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December 20, 2006

Letter to the Globe: Ignatieff on

In what may become a regular thing, we're once again sharing letters that likely won't be published in the Globe. Here's one by Stefan Christoff. Sending a letter? cc: it to dru [at] dominionpaper.ca.

Stéphane Dion has placed his formal Liberal leadership rivals in prominent party positions including Michael Igantieff. Yesterday's Globe and Mail editorial on this subject pin-pointed Ignatieff's political "fumbles" as a potential headache for Dion in a looming election. I am curious which Ignatieff fumbles the Globe is referring to, could one be Ignatieff's public assessment that the Israeli military's air strike on the Lebanese town of Qana on July 30th was a "war crime"? Of all Ignatieff's political mishaps including his public endorsement for the internationally condemned U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, labeling the Israeli military's killing of dozens of civilians in southern Lebanon a "war crime" to any unbiased observer is absolutely accurate.

Stefan Christoff
Montreal

December 19, 2006

Afghan correspondent

The Dominion just published its first dispatch from Afghanistan, by correspondent Chris Sands. It promises to be the first of many.

December 12, 2006

Bleeding Afghanistan

Seven Oaks has an interview with Sonali Kolhatkar and Jim Ingalls, co-authors of Bleeding Afghanistan, which I neglected to link to long ago.

December 07, 2006

Letter to the Globe: Jimenez and Chavez

Dear Globe Editors,

In her most recent dispatch from Venezuela, Marina Jimenez strongly implies--without any evidence--that recently re-elected President Hugo Chavez is anti-beauty pageant. Earlier, we heard about how Venezuelans like to shop, and again, it was implied that this is a slap in the face of Chavez's socialist agenda. Again, no real evidence was provided. I look forward to future dispatches discussing how, despite Chavez's agenda (recently bolstered with a 60% mandate), Venezuelans continue to enjoy going to the beach, watching movies, eating dessert and admiring cute puppies.

Dru Oja Jay
Montreal

November 16, 2006

Machiavelli on...

From Wikipedia's page on Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince:

When in the acquisition of foreign territories with dissimilar customs and languages a prince must have both fortune and ability. For in the acquisition of an appendage state of various customs and languages dissimilar from yours, "many difficulties arise." The best strategy in this situation is for the prince to physically reside in the new territory, so that he can quickly put down rebellions and can instill loyalty and fear into his subjects. In addition, a foreign prince would be less inclined to attack a territory when its prince is present. The next best alternative is to establish settlements in the new appendage state. Settlements are cheap and leave the inhabitants of the territory relatively undisturbed, while still asserting a prince's presence in the territory. However, the worst alternative is to occupy the new territory with troops, which are expensive and cause everyone to suffer.

November 13, 2006

New Indigenous

New Socialist's most recent issue is on Indigenous resistance, and is guest edited by Taiaiake Alfred, Glen Coulthard and Deborah Simmons.

November 11, 2006

Foxy?

Shunpiking looks at the feds' role in tensions in East-coast fisheries.

The bizarre tale of how fox hunting continues in Britain, through the use of golden eagles (via Colby Cosh).

A series of posts on "progressive" politics, rape, sexism and mental illness from Marginal Notes.

The latest post-"Orange Revolution" wrangling in the Ukraine (also via Cosh).

November 09, 2006

Jensen on the Obvious

Robert Jensen: "I hear little coming from Democratic Party leaders that suggests they will pursue policies that will significantly turn from an unsustainable capitalism or a profoundly immoral empire. Instead, they talk of different strategies and tactics for managing those systems."

Which brings up the question: is Bolton not getting Senate approval really a good thing? Can replacing him with someone who is less abrasive and more effective at implementing the same agenda really be called progress?

November 08, 2006

Democratic Consequences

Alexander Cockburn: "Pick a topic--the war, the economy, a two million-plus prison population, the environment, the condition of organized labor, the Bill of Rights--and can you recall any Democrat this fall having said anything suggesting that in the event Democrats recapture either the House or the Senate or both anything of consequence might occur?"

October 31, 2006

Attacking Iran, Losing an Army

Conservative commentator William S. Lind speculates that if the US (or Israel) launches a missile attack on Iran, it could ultimately result in the demise of the American troops in Iraq, who could be trapped if their supply lines were cut.

September 27, 2006

From Good Wife to Shrink/Sex Kitten

Marginal Notes maps the evolving role of women in the household.

September 15, 2006

Montreal Shooting Coverage

J. Kelly Nestruck has a bunch of excerpts from weblog entries written by people close to the Dawson College shooting.

Keith Jones of the World Socialist Web Site identifies an interesting theme in media coverage the day after the shooting:

An editorial in the National Post affirmed, "To the extent" shootings like those at Columbine and Dawson College "follow a pattern, it is not one that can be traced to any particular social or technological phenomenon. ...

