http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBWeUE1THvQ

Why haven’t the 2011 protests hit Russia? 

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – A spectre is haunting the globe – the spectre of the indignant. From New York to Hama, London to Tripoli, Madrid to Athens, a zone of revolt has descended. The year 2011 will one day be entered into the pantheon of revolutions – 1848, 1917, 1968 and 1989/91. Will Russia join the fray? Will it topple like in 1917 and 1991, or will it remain impervious to the revolutionary waves, like in 1848 under Nicholas I, the Gendarme of Europe? As it now stands there doesn’t appear to be a mass movement, let alone a revolution in the stars. Like the other BRICs, Russia is a model of political and economic stability. It weathered the Coloured Revolutions in its periphery in the mid-2000s; now it appears that it will survive 2011 in a similar way. Why has Russia not shaken? And if there is a potential mass movement in the making, why would it be a movement no sensible person in Russia or abroad would want?

There are a variety of reasons why mass protests haven’t hit Russia. Some say that the Kremlin is so repressive that any attempt to set up tents in central Moscow would be instantly squashed. Advocates of this view seem to forget the even more repressive regimes of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Others point to the fact that Russians have “revolution fatigue”. After a century that witnessed three revolutions, Russians know that another one will not hold the keys to the promised land. Some even suggest that something much harder has to hit Russia to provoke a popular reaction. “Our society has completely different problems and different means to solve them,” Boris Nadezhdin, a member of Right Cause’s political council, recently told Voice of America. “People would survive the destruction of something like the housing market. For them it’s not a catastrophe. A catastrophe for them is war and famine.”

Russia is far from a brutal war or famine. In fact, it lacks many of the social and economic conditions plaguing Arab states and Western liberal democracies. Despite declining polls, Putin and Co. still remain popular. Russia has successfully weathered the global economic crisis, has no sovereign debt problem, no mortgage crisis, and no widespread household debt. According to Rosstat, overall unemployment is low, around six per cent, but joblessness among young people 16-25 years old is quite high, 26.1 per cent, and comparable to that in Arab states and the West.

Yet this has not caused many young people to lose faith in capitalism or the Putin system. “In Russia everyone knows the emperor wears no clothes, even when he’s dressed in Armani and Brioni. Yet we don’t have “occupiers”, writes Malor Sturua in Moskovskii komsomolets. “The ideals of our youth are Putin and [the oligarch Roman] Abramovich, power and money. They aren’t drawn to occupy Moscow’s ‘Wall Street’. They prefer to be a part of it.”

Moreover, Sturua continues, Russia is “submerged in a pool of social passivity and civic apathy. Civil society has not ripened in it. Authoritarian society has ripened where they chose the Presidents and nominate the Prime Ministers several years before the elections in secret from the people. And the people who do this are a million times less than one per cent of the Russian population. ‘Stability’ plays the role of progress. And as they explain not long ago, the Brezhnev stagnation was damn good for the Soviet Union.”

Sturua’s pessimism and sarcasm is typical of the Russian intelligentsia. The Russia people, the narrative goes, are too naturally inclined toward gentle patronage of the tsar-batiushka (little father). They all know that the entire system is a joke, but yet they do nothing. 

Authoritarian personalities aside, the fact is though dissatisfaction in Russia exists, people are willing to weather whatever comes their way. Thus, while a study conducted by the Zircon research group shows that the 20 per cent of Russians who considered themselves “middle class” in 2008 has dropped to 12 per cent, other indicators demonstrate that Russians’ overall outlook on their personal and national economy reveals a growing sense of stability. A poll just released by the Levada Centre shows that about half of Russians see their life as “difficult but possible to endure”, and a majority sees their personal and the country’s economic situation as “average”. At the same time, a third see protests against falling living standards as “completely possible”. This is no small number. Yet nothing of the sort has happened because when asked whether they would hit the streets, an overwhelming majority, 73 per cent, said “No”.

Dizziness without success

Still, whatever social and economic discontent exists in Russia, established opposition forces seem reluctant to harness it. The Russian Left has been marginalised and fragmented. Trade unions are atrophied. The Communist Party speaks the rhetoric of socialism and worker’s rights but is unwilling to break with electoral politics. This leaves Russia’s liberals as the most potent force for change: that is, if you read the New York Times or New York Review of Books.

