Month: March 2008

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Analysis

Tibet erupts!

20 March 2008

Brutal crackdown by Beijing regime meets muted reaction from foreign governments

Thousands of paramilitary police and soldiers have been deployed in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, after the most serious protests against Chinese rule for nearly 20 years. More than 80 people have been killed and hundreds injured according to exile Tibetan groups, while official Chinese and Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) sources put the fatalities so far at 16, including three Tibetan youths who “died by jumping from a roof”. The protests began more than one week ago and culminated in serious rioting in the Tibetan capital on Friday, 14 March, with more than 300 houses and shops burned according to official sources. This week, on Sunday and Monday, protests spread to Tibetan regions of the neighbouring provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu, and even a sitdown action by around a hundred Tibetan students in a park in the Haidian district of the Chinese capital, Beijing. read more

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Youth Speak

Darwin: The Origin of Species

19 March 2008

Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’, first published in 1859, was one of the most influential works of the last Millennium. It is also one of the most controversial works ever produced. Hence it becomes imperative to understand the politics behind those controversies and most importantly the theory behind those controversies, which had a profound influence on the earth science and modern thought in general. read more

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Environment

Kodaikanal: A struggle against Capitalist hegemony and Economic racism

1 March 2008

“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (least developed countries)?” wrote Lawrence Summers, the then chief economist of the World Bank, in 1991. He argued that the loss of income due to disablement or death of workers in the LDCs would have a lesser impact on the world economy. Therefore, the World Bank should encourage the shifting of the environmental burden onto the LDCs. It made economic sense to him; it makes economic sense to the World Bank and the numerous multinational corporations (MNCs) that have profited by doing just this. But what of the workers and the communities that work and live around the “dirty industries”?

This is the story of a small hill town in Tamil Nadu, India. Famous as a hill resort for those wanting to escape the Indian summer, Kodaikanal also attracted a deadly MNC which was trying to please its shareholders while abiding by the US laws. Thus came Chesebrough Ponds in 1984. This company relocated its thermometer factory from Watertown, New York and, in its 18 years of operation in Kodaikanal, manufactured 165 million thermometers that were exported back to the US and Europe. Labour is cheap in India and the laws were either not there or never mattered. It made perfect economic sense for a company to relocate poisons across oceans as it made its obscene profits. read more