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S. Artesian wrote: > You mean the 70% downpayment is not headed to my bank account? > Hey comrade, we'll send it there: but have you got 1000 red tee-shirts with a radical message for shipment to Durban by noon on Saturday? :-) Here's what's at stake (and to be frank, I'm very nervous about fascistic tendencies breaking out against immigrants here, as well as Joburg and Cape Town, on/after 12 July): The Mercury (Durban newspaper) After the pixie-dust It’s time South Africa looked at the real issues like social stresses and the blood diamond trade in Zimbabwe June 23, 2010 Edition 1 Patrick Bond No matter how hard we cheered last night, the demise of Bafana Bafana’s campaign will at least blow away much pixie-dust from the World Cup. Today our eyes are left clearer to comprehend problems that soccer-loving cynics have long predicted: loss of large chunks of state sovereignty to Fifa, massively amplified income inequality, and future economic calamities as debt payments come due - and perhaps soon also xenophobia? The crucial question in coming weeks is whether instead of offering some kind of progressive resistance, as exemplified by the Durban Social Forum coalition rally last Wednesday at City Hall, will society’s sore losers adopt right-wing populist sentiments, and frame the foreigner? This is not an idle concern, as the Facebook pages of hip young Joburg gangstas exploded with xenophobic raves after Uruguay beat Bafana last week. Recalling the May 2008 violence that left 62 people dead and more than 100 000 displaced, President Jacob Zuma told his party executive in May that “the branches of the ANC must start working now to deal with the issue of xenophobia”. Replying that “there is no tangible evidence,” police general Bheki Cele added, a few days later: “We have observed a trend where foreigners commit crime - taking advantage of the fact that we have an unacceptable crime level - to tarnish our credibility and image.” Generalisations against foreigners as prolific perpetrators of crime are baseless, as no scientific trend can be discerned because no reliable data exists to confirm whether immigrant tsotsis represent a greater ratio of their numbers than indigenous tsotsis. (We don’t even know roughly, to the 500 000th, how many immigrants there are in South Africa.) Instead, the state should address root causes for social stresses expressed as xenophobia: mass unemployment, housing shortages, intense retail competition in townships and South Africa’s regional geopolitical interests which create more refugees than prosperity. If we thought (as did I) that the replacement of Mbeki with Zuma might mean a change in Pretoria’s foreign policy so as to end the nurturing of Robert Mugabe’s repression, then that was naive, as Zuma showed in London by lobbying hard for an end to smart sanctions a few weeks ago. These men are simply unwilling to reverse a 120-year-old structural relationship of exploitation, by which South African companies - such as those involved in eastern Zimbabwe’s bloody Marange diamond fields, controlled by Mugabe’s army - rip off the region. The Pretoria-Harare arrangement has given rise to more than two million desperate border-jumpers, in turn fuelling South African worker resentment. One victim of collusion, Zimbabwean civil society researcher Farai Maguwu, was jailed last month because a South African officer of the Kimberley Process with strong family connections to Marange-related corporations allegedly set up Maguwu with Mugabe’s police, then issued a report finding that Marange complies with international diamond trading guidelines. Several major South African mining houses stand to benefit if a Kimberley Process summit under way in Tel Aviv today decides that Zimbabwe is “clean”. (Maguwu’s bail was denied on Monday so he can’t be there to make his scheduled input.) But if the South African’s report is approved, leading civil society groups like Human Rights Watch promise that the Kimberley Process reputation for monitoring blood diamonds will become as soiled as Mbeki-Zuma’s when it comes to Pretoria’s promotion of justice and democracy in wretched Zimbabwe. Given such relationships, it’s not surprising that a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report last week records 158 200 Zimbabweans currently seeking formal asylum, 90 percent of whom are in South Africa. That’s more than three times as many as the second-place country, Burma, which was followed by two Washington-backed regimes: Afghanistan and Colombia. Indeed, if Cele intends going after foreign criminals he might concentrate a bit more of his force’s effort on a really dangerous crew: Fifa. With the possible exception of Wall Street and the City of London, no more larcenous a gang of white-collar thugs are to be found than in Zurich, both in the banks which financed apartheid when no one else would, and at their hideout at Soweto’s Soccer City. The latter mafia is so self-confident in dealing with Cele’s mentally corrupted South African Police Service that last Friday Fifa general secretary Jerome Valcke openly bragged how they will spirit away R24 billion (50 percent more than the $1.8 billion taken from Germany four years ago). Fifa pays no taxes, ignores exchange controls, and is quite likely preparing South Africa for a currency crash in the process. Many are altogether disgusted. To ensure the heist is complete, Cele’s police are obviously on the take, observers confidently conclude - but not because there’s evidence of Fifa’s fabled fraud squad at work. No, just as debilitating is the above-board commercial, contractual corruption in evidence these past few days: # In the service of the Stallion Security labour brokers, who should have been banned last year (as promised by Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana), the police enforced an exploitative low-wage regime, heaving stun grenades and tear-gas at unpaid workers, even shooting a bystander multiple times with rubber bullets; # No wonder, because Linda Mti - the former prisons commissioner linked financially to the notorious, privatised Lindela transit camp for arrested immigrants - is head of security for Fifa’s local organising committee; # Defending that insipid US beer Budweiser, SAPS were again at Fifa’s service when they arrested two Dutch women, whose subtle ambush marketing last week amounted merely to orange dresses with a tiny Bavarian beer logo; # At the Fan Fest at South Beach, police arrested local environmentalist Alice Thomson last Monday for passing out anti-Fifa fliers regarding the June 16 march to City Hall; and # A man caught with 30 game tickets “and no explanation” got a three-year jail sentence, while hardened criminals roam the streets. Thieving and trademarking culture too, Fifa and corporate partner Coca-Cola also tried to steal Africa’s soul by paying Somali singer K’naan to raise spirits. But that won’t work, for much more challenging tunes for Fifa to digest have been produced - and are free to download on the internet - by hip-hop artists Nomadic Wax and DJ Magee (World Cup), Chomsky AllStars (The Beautiful Gain) and, best of all, Durban’s own Ewok (Shame on the Beautiful Game). And on July 3, another City Hall rally - this time against xenophobia - will let Durban reproduce a genuine African ubuntu spirit that can withstand Bafana’s defeat, Fifa’s profiteering and all the other losses we are suffering. # Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: marx...@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