Russian liberals, however, seem wholly uninterested in the social and economic lives of most Russians. Instead, they hold protests around abstract issues like free and fair elections, freedom of assembly and human rights. Russian liberals have lionised a one-percenter – Mikhail Khodorkovsky – as the archetypical hero to Putin’s villainy. On the whole, Russian liberals are more neo-liberal than liberal. Their problem with Russian capitalism is that it’s not capitalist enough. The magic of the invisible hand, they argue, keeps getting slapped down by the interventionist bureaucratic state. Perhaps this is why the Occupy Wall Street has received a lukewarm response. It took weeks before Russia’s three main liberal outlets – Novaya Gazeta, New Times, and Ezhednevnyi zhurnal – to cover OWS, though the rest of the Russian media was providing extensive coverage and opinion. Igor Aidman, a sociologist and oppositionist, offered this diagnosis:

As Aidman’s provocation suggests, events have shown that the West also wears no clothes. Russian liberals often cite the US as the model for the rule of law, free speech and free assembly. But the Occupy movement has shown that the American state is less tolerate when protests against the rich are concerned. Are the images of police firing tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of peaceful protests, the raiding Occupy camps with clubs, and harassing and arresting journalists, causing vertigo among Russian liberals?

The revolution will be nationalist

If there is any threat of an emerging mass movement in Russia, it is the nationalist right. Anti-immigrant sentiment garners popular sympathy. A study by the Levada Centre found that 60 per cent of Russians support the nationalist slogan, “Russia for the Russians”, and about 50 per cent of Moscow residents support curtailing migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia to the city. The concern, says Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Centre, is not that xenophobia is spreading, but that “social resistance to [it] is weakening”.

You can see this growing tolerance for intolerance in political parties’ attempt to tap nationalist sentiment among the electorate. As part of its Duma campaign, the Communist Party is proposing a return to the Soviet practice of stating a citizen’s nationality in their passport, while the LDPR is putting “We’re for Russians” on its campaign posters. Even Russian liberals have thrown their hat into the nationalist ring.

Most prominently, Alexey Navalny, Russia’s premiere anti-corruption fighter, and liberal activist Vladimir Milov, “the Russian opposition’s fresh face“, recently promoted the “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” campaign. Navalny went even further and joined the organising committee of the Russian March, a nationalist potpourri that rallies ever year on November 4, Unity Day. Amid the gold, black and white tricolor of the Romanov Dynasty and Nazi salutes, you can hear such slogans as “Russia for Russians”, “Fuck the Jews” and Navalny’s own anti-United Russia battle cry, “Down with the party of crooks and thieves”. Navalny’s nationalist sympathies are well known, but until now, conveniently forgotten. Nevertheless, his and Milov’s move has caused a rift in the liberal camp, and in some cases, calling for some to ignore the inherent contradictions between liberal values and extreme nationalism for the larger strategy of Liberal-Nationalist front.

Russian nationalism has a long history, though its present manifestation is coded in similar sentiments found in Europe and the US. The sense that immigrants, particularly the Muslim variety from the Caucasus and Central Asia, are taking over the country, stealing jobs, spreading crime and benefitting at Russians’ expense are all hallmarks of nationalist rhetoric. Russians’ perception that they are victims despite their dominance in Russian political and cultural life stems from the belief that they are a people without a nation. The official title of Russia is the Rossiiskii Federation, not the Russkii Federation. It’s difficult to render the difference in English, but Rossiiskii is akin to a civic identity like “American”, while Russkii is an ethno-cultural identity. Historically, the latter had to be subordinated for the former to prosper.

The power of “Russian victimhood” has reared its head in two incidents in the last year. The first was in December 2010 when 5,000 football fans and nationalists rioted on Manezh Square in central Moscow over the murder of Yegor Sviridov by a Caucasian men. The second occurred in July in the village of Sagra when a firefight between residents and a criminal gang of Azeris led to the death of Faig Musaev, an illegal immigrant. To nationalists, both Manezh and Sagra and several other ethnic clashes, in the words of one commentator, “have become proper nouns and symbols of this molecular war”.

The question is: Will this war remain molecular or will it eventually expand into a molar conflagration? One thing is clear: If it does, youth will be its spearhead. Nationalism is most popular among Russia’s working class and provincial youth, the very people who see fewer and fewer future prospects and are in direct competition with immigrant labour for jobs.

However, these youths share little by way of ideology, tactics or vision to their counterparts in the Middle East, Europe and America. While the latter looks for a more inclusive world where power is deployed horizontally, the former wants to establish a strict hierarchy of peoples with Russians on top. Yet despite their vast differences, Russian nationalism, the Arab Spring, the indignado protests in Spain, the encampments on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Avenue, the London student protests and ghetto riots and the occupants of numerous parks and squares around the United States Wall Street share one undeniable quality: youth. Youth predominate in all these movements, and their sense of marginalisation and anger is growing. And that makes for a ticking time-bomb.

Sean Guillory is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He blogs about Russia at Sean’s Russia Blog and can be followed on Twitter @seansrussiablog.

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

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111117163521514513.html

spoiled, rich enemies of the poor

Capitalism and globalisation are the solutions to third world poverty. Anyone who cares about the third world should promote globalisation and economic freedom. Anti-globalisation protesters are spoilt, rich children who want to prevent the rest of the world from enjoying the fruits of capitalism that they have grown up with. They are worse than immoral. Poverty is not funny. Poverty is not a matter of living in a squat or not having enough for a pint. Poverty is a matter of watching your children starve and die.

• Anti-capitalism
• Anti-globalization
• Anti-consumerism 
• Anti-globalisation protesters
  • Anti-Globalization: The Left’s Violent Assault on Global Prosperityby Edwin A. Locke
  • The ironies of anti-globilization protestersby Jonah Goldberg
  • The Moral Inversion in Seattle by Robert W. Tracinski – It is a world in which hordes of middle-class students and $25-an-hour union workers band together to take away economic opportunities from third-world peasants making 60 cents an hour – while claiming that their goal is “social justice”.
  • The film Battle in Seattle (2008) takes the side of the protesters. Wouldn’t it be cool to see a pro-globalisation movie? 
  • May Day “anarchist” rioters- Anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation, “anarchists” – it’s just new names for the same old story – just more people who want to take away our freedoms in some oppressive collectivist project.
  • On May Day Celebrate Capitalismby Edwin A. Locke 
  • Antiglobalism- the green-communist-fascist-nationalist-protectionist-antisemitic alliance.
  • Anti-Americanism – “anti-Americanism is the most dangerous global ideology. Today all the totalitarianisms, the fundamentalisms, the anti-Semitisms hide behind the banner of the fight against the USA.” 

   

• Demos are not democracy:
• The Law of Protests: Protests and demos do not represent public opinion
•  
  • Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel – “Anti-globalists have tried to replace democracy with a despotism of the mob, advancing the brutal proposition that street demonstrators are more legitimate than elected governments. … Democrats worthy of the name should not forget that power is conferred by ballots, not by bricks hurled through windows.”
  • It has been said before: Those who cannot win elections, take to the streets. Nobody will vote for the anti-globalisation street thugs, anti-semites and totalitarian marxists. So democracy will not help them. Furious that no one finds their arguments convincing, they turn to demos and riots to try to bypass the democratic process. Western governments, sensibly, will let them protest but will never listen to them.

   

• French anti-capitalism
  • Rioting for Ineptitude in France – The moronic French students rioting in 2006 are rioting to keep France poor and unemployment high. “If France were a U.S. state, it would rank as the fifth poorest, just ahead of Arkansas”.

   

• The G8
  • The protesters against the G8 summits really do have something they could protest about: the inclusion of Putin’s illiberal dictatorship of Russia in this group of otherwise civilized liberal democracies. But of course that’s not what bothers them.

   http://markhumphrys.com/third.world.html#why

Gulalai Ismail started this work aged just 16, after meeting a woman whose son had become a terrorist martyr. The mother had taken delivery of her boy’s dead body. The boy was only 12 years old.

