from my collection:

GLOWCHILD - A BELATED BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO RUBY DEE, OCTOBER 27, 2011

• Though known as a celebrated actress/activist, Ruby’s earliest interest in the arts was through her poetry, which was published in the Amsterdam News.
• Ruby Dee’s 1st book publication as author/editor is GLOWCHILD and OTHER POEMS from 1972.
• John Henrik Clarke, editor of Freedomways, was instrumental in reacquainting Ruby with her long time passion for poetry through this editorship opportunity.
• The book includes poems from junior high and high school students in Ruby’s neighborhood, New Rochelle, alongside poems by herself, John Henrik Clarke, Abiodun Oyewole, Margaret Burroughs et al.
• Glowchild was later made into a young audience TV special, Today is Ours.  Harry Belafonte , young writers included in the book and the entire Davis family contributed creative skills to the production.
• The Third Press, publisher of Glowchild, also published Katherine Dunham, Chinua Achebe, Angela Davis and many others throughout the 70’s & 80’s.
• Joseph Okpaku, owner of The Third Press, is currently a renowned player in the realm of African telecommunications development.

Dee, Ruby. Glowchild, and Other Poems. New York: Third Press, Joseph Okpaku Pub. Co, 1972. Print.

Fatuma Noor

Kenya: I was told that

I deserved to die –

for being a female journalist

 

As a Somali woman writing investigative stories, I face regular threats and my family's opposition

 

• 
• • Fatuma Noor
  • guardian.co.uk, Saturday 2 July 2011 19.06 EDT
  • Article history

It's not always easy being a female investigative journalist, even in the west. But imagine going to do an interview and not being able to shake hands with the interviewee or indeed even being able to sit in front of him to ask questions.

In Somali culture – I grew up in a Somali family in Kenya – it is wrong to speak and raise an opinion in front of men or even to shake hands with a man of no relation to you. Even travelling for work unaccompanied by a relative is not permitted.

Somewhere on the Kenyan-Somali border, a Somali woman was chosen to be a town chief, but she fled from the town because of violent opposition from the elders. As a journalist, I tried to get comments from the Somali elders, but they then turned on me and threatened to punish me also.

The women who attempt leadership positions or take on roles such as journalism are often intimidated and many end up giving up the profession at the early stages of their career. Political instability and extremist groups in Somalia have posed an even greater challenge, with the introduction of strict sharia. These hardline groups even disapprove of women working in informal markets or within women's organisations.

Coming from a conservative Somali background, my parents, who buy and sell clothes, refused to fund my journalism course but were ready to pay for any other. (The need to meet and talk to men was, for them, the major problem with journalism.) Three years down the line, my choice still causes a strained relationship with the family. In a way, one could understand their reasons – as a female journalist, you face regular threats and intimidation.

I have had more than a few of those in my short career as a journalist. One time I did a story about a Somali woman who was shunned by her community and was ousted by her own sons and husband because she was suffering from HIV/Aids. I received phone calls – not what you would describe as friendly calls – from men in my native Somali community who believe that some things should not be shared with the world; suffering from HIV was certainly one of those things I shouldn't share, they thought.

One of the pleasures of being a journalist is the chance to travel and meet people. But according to the strictures of the culture in which I was raised, a woman should not travel unless she is accompanied by her brother, father or husband.

As a woman, you are then left to choose between career and family since if you choose the former, there is the risk of being banished by your family. A typical Muslim man would prefer a housewife to a journalist who travels a lot and has odd working hours. Even if you persist, you are not meant to interact with men other than your husband and immediate family members. As a reporter, this poses a challenge, to say the least.

When I started as a journalist, my editor did not fully grasp the limitations that come with my culture. But after constant pestering from my parents to fire me she got the message! (Sometimes now, she is careful when determining where I should go and what I should do, though I like to push.) To do my job as an investigative journalist properly stories often require days on the road. And this has led to a constant war between my parents and myself, not helped by some stories, on more than one occasion, almost getting me killed.

Recently, I wrote a series of stories on the al-Shabaab group, "the Taliban of Somalia", a series for which last week I was lucky enough to receive an award. The series dealt with men of Somali descent, raised elsewhere, often the US, "returning" to fight for al-Shabaab. I was travelling with recruits from different countries, heading towards Mogadishu, when we were surrounded by some of the militia.

They did not care much about who we were and seemed happy for the men accompanying me to get on with their work but my presence as a woman offended them. I wasn't married and had no relation within my group– reason enough for punishment, even execution.

 

 

There then followed an eight-hour ordeal in the hands of the militia group. They had guns fixed on my head, while smashing my belongings and discussing among themselves just what sort of punishment was fitting. The elder of the group finally decided that I should be killed and only the intervention of a contact that I had previously made, arguing vigorously in my favour, saved me.

Every single time I do any Somali-related story, to avoid problems with the family and immediate relations I choose never to disclose where I will be going and who I'm travelling with. It's perhaps then not a surprise that there should be such a small number of women in the Somali media And those who survive are more likely to work as radio presenters, not needing to go out and get stories. Even then, there can be problems. Bhajo Mohamud, who was a reporter in one of the radio stations, has had to leave the country and even in exile still gets threatening calls.

Beyond the particular problems of the Somali community, there's a general scarcity of women in our newsrooms, making it difficult for burning issues to be discussed from a female perspective. 

Catherine Gicheru, a distinguished woman journalist and the managing editor of the Kenyan Star, says that a female journalist has to work extra hard so that nobody says she can't do this or that. "You must be willing to take anything that is thrown at you in order to survive in the career."

These are all issues that are faced by our counterparts in western newsrooms. But specific cultural barriers mean that fewer women, says Gicheru, want to break into the typically male-dominated areas such as politics.

As for investigative journalism, a gun to your head is not much of an encouragement.

 

Fatuma Noor was last week awarded the top prize at the CNN MultiChoice African Journalist 2011 awards ceremony for her investigative three-part series on the "Al-Shabaab". (You can read it at http://www.nairobistar.com/lifestyle/128-lifestyle/29535) She is at the Observer as part of the David Astor Journalism Programme.

__________________________

MY ENCOUNTER WITH

AMERICAN- SOMALI JIHADIST

IN NAIROBI

MONDAY, 27 JUNE 2011 15:43 BY FATUMA NOOR

Many Somali refugees would die to have the supposedly good life abroad. However, some young men from the Diaspora are now returning to fight for Al Shabaab in Somalia, rated as one of the most dangerous countries on earth. Our investigative writer FATUMA NOOR recently met with some of these Mujahideens from the US, Canada and Sweden and this is her gripping report.

It all started when a mother called to inquire about the whereabouts of her 18-year-old son Nuno Ahmed whom she believed was in Nairobi and had plans of going to Mogadishu. “He left with his three friends and l have just found out that they are going back home,” she told me when she called from her home in Minnesota, US. “I would rather he is arrested and stays in a Kenyan prison than let him go back to Mogadishu and die there,” she says as if pleading for my help.
She said Nuno got in touch with his family and assured them that he was fine and they should not worry. “He would say things like, we should not worry and he would be back if God had intended it to happen,” said a worried Sophia Ahmed who is Nuno’s mother.

When l eventually track down Nuno, I find him at a hotel in Eastleigh, where he and other young men from the US have been hiding out since their arrival. After much persuasion, Nuno agrees to meet with me at a restaurant in the city centre, Nairobi.

Like most of the young Somalis who have grown up in the West, Nuno speaks very little Somali.  We end up conversing in English, his heavily inflected with an American twang. “Your mother tells me that you have plans of going to Mogadishu, Why?”  I ask Nuno once we are done with the small talk.“Young people like me are needed there to protect our country. I can do something important over there compared to what I was doing back in the US,” he says.
The five foot six inch tall, slender, 18-year-old Nuno is a far cry from the media’s stereotype of a terrorist. His trendy clothes, leather jacket and hip sneakers do not differentiate him from the many young men passing by outside the coffee shop where we are meeting. “This is my choice and no-one has made me come here as my mother would like to believe. They have lived in Minnesota for too long and now they want to forget about home. But not me,” he says quietly and with deep conviction.

Later during another meeting in Eastleigh, Nuno introduces me to four of his friends— all from Minneapolis and all in the last stages of finalising their plans of travelling to Mogadishu. 

 

Abikar Mohamed’s story

“It feels good to be back. We are so used to life back in the US that we are forgetting where we were born. Eastleigh reminds me so much of Mogadishu!” says 23-year-old Abikar Mohamed.

The last time Abikar was in Mogadishu was when he was seven years old. His family fled to Kenya after the fall of the Siad Barre government, languished in the Dadaab refugee camp before they were relocated to the US. It was his first time back to Kenya since those days when he was living here as a refugee. “We are all here to defend what we believe in. We are all here to protect Islam and we are going to do that at all cost,” says Abikar to partially explain why he and the others in the group would surrender a life in the US where many in the refugee camps can only dream about.

This is the same reason the others give when asked why they would leave their country of asylum to fight for a home majority of them know little about. “Moving to the US was a dream for us. I mean we had nothing left back home. The camp wasn’t the best place to live and after finally getting repatriated to the US, it meant a better future and life for all of us,” says Abikar who speaks with a strong American accent.

Once in the US, Abikar and his family lived on government support and assistance for eight years before they were finally granted citizenship. Abikar and his siblings got citizenship as his parents continue to live as refugees. “This was it for me. I thought I would enjoy the same treatment and rights as any other US citizen, but that was never to happen,” he said. Abikar says it was impossible to get a job or even a scholarship to further his education after high school. “In as much as we are citizens, we are never treated equally. What is the use of granting us citizenship if they don’t treat us equally?” he says. Abikar explains that he finished his high school at Sixth Street, Minnesota, and emerged among the top five students. “All the rest got scholarships to go to college; most of them did not deserve because they come from rich families. I was in need and I did not get it even when it was clear I deserved the scholarship,” he said.

He said this incident opened his eyes to the flagrant discrimination that the system meted out to Somali Americans and other refugee minorities. “I even went with my family to school to ask why I was denied the scholarship but they did not have any real reason for denying me the opportunity,” said Abikar. Abikar had wanted to go to college to study literature, become a lecturer and also a writer. This will not happen now.

On their arrival from the US, the four lived at different hotels and guest houses in Eastleigh as they waited to be joined by other young men, most of them in their late teens, who were coming from different parts of the world.

All of them had the same agenda: to travel to Somalia and join the Al Shabaab— the militia group loosely associated with Al Qaeda which is fighting to remove the transitional federal government (TFG) which they believe is a western imposition.

Al Shabaab seized control of much of Somalia in 2006 until Ethiopian forces at the request of the TFG and with the backing of the US invaded the country. The militia group was pushed out but has since been fighting to regain control and oust the government. This ‘invasion’ prompted the political awakening among young Somalis in the Diaspora.c“We know there is another group from Minneapolis, California and Minnesota but we have also been told others are coming from Norway and Sweden,” Abikar and his colleagues tell me.

Later that day, at 4pm, Nuno Ahmed calls saying all his friends had arrived and they were agreeable to an interview.

At the agreed venue, I meet up with Nuno and nine other young men— the youngest at 17 while the oldest was 24 years old.  All of them are convinced that their reasons for making the perilous journey to Somalia are right.

None of them were born in the US or any of the European capitals from where they are from. They started their journey as refugees from Mogadishu and spent several years at the Daadab refugee camp, established in the early 1990s to take the waves of Somali refugees who streamed into Kenya after the fall of the Siad Barre government and the start of the civil war which has continued since then.
 

Abdirahman Gullet’s story

“From 2008 when Burhan went back to Mogadishu, we have all been seen as terror suspects. Police regularly storm our houses and conduct searches without permission,” says 19-year-old Abdirahman Gullet.

Abdirahman recalled several instances when he was walking on the street and had been forcefully taken away by men claiming to be FBI. The men would interrogate him for several hours about what he knew about Al Shabaab and demand to know whether he was a member.

“It never crossed my mind to join up with the Al Shabaab. Even when Burhan went, I thought it was a stupid thing he did. Now I understand why. I have had first and experience,” he said.  

Burhan Hussein Ahmed, known as Little Bashir, was only 17 when he  disappeared from his home in Minneapolis in 2008 and in November that year, called his family to say he was in Mogadishu.

The family received a call from Mogadishu informing them that he had died. The family still believes that Burhan was murdered by the Al Shabaab when he refused to carry out a suicide bombing.

A month earlier, 26-year-old Shirwa Ahmed became the first known American suicide bomber when he drove a car loaded with explosives into a government compound in Puntland in October 2008 killing 30 people. He had left Minneapolis for Saudi Arabia before making his way to Mogadishu.

Shirwa was one of 20 Somali Americans who left Minneapolis for Somalia in a trend which became the focus of a large terrorism investigation in the US. Some of these fighters are suspected to have made their way to Mogadishu through Kenya. “We came to Nairobi just like any American citizen. None of the officials at the airport suspected anything,” Abdirahman said.

Interviews with the nine young men at Eastleigh confirmed that Nairobi was the preferred jumping off point for many of those headed to Somalia to join the Al Shabaab.

Once they arrive, each of them is given the address and contacts of a place where they all converge. They did not tell me where they all congregated for security reasons. One of the contacts who organised the young men’s arrival in Kenya and was making arrangements for their trip to Mogadishu also refused to be interviewed citing security concerns.

                         

Adan Hussein’s story

Adan Hussein is 24 years old. He is also from Minneapolis. Adan had just cleared his college studies in Information Technology at one of the private colleges near his home. “I had an opportunity to leave with my friends who left before me but I wanted to continue with my studies. We write each other mails and they send photos of how things are in Mogadishu. They told me they had even met with a cousin of mine who had been left behind when we fled the war,” he says.

It is his cousin who explained to him how half the family left behind was killed in the fighting that has been going on since the collapse of the Barre government. “He told me that through Al Shaabab they are protecting the larger part of Somalia and saving lives although the media would report otherwise,” he says.  
Adan said he and his friends attended a mosque where one of the elders kept them updated with the news coming from Somalia.

“He had first-hand information about what was going on at home. He would travel to Somalia and back to the US until recently when he was banned from traveling. “They stopped him because he would come back and tell us how the US, the country we had grown up in, was helping Ethiopia to kill our families,” Adan says.

He is sad to have left his mother and two younger sisters without telling them of his plans to travel to Mogadishu and fight with the Al Shabaab.

He hoped that his mother, who in her daily devotions prayed for Somalia, will eventually understand his reasons for leaving home. “There is a chance I might never come back here and might die protecting my religion, it’s a price I’m willing to pay,” he says.

Aden like some of the young recruits could not pay for his ticket to Nairobi as most of them were students so the elders funded their trips to Nairobi and to Hargeisa, Somaliland, from where they will proceed by road to Somalia.
He denied suggestions that they had been brainwashed by the elders at the mosque.  “The mosque is just a meeting place. Coming back to fight for our home is our own free will. “We are not doing this to please human beings. It’s not our intention. We are protecting our religion and our reward is in heaven,” says Adan.

Born in 1986, Adan left Mogadishu after his father was killed in 1993. Coming to Daadab, he was relocated with his mother and two young sisters to the US.“To avoid attracting any kind of suspicion, all of us will book our tickets individually while a second group of Kenyan recruits will make their way by road all the way through Liboi,” says Adan.

                

Omar Hassan

Omar Hassan, 22, went to Canada to join his family who had been granted asylum there. He has been living in Canada as a refugee for the last ten years. He was just a class four pupil at the Daadab camp when he left for Canada. He came to Nairobi on several occasions to plan his travel to Canada but something would always crop up with his papers. “Finally when I got the visa to travel, I could not believe it, my family had paid so much money for me to join them, I knew this would be a good thing for me,” he said.

Once in Canada, Omar did not continue his education, he joined his family’s business and at the age of 20, he married a second generation Canadian Somali woman.

Very soft spoken with plastic spectacles, Omar tells me that discrimination is a big part of his adopted country. “There has never been integration of Somalis and native Canadians. Why do you think we all live at the same place and they stay far away from us?” he asks.

He adds that the discrimination is what makes many young people join Al Shaabab and to take any chance they can get to go back home.

Omar says he knows thousands of refugees would swap places with him to have the kind of life he has had in Canada. “I am willing to give all that up for my religion.  I have always cared about material things that this life has to offer but I have not seen the benefit of it,” he says.

His understanding is that Al Shaabab is not a terror group but believers committed to ensuring Shariah law is observed in all of Somalia. “Somalia is a Muslim country and the law of the Quran should be observed by all,” says Omar.
Omar denies that the motivating factor behind most of the youth joining up is the stipend that each of them gets when they join up and the monthly payment they receive. With his Somali accent, he tells me that they were promised $30 (Sh2,400) per day for their services but it’s not what motivates them, “yes I might take the money for my basic use while in Somalia but it’s not the motivation,” he says.

He tells me that the group coming from abroad were promised $ 200- $250 (Sh16,000-Sh20,000) per month and there is a high possibility that this might go up. “Like I said it’s not about the money, my family’s business makes more than this,” he added.

“It’s not about the money; it’s to protect what I believe in. This is a holy war and all the young people who have died before us have done that for the sake of religion,” he says.

             

Abdinassir Osman’s story

“I was only 20 when some policemen stopped me and started interrogating me. They said they suspected me of having links with Al Shabaab. They did not believe me when I told them I knew nothing about the organisation. “At the time I had no links or even knowledge of Al Shabaab. I didn’t know much about them,” recalls 22-year-old Abdinassir Osman.

Osman has been living in Ohio for the last 12 years. He said he had been unable to get a job since he did not have a high school diploma. Even when he applied for blue collar jobs, Osman said he was passed over just because he was an American Somali.

“Everywhere I would go, I would be treated differently because I am a Somali. I can understand if I can’t get a good job and I accept that fact as I quit school early, but even a cleaning job? It does not make sense!” he said. “I did nothing there. Instead I was in a gang and I know l was wrong. Now I can do something good back home in Somalia.” Osman decided to join two of his friends who were travelling to Mogadishu.

         

Ali Mohamud

Born in 1985, Ali Mohamud, known to his friends as Amad, left Daadab refugee camp in 1995 after his family fled Kismayu. They were relocated in Ohio. “It was cool at first. We were treated well since we were just children.  But when we finished school, there were no jobs, not even for those of us who were qualified,” he said.

He and Osman listened to the stories and exhortations of the mosque elders and they decided that they were needed more in Somalia to fight for their homeland than wasting time looking for jobs. “My services are needed back home, to protect Somalia and Islam. I am here out of my will and it’s the least I can do for my religion,” he says.

He stayed with his mother and young brother who is currently in college in Ohio. “This will break my mother’s heart I know, I told her of the plan and she completely refused but hope she would understand my reasons.”

ON THE ROAD WITH

AL SHABAAB RECRUITS

TUESDAY, 28 JUNE 2011 14:58 BY FATUMA NOOR

BEAUTIFUL: A busy street in Hargeisa, Somaliland

Why would you leave the safety and comfort of your home to go to a warzone? That is the question running through my mind at the JKIA in Nairobi as I board the plane for Hargeisa. I was on assignment to Somaliland to cover the swearing-in ceremony of the new President of the semi-autonomous region of Somalia. Outgoing President Dahir Rayale Kahin was handing over power to President-elect Ahmed Mohamed ‘Silyano’ Mohamoud.

My trip to Hargeisa coincided with that of the nine Al Shabaab recruits who had left their homes in Canada, US and Sweden to join the militia group which is linked to the Al Qaeda.

I had interviewed some of them a week earlier. Now five of them were on the same plane headed to Hargeisa and then from there to Mogadishu.

One of the recruits, Adan Hussein, told me they were to be joined by two others, Abdinassir Osman and Abdirahman Gullet, who arrived a few minutes later. Apart from Gullet who was dressed in a grey kanzu, the rest were wearing expensive jeans, sneakers, shirts or T-shirts. They each had an iPhone or lagged a laptop where they continuously updated their Facebook pages or emailed their families and friends back home.  

Adan lifted his head from his laptop where he had emailed his mother to tell her he was in Nairobi and not to worry. He said he promised her he would keep in touch. “Frankly I’m scared, I do not know what to expect. It’s weird.  It feels like it’s my first time to go to Mogadishu and yet I was born there! But my mind is made up,” he tells me.  He says he does not know who is paying for his trip from the US to Kenya and now to Hargeisa.  “I think it’s from a maalim at the mosque, we all just had tickets booked for us,” he says.

We go through the security checks at the JKIA then we board the plane which lands in Hargeisa’s Egal International Airport two hours later. The immigration process is smooth and not as intense as it is in Nairobi. We each pay $50 (Sh4,000) for the visa.

Immediately we all get a Somaliland Telecom SIM card which comes with a dollar as airtime. We exchange numbers with the recruits and I leave them to go and attend the swearing-in ceremony.  Hours later, I joined the recruits at the lobby of the Star Hotel where they were waiting for their contact to arrive.

As we sip our soft drinks, the recruits are increasingly quiet. Twenty-year-old Omar Hassan who during our interview in Nairobi had been talkative and exuberant is now very quiet. He says little.

It is late afternoon when we are joined by an elderly man in his 50s whose long beard is dyed with red henna. He asks for a cup of coffee before greeting us. He is Mohammed Jimale, the recruit’s contact person in Hargeisa. 

He is taken aback by my presence and demands to know who l am and what l am doing there. I tell him l had got permission from the Al Shabaab spokesman Mukhtar Rubow to interview the recruits and accompany them to Mogadishu. 
He reaches for his phone, dials a number and walks away to talk. He returns smiling and in a more relaxed manner. “How are the young Somalis in Eastleigh. I have been there a lot you know,” he says. He abruptly turns to the recruits and tells them: “You all know why you are here; Allah will grant you heaven as you are protecting our religion.  “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, and slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them,” the old man continues quoting the Quran.

He tries to clear any doubts that any of the recruits may have by saying that their mission was godly.  “Allah has said it. It is clear in the Quran that there is reward for all those Mujahideens who fight to protect Islam,” he says. “If any of you wants to go back they can do it now. I am sure most of you left when you were still young. All you know of Somalia is what you have seen on TV in the comfort of your lovely homes. The situation is not as it’s reported,” Jimale says.  “They do not report how many of our sisters, mothers and wives that they have killed, they say we are oppressing women while all we are doing is protecting Islam. What is wrong with introducing Shariah law in an Islamic country,” he tells the new recruits.

Omar Hassan who is a Canadian citizen is worried and wants to know what they should expect in Mogadishu. “How bad are things there? What happens once we get there? Will there be security for us?” he asks. “You’re the soldiers; you’re going to protect Islam. Do not worry. You will have a place to stay but your mission is not to come back and stay but to fight,” Jimale says, adding with a chilling finality: “Mujahideen should not care much about this life but the after life.”

Jimale warns me that it is not safe to go to Mogadishu with the recruits even if l had been given permission by Rubow. “It’s not safe my daughter.  I think you have your story already” he tells me in impeccable English.  “I’m a Danish citizen. I came to Somalia six months ago and then moved to Hargeisa, I want to do some business here and also bring my family members,” Jimale tells me when l ask him where he is from. 

He asks the recruits when their colleagues would be arriving. “They would be flying in by 3pm as we used different airlines,” said Adan Hussein in halting Somali. Jimale laughs and makes fun of the way Adan and the others speak the Somali language. “You boys need not to forget where you come from even if you have grown up around the wazungus,” he says. 

Before he left, he said once the others arrive, the team will be picked by two Land Cruisers and travel to another base where they will get final debriefing before starting the jihad. “Mujahideens like you need to be fit and prepared for the battle,” he concludes.

Three other recruits— Ali Mohamud ‘Amad’ from Ohio, Khalif Abdi from Sweden and Mukhtar Abdi, a Kenyan — arrive an hour later and join their colleagues.   “This place is developed; they have nice buildings and architecture. It’s completely different from what we expected,” says Amad in his American twang.  “Even the hotels are state-of-the-art and the internet is fast,” says Abikar who was using his iPhone to stay connected to the net. They, however, agree that the presidential palace needs an upgrade and a facelift.

  I still have a nagging question: Why leave the safety and comfort of home for a warzone? Is it only about religion or is the financial reward an added incentive? “We have been told we could be given $250 (Sh20,000) per month as foreign recruits which is a lot of money in Somalia,” Abikar says.  “We all make more than that back home. Even those of us who don’t have jobs get that as pocket money, so it’s not about the money. It’s about what we believe in,” he tells me.

Jimale returns with a younger man in his 30s who introduces himself as Ahmed. He asks me to leave as he wants to brief the recruits on their plans and destination. He tells me to join them after an hour.

When l join them later, l am told that the vehicles are ready to leave. I get in the back seat of one of the Land Cruisers together with five other recruits and we are off to Mogadishu.  Seated next to Omar, l can see he is nervous and afraid. He tells me that I should stay behind. I am more concerned about him. “I’m scared but I cannot change my mind now. It’s finally real. I have come too far to go back,” he tells me. 

The recruits joke about what they hope to find in Somalia.  “For those who are single, this is a good place to get a wife who will always obey you,” Abikar says with a laugh.   

After driving for hours and through several security checks in Somaliland, we make a brief stop over in Gaalcayo, a small town in Somalia.  It’s here that we encountered the ruthless Al Shabaab militiamen.

In the last part of our series tomorrow, read about how the  Al Shabaab recruits saved Fatuma Noor’s life

__________________________

 

 

Somalia: 

How Al Shabaab Recruits

Saved My Life

Fatuma Noor

29 June 2011

In yesterday's issue, Fatuma Noor told you about her flight with the nine US, Canadian and Swedish mujahideens to Hargeisa, Somaliland, and the gruelling road journey into Somalia. In the last part of the series, read about her brush with death after coming face to face with the ruthless Al Shabaab militants.

All the young recruits got out and I was left alone in the car. As a Muslim woman, I couldn't even contemplate going for a short call at the open ground even though I was very pressed. After what looked like a long time, they all came back. We were about to leave when all hell broke loose. Right in front of us, seven men appeared from nowhere wielding guns pointed at us. What I had been dreading all along had come to be: I was looking at the ruthless Al Shabaab militants in the face. They surrounded the two Land Cruisers we were travelling in.

This was unexpected as Gaalcayo is one of the strongholds of the US-backed Transitional Federal Government headed by Sheikh Shariff Sheikh Ahmed. I kept thinking of the old man who told me I shouldn't go past Gaalcayo as it is unsafe for a woman.

"All of you get out of the car," one of the Al Shabaab men who looked like their leader thundered. We did what we were told without question. The militants proceeded to inquire about who we were and what our mission in Somalia was.

By their looks, the oldest was probably 25 and the youngest couldn't have been more than 13 years. The boy who was barely in his teens was dressed in an oversized blue shirt with brown pants. "Is he here by choice? Does he even know how to use the rifle that looked heavy for him?" I wondered.

CNN

Nairobi Star reporter Fatuma Noor.

My silly thoughts were interrupted by our driver. "My name is Abdi, I have been sent to pick the new recruits from Hargeisa and we are heading to Mogadishu," he said.

It was clear that the young militants who were all dressed up shoddily had no idea that the group was expecting new recruits as they continued to issue threats.

Despite the fervent explanation from our driver, who had been joined by the other driver in arguing our case, the mean-looking Al Shabaab men could hear none of it. I couldn't help but notice that the new recruits had all kept mum, probably realising the gravity of the situation. "Give us your money," they ordered the recruits who nervously gave the militants all the money they had in Somali currency. They had exchanged the money at the Egal International Airport in Hargeisa. "Who is this girl?" one dressed in a blue Maawis (Somali attire) asked. "I'm a Kenyan Somali journalist and I am here to do a story. Robow has given me the permission to accompany the recruits," I said quickly, hoping that the name-dropping would defuse the tension.

Robow is one of the officials of Al Shabaab. He was formerly the spokesperson of the insurgent group. "Is she married or related to any of you?" the same man asked. "No," I answered although the question was not directed at me.

Clearly they were not amused and they kept on asking questions why l was traveling with men who were not my relatives. I tried in vain to explain that I was just a journalist doing my work after being granted permission by their leader but that fell on deaf ears. "This is what we are discouraging; a Somali girl to act like some 'Adon' (means Kafir - infidel - or derogatory for a black person) and not obeying what our religion requires of her," the leader said pointing his rifle at my head. Knowing that none of the new recruits would come to my rescue as they were probably more scared than I was, I decided to try and reason with one of the militants.

"I'm not here to do anything to harm your mission; I am just here to do a story. I have travelled with the new Mujahideens from Nairobi; I did not know it's against your rules," I pleaded with their leader but he could have none of it.

He started consulting with his colleagues on the appropriate punishment they should mete out on me. Ideas were bandied around as we silently watched. The men were discussing my fate and there was absolutely nothing I could do. There has never been a time I have been more scared for my life than that moment.

For a moment I regretted travelling with the recruits in the first place. I questioned myself why I allowed my journalistic instincts to override my security concerns. However, there was no time for this. It was too late now. I was so sure they would kill me that I started making a silent prayer to Allah.

All this time, our drivers were frantically trying to contact the officials expecting us in Mogadishu. When the call went through, one of the drivers interrupted the insurgents who discussing my fate. Their leader took the phone and spoke for a while with the person on the other end. He kept insisting that I should be severely dealt with for going against the dictates of Islam. "It's fine for the rest of you to proceed but we have to punish her," he said after returning the phone to the driver. "Empty your handbag," he ordered me.

Just as I was about to empty my bag, my phone started ringing. Luck was not on my side that day. Al Shabaab had recently banned ringtones, arguing that it was unIslamic and here I was, with my handset unleashing what sounded like a very loud ringtone. One of them grabbed my phone. He told his colleagues that I could be a spy and without a moment's hesitation, he proceeded to drop the phone on the ground and crashed it. I made another dua, knowing too well that I was the next to be crashed.

The militants then ordered the foreign Mujahideens to enter the vehicles and drive off without me. It's then that one of the new recruits, Abikar Mohamed, gathered courage and spoke for the first time. "Let her not proceed from here but please allow her to go back to Hargeisa." The militants brushed him off, insisting that I will be punished for disobeying Islam. The driver who was for the second time trying to get in touch with Robow gave the phone to the militiamen's leader. The few minutes that he was on phone talking to Robow felt like a lifetime. "Ok, she can go back to Hargeisa. She will have to wait here for a taxi that's going to take her there," he said giving the driver back his phone. I sighed with relief and thanked Allah for saving my life.

Aden Hussein, one of the new recruits, who had also been awfully quiet, intervened, perhaps after getting reassurance that they were needed by the insurgent group. "We have been here for the last four hours, not a single car has passed, we cannot just leave her here," he said.

Still shocked, I said my goodbyes to my new friends, promising to keep in touch. I promised myself I would never return to Somalia again - not until peace prevails in the country. My brush with death had made me wiser.

NOTE: This is the third of a three-part series first published in 2010 for which Fatuma Noor was awarded the top prize at this year's CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards. For the entire series visit this Topical Focus page.

>via: http://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00013567.html

The Rise of the

New Global Elite

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

 

By Chrystia Freeland

 

Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine

 

 

If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.

This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”:

 

In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

 

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.

Through my work as a business journalist, I’ve spent the better part of the past decade shadowing the new super-rich: attending the same exclusive conferences in Europe; conducting interviews over cappuccinos on Martha’s Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms; observing high-powered dinner parties in Manhattan. Some of what I’ve learned is entirely predictable: the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, different from you and me.

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

 

 

The Winner-Take-Most Economy

The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade. Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality—financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico. But the shared narrative is that, thanks to globalization and technological innovation, people, money, and ideas travel more freely today than ever before.

Peter Lindert is an economist at the University of California at Davis and one of the leaders of the “deep history” school of economics, a movement devoted to thinking about the world economy over the long term—that is to say, in the context of the entire sweep of human civilization. Yet he argues that the economic changes we are witnessing today are unprecedented. “Britain’s classic industrial revolution was far less impressive than what has been going on in the past 30 years,” he told me. The current productivity gains are larger, he explained, and the waves of disruptive innovation much, much faster.

From a global perspective, the impact of these developments has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly in the poorer parts of the world. Take India and China, for example: between 1820 and 1950, nearly a century and a half, per capita income in those two countries was basically flat. Between 1950 and 1973, it increased by 68 percent. Then, between 1973 and 2002, it grew by 245 percent, and continues to grow strongly despite the global financial crisis.

But within nations, the fruits of this global transformation have been shared unevenly. Though China’s middle class has grown exponentially and tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty, the super-elite in Shanghai and other east-coast cities have steadily pulled away. Income inequality has also increased in developing markets such as India and Russia, and across much of the industrialized West, from the relatively laissez-faire United States to the comfy social democracies of Canada and Scandinavia. Thomas Friedman is right that in many ways the world has become flatter; but in others it has grown spikier.

One reason for the spikes is that the global market and its associated technologies have enabled the creation of a class of international business megastars. As companies become bigger, the global environment more competitive, and the rate of disruptive technological innovation ever faster, the value to shareholders of attracting the best possible CEO increases correspondingly. Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons—including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay—but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

Many corporations have profited from this economic upheaval. Expanded global access to labor (skilled and unskilled alike), customers, and capital has lowered traditional barriers to entry and increased the value of an ahead-of-the-curve insight or innovation. Facebook, whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of college just six years ago, is already challenging Google, itself hardly an old-school corporation. But the biggest winners have been individuals, not institutions. The hedge-fund manager John Paulson, for instance, single-handedly profited almost as much from the crisis of 2008 as Goldman Sachs did.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of U.S. workers, however devoted and skilled at their jobs, have missed out on the windfalls of this winner-take-most economy—or worse, found their savings, employers, or professions ravaged by the same forces that have enriched the plutocratic elite. The result of these divergent trends is a jaw-dropping surge in U.S. income inequality. According to the economists Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population. The financial crisis interrupted this trend temporarily, as incomes for the top 1 percent fell more than those of the rest of the population in 2008. But recent evidence suggests that, in the wake of the crisis, incomes at the summit are rebounding more quickly than those below. One example: after a down year in 2008, the top 25 hedge-fund managers were paid, on average, more than $1 billion each in 2009, quickly eclipsing the record they had set in pre-recession 2007.

 

 

Plutocracy Now

If you are looking for the date when America’s plutocracy had its coming-out party, you could do worse than choose June 21, 2007. On that day, the private-equity behemoth Blackstone priced the largest initial public offering in the United States since 2002, raising $4 billion and creating a publicly held company worth $31 billion at the time. Stephen Schwarzman, one of the firm’s two co-founders, came away with a personal stake worth almost $8 billion, along with $677 million in cash; the other, Peter Peterson, cashed a check for $1.88 billion and retired.

In the sort of coincidence that delights historians, conspiracy theorists, and book publishers, June 21 also happened to be the day Peterson threw a party—at Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant, of course—to launch The Manny, the debut novel of his daughter, Holly, who lightly satirizes the lives and loves of financiers and their wives on the Upper East Side. The best seller fits neatly into the genre of modern “mommy lit”—USA Today advised readers to take it to the beach—but the author told me that she was inspired to write it in part by her belief that “people have no clue about how much money there is in this town.”

Holly Peterson and I spoke several times about how the super-affluence of recent years has changed the meaning of wealth. “There’s so much money on the Upper East Side right now,” she said. “If you look at the original movie Wall Street, it was a phenomenon where there were men in their 30s and 40s making $2 and $3 million a year, and that was disgusting. But then you had the Internet age, and then globalization, and you had people in their 30s, through hedge funds and Goldman Sachs partner jobs, who were making $20, $30, $40 million a year. And there were a lot of them doing it. I think people making $5 million to $10 million definitely don’t think they are making enough money.”

As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: “They started saying, ‘If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing’”—this is a service offering “fractional aircraft ownership” for those who do not wish to buy outright—“‘and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.’”

The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”

As with the aristocracies of bygone days, such vast wealth has created a gulf between the plutocrats and other people, one reinforced by their withdrawal into gated estates, exclusive academies, and private planes. We are mesmerized by such extravagances as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 414-foot yacht, the Octopus, which is home to two helicopters, a submarine, and a swimming pool.

But while their excesses seem familiar, even archaic, today’s plutocrats represent a new phenomenon. The wealthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s era were shaped, he wrote, by the fact that they had been “born rich.” They knew what it was to “possess and enjoy early.”

That’s not the case for much of today’s super-elite. “Fat cats who owe it to their grandfathers are not getting all of the gains,” Peter Lindert told me. “A lot of it is going to innovators this time around. There is more meritocracy in Bill Gates being at the top than the Duke of Bedford.” Even Emmanuel Saez, who is deeply worried about the social and political consequences of rising income inequality, concurs that a defining quality of the current crop of plutocrats is that they are the “working rich.” He has found that in 1916, the richest 1 percent of Americans received only one-fifth of their income from paid work; in 2004, that figure had risen threefold, to 60 percent.

Peter Peterson, for example, is the son of a Greek immigrant who arrived in America at age 17 and worked his way up to owning a diner in Nebraska; his Blackstone co-founder, Stephen Schwarzman, is the son of a Philadelphia retailer. And they are hardly the exceptions. Of the top 10 figures on the 2010 Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans, four are self-made, two (Charles and David Koch) expanded a medium-size family oil business into a billion-dollar industrial conglomerate, and the remaining four are all heirs of the self-made billionaire Sam Walton. Similarly, of the top 10 foreign billionaires, six are self-made, and the remaining four are vigorously growing their patrimony, rather than merely living off it. It’s true that few of today’s plutocrats were born into the sort of abject poverty that can close off opportunity altogether— a strong early education is pretty much a precondition—but the bulk of their wealth is generally the fruit of hustle and intelligence (with, presumably, some luck thrown in). They are not aristocrats, by and large, but rather economic meritocrats, preoccupied not merely with consuming wealth but with creating it.

 

The Road to Davos

To grasp the difference between today’s plutocrats and the hereditary elite, who (to use John Stuart Mill’s memorable phrase) “grow rich in their sleep,” one need merely glance at the events that now fill high-end social calendars. The debutante balls and hunts and regattas of yesteryear may not be quite obsolete, but they are headed in that direction. The real community life of the 21st-century plutocracy occurs on the international conference circuit.

The best-known of these events is the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, invitation to which marks an aspiring plutocrat’s arrival on the international scene. The Bilderberg Group, which meets annually at locations in Europe and North America, is more exclusive still—and more secretive—though it is more focused on geopolitics and less on global business and philanthropy. The Boao Forum for Asia, convened on China’s Hainan Island each spring, offers evidence of that nation’s growing economic importance and its understanding of the plutocratic culture. Bill Clinton is pushing hard to win his Clinton Global Initiative a regular place on the circuit. The TED conferences (the acronym stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”) are an important stop for the digerati; Herb Allen’s* Sun Valley gathering, for the media moguls; and the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival (co-sponsored by this magazine), for the more policy-minded.

Recognizing the value of such global conclaves, some corporations have begun hosting their own. Among these is Google’s Zeitgeist conference, where I have moderated discussions for several years. One of the most recent gatherings was held last May at the Grove Hotel, a former provincial estate in the English countryside, whose 300-acre grounds have been transformed into a golf course and whose high-ceilinged rooms are now decorated with a mixture of antique and contemporary furniture. (Mock Louis XIV chairs—made, with a wink, from high-end plastic—are much in evidence.) Last year, Cirque du Soleil offered the 500 guests a private performance in an enormous tent erected on the grounds; in 2007, to celebrate its acquisition of YouTube, Google flew in overnight Internet sensations from around the world.

Yet for all its luxury, the mood of the Zeitgeist conference is hardly sybaritic. Rather, it has the intense, earnest atmosphere of a gathering of college summa cum laudes. This is not a group that plays hooky: the conference room is full from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and during coffee breaks the lawns are crowded with executives checking their BlackBerrys and iPads.

Last year’s lineup of Zeitgeist speakers included such notables as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, London Mayor Boris Johnson, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (not to mention, of course, Google’s own CEO, Eric Schmidt). But the most potent currency at this and comparable gatherings is neither fame nor money. Rather, it’s what author Michael Lewis has dubbed “the new new thing”—the insight or algorithm or technology with the potential to change the world, however briefly. Hence the presence last year of three Nobel laureates, including Daniel Kahneman, a pioneer in behavioral economics. One of the business stars in attendance was the 36-year-old entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, who had sold his Zappos online shoe retailer to Amazon for more than $1 billion the previous summer. And the most popular session of all was the one in which Google showcased some of its new inventions, including the Nexus phone.

This geeky enthusiasm for innovation and ideas is evident at more-intimate gatherings of the global elite as well. Take the elegant Manhattan dinner parties hosted by Marie-Josée Kravis, the economist wife of the private-equity billionaire Henry, in their elegant Upper East Side apartment. Though the china is Sèvres and the paintings are museum quality (Marie-Josée is, after all, president of the Museum of Modern Art’s board), the dinner-table conversation would not be out of place in a graduate seminar. Mrs. Kravis takes pride in bringing together not only plutocrats such as her husband and Michael Bloomberg, but also thinkers and policy makers such as Richard Holbrooke, Robert Zoellick, and Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, and leading them in discussion of matters ranging from global financial imbalances to the war in Afghanistan.

Indeed, in this age of elites who delight in such phrases as outside the box and killer app, arguably the most coveted status symbol isn’t a yacht, a racehorse, or a knighthood; it’s a philanthropic foundation—and, more than that, one actively managed in ways that show its sponsor has big ideas for reshaping the world.

 

 

Philanthrocapitalism

George Soros, who turned 80 last summer, is a pioneer and role model for the socially engaged billionaire. Arguably the most successful investor of the post-war era, he is nonetheless proudest of his Open Society Foundations, through which he has spent billions of dollars on issues as diverse as marijuana legalization, civil society in central and eastern Europe, and rethinking economic assumptions in the wake of the financial crisis.

Inspired and advised by the liberal Soros, Peter Peterson—himself a Republican and former member of Nixon’s Cabinet—has spent $1 billion of his Blackstone windfall on a foundation dedicated to bringing down America’s deficit and entitlement spending. Bill Gates, likewise, devotes most of his energy and intellect today to his foundation’s work on causes ranging from supporting charter schools to combating disease in Africa. Facebook’s Zuckerberg has yet to reach his 30th birthday, but last fall he donated $100 million to improving the public schools of Newark, New Jersey. Insurance and real-estate magnate Eli Broad has become an influential funder of stem-cell research; Jim Balsillie, a co-founder of BlackBerry creator Research in Motion, has established his own international-affairs think tank; and on and on. It is no coincidence that Bill Clinton has devoted his post-presidency to the construction of a global philanthropic “brand.”

