle that is Hong Kong: Old Cantonese love songs hurled into the growing wind of a typhoon, torn apart before they reach the walls of lifeless cruise ships and shopping malls looming under the lights of the financial district. Here spectacle confronts stubborn humanity in the archetypal "global city," designed to allow capital to filter through the port, banks and real estate markets, to plunder the Asian mainland without ever having to pass outside the safety of climate control and security cordon.

Kobanê Style Revolution

by Houzan Mahmoud, Huffington Post

The role of women in war, peace and revolution has long been portrayed in manifold, often contradictory ways. Images of women as victims, pacifist peace-makers, protestors, and home-makers have dominated literature. Opposed to these images we find that the male figure is represented as a fighter, the ones who take part in war and defend the motherland against the enemy. The homeland is thus a female body, a passive and defenseless geography which requires brave men to defend and protect her. It could be argued that history is written by men; therefore they narrate it in a manner that suits the usual gender stereotypes.

The Middle East, North Africa and their female populations in particular have been represented, portrayed and stereotyped in different ways, at different times and in different contexts. Take a look at the media coverage of the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa region. News of the sexual harassment of women in the "Arab uprising," brutal attacks, imprisonments and virginity tests of female protestors dominated the screens. Yet women played a significant role in these events. For them, the uprising was part of a long history of resistance to suppression and a lack of freedom in their countries. The fact is that women were fighting and have proved their existence despite the counter-revolutionary and anti-women treatment that they were receiving.

Today this portrayal is reversed. We now see photos, video footage, reports, documentaries and writing about the Kurdish female freedom fighters in Kurdistan. Kobanê, a predominantly Kurdish city in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) on the Syrian-Turkish border, is dominating our thoughts, our understanding and perception of the role of women in society and revolution.

Traditional Rulers Make Claim in Agrarian Reform

by Kristy Siegfried, IRIN 

BABANANGO/JOHANNESBURG — The pace of land reform in South Africa has long been criticized as too slow, but experts and black South Africans still awaiting restitution fear that the recent reopening of the land claims process may not only delay outstanding claims further but could actually reverse the limited progress that has been made in restoring land to those dispossessed by Apartheid-era policies.

An amendment to the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act was signed into law by President Jacob Zuma on June 30 in an apparent attempt to give people who missed the original 1998 cut off for lodging land claims another five-year window to do so. According to the Land Claims Commission, nearly 12,500 new claims have already been lodged.

A number of civil society groups made submissions to Parliament prior to the amendment being passed, warning that unless thousands of outstanding land claims were ring-fenced from new ones, their resolution would likely be delayed for many more years, particularly as new claims could overlap with unresolved pre-existing claims made on the same land.

from Frontera NorteSur

Mexico is emerging as the next big battleground in conflicts over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as the method of extracting natural gas is commonly known. While Mexican lawmakers consider regulatory legislation to put into practice the 2013 energy reform that opened up their county's oil and gas reserves to private investors, anti-fracking forces are mobilizing for a moratorium or an outright ban of the controversial practice from the Mexican Congress.

"There are many warning signs around the world about this predatory practice in the environment and on health," said Mexican Senator Rabindranath Salazar Solorio, a member of the center-left PRD party and secretary of the Senate's energy commission. "It's for this reason that Mexico should reflect and not commit the same errors to the detriment of the population."

Mexican environmentalists cite many reasons to forget fracking: the depletion of scarce water resources; the potential contamination of aquifers; the usage of toxic chemicals, including substances identified as carcinogens, mutagens and endocrine disruption agents; the generation of toxic waste; and a growing body of evidence linking earthquakes to fracking.

Multinational Mineral Company Strikes Back at El Salvador

by Pete Dolack, Systemic Disorder

An Australian mining company insists its "right" to a guaranteed profit is superior to the right of El Salvador to clean drinking water—and an unappealable World Bank secret tribunal will decide if that is so.

