Simply The Best

The YCL’s Castro Ngobese is the best young talent in the Spokesperson business. His ground-breaking releases set a pace that few others can match. Comrade Castro was first out for the YCL with their rejection of the falsification of P W Botha’s role in history. Great headline, too. See the first link below. The rest of the documents linked below today are from Business Day and its spin-off, the Weekender. The Communist University trawls many sources, national and international but often, as today, the Business Day is the one that comes up with the goods. Peter Bruce, politically nutty, personally not always pleasant, is the successful editor of the daily paper, while Simba Makunike is listed as Executive Editor of the Weekender. Vukani Mde’s Political Diary is cooking again in the Weekender. Linked below are a couple of items from it that happen to glance briefly at Castro Ngobese’s work. Quality respects quality. The front page of the Weekender reports on the latest round of harassment of Ngoako Ramatlhodi by the Scorpions/NPA. Journalists should be like shop stewards. The bosses don’t usually victimise the heroes. They victimise the apparently compromised ones. The good shop steward knows that these have to be defended vigorously, or the boss will get a purchase and a leverage, and the courage to pick off others. Ramatlhodi may not be everybody’s idea of a political hero, but he must be defended. Heidelberg is a dorp in the hills south of Johannesburg. In it there is a rotten carcase of a company called Karan Beef, where management, security, police, army and prison officials braai together (with free meat from the company) and shoot workers together. P W Botha and Eugene de Kock would still feel at home in Heidelberg today. Maybe the Business Day could have been a bit stronger with this one, but at least they reported it for once (the strike at Karan has been on since July 28, 2006). This is the kind of story that needs a Sunday newspaper “investigative” report, over several pages, with photos. Neva Makgetla’s and Joseph Stiglitz’ articles both concentrate on the plight of the poor petty-bourgeoisie. When we say “the workers and the poor” we must know that the poor in question are petty-bourgeois, and that poor petty-bourgeois (as much as they might be capitalists in their minds) are generally poorer than employed workers, and often a lot poorer. Read these articles to see why. Rhoda Kadalie is not notably a friend of the working class (although a grand-daughter of the great Clements Kadalie of ICU fame) but is even less of a friend to the woman she refers to as “Queen BEE”, Brigalia Bam, who it seems has quite a few different honey-pots on the side apart from the job that makes her haughty tones so familiar to South Africans – the “Independent” Electoral Commission. It is quite possible there is a history between the Kadalies and the Bams, who are probably like the Hillys and the Billys in the Cape. Finally, showing how wide the Business Day can range in a short period, the engineer-politician Andrew Kenny had a worthwhile letter published in the Business Day about “global warming”. Meanwhile, our Communist University wikispace web site has been pumping good material for a year, has clocked up one-third of a million “page views”, and is the second most viewed out of 9619 other public wikispaces in the world. The SACP Johannesburg Central Branch meets today (Sunday Nov. 5th) at 10h00 in the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison, Johannesburg. Further discussion of the NDR is anticipated, woth proposals looking forward to next year’s SACP Congress. Click on these links: YCL rejects falsification of P W Botha's role in history, YCLSA (573 words) PW deserves no honour, Vukani Mde, B Day Weekender (287 words) Ramatlhodi strikes, Mde, Brown and Musgrave, B Day Weekender (461 words) COSATU to Mdladlana, Amy Musgrave, Business Day (498 words) Army of the unemployable, Neva Makgetla, Business Day (713 words) Lose-lose tyranny of King Cotton, Joseph Stiglitz, Business Day (735 words) IEC, Brigalia Bam, and Lotto, Rhoda Kadalie, Business Day (799 words) Political science, Andrew Kenny, Business Day (319 words)