The super-wealthy have long recognized that philanthropy, in addition to its moral rewards, can also serve as a pathway to social acceptance and even immortality: Andrew “The Man Who Dies Rich Dies Disgraced” Carnegie transformed himself from robber baron to secular saint with his hospitals, concert halls, libraries, and university; Alfred Nobel ensured that he would be remembered for something other than the invention of dynamite. What is notable about today’s plutocrats is that they tend to bestow their fortunes in much the same way they made them: entrepreneurially. Rather than merely donate to worthy charities or endow existing institutions (though they of course do this as well), they are using their wealth to test new ways to solve big problems. The journalists Matthew Bishop and Michael Green have dubbed the approach “philanthrocapitalism” in their book of the same name. “There is a connection between their ways of thinking as businesspeople and their ways of giving,” Bishop told me. “They are used to operating on a grand scale, and so they operate on a grand scale in their philanthropy as well. And they are doing it at a much earlier age.”

A measure of the importance of public engagement for today’s super-rich is the zeal with which even emerging-market plutocrats are developing their own foundations and think tanks. When the oligarchs of the former Soviet Union first burst out beyond their own borders, they were Marxist caricatures of the nouveau riche, purchasing yachts and sports teams, and surrounding themselves with couture-clad supermodels. Fifteen years later, they are exploring how to buy their way into the world of ideas.

One of the most determined is the Ukrainian entrepreneur Victor Pinchuk, whose business empire ranges from pipe manufacturing to TV stations. With a net worth of $3 billion, Pinchuk is no longer content merely to acquire modern art: in 2009, he began a global competition for young artists, run by his art center in Kiev and conceived as a way of bringing Ukraine into the international cultural mainstream. Pinchuk hosts a regular lunch on the fringes of Davos and has launched his own annual “ideas forum,” a gathering devoted to geopolitics that is held, with suitable modesty, in the same Crimean villa where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill attended the Yalta Conference. Last September’s meeting, where I served as a moderator, included Bill Clinton, International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin.

As an entrée into the global super-elite, Pinchuk’s efforts seem to be working: on a visit to the U.S. last spring, the oligarch met with David Axelrod, President Obama’s top political adviser, in Washington and schmoozed with Charlie Rose at a New York book party for Time magazine editor Rick Stengel. On a previous trip, he’d dined with Caroline Kennedy at the Upper East Side townhouse of HBO’s Richard Plepler. Back home, he has entertained his fellow art enthusiast Eli Broad at his palatial estate (which features its own nine-hole golf course) outside Kiev, and has partnered with Soros to finance Ukrainian civil-society projects.

 

 

A Nation Apart

Pinchuk’s growing international Rolodex illustrates another defining characteristic of today’s plutocrats: they are forming a global community, and their ties to one another are increasingly closer than their ties to hoi polloi back home. As Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of the private-equity firm Silver Lake, puts it, “A person in Africa who runs a big African bank and went to Harvard might have more in common with me than he does with his neighbors, and I could well share more overlapping concerns and experiences with him than with my neighbors.” The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”

In a similar vein, the wife of one of America’s most successful hedge-fund managers offered me the small but telling observation that her husband is better able to navigate the streets of Davos than those of his native Manhattan. When he’s at home, she explained, he is ferried around town by a car and driver; the snowy Swiss hamlet, which is too small and awkward for limos, is the only place where he actually walks. An American media executive living in London put it more succinctly still: “We are the people who know airline flight attendants better than we know our own wives.”

America’s business elite is something of a latecomer to this transnational community. In a study of British and American CEOs, for example, Elisabeth Marx, of the headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles, found that almost a third of the former were foreign nationals, compared with just 10 percent of the latter. Similarly, more than two-thirds of the Brits had worked abroad for at least a year, whereas just a third of the Americans had done so.

But despite the slow start, American business is catching up: the younger generation of chief executives has significantly more international experience than the older generation, and the number of foreign and foreign-born CEOs, while still relatively small, is rising. The shift is particularly evident on Wall Street: in 2006, each of America’s eight biggest banks was run by a native-born CEO; today, five of those banks remain, and two of the survivors—Citigroup and Morgan Stanley—are led by men who were born abroad.

Mohamed ElErian, the CEO of Pimco, the world’s largest bond manager, is typical of the internationalists gradually rising to the top echelons of U.S. business. The son of an Egyptian father and a French mother, ElErian had a peripatetic childhood, shuttling between Egypt, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and now leads a U.S.-based company that is owned by the German financial conglomerate Allianz SE.

Though ElErian lives in Laguna Beach, California, near where Pimco is headquartered, he says that he can’t name a single country as his own. “I have had the privilege of living in many countries,” ElErian told me on a recent visit to New York. “One consequence is that I am a sort of global nomad, open to many perspectives.” As he talked, we walked through Midtown, which ElErian remembered fondly from his childhood, when he’d take the crosstown bus each day to the United Nations International School. That evening, ElErian was catching a flight to London. Later in the week, he was due in St. Petersburg.

Indeed, there is a growing sense that American businesses that don’t internationalize aggressively risk being left behind. For all its global reach, Pimco is still based in the United States. But the flows of goods and capital upon which the super-elite surf are bypassing America more often than they used to. Take, for example, Stephen Jennings, the 50-year-old New Zealander who co-founded the investment bank Renaissance Capital. Renaissance’s roots are in Moscow, where Jennings maintains his primary residence, and his business strategy involves positioning the firm to capture the investment flows between the emerging markets, particularly Russia, Africa, and Asia. For his purposes, New York is increasingly irrelevant. In a 2009 speech in Wellington, New Zealand, he offered his vision of this post-unipolar business reality: “The largest metals group in the world is Indian. The largest aluminum group in the world is Russian … The fastest-growing and largest banks in China, Russia, and Nigeria are all domestic.”

As it happens, a fellow tenant in Jennings’s high-tech, high-rise Moscow office building recently put together a deal that exemplifies just this kind of intra-emerging-market trade. Last year, Digital Sky Technologies, Russia’s largest technology investment firm, entered into a partnership with the South African media corporation Naspers and the Chinese technology company Tencent. All three are fast-growing firms with global vision—last fall, a DST spin-off called Mail.ru went public and immediately became Europe’s most highly valued Internet company—yet none is primarily focused on the United States. A similar harbinger of the intra-emerging-market economy was the acquisition by Bharti Enterprises, the Indian telecom giant, of the African properties of the Kuwait-based telecom firm Zain. A California technology executive explained to me that a company like Bharti has a competitive advantage in what he believes will be the exploding African market: “They know how to provide mobile phones so much more cheaply than we do. In a place like Africa, how can Western firms compete?”

The good news—and the bad news—for America is that the nation’s own super-elite is rapidly adjusting to this more global perspective. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U.S. Internet company. A gentle, unpretentious man who went from public school to Harvard, he’s nonetheless not terribly sympathetic to the complaints of the American middle class. “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world,” he told me. “So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.”

At last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael Splinter, CEO of the Silicon Valley green-tech firm Applied Materials, said that if he were starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the U.S.,” he explained. “The pull to be close to the customers—most of them in Asia—is enormous.” Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

 

 

Revolt of the Elites

Wilson’s distinction helps explain why many of America’s other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global “nation” in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine—indeed, it’s thriving. As a consequence of this disconnect, when business titans talk about the economy and their role in it, the notes they strike are often discordant: for example, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein waving away public outrage in 2009 by saying he was “doing God’s work”; or the insistence by several top bankers after the immediate threat of the financial crisis receded that their institutions could have survived without TARP funding and that they had accepted it only because they had been strong-armed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Nor does this aloof disposition end at the water’s edge: think of BP CEO Tony Hayward, who complained of wanting to get his life back after the Gulf oil spill and then proceeded to do so by watching his yacht compete in a race off the Isle of Wight.

It is perhaps telling that Blankfein is the son of a Brooklyn postal worker and that Hayward—despite his U.S. caricature as an upper-class English twit—got his start at BP as a rig geologist in the North Sea. They are both, in other words, working-class boys made good. And while you might imagine that such backgrounds would make plutocrats especially sympathetic to those who are struggling, the opposite is often true. For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead to obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others.

Unsurprisingly, Russian oligarchs have been among the most fearless in expressing this attitude. A little more than a decade ago, for instance, I spoke to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent political travails—his oil company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison—have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in a jail-cell correspondence last year, he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)

Though typically more guarded in their choice of words, many American plutocrats suggest, as Khodorkovsky did, that the trials faced by the working and middle classes are generally their own fault. When I asked one of Wall Street’s most successful investment-bank CEOs if he felt guilty for his firm’s role in creating the financial crisis, he told me with evident sincerity that he did not. The real culprit, he explained, was his feckless cousin, who owned three cars and a home he could not afford. One of America’s top hedge-fund managers made a near-identical case to me—though this time the offenders were his in-laws and their subprime mortgage. And a private-equity baron who divides his time between New York and Palm Beach pinned blame for the collapse on a favorite golf caddy in Arizona, who had bought three condos as investment properties at the height of the bubble.

It is this not-our-fault mentality that accounts for the plutocrats’ profound sense of victimization in the Obama era. You might expect that American elites—and particularly those in the financial sector—would be feeling pretty good, and more than a little grateful, right now. Thanks to a $700 billion TARP bailout and hundreds of billions of dollars lent nearly free of charge by the Federal Reserve (a policy Soros himself told me was a “hidden gift” to the banks), Wall Street has surged back to pre-crisis levels of compensation even as Main Street continues to struggle. Yet many of America’s financial giants consider themselves under siege from the Obama administration—in some cases almost literally. Last summer, for example, Blackstone’s Schwarzman caused an uproar when he said an Obama proposal to raise taxes on private-equity-firm compensation—by treating “carried interest” as ordinary income—was “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

However histrionic his imagery, Schwarzman (who subsequently apologized for the remark) is a Republican, so his antipathy toward the current administration is no surprise. What is more striking is the degree to which even former Obama supporters in the financial industry have turned against the president and his party. A Wall Street investor who is a passionate Democrat recounted to me his bitter exchange with a Democratic leader in Congress who is involved in the tax-reform effort. “Screw you,” he told the lawmaker. “Even if you change the legislation, the government won’t get a single penny more from me in taxes. I’ll put my money into my foundation and spend it on good causes. My money isn’t going to be wasted in your deficit sinkhole.”