In Gulalai’s province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, religious extremism is an everyday event and the Taliban a lurking presence. More than 4,000 people have been killed in over 250 suicide attacks, and many thousands more live in fear of the next attack. Women live under traditional law, and children – especially young girls – are discouraged by the extremists from going to school.

Gulalai began to recruit and train people of her own age as volunteers to go out into schools, universities and villages. Their mission is to counter the appeal of militancy and show there are alternatives. They aim to save the next generation.

http://www.peacedirect.org/peace-network-pakistan/

Paper Recycling Facts

	To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
	Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
	If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
	If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
	If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you’d get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
	The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
	The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
	Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
	Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
	The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
	In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
	Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
	The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
	The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.

http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html

Denying someone access to other relationships. Taunting on the playground. Yelling degrading remarks. Downplaying accomplishments. Threatening to take the children away.

From bullying and manipulative mind games to sexual harassment and elder care neglect, emotional and verbal abuse is rampant in our society. No one is immune from encountering abusive people, but everyone can make healthy choices to end destructive relationship patterns.

Emotional abuse

Emotional abuse is difficult to define and many cases are never reported; nevertheless, it’s clear that this form of destructive behavior is based on power and control. An emotionally abusive person may dismiss your feelings and needs, expect you to perform humiliating or unpleasant tasks, manipulate you into feeling guilty for trivial things, belittle your outside support system or blame you for unfortunate circumstances in his or her life. Jealousy, possessiveness and mistrust characterize an emotionally abusive person. Widely recognized signs of emotional abuse include:

Rejecting or denying a person’s value or presence and communicating devaluing thoughts and feelings to another person.

Degrading, ridiculing, insulting or name-calling to lessen the self-worth and dignity of another person. Examples include humiliating someone in public or responding to a senior as if he or she is not capable of making decisions.

Terrorizing by inducing intense fear in someone; intimidating and coercing; or threatening physical harm to a person or a person’s loved ones, pets or possessions. Stalking, threatening to leave and forcing someone to watch violence toward a family member are all types of terrorizing.

Isolating, physically confining or limiting another’s freedoms. These restricting behaviors include denying a person contact with others and controlling someone else’s financial affairs.

Exploiting someone’s personal rights and social needs or using another person for profit or advantage. Enticing someone into illegal activities for financial gain (drug selling, prostitution) is an example of exploitation.

Detaching and denying emotional care or affection. Shunning a person’s efforts to interact or neglecting someone’s mental health needs are forms of this type of psychological abuse.1Although emotional abuse can occur on its own, all types of abuse involve some form of emotional abuse. Similar to other forms of relationship violence, emotional abuse happens most often to individuals with the least power and resources. Over time emotional abuse brainwashes the victim. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, it is clear that for many, emotional abuse is even more devastating than physical abuse.

Emotional abuse tears at a person’s self-esteem and can greatly impair psychological development and social interaction. In children, emotional abuse can hinder attention, intelligence, memory and the ability to feel and express emotions appropriately. For both children and adults, emotional abuse can manifest itself in social withdrawal, severe anxiety, fearfulness, depression, physical complaints, avoidance of eye contact, self-blame and substance abuse. Emotionally abused seniors may feel extreme guilt, inadequacy, depression or powerlessness. Unfortunately, many psychologically abused elderly people are labeled “senile” or “inept.”

Because emotional abuse is not as regularly reported as other forms of violence, statistics are sparse. A Canadian study on abuse in university and college dating relationships revealed that 81 percent of male respondents admitted they had psychologically abused a female partner.2 According to a 2000 report by the National Institute of Justice, an estimated 503,485 women are stalked each year in the United States. Emotional abuse is a worldwide problem for people of any age and any sex.3

Verbal abuse

The well-worn chant, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is just not true. As Dr. Grace Kettering writes in her book Verbal Abuse, “Cruel names and labels can hurt us — dreadfully! Many times the emotional damage is unintentional. Crippling comments may seem so trivial to the speaker as to be soon forgotten. But at a crucial moment or from an important person, certain words spoken to a vulnerable, receptive individual can make or break a life.”

Verbal abuse takes on many forms including criticizing, insulting, degrading, harsh scolding, name-calling, nagging, threatening, ridiculing, belittling, trivializing, screaming, ranting, racial slurring and using crude or foul language. Disparaging comments disguised as jokes and withholding communication are also examples of verbal abuse.

Hurling hurtful words at another may sound like: “You’re a nag just like your parents!” “You don’t know how to do anything right.” “It’s your fault!” “You’re too sensitive.” “Come on, can’t you take a joke?” “That outfit makes you look fat.” “You’re worthless in bed.” “Who asked you?” “You don’t need that second helping.” “All you do anymore is go to church stuff.” “Your ex sure screwed you up emotionally.” Verbal abuse can happen anywhere, at any time. Individuals who are teased and pressured at work or school may in turn take out their pent-up frustrations at home. “Kicking the dog” is not enough; instead, they verbally attack their spouse, children, parents, close friends — no loved one is safe.

Wounds that typically accompany emotional, physical and sexual abuse must not be ignored. Both men and women inflict verbal abuse, but women tend to be more often on the receiving end of this destructive behavior. What may seem innocent and infrequent at first can escalate. Verbal abuse frequently plays a major role in violent crimes. According to a 1998 U.S. Justice Department report on violent crimes, women are five to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.4

All forms of abuse follow a pattern that, left unchecked, will only increase over time. Injuries from verbal and emotional abuse can run deep and leave lasting scars. Many emotionally and verbally abused people reason that, because there are no bruises or broken bones, their abuse must not be serious. But it is. Fortunately, support and resources are readily available to guide individuals into safe, loving relationships. In their well-received book Boundaries, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend state that, “Our pain motivates us to act.” If pain motivates you to act against emotional and verbal abuse, then listen and act. You may be saving more than your life.

CON

• Capitalism has a systemic bias against helping others. Since third parties are externalised from prices in capitalism, it is economically inefficient to consider the effects that something has on others. And since this exclusion of third parties leads to the overpricing of positive externalities and the underpricing of negative externalities, it is cheaper to exploit someone than it is to be fair towards them (see the section on market prices for more detail). This is compounded by the selfish pursuit of profit that capitalism encourages (see the section on individual desires for more detail) . These combine together to mean that it is economically inefficient in capitalism to consider others and so charity and solidarity is punished, whereas anti-social behaviour is rewarded with profits. A perfect example of this is fair-trade: since workers are treated equitably in fair trade products, they become more expensive (the overpricing of positive social costs) and are thus rare and often unaffordable except for the well-off.

• Socialism provides motivation of aiding fellow man. The impulse to share wealth and material amongst the community, to support all, leaving none behind, is one of the purest among humankind. Socialism harnesses this impulse effectively, whereas capitalism tends to squash it in favor of individualism and competition.

• Charity is not meaningful in a capitalist system. Charity is invalidated in capitalism because if you steal a million pounds from someone and then give them a pound of charity because they are starving then that is not increasing their living standards.

PRO

• Capitalism fosters, does not prevent, charity. There are lot of rich people in capitalist society who provide grants for charity funds, student fellowships etc. After all, anybody in a capitalistic society can take some of his own money or goods today, out of his/her free will, and go and give them to other (poorer) people, if he or she feels it’s the right thing to do. Capitalism doesn’t prevent that; nor does it prevent you from keeping your earned goods/money if you want to. Some examples of rich people who donated to charity are Bill Gates, Oprah, and others. On the other hand, socialism actively and rather aggressively restricts the amount of riches one can have. So, out of the two, capitalism clearly offers more choice.

• There is less charity in a socialist society. Every resource considered by the majority to be either necessary or highly desirable is supplied through government. Government acquires these resources via taxation. Taxation does not require consent. Therefore, the resources used and provided to members of a society are not obtained through voluntary giving, which is the definition of charity. Since the majority in a socialist society believes that everyone has access to all necessary and highly desirable resources, then they have little motivation to sacrifice their personal resources to benefit another member of that society. They believe that it is not their responsibility to help others, rather, responsibility exists within government.

http://debatepedia.idebate.org/en/index.php/Debate:_Capitalism_vs_socialism#Charity:_Which_fosters_greater_charity.3F

Researchers Say They Can Restore 1 of Destroyed

Bamiyan Buddhas