"Instead of hunting for external phenomena on which to blame this tragedy, Canadians should focus their attention on the real 'root cause' of school shootings: evil, troubled souls."

Not to be outdone, English Canada's newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail, published three columns that all reprised the theme that Wednesday's events were inexplicable and not in anyway related to the social environment.

As the headline for his column, Roy MacGregor used a remark made by the father of the sole fatality victim of a 1999 school shooting in Taber, Alberta: "If you can make sense of this, let me know." Christie Blatchford, for her part, proclaimed the phenomenon of school shootings akin to a freak of nature and just as unpredictable and unmanageable. John Ibbitson made the obvious point that mass-killers are alienated from society. But he declared it pointless to try to answer the question as to why people could become so alienated and so angry as to run amuck, doing horrific violence to other and themselves. It's "just evil in our midst," said Ibbitson. "... No society has found a way to prevent, or even identify, minds warped to the point where they become a lethal menace."

Yet shooting-sprees, let alone mass shootings at schools and colleges, have not always been regular occurrences.

What causes a given individual to seek vindication and validation through such a vile form of action as mass killing is undoubtedly the product of a unique combination of personal despair and extreme disorientation, but a combination that emerges in and is reinforced by a very definite social environment.

At the very least, it seems utterly silly to dismiss the possibility that use of violence to solve political problems (and the attendant violent propaganda made available for public consumption) doesn't has nothing to do with events like this seems, let's say, premature.

Seattle-based singer/songwriter Jim Page has a painfully beautiful song about the Columbine shooting called "It's not supposed happen but it did". The lyrics aren't online, but a few lines in the middle of the song goes something like this:

Bang another high school massacre
Trench coat terror, walkin' down a long dark hall
Like a video game gone real--oh my god they're gonna kill em all
And they almost did, they were good clean kids
It's not supposed to happen but it did.

In sad Colorado the stadium was filled with the dearly beloved all gathered in silence
All of the tears and the trembling fears of a culture gone crazy with violence
Their minds were numb, in the shivering sun--light
It's not supposed to happen but it did.

The singer sang out about the love of Jesus and the faraway reach of the savior's good right hand
The prayers were spoke but no Lazarus awoke from the terminal peace of this damaged land
And their eyes were glazed--these were dangerous days
It's not supposed to happen but it did.

And the President spoke with a voice like gunsmoke
he said there's too much aggression, our ways will have to change
And the bombers he sent off to Kosovo went but nobody seemed to notice anything strange
And how would you feel, beneath a sky made of steel?
It's not supposed to happen but it did

The general droned as his bright medals shone
And for peace, he fairly did shout it
And he never looked back at what he did in Iraq and nobody asked him about it
They just tried to accept, as they silently wept

The fighter planes flew through the stadium blue
It was an honor formation a thundering roar
The squadron leader he was a high school graduate and he loved his alma mater and that's what it was for
And reality spun with its anchor undone
It's not supposed to happen but it did.

Please don't think me a fool, uncaring or cruel
but I have to ask questions where questions have grown
Who are these ones with their official big guns and how they dare complain about the violence they have sewn?
My heart is undone for these friends and relations whose lives have gone hollow and may never repair
Oh but the hypocrisy screams when I think of these monsters pretending to care
And the silence will roar in this country of war...

It's not supposed to happen but it did.

While I doubt the "culture gone crazy with violence" bit resonates with most people living in Canada (due to prevailing mythology, I mean), it's pretty interesting to see the parallels with the events of seven years ago, which apparently influenced Kimveer Gill. On the one hand, General Rick "our job is to kill people" Hillier, gets all kinds of kudos from media commentators for his, uh, refreshing frankness. But then this event is just totally inexplicable, and that point of view is apparently so important that it needs to be repeated with some frequency.

September 12, 2006

The truth about the truth about 9/11

While the CBC ran an interview with a leading members of the "9/11 Truth Movement", the World Socialist Web Site has compiled some pretty interesting information about 9/11. They quote Nafeez Mosaddeq's The War on Truth:

In summary, despite being well known to authorities, Mohamed Atta seems to have led a rather charmed life. Although listed since 1986 on the State Department’s terrorist watch list, he was repeatedly permitted to enter, leave, and return to the United States freely. He had been under surveillance by US agents between January and May 2000 due to his suspicious purchase of large amounts of chemicals, which might be used to make explosives. In January 2001 he was detained by INS agents at Miami International Airport for 57 minutes due to previously overstaying a visa and failing to produce a proper visa to enter the US to train at a Florida flight school. But that did not stop him. Despite the FBI’s longstanding concern that terrorists might be attending flight schools in the US, Atta was allowed to enroll in the Florida flight school. By April 2001, he was stopped by police for driving without a license. He failed to show up in court in May and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. But that did not stop him either, because the warrant was never executed—although he was subsequently arrested for drunk driving on two more occasions. Throughout this period in the US, Atta never made any attempt to operate under an alias, traveling, living, and studying at the flight school under his real name. Stranger still, Atta was in regular email contact with current and former employees of major US defense contractors, as revealed by the regular email list of some 40 individuals he maintained, discovered by the FBI in September 2001.

I usually try to point out that one need only look at the undisputed public record to see that things are deeply amiss: that the CIA funded radical Islamic militants for years; there was never an actual investigation into 9/11; no one can reasonably dispute that Bush had information about imminent terrorist attacks, and so on. That said, there is a real need for investigative work that confirms (or renders hollow) information like that cited above.

September 11, 2006

Albritton takes a break

Back to Iraq 3.0: "Which is why I took a break. I got tired of defending myself to anklebiters who frankly had no idea what they were talking about. I got tired of going out every day, risking the life of my driver, translator and myself, only to be told I can’t do anything put parrot Hezbollah propaganda. It was insulting and it pissed me off. To all you people who think you could do better in a war zone, bring it on."

August 28, 2006

This has been your leftist in-fight

It seems that Counterpunch's Alexander Cockburn and by As'ad AbuKhalil of Angry Arab News Service are having a little spat over the authenticity of an interview that CP ran with Hezbollah's Nasrallah.

Letter to the Editor

So the one letter of mine that the Globe published was a late-night toss-off in which I very delicately suggest that Michael Ignatieff is a whore to power. They don't seem to like the ones with actual facts in them.

What's fun about this, is that we get a first-hand look at what it's like to be edited by the good people at the Globe. The original letter follows. The bits in red were removed by the editor.

* * *

In his fascinating, epic monograph on "Iggy," Michael Valpy illustrates the candidate's tendency to make major shifts in his thinking, gaining him a great deal of attention. Not explicitly said, but nonetheless evident from Valpy's account, is that in each case, Ignatieff's turns have been in favour of those in power: Thatcher during the coal strike, then Bush with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the ruthless bombing of Lebanon. In the interceding years, surely there have been occasions for controversial, nuanced intellectual stands that turn away from those with money and power. On such occasions, Mr. Ignatieff has been absent. We should endeavor to find out why this is so--that is, if we find the obvious answer to be insufficient.

* * *

In all, I'm a bit embarassed that this letter made it in, though it was the only one one of two they printed that was even vaguely critical of Iggy. Let this be a lesson to all who care to listen: don't write letters to the editor at 3am that you don't want to be seen by thousands of people. Obvious, I know, but it's easy to get used to letters not being printed.

August 12, 2006

Batsignal

A Tiny Revolution: "Apparently there's some kind of batsignal for the U.S. punditocracy that tells them all what to write each week."

July 28, 2006

Foreign Concept

CalgaryGrit: "foreign affairs are definitely taking on a larger role in this contest than I would have imagined back in March."

July 26, 2006

And now for some non-war coverage, dude

Daniel Cassidy has an etymological history of the the word 'dude'.

July 20, 2006

Buckets of Wells

Two lines from Paul Wells:

"Jack Layton's NDP has so far shown little ability to capitalize on Liberal weakness. And the resentment of leftish voters who think he caused Liberal weakness is Layton's biggest problem." [original emphasis]

"Conservatism opens itself to ridicule when it becomes false nostalgia in pursuit of a world that never existed. A prime minister exposes himself to trouble when he treats every file the way Zinedine Zidane treated one opponent."

July 19, 2006

Kim Jong-Il's take?

Kim Myong-chol, apparently an "unofficial" spokesperson for the North Korean government, lays out their case for Pyongyang's missile tests in Asia Times.

The North Korean situation always strikes me as a bit strange, possibly because you never hear some of the most obvious points:

1. North Korean nukes are useless to North Korea, except as a deterent against invasion. If they were to use them, the entire country would be instantly vapourized by the US. It's called mutually assured destruction, and the concept has been around for a long time, though in this case the destruction of one side would be more assured than the other. What it does do is give them a way to prevent a US invasion and force the US to negotiate.

2. What do the North Koreans want? Above all else, the ability to do their thing within their borders, and outside of their borders without intervention from the US. As Myong-chol puts it, "live and let live". A non-aggression pact.

On the power side, the US's use it or lose it approach to global power means that it has to maintain its prerogative of intervening in states that aren't, in the word of one analyst, "responsive" enough to its needs.

On the public rhetoric side, North Korea's human rights record makes this a difficult conceit for folks in the west from across the political spectrum. Anyone casual observer of US foreign policy will know that this consideration has nothing to do with it.

However, I would tentative add:

3. The single most significant moral justification for the Stalinist unity in North Korea is the (real, omnipresent) threat of US military intervention. Remove that, and two things happen: the legitimacy of authoritarianism will begin to erode (though I'd imagine it would take a long time) and so would the legitimacy of the US's ability to dictate who is and isn't a legitimately sovereign nation.