He is not alone in his fury. In a much-quoted newsletter to investors last summer, the hedge-fund manager—and 2008 Obama fund-raiser—Dan Loeb fumed, “So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire.” Two other former Obama backers on Wall Street—both claim to have been on Rahm Emanuel’s speed-dial list—told me that the president is “anti-business”; one went so far as to worry that Obama is “a socialist.”

Much of this pique stems from simple self-interest: in addition to the proposed tax hikes, the financial reforms that Obama signed into law last summer have made regulations on American finance more stringent. But as the Democratic investor’s angry references to his philanthropic work suggest, the rage in the C-suites is driven not merely by greed but by a perceived affront to the plutocrats’ amour propre, a wounded incredulity that anyone could think of them as villains rather than heroes. Aren’t they, after all, the ones whose financial and technological innovations represent the future of the American economy? Aren’t they “doing God’s work”?

You might say that the American plutocracy is experiencing its John Galt moment. Libertarians (and run-of-the-mill high-school nerds) will recall that Galt is the plutocratic hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Tired of being dragged down by the parasitic, envious, and less talented lower classes, Galt and his fellow capitalists revolted, retreating to “Galt’s Gulch,” a refuge in the Rocky Mountains. There, they passed their days in secluded natural splendor, while the rest of the world, bereft of their genius and hard work, collapsed. (G. K. Chesterton suggested a similar idea, though more gently, in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday: “The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”)

This plutocratic fantasy is, of course, just that: no matter how smart and innovative and industrious the super-elite may be, they can’t exist without the wider community. Even setting aside the financial bailouts recently supplied by the governments of the world, the rich need the rest of us as workers, clients, and consumers. Yet, as a metaphor, Galt’s Gulch has an ominous ring at a time when the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting “their” taxes to paying down “our” budget deficit. They may not be isolating themselves geographically, as Rand fantasized. But they appear to be isolating themselves ideologically, which in the end may be of greater consequence.

 

 

The Backlash

The cultural ties that bind the super-rich to everyone else are fraying from both ends at once. Since World War II, the United States in particular has had an ethos of aspirational capitalism. As Soros told me, “It is easier to be rich in America than in Europe, because Europeans envy the billionaire, but Americans hope to emulate him.” But as the wealth gap has grown wider, and the rich have appeared to benefit disproportionately from government bailouts, that admiration has begun to sour.

One measure of the pricklier mood is how risky it has become for politicians to champion Big Business publicly. Defending Big Oil and railing against government interference used to be part of the job description of Texas Republicans. But when Congressman Joe Barton tried to take the White House to task for its post-spill “shakedown” of BP, he was immediately silenced by party elders. New York’s Charles Schumer is sometimes described as “the senator from Wall Street.” Yet when the financial-reform bill came to the Senate last spring—a political tussle in which each side furiously accused the other of carrying water for the banks—on Wall Street, Schumer was called the “invisible man” for his uncharacteristic silence on the issue.

In June, when I asked Larry Summers, then the president’s chief economic adviser, about hedge funds’ objections to the carried-interest tax reform, he was quick to disassociate himself from Wall Street’s concerns. “If that’s been the largest public-policy issue you’ve encountered,” he told me, “you’ve been traveling in different circles than I have been over the last several months.” I reminded him that he had in fact worked for a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, as recently as 2008, and he emphasized his use of the qualifier over the last several months.

Critiques of the super-elite are becoming more common even at gatherings of the super-elite. At a Wall Street Journal conference in December 2009, Paul Volcker, the legendary former head of the Federal Reserve, argued that Wall Street’s claims of wealth creation were without any real basis. “I wish someone,” he said, “would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth—one shred of evidence.”

At Google’s May Zeitgeist gathering, Desmond Tutu, the opening speaker, took direct aim at executive compensation. “I do have a very real concern about capitalism,” he lectured the gathered executives. “The Goldman Sachs thing. I read that one of the directors general—whatever they are called, CEO—took away one year as his salary $64 million. Sixty-four million dollars.” He sputtered to a stop, momentarily stunned by this sum (though, by the standards of Wall Street and Silicon Valley compensation, it’s not actually that much money). In an op-ed in TheWall Street Journal last year, even the economist Klaus Schwab—founder of the World Economic Forum and its iconic Davos meeting—warned that “the entrepreneurial system is being perverted,” and businesses that “fall back into old habits and excesses” could “undermin[e] social peace.”

 

 

Bridging the Divide

Not all plutocrats, of course, are created equal. Apple’s visionary Steve Jobs is neither the moral nor the economic equivalent of the Russian oligarchs who made their fortunes by brazenly seizing their country’s natural resources. And while the benefits of the past decade’s financial “innovations” are, as Volcker noted, very much in question, many plutocratic fortunes—especially in the technology sector—have been built on advances that have broadly benefited the nation and the world. That is why, even as the TARP-recipient bankers have become objects of widespread anger, figures such as Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett remain heroes.

And, ultimately, that is the dilemma: America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create. And even if a growing portion of those jobs are overseas, it is better to be the home of these innovators—native and immigrant alike—than not. In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever.

There is also the simple fact that someone will have to pay for the improved public education and social safety net the American middle class will need in order to navigate the wrenching transformations of the global economy. (That’s not to mention the small matter of the budget deficit.) Inevitably, a lot of that money will have to come from the wealthy—after all, as the bank robbers say, that’s where the money is.

It is not much of a surprise that the plutocrats themselves oppose such analysis and consider themselves singled out, unfairly maligned, or even punished for their success. Self-interest, after all, is the mother of rationalization, and—as we have seen—many of the plutocracy’s rationalizations have more than a bit of truth to them: as a class, they are generally more hardworking and meritocratic than their forebears; their philanthropic efforts are innovative and important; and the recent losses of the American middle class have in many cases entailed gains for the rest of the world.

But if the plutocrats’ opposition to increases in their taxes and tighter regulation of their economic activities is understandable, it is also a mistake. The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda—that, for instance, middle-class Americans could conclude that the world economy isn’t working for them and decide that protectionism or truly punitive taxation is preferable to incremental measures such as the eventual repeal of the upper-bracket Bush tax cuts.

Mohamed El-Erian, the Pimco CEO, is a model member of the super-elite. But he is also a man whose father grew up in rural Egypt, and he has studied nations where the gaps between the rich and the poor have had violent resolutions. “For successful people to say the challenges faced by the lower end of the income distribution aren’t relevant to them is shortsighted,” he told me. Noting that “global labor and capital are doing better than their strictly national counterparts” in most Western industrialized nations, ElErian added, “I think this will lead to increasingly inward-looking social and political conditions. I worry that we risk ending up with very insular policies that will not do well in a global world. One of the big surprises of 2010 is that the protectionist dog didn’t bark. But that will come under pressure.”

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. It is obvious which of these would be the better outcome for America, and the world. Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to recognize this. Because, in the end, there can never be a place like Galt’s Gulch.

 

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*Originally, the article mistakenly referred to the sponsor of the Sun Valley conference as Paul Allen. We regret the error.

October 27, 2011

Liberate Oakland!

Shut down the 1 percent on Wednesday!

Protect OccupySF by packing the hearing on the Avalos resolution Monday, Oct. 31, 10 a.m., in Supervisors’ Chamber, Room 250, San Francisco City Hall

 

by Occupy Oakland

Occupy Oakland holds its first General Assembly after retaking Oscar Grant Plaza in front of City Hall Tuesday evening and votes for a General Strike on Wednesday, Nov. 2.

Below is the proposal passed by the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011. In reclaimed Oscar Grant Plaza, 1,607 people voted – 1,484 voted in favor of the resolution, 77 abstained and 46 voted against it, passing the proposal at 96.9 percent. The General Assembly operates on a modified consensus process that passes proposals with 90 percent in favor and with abstaining votes removed from the final count.

 

Proposal

We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1 percent.

We propose a citywide general strike and we propose we invite all students to walk out of school. Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city.

All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them.

While we are calling for a general strike, we are also calling for much more. People who organize out of their neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, affinity groups, workplaces and families are encouraged to self-organize in a way that allows them to participate in shutting down the city in whatever manner they are comfortable with and capable of.

The whole world is watching Oakland. Let’s show them what is possible.

The Strike Coordinating Council will begin meeting every day at 5 p.m. in Oscar Grant Plaza before the daily General Assembly at 7 p.m. All strike participants are invited. Stay tuned for much more information, and see you next Wednesday.

Updates: Occupy Oakland retakes Oscar Grant Plaza, Occupy San Francisco thwarts raid

The 99 percent have continued Occupy Oakland and protected Occupy San Francisco. After a devastating early morning raid and a night of police repression and brutality, people did what they had to do: They returned to the site by the thousands.

This time the police stood down. In a triumphant return to Oscar Grant (Frank Ogawa) Plaza, 3,000 members of the 99 percent held their General Assembly. It was powerful. It was peaceful. And it could not be stopped.

Injustices that mandate the continuation and growth of the Occupy movement abound. Oakland spent several million dollars on its campaign Tuesday to shut down free speech in Oakland – a campaign so brutal that Scott Olsen, 24, a Marine veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq who had been staying at Occupy Oakland, is hospitalized in critical condition, his skull fractured by a police projectile.

Meanwhile, despite parents’ impassioned testimony and the attendance at a School Board meeting of a crowd of 300, bolstered by occupiers, the board voted Wednesday to close five schools: Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park and Santa Fe.

Supervisor John Avalos sits in support of Occupy San Francisco with thousands of protesters Wednesday night, Oct. 26, to prevent a raid threatened by Interim Mayor Ed Lee and Police Chief Greg Suhr. The presence of Avalos, who stayed until 4 a.m., along with several more supervisors, Public Defender Jeff Adachi and other elected officials, helped thwart the raid. – Photo: Jeff Chiu, AP

Across the Bay in San Francisco, hundreds gathered to stop a planned raid ordered by Interim Mayor Ed Lee. Community organizations, labor unions and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors came down to defend the camp and risk arrest.

 

“We have a responsibility to protect the legacy of this city as a haven for free speech, as well as to protect the residents,” said Supervisor John Avalos, who stayed at the camp until 4 a.m. along with four other supervisors. They were responding to calls from labor and community groups to join the peaceful protest in a show of solidarity and an attempt to head off a violent clash as San Francisco police marshaled forces to raid the encampment. Avalos is also a candidate for mayor.

Periodically, he reported, they heard reports of police heading to the area and amassing in two different locations. Avalos says he did not receive any response from repeated calls to Interim Mayor Lee, Police Chief Greg Suhr or Suhr’s deputies. Helicopters began hovering over the protest site at 9 p.m., adding to the tension among protesters after the violent conflicts the night before in Oakland.

This comes days after Avalos introduced a resolution supporting the goals of Occupy Wall Street and the right to peaceful assembly in San Francisco. The resolution, co-sponsored by Supervisors David Campos, Jane Kim and Eric Mar, would put the San Francisco Board of Supervisors officially on the record in support of the growing protest movement. It also explicitly called on the interim mayor to halt the crackdown on protesters and prevent further violence.

