Obama says, “We have one president at a time…

“… now watch this drive.”

The image after the jump is dedicated to the President-elect who spent today playing golf in Hawaii, unbothered that all out war is declared on Gaza:

Prachanda takes Manhattan

Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and Health of Nepal, addresses the general debate of the sixty-third session of the General Assembly.

“A Maoist Vision for a New Nepal” – an MP3 recording of a talk by Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, aka Prachanda, presented by the India China Institute of New School University.

These MP3 recordings include remarks by Professor Andrew Arato, the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory at New School University; remarks by Kul Chandra Gautam, advisor to the Nepal Democracy and Development Initiative at the India China Institute; as well as a Q&A between PM Pushpa Kamal Dahal and the audience.

These MP3 audio clips are presented by Hegemonik. They have been edited for length. As the program was both in English and Nepali (without translation equipment), clips have had Nepali language conversation excised. An unedited version is available upon request to the author.

• Speech by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (13:53)
  

• Remarks by Professor Andrew Arato (12:10)
  

• Remarks by Kul Chandra Gautam (4:48)
  

• Question and Answer with the Prime Minister (50:16)
  

“A Maoist Vision for a New Nepal” by Hegemonik is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Border walls for the many; red carpet treatment for the pretty

Because everybody knows that New York needs more pretty vacant people (and their pimps) coming over the border.

Heaven forbid that we think of stopping ICE raids on the poor:

Congressman Wants To Make It Easier For Models To Get Visas
June 12, 2008

Calling for fairer visa laws, one crusading New York politician has taken the immigration debate straight to the catwalk.

Congressman Anthony Weiner is reportedly pushing legislation to make it easier for foreign fashion models to come to the United States for work.

Weiner says models are lumped into a category that forces them to compete with computer experts and doctors for highly-specialized visas.

The rumored mayoral candidate says a change in the immigration law will make it easier for designers and photographers to do their shoots in the city. Weiner’s proposal would allow models to apply for the same visas that entertainers and athletes get.

From the palace to the dustbin of history

King Gyanendra learned the hard way . . .

that the people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

Savor this moment. It will surely be difficult from here on out.

What about the Maobadi?: the activist media flat footed on events in South Asia

The following is an essay contributed by the author of Good Morning, Revolution. It properly asks why, with Nepal going off like a firecracker, the events there have essentially been virtually ignored by self-professed revolutionaries in the U.S.

I tend to sit at my computer, googling for the news and updates about what is happening in Nepal over the current political struggle between Maoists, their growing coalition, and the other parliamentary parties who are set to try to win as much as possible if not sabotage the process of creating a coalition government under the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), a Party who won a great plurality of the historical elections, which surprised the international community. It has been over ten years of People’s War, which saw around 10,000 people lose their lives, over two years of political struggle since which saw the fascist feudal King Gyanendra fall from power and beginning of desolution of the Monarchy. There is a real struggle for the path and future of over 25 million people in Nepal, and yet my Google news search results only get the international news from the Hindi Times or Kantipur Online. Unbelievable.

How is it we in this country here nothing of what is happening? How is it there is almost an unspoken silence of the struggles of South Asia? Of course there is a failure here of the media to report, no questioning, we hear nothing of the truth in the struggles of the people in Latin America, in Palestine, etc. We know this as just the Chomksyian unspoken rule of the media, it is general knowledge. This is not what makes me flinch, its the fact that the Left is unquestionably silent on it. We still get more reports on Chiapas (a struggle, that for all honesty, has stagnated and is losing its base.), on Tibet and all its Oriental mystique attached, and even on the need to defend China (Party for Socialism and Liberation is promoting a book on the need to defend tarnished “socialism” in China.). There are a few notable exceptions like Revolution in South Asia blog and Learn from Nepal project.

The Question of Building a New Type of State

Illustrating Mike Ely’s point regarding the Maobadi as having “discarded rigid thinking, but not their radicalism” here is an essay by the chief theoretician of the Maobadi, Baburam Bhattarai.

In the U.S. (and West) much has been said regarding the Maoists’ line on the question of the state; much of it is absent any actual reference to what the Maoists have actually stated as their line on such questions. There’s a temptation to dig out that old “No investigation, no right to speak,” line. But let us not quibble. For those anarchists who have chosen to nitpick from the sideline, here is Baburam Bhattarai’s “The Question of Building a New Type of State”; a brief but thorough summation of the Maobadi’s views on the state, taking both the long and short views of the history of revolution throughout the world as well as the particular situation of Nepal.

This essay originally appeared in The Worker no. 9 published in Feb. 2004. It was formatted and reposted on the Revolution in South Asia blog, by n3wday

The Question of Building a New Type of State

by Baburam Bhattarai

“The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.”

- V.I. Lenin, (1917b: 34)

The question of state power has now become the central question for the New Democratic revolution in Nepal, which is marching forward to capturing central state power after building revolutionary base areas and local power in the vast rural areas. The question has assumed significance and may be discussed primarily from two angles. Firstly, in the universal context; and secondly, in the concrete national context. Firstly in the universal or general sense, the proletarian (i.e. New Democratic or Socialist) state power is of a ‘new type’ as compared to all the state powers of minority exploiter classes in history. Further-more, after the downfall of all People’s Democratic or Socialist state powers including those in Russia, China and others in the past, the proletarian state powers arising in a new setting in the 21st century have to be of a further newer type. Secondly, in the concrete semi-feudal and semi-colonial national context of Nepal, where even the old bourgeois revolution and state has not been accomplished, the prospective proletarian state would naturally be, and have to be, of a ‘new’ type. Hence, we would first make a general review of the historical experiences on the question of state and strive to analyse the fundamental characteristics of a new type of state.

4 Reasons Nepal’s Revolution Matters

Mike Ely of Kasama fame has recently posted up an essay, “4 Reasons Nepal’s Revolution Matters.” It is reposted here verbatim. For those who are interested, there is also a handsome print version available for download as well.

Eyes on the Maobadi:
4 Reasons Nepal’s Revolution Matters

By Mike Ely

Something remarkable is happening. A whole generation of people has never seen a radical, secular, revolutionary movement rise with popular support. And yet here it is – in Nepal today.

This movement has overthrown Nepal’s hated King Gyanendra and abolished the medieval monarchy. It has created a revolutionary army that now squares off with the old King’s army. It has built parallel political power in remote rural areas over a decade of guerrilla war – undermining feudal traditions like the caste system. It has gathered broad popular support and emerged as the leading force of an unprecedented Constituent Assembly (CA). And it has done all this under the radical banner of Maoist communism — advocating a fresh attempt at socialism and a classless society around the world.

People in Nepal call these revolutionaries the Maobadi.

Gyanendra is (formally) finished

United We Blog reports that the formalities are through: Gyanendra is a king no more. By a vote of 560 to 4, the CA stripped Gyanendra of royal title and privilege. And there shall be no more kings of Nepal; the same vote established Nepal as a federal republic.