Drinking water is the underdog here. It might be thought that Salvadorans ought to have the right to decide on a question as fundamental as their source of water, but that is not so. It will be up to a secret tribunal controlled by corporate lawyers. And as an added bit of irony, the hearing began on El Salvador's Independence Day, September 15. Formal independence, and actual independence, alas, are not the same thing.

The case, officially known as Pac Rim Cayman LLC v. Republic of El Salvador, pits the Australian gold-mining company OceanaGold Corporation against the government of El Salvador. OceanaGold is asking for an award of $301 million because the Salvadoran government won't give it a permit to open a gold mine that would poison a critical source of drinking water on which millions depend.

by Chris Williams, The Indypendent

World leaders from government, business and civil society will gather in New York on September 23 for a United Nations climate summit. After two decades of failed talks, it will be the latest attempt to make progress on a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This time, legions of protesters will be on hand to press for meaningful solutions to the climate crisis to be implemented.

Resolving the climate crisis requires the world's leading industrial nations to collectively agree to legally binding cuts in their emissions and to forego the short-term benefits to their economies of continuing to burn more fossil fuels. To look back on the history of the failed UN climate talks is to understand how maddeningly elusive this goal is and to come face to face with a global economic order that is incapable of making the kind of deep systemic changes needed to adequately address the climate crisis.

Not for the Squeamish

by Bill Weinberg, The Villager

On July 28, the same day that some 10,000 joined a "New York Stands with Israel" rally at the UN, my frustration was compounded by a demoralizing encounter outside St. Mark's Church. I was biking down Second Ave., and saw the "FREE PALESTINE" banner outside the church, and stopped to check it out. To my disappointment (but not, alas, surprise) it was one of the highly problematic groups that have mobilized around that issue in New York City. In this case, "If Americans Knew."

It is obvious from its name that this is basically a right-wing nationalist formation with (at least) an anti-Semitic streak. Right, I think every time I see their name, "Americans" are pure and righteous (never mind Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and "shock & awe"), but are being hoodwinked into supporting atrocities by those wily Jews... I nonetheless took one of their flyers just to see what it said, and was dismayed to find it was a big quote from Gilad Atzmon, a practically open Jew-hater (notwithstanding his own Jewish origins), with a website full of Holocaust revisionism, claims that Hitler's anti-Semitism was "in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership," and other such gems.

When I told the woman who handed me the flyer I don't like Gilad Atzmon, she smiled smarmily and said, "He's awesome."

And that wave of existential loneliness swept over me yet again... With death raining down on the Gaza Strip, Israel's atrocities must be opposed—urgently, uncompromisingly. But groups like "If Americans Knew" and figures like Gilad Atzmon just play right into the propaganda ploy that any opposition to Israel is anti-Semitism. Their presence on this issue is worse than useless: it is deeply counter-productive.

It has actually been hard to find protests I can join against the aerial terror on Gaza.

by Razan Ghazzawi, openDemocracy

"They brought us by bus. We were a large group of female and male comrades. I recall that we were shackled, and an increasing sense of fear overwhelmed me about reaching that place, the expected interrogation, from facing Mudar whom I thought was there, and seeing all the comrades. Mixed feelings of fear and anticipation and desire and ... But it all began to disappear en route and as I am approaching the city that I loved and still do, I did not feel the length of the road or the time that had passed by...Damascus was looming in front of us."

—Amira Huweija, member of the Communist Labor Party, from her time in Douma prison between 1987-1991.

This account will try to give an overview of the role of grassroots women in the Syrian uprising in an attempt to highlight angles not widely covered by the mainstream media, in Arabic or internationally. Nor is this well represented in the narratives of the Syrian political opposition abroad. In fact in all these narratives, women are rather systematically excluded from any account of political decision-making regarding this country in such a historic phase. Women and youth have very little representation in the ranks of either the local councils or the Syrian National Coalition. So how is it that women in Syria have played an essential role throughout the phases of the uprising, a role that has shifted over time in response to the increased violence and rapid developments on the ground?