Supporters from Occupy Oakland streamed across on BART to stand with San Francisco – until BART shut down three stations in Oakland at 11 p.m. With hundreds picketing, chanting and rallying all through the night, the city wisely called off the raid.

“I have no doubt that the broad show of solidarity last night from the people of San Francisco is what prevented the police raid. I am proud that my colleagues and I were there to be a part of this small but significant victory.”

Community organizations, labor and faith leaders worked throughout the day yesterday, pushing both mayors to back off and let the encampments continue and calling people to come out and support. The mayors were told the movement would not be deterred and the people would come back.

Calls are being heard for the recall of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan. This movement is now too big to fail.

If you haven’t already, sign the petition to permanently prevent the raid in San Francisco.

Go visit your local encampment. Stay a while. Let’s find even more ways to connect Occupy, community organizing, labor and all of the 99 percent to keep this movement growing.

This story is based on a report from Causa Justa :: Just Cause, with additions by Bay View staff.

During the police raid by 500-600 officers from Oakland PD and 16 other jurisdictions on the Occupy Oakland camp in front of City Hall, the brutality by cops against peaceful protesters was crazy. This is one of the short trailers of a documentary being made by Tony Coleman. – Video: OneFam

Sauti Sol (Kenya)

Video: Ay feat Sauti Sol

- "I dont wanna be alone (Shukuru) "

 

 

Posted by KenyaChristian

 

Hail! Hail! Chuck Berry,

The Father of Rock & Roll,

Is 85

 

October 18th, 2011

 

“If you had to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon once said, “you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’” The man known as the father of rock and roll turns 85 today and he’s still going strong. To celebrate, we bring you this powerful 1958 performance of “Johnny B. Goode.”

Berry was born October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri. He developed a love of music early, and made his debut playing a blues song in a high school talent show. While still in high school, Berry was sentenced to juvenile prison for armed robbery. After getting out, he joined pianist Johnnie Johnson’s trio. It didn’t take long before Johnson was the sideman and Berry was the bandleader. His big break came in 1955, when he made a road trip to Chicago and sought out his hero, Muddy Waters. Waters suggested he go see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry returned to Chicago with a demo tape that included an up-tempo adaptation of a traditional country song called “Ida Red.” Chess liked it, but said it needed a new name. Berry recorded it as “Maybellene.” The song went to number one on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart. Over the next few years Berry virtually invented the Rock and Roll form, with songs like “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Johnny B.Goode,” and “No Particular Place to Go.”

“He was the king of rock and roll,” Jerry Lee Lewis said in the biopic Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. “My mama said, ‘You and Elvis are pretty good, but you’re no Chuck Berry.’” When Keith Richards inducted Berry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, he joked that he had stolen every lick Berry ever played. “The beautiful thing about Chuck Berry’s playing,” Richards wrote in his autobiography, Life, “was it had such an effortless swing. None of this sweating and grinding away and grimacing, just pure, effortless swing, like a lion.”

For one more look at the lion in action–this time playing “Roll Over Beethoven”–here’s another clip from the 1958 television broadcast:

 

OPENING FOR SUBMISSIONS ON OCTOBER 1, 2011.

CONTEST SUBMISSIONS MUST BE POSTMARKED FROM OCTOBER 1, 2011 THROUGH NOVEMBER 16, 2011.

 

2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Open Competition Awards
$3500 and publication
for two collections of poems
final judge: Cynthia Huntington

 

Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press are pleased to announce the selections for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards. Our final judge, Yusef Komunyakaa, selected Jacob Shores-Arguello's IN THE ABSENCE OF CLOCKS and Wally Swist's HUANG PO AND THE DIMENSIONS OF LOVE as this year's winners. Both collections will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in June 2012 and both authors will be awarded a $2000 prize and $1500 as an honorarium for a reading at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Both readings will follow the publication of the poets' collections by Southern Illinois University Press.

 

Below are the guidelines for the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition:

All unpublished, original collections of poems written in English by United States citizens and permanent residents are eligible* (individual poems may have been previously published). (*Current or former students, colleagues, and close friends of the final judge, Cynthia Huntington, and current and former students and employees of Southern Illinois University and authors published by Southern Illinois University Press are not eligible for the Open Competition.) For questions about judging, please visit http://www.CrabOrchardReview.siuc.edu/conpo3.html.> Two volumes of poems will be selected from an open competition of manuscripts postmarked October 1 through November 16, 2011. The winners will each receive a publication contract with Southern Illinois University Press. In addition, both winners will be awarded a $2000 prize and $1500 as an honorarium for a reading at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Both readings will follow the publication of the poets’ collections by Southern Illinois University Press.

Manuscripts should be typewritten and single-spaced (recommended length: 50 pages minimum to 100 pages maximum; 12 pt. type preferred). No more than one poem should appear on a page. A clean photocopy is recommended. Please do not send your only copy of the manuscript since manuscripts will not be returned, and please do not include illustrations. Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press assume no responsibility for damaged or lost manuscripts. All submissions must be accompanied by a $25 entry fee. Please make your check out to “Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.” All entrants will receive a one-year subscription to Crab Orchard Review.

Submit two title pages for the collection. The author’s name, address, e-mail, and daytime phone number should appear on the first title page only. The author’s name should appear nowhere else in the manuscript. An acknowledgments page listing poems previously published in magazines, journals, or anthologies should be placed after the second title page. All identifying materials will be removed before screening and the final judge sees only the first title page, table of contents, and text.

ALL ENTRIES MUST BE POSTMARKED OCTOBER 1, 2011 through NOVEMBER 16, 2011. (Since this is a postmark deadline, there is no need to send Express Mail, Fedex, or UPS. First Class or Priority Mail are preferred.)

Please address entries to:

Jon Tribble, Series Editor
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
(Open Competition Awards)
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
1000 Faner Drive
Carbondale, IL 62901

Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope for notification of contest results. If you would like confirmation that the manuscript has been received, please include a self-addressed, stamped postcard as well. Manuscripts may be under consideration elsewhere, but the series editor must be informed immediately if a collection is accepted for publication.

Announcement:

Northwestern’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize Series for Poets of Color

By Arturo On October 28, 2011

By Arturo R. García

Thanks to Northwestern University’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium for the heads-up regarding a new annual competition geared toward unpublished poets of color.

The PPC is teaming up with Northwestern University Press for the inaugural Drinking Gourd chapbook poetry prize. A panel of POC poets will select the winning entry, and the first prize chapbook will be introduced by poet

Northwestern University’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium (PPC) proudly announces a partnership with Northwestern University Press for the inaugural Drinking Gourd chapbook poetry prize, a first-book award for poets of color. Poet Ed Roberson will introduce the winner, and will also publish an accompanying chapbook of new work to launch the series.

The submission deadline is January 15th, 2012, and the winner will be notified by March 15th. The two chapbooks will be published in Fall 2012 by Northwestern University Press. Submission guidelines are under the cut.

Award

• Winner receives $350 prize money, publication by Northwestern University Press in Fall 2012, 15 copies of the book, and a featured reading. Results announced in March 2012.

Judging

• Judging will be conducted by a panel of senior minority poets and scholars assembled by the Northwestern University Poetry and Poetics Colloquium.

Eligibility

• Poets of color who have not previously published a book-length volume of poetry. Simultaneous submissions to other contests should be noted. Immediate notification upon winning another award is required.

Deadline

• Reading period begins January 15, 2012. Manuscripts must be received by January 15, 2012. To be notified that your manuscript has been received, please enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard. The winner will be announced on March 15, 2012.

Submission

•  Send two copies of a single manuscript. One manuscript per poet allowed.
• Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope to receive notification of results.
• Author’s name should not appear on any pages within the manuscript. Copy One must include a title page with the author’s brief bio (200 words, maximum) and contact information: author’s name, postal address, e-mail address and telephone number. Copy Two must include a cover sheet with the title only.
• Manuscript must be typed single-sided with a minimum font size of 11, paginated and 25-35 pages in length.
• Manuscript must include a table of contents and list of acknowledgments of previously published poems.
• Manuscript must be unbound. Use a binder clip—do not staple or fold. Do not include illustrations or images of any kind.
• Manuscripts not adhering to submission guidelines will be discarded without notice to sender.
• Due to the volume of submissions, manuscripts will not be returned.
• Post-submission revisions or corrections are not permitted.

Reading Fee

• $10. Enclose check with submission, made payable to Northwestern University.

Direct packet to:
Northwestern University Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Workshop
Drinking Gourd Prize Chapbook Series
University Hall, Room 215
1897 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Attn: Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb

Danahy Fiction Prize

Submission Guidelines

The Danahy Fiction Prize is an annual award of $1,000 and publication in Tampa Review. 

Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review, and all entries will be considered for publication.

1. All entrants receive a one-year subscription to Tampa Review. 
2. Submissions must be original, previously unpublished short fiction. We generally prefer manuscripts between 500 and 5,000 words, but stories falling slightly outside this range will also be considered. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but Tampa Review must be notified immediately if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Submissions are not accepted from current faculty or students at the University of Tampa. Editors will recuse themselves from judging entries from close friends and associates to avoid conflicts of interest.
3. Manuscripts should be double-spaced and include a cover page with author’s name, mailing address, and other contact information, plus a total word count.
4. Submissions can be made by mail or by using our online Submissions Manager. Enclose a $15 entry fee payable to “Tampa Review” with entries by mail; follow online instructions for submitting your entry fee through Submissions Manager (a small processing charge is added for online submissions.)
5. Entries must be postmarked (or date-stamped online) by Nov. 1, 2011.

The winner will be announced as soon as possible, usually early in the new year.

Submissions by mail should be sent to:

Tampa Review
Danahy Fiction Prize
The University of Tampa
401 West Kennedy Blvd.

Tampa, FL 33606-1490

Online submissions should use this link: Danahy Fiction Prize Submissions  

 

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We subscribe to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Contest Code of Ethics:
"CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to (1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; (2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and (3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage." 

On DVD/Blu-ray

- “Venus Noire”

(“Black Venus” -

The Hottentot Venus Film)

+ Review + Clip +Interview

It’s been over a year since I saw Venus Noire (Black Venus) at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2010, and it never received a stateside release; actually I’m not sure it got much of a release outside of the international film festival circuit and a few European territories.

So I’m betting most of you have never seen French/Tunisian filmmaker Abdel Kechiche’s problematic though worth-watching Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, otherwise derogatorily known as the Hottentot Venus film, which starred newcomer Yahima Torres in the title role.

The subject matter certain isn’t one that will attract audiences to the theater en masse; and the fact that the film is almost 3 hours long, with subtitles, likely didn’t exactly make potentially interested American distributors salivate at the film’s box office potential.

