Something nice and laid back to start the weekend. Manu Chao.

The USA supreme court has allowed a $400 billion lawsuit against a group of fifty multinational cooperations, the majority of them US based, to proceed. The lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Apartheid victims who suffered human rights abuses under the Apartheid government. The list of cooperations are accused of supporting Apartheid by doing business with the Apartheid regime and includes Bank of America, Ford, General Motors, Deutsche Bank, Exxon Mobil, Colgate Palmolive and IBM.

It is not clear however how a private lawsuit of this nature will benefit the majority of people in South Africa. The post-Apartheid, ANC led South African government apparently sees the suit as a “a violation of its sovereignty” and opposes the suit because “it would hurt its ongoing efforts to foster reconciliation and improve the economic security of all its citizens”. I’m not sure what that means since three trillion South African rands (ZAR) should take care of our annual national budget for education for the next 20 years or our health budget for the next 40 years. I can only assume that it is a diplomatic euphemism meaning that the international business community will retaliate by punishing the new South African economy if the victims of Apartheid dare to demand compensation.

link : U.S. top court clears way for multibillion-dollar anti-apartheid lawsuit

link : South African budget

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court - apparently handcuffed by possible conflicts of interest - has allowed a multibillion-dollar federal lawsuit from South African blacks and others to proceed. The suit claims U.S. and foreign companies should be held liable for helping the former white-led apartheid government.

Four members of the high court were forced to remove themselves from consideration of the cases. Although no reason was given for their recusal, financial disclosure reports show Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito, own stock in several of the companies being sued. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son Gregory is a top manager in investment bank Credit Suisse.

The justices in a brief order Monday said that “because the court lacks a quorum,” they let stand a lower court ruling allowing the class-action lawsuit to go forward.

Under federal rules, at least six justices must hear a case that is accepted for review. With four of the nine recused, the high court had no choice but to uphold the lower court ruling.

The lawsuits want nearly three dozen U.S. and foreign companies to pay as much as $400 billion to South African blacks and others who say they suffered under that country’s official policy of oppressive separation of the races between 1948 and 1994.

A federal court last October agreed to hear some 10 related lawsuits. The Bush administration argued the appeals court was wrong to accept the “unprecedented and sprawling” claims.

The governments of Britain, Germany, Switzerland, and post-apartheid South Africa filed supporting memos.

The private suits were filed under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which allows foreigners access to American courts when they allege U.S. laws or treaties were violated. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act - passed in 1986 over President Reagan’s veto - banned U.S. companies from establishing new trade and business with South Africa. Other nations had similar laws.

Among the key plaintiffs is Lungisile Ntsebeza, a sociology professor at the University of Cape Town. He was arrested by the white-controlled South African government in 1976, and spent nearly six years in prison for his anti-apartheid activism. He claims he was beaten and tortured while in custody, and later was banished for six years to a remote part of the country.

In his lawsuit, Ntsebeza’s lawyers say companies that continued to do business in his homeland provided “resources, such as technology, money and oil, to the South African government,” which in turn used them “to further its polices of oppression and persecution of the African majority.”

The lawsuits are part of a years-long global effort to hold a range of parties accountable for decades of human rights violations in South Africa.

That nation’s current black-majority government opposes the lawsuit, saying it would hurt its ongoing efforts to foster reconciliation and improve the economic security of all its citizens.

The Bush administration, in its brief, said, “Litigation such as this would also interfere with the ability of the U.S. government to employ the full range of foreign policy options when interacting with regimes the United States would like to influence. … Such policies would be greatly undermined if the corporations that invest or operate in a foreign country are subjected to lawsuits under the ATS.”

The Justice Department argued the ATS allows lawsuits only against the South African government, not companies that allegedly “aided and abetted” repressive polices.

link : Supreme court upholds apartheid-era lawsuit

I just watched a wonderful little movie with one of those beautiful moments that tends to get stuck in your memories for ever. The movie called Stranger than fiction is about a dull and socially invisible tax collection man who realizes that he is the main character in a modern tragedy and that the author of the book is planning to “kill” him in the ending. The foreknowledge of his inevitable and imminent death spurs him into waking up to life and starting to live his dreams, the biggest one being to learn the guitar and to play a quaintly romantic pop sang called Whole Wide World. The lyrics go something like this.

When I was a young boy
My mama said to me
There’s only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in TahitiI’d go the whole wide world
I’d go the whole wide world
Just to find her

Or maybe she’s in the Bahamas
Where the Carribean sea is blue
Weeping in a tropical moonlit night
Because nobody’s told her ’bout you

I’d go the whole wide world
I’d go the whole wide world
Just to find her
I’d go the whole wide world
I’d go the whole wide world
Find out where they hide her

Why am I hanging around in the rain out here
Trying to pick up a girl
Why are my eyes filling up with these lonely tears
When there’re girls all over the world

Is she lying on a tropical beach somewhere
Underneath the tropical sun
Pining away in a heatwave there
Hoping that I won’t be long

I should be lying on that sun-soaked beach with her
Caressing her warm brown skin
And then in a year or maybe not quite
We’ll be sharing the same next of kin

I’d go the whole wide world
I’d go the whole wide world
Just to find her
I’d go the whole wide world
I’d go the whole wide world
Find out where they hide her

Artist: WRECKLESS ERIC

Just two chords in there: E and A. If you also feel like a frustrated revenue collector and you want to start living for a change get up from your couch, go buy yourself a guitar and try Acoustic Guitar Lesson for a little bit of guidance.

Here is a slightly more colorful version of the same song by the Monkees: