Anti-Empire

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See also: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-quigley/what-the-mainstream-media_b_424126.html

I've known a lot of Haitians. Opinions are very divided. As are politics here. I came across a website, electionnightincanada.com, with some banners and useful resources targetted at educating people about the essential issue re. Harper & democracy, that goes beyond prorogation & Saturday rallies.

In the commnents section of his article on Znet, Paul Street has posted the following:


"Classquake" term comes from the people themselves!

By Street, Paul

On the term classquake, Turns out that it ''first appeared in print in an essay in Nature (1976, vol. 260) by Phil O'Keefe, Ken Westgate and Ben Wisner called 'Taking the Naturalness out of Natural Disasters.' It is mentioned also in an essay they contributed to my edited volume Interpretations of Calamity (1983). However, they also do not claim authorship of the term and ...what they wrote is quite important:"

The poor are often clearly aware of their own vulnerability. Why else would the devastated slum dwellers of Guatemala City refer to the earthquake as a 'classquake" (Interpretations of Calamity, p.277)

This (above) is from Kenneth Hewitt, who wrote me to make the correction, for which I am very grateful.

Thank you for this information, David.
I often find that so-called radical perspectives in academically oriented circles are simply drawn from commonsensical understandings of people of their situations. Certainly, this could be said of the Iraq invasion - early polls had something like 90% of Iraqis saying it was for oil...Similarly, people in the "global South" have long named the IMF, WB and WTO has instruments of Imperialism....One wonders how we don't see the obvious.

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