The centerpiece of Haitian President Martelly's policies so far is his scholarship program. It is an ambitious plan to provide free education to every primary school-aged child, between 6-12 years old or from grades 1-6. President Martelly's press office provided some of the plan's details.

Barbancourt 17, a camp on a construction site south of the Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport (sud-aeroport), was evicted last week – on Thursday September 29 - by the International Organization on Migration (IOM), the manager of Haiti's post-earthquake camps. Home to 43 families, the camp dates to immediately after the earthquake in January 2010.

I spent the weekend in Salina, Kansas, of all places.

I read:

Anthony James Joes's Urban Guerrilla Warfare
The US Marine Corps's Guerrilla and how to fight him
Carlos Marighella's Manual of the Urban Guerrilla

The latter 2 books are from the 1960s and I read them as background. Joes is a counterinsurgency theorist who analyzes a wide range of urban insurgencies and comes to several interesting conclusions:

1. Urban insurgencies almost always fail militarily because they lack any safe areas and because they attack their enemy where it is strongest.

Published on ZNet

Ha-Joon Chang is a development economist with a special interest in economic history. His most recent book, “23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism”, as well as previous books, have critiqued neoliberalism and laissez-faire economics. I interviewed him by telephone on August 9.

Between economic austerity and riot stories, my reading is out of sync with the headlines. I've been reading more about African conflicts, especially very recent and ongoing ones. Specifically:

-Allen and Vlassenroot's book on the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.

-Jason Stearns's book on the Congo war, "Dancing in the Glory of Monsters".

-My friend Lansana Gberie's "A Dirty War in West Africa" on Sierra Leone, and a book he critiques, Paul Richards's "Fighting for the Rainforest".

-Assis Malaquias's "Rebels and Robbers" on Angola's civil war.

I read Metro Today on the subway today. There was a story blaming City of Toronto staff for squandering - wait for it - up to $1 MILLION dollars in sole-sourced contracts.

So, Rob Ford is right, and there is waste to be cut, eh?

Except that $1 million is, for example, 1/3 of what the KPMG report that suggested closing libraries and taking fluoride out of the water cost.

Or 1/64 of the vehicle registration tax whose disappearance is now contributing to the supposed $700 million deficit.

And oh yes, it's 1/700 of the deficit.

Sorry for the hiatus. Partly I've been busy with work and life and been unable to spend as much time doing articles. Partly I am trying to train myself to not relate to the world through 2000 word articles but to have a little more variety, including longer things (ie., books), one of which I am actually going to publish after having it sit on my hard disk for a few years. Related, I have been trying to stop and think, to be less in a reactive mode, which is what the twitter and blogging and surfing seem to encourage me to do.

This is a video that should be watched widely. These are Harper voters.

Francis Fox Piven (who has had her own experiences recently with Harper's US mentors) and Richard Cloward wrote a very interesting book called "Why Americans Don't Vote", which showed how a key electoral strategy in the US has always been demobilizing opposing voters, a strategy just as important as mobilizing supporters. If you look at the way Harper has worked over the past few years, you can see that demobilizing strategies are a part of the package here too.