But if you’ve got one of those multi-region Blu-ray DVD players, you can purchase the film, because it’s available on home video in France (and maybe other European countries, though I could only verify France); it’s entirely a French financed and produced film by the way.

You’ll find it on Amazon’s France website (HERE) on sale for EUR 12.56 (about $18) for the DVD, or on Blu-ray for EUR 19.45 (about $27).

UPDATE: Emmanuel just alerted me to the fact that the film is available in NTSC (Region 1) on Amazon’s Canadian website for CDN$ 29.71 (about the same in USD). So, even better. You can purchase a disc HERE.

I wrote a lengthy review of it last year, after I saw it; and, as I said in that write-up, I was left with conflicting thoughts on the film, and I wasn’t even sure how I would review it, and I wanted to see it a second time hoping that would help clarify my thoughts. Unfortunately, I never got to see it again; and in re-reading that review I wrote a year ago, after 12+ months of not having to think about it, and then remembering it again today, I realized that I actually don’t agree with all I said in that initial critique. I’m having a much more adverse reaction to the film than I did back then; however, as already noted, a second viewing is necessary, and I’m planning to pick up a copy of the Blu-ray, re-watch and re-review it.

In the meantime, below you’ll find my initial review, as well as a trailer for the film, a clip from it, and an interview with star Yahima Torress…

First the trailer:

And here is the clip (sorry, these aren’t subtitled, but some of it is in English, and you kinda get what’s going on here):

 

And here’s Yahima Torres (one of the few subtitled interviews with her I could find):

 

And finally here’s my 2010 review:

So there I was waiting for the subway train after my screening of Venus Noire (Black Venus), and what did I see plastered almost all over one of those ubiquitous tunnel newsstands? Covers for various magazines, many unabashedly featuring the barely covered-up plump bottoms of predominantly black women in seductive poses - 2 dimensional images of voiceless bodies, objectified, exotified, envied, denigrated, and more; depending on the viewer.

And with that picture, Obvious Guy asks, so, really, has much changed in the 200 years since Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman found herself victim of the same kind of mixed gaze? Of course, there’s the perceived independence, and even false sense of power and control some might claim those in the present-day wield over their spectators (an illusory brand of feminism as I’ve heard others suggest), and they aren’t introduced in cages by a man carrying a whip (well, actually, some are), and Saartjie’s experiences were more direct and literal; but, frankly, the similarities can’t be ignored. I even considered that Saartjie’s torment was strictly race-based, and a result of its time; but I was able to dismiss that notion in realizing that there still certainly exists a racial “otherness” that precedes and influences the various gazes I mentioned above. For example, I still (unfortunately) hear stories about enthralled white women asking black women if they can touch their hair, ignorant of the sensation the request itself provokes.

The film opens in 1815, France, some time after Saartjie’s death, as a French academic, addressing what look like his peers, with a physical mold of Saartjie’s body on display, makes his scientific and historic case for why her “species” is inferior to theirs. The lengthy opening lecture is met with applause from his audience of all white men. The matter-of-fact nature of the entire sequence is revelatory in that it shows just how ignorant, yet assured of themselves these leaders of the world were, and helps explain their callous treatment of their perceived inferiors - a trend that continued long after they themselves perished.

Following that opening sequence, we travel back in time, 5 years, to 1810, London, some time after Baartman had been taken from Cape Town, with promises of wealth, via exhibition, in Europe. And so the tragic tale of the “freak show attraction” known as the Hottentot Venus began…

Like those women on the magazine covers, Saartjie is mostly mute throughout the film, her body language representative of her thoughts, and clearly, she isn’t exactly cherishing the spectacle that’s being made of her physical self - much of it some will find difficult to watch, as it should be. Writer/director Abdellatif Kechiche makes sure of that, with numerous scenes running quite lengthy - possibly 10 minutes or more in some cases.

Given the style in which the film is made, it felt almost like a documentary. Kechiche does little to distract from the narrative; the performances from the entire cast are realistic (you believe them), including Yahima Torres (as Baartman), Andre Jacobs, Olivier Gourmet, Elina Lowensohn, Francois Marthouret, Michel Gionti, and Jean-Christophe Bouvet; there’s virtually no soundtrack (any music heard occurs naturally within the scene); the mostly hand-held camera moves but, oddly, you forget that it’s there - partly due to the stark nature of the physical settings, and also of the subject matter itself; you may feel guilty enough to look away, but you can’t.

In reading some early reviews of the film before I saw it, I expected to be turned off by what some seemed to suggest would be gratuitous on the part of the director. But I didn’t feel what they felt, and I do wonder if the reactions to Venus Noire will be similar to a film like Precious (a story about a character whose physical self was also arguably a character in its own right), in that they will be separated along color lines. I could certainly make sense of a white film critic being made uncomfortable by the inhumane treatment Saartjie endured; her captors are white. And as I’ve already suggested, one can’t help but see connections to the present-day race- and sex-based prejudices that still exist. There’s a reason (amongst many) that films that center on whites-as-saviors-of-“others” continue to be produced. They like to see themselves in that light. Rarely do we see stories told that detail the inhumanities whites have dished out intently and indiscriminately on the darker-skinned “others” across the world, without retribution. In a way, it’s like a revision of history.

But no one comes to save Saartjie here; she lives a brutal life, and dies just as punishingly, with the film not necessarily making it clear who we are supposed to point our fingers to, for blame.

Although, I felt numb to it all, and I wonder if my reaction would mirror those of other people of African descent. By most accounts, I should have been appalled, disgusted, and completely turned off by Kechiche’s lengthy scenes showing all the horror that Saartjie endured before her early death. But, little of it actually disturbed me.

In thinking about it further, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily because the filmmaker had failed in creating moments within the film that would elicit specific reactions out of me (although, who am I to say what the filmmaker intended); I felt numb because, again, as I eluded to above, we have and still are so bombarded with similar parades of images of women’s bodies (specifically black women’s bodies), accentuating specific attributes, whether still or moving, that what I saw on screen, as revolting as it was, seemed almost, dare I say, “ordinary” to me.

From music videos, to magazines… however, less obvious and even deceptive are those studies, surveys, investigations into the so-called black experience that suggest an “otherness;” different, and thus must be observed and studied like monkeys in a cage. Whether it’s CNN’s redundant, surface “Black In America” series, the recent article about how black people use Twitter, or more direct, scientist claims that people of African descent are less intelligent than whites, and so on.

I’ve rallied against most of these ideas and occurrences on this blog and elsewhere, and will continue to do so. However, the point here is that this long-standing, continuous assault on our senses, all suggesting an inferiority as the basis for marginalization of a group of people, have had an effect on how I react to similar instances (real or fictional). Numb - which can be a dangerous place to be, because it could lead to a lessened desire to act against like injustices.

Saartjie doesn’t speak very much in the film, as I already stated; usually only when spoken to; we don’t really get a sense for how she feels. Certainly, as I said above, her body language leaves little doubt that this isn’t the kind of life she thought she would be leading, or that was promised to her by the man who brought her to Europe (he lied, telling her and her slave owner that she’d essentially be a song and dance act, not the circus freak show he would eventually convince her to be); but I would have liked to hear her wrestle with her predicament; here she is, seemingly a willing (coerced) participant in an act, sharing in the benefits afforded by the booty (no pun intended), though unequally, with her captors; but struggling to come to terms with the truth of who (or rather what) she is to the ignorant, yet curious and enchanted audience that pays to watch her perform. To contemporize it, think of the strippers who are “trapped” by the money they earn used to feed, house and clothe themselves, but who struggle with the impact the work they do has on their lives, and the perception others have of them. Not exactly the same thing as what Saatjie endured, but I’m trying to make sense of what I felt was one of the film’s notable deficiencies. We see Saartjie through the eyes of her captors and the audiences that pay to see her - as a lottery ticket, and a spectacle respectively - but we get few glimpses into the mind of the woman that the body belongs to.

From the film, we know she despised her treatment, she’s outright defiant in moments, and the filmmaker does attempt to humanize her, giving her some 3-dimensionality; and I never once felt like he was being exploitative; but, as is, it’s still questionable just how much control she really had over her predicament (although we know that she was a slave). In the film, she remains something of a mystery, and I can’t say whether that was all intentional on the filmmaker’s part, as, I’d guess, he tried to piece together a personality based on limited availability of information, written by others about her.

There’s also that saying about the the presence of mental shackles even in the absence of tangible ones.

Director Kechiche’s film isn’t a lecture on the matters it documents. Each scene is presented “as is,” without any obvious commentary, you could say. It’s neither what I’d describe as a call to action. You are simply witness to an ugly injustice, an accomplice even, and your reaction to it is just that… your reaction, based on your own life experiences, which will also determine what you choose to do about whatever it is you felt, assuming you’re inspired to act in any way.

Don’t go into this looking for a biopic of Baartman, as you will be disappointed. It’s more a document of a very specific part of her life, that which she’s most known for. And despite the title of the film, she instead feels like one of several equal players in this tragedy, instead of its star center. There’s also what I’d call a disconnect between the filmmaker and the material. Like I said, he doesn’t necessarily take sides. In fact, the film played out more like a series of filmed news reports.

It does take a few creative liberties, however, the script remains fairly close to the true story of Saartjie Baartman. At almost 3 hours in length, some editing could have been done to trim it a bit, without losing its substance; and that running time makes it a tough sell for audiences outside of the expected art-house crowd - especially here in the USA.

Although, I certainly hope it does receive a wide enough release. I’m curious about global reactions to the film. I suspect most aren’t at all familiar with Saartjie Baartman’s story, or are even aware of the derogatory “Hottentot Venus.” In a way, I actually envy those who’ll be seeing the film ignorant of the real-life story it’s based on. Most importantly, it means that one is less likely to spend time comparing the film’s details to what they know of the historic figure the characterization is inspired by. I can only imagine what their reactions would be, but I expect sharply contrasting sets of opinions.

I’m left with conflicting thoughts on the film, and I wasn’t even sure how I would review the film. I feel like I could write volumes on the experience I  had watching it. But maybe that’s all a good thing. I think a second viewing might be helpful in clarifying my thoughts. If anything, it’s not a film one walks out of the theater and immediately forgets. Other reviews I’ve read thus far have expressed concern about the film being hard to watch - not because it’s a bad film, but due to the contemptible scenarios Baartman lived through as explicitly documented in the film. As I’ve said before, the subject matter is already controversial enough, that any film made about Baartman will find it impossible to escape controversy. Kechiche’s handling of it is obviously crucial, and I’d say he handles it better than I expected. It certainly should inspire further discussion, especially with regards to contemporary correlations.

Definitely see it if it comes your way. I’m looking forward to the conversations that follow…

tambay posted