It's for that second reason that the US will never sign a non-aggression pact with North Korea, unless of course Kim Jong Il's "brinksmanship" is as good as Mr. Myong-chol believes it is.

The other possible result is the success of US policy, the most likely result of which will be a "successful" invasion like that in Iraq. However, it will be much harder to carry out and many more people will likely be killed before a US puppet regime can be installed.

Wikipedia has some interesting reading on North Korea's relations with the "international community".

July 18, 2006

One-sided Analysis

Tanya Reinbart: "Whatever may be the fate of the captive soldier Gilad Shalit, the Israeli army's war in Gaza is not about him. As senior security analyst Alex Fishman widely reported, the army was preparing for an attack months earlier and was constantly pushing for it, with the goal of destroying the Hamas infrastructure and its government."

Ramzy Baroud: "The capture of Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit is an act of self-defense. According to international law and the Geneva Conventions, he can be considered a prisoner of war, but not according to CNN, Fox News and the increasingly spineless BBC, which presents the soldier as a victim, who was 'kidnapped' by Palestinian 'militants' who are 'affiliated' with the Hamas government."

Former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison: "A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)"

July 17, 2006

What he said: Lerner on Israel in Gaza and Lebanon

Rabbi Michael Lerner: "The people of the Middle East are suffering again as militarists on all sides, and cheerleading journalists, send forth missiles, bombs and endless words of self-justification for yet another pointless round of violence between Israel and her neighbors. For those of us who care deeply about human suffering, this most recent episode in irrationality evokes tears of sadness, incredulity at the lack of empathy on all sides, anger at how little anyone seems to have learned from the past, and moments of despair as we once again see the religious and democratic ideals subordinated to the cynical realism of militarism."

July 03, 2006

Counterpunch Twofer

Happy, uh, Dominion Day!

Two good ones from CP. CounterPunch, that is.

Alex Cockburn discusses how Gates, Buffet et alia < a href="http://counterpunch.org/cockburn07032006.html">could better aid the third world with their billions.

Julia Olmstead talks about the promise of using biofuel to replace foreign oil, and how it would require using "nearly double the amount of land" currently used for crops in the US, and plant it all in corn.

June 12, 2006

What's more effective: Nothing, or the War on Terror?

Gwyn Dyer: How Canada Reacted to Sikhs in 1985 Is Still Relevant

It was immediately clear that the terrorists were Sikhs seeking independence from India, but here's what Canada didn't do: It didn't send troops into India to "stamp out the roots of the terrorism"� and it didn't declare a "global war on terror."� Partly because it lacked the resources for that sort of adventure, of course, but also because it would have been stupid. The investigation was not very successful, and twenty-one years later most of the culprits have still not been punished. But Sikh terrorism eventually died down even though nobody invaded Punjab, and nobody else got hurt in Canada.

June 11, 2006

More World Cup Politics

Dave Zirin and John Cox: Will Racism Spoil the World Cup?

First there has been the growing pattern of "football racism" across the continent. In late February, Cameroonian FC Barcelona star Samuel Eto'o almost walked off the pitch after being showered by "fans" with monkey chants and peanuts. Last November, Messina's Marc Zoro picked up the ball and threatened to walk off the field because of racist chants from followers of Inter Milan. These are only the most well publicized stories. There are countless tales of players of African origin being treated, in the words of one, "worse than dogs." This has gotten even more play in the United States as US star DaMarcus Beasley has recounted tales of monkey noises and tossed banana skins that trail him every time his foot touches the ball.

June 10, 2006

Wipe Israel off the map?

It's frustratingly difficult just to get the media to keep the facts straight about Iran.

Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off the map".

Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.

June 02, 2006

Rich, c. 1994

Interesting interview with Adrienne Rich from 1994

I find the conditions of life in this country often very, very depressing. The work that I choose to do is very much in part to not get lost and paralyzed. The activism I choose to do, the kind of writing I choose to do has a lot to do with that, with going to the point where I feel there is some energy. And there is a lot of energy in this country--but it's diffused, it's scattered, it's localized. And it's not in the mainstream media; you can get totally zonked there. What is so notably absent from there is the very thing that poetry embodies, which is passion, which is desire, real desire--I'm not talking about sex and violence. And what I feel among my friends who are activists, who are making things happen, however locally and on however limited a scale--there is an energy there.

We're in this for the long haul. That just cannot be said too often. I mean, there's not going to be some miracle in the year 2001. It seems to me our thinking is much less naive than when I started out--about what it's going to take to make real human possibility happen, to make a democracy that will really be for us all.

May 30, 2006

Ice T on Democracy

Counterpunch: "One of Rock the Vote's few high points came in the early 1990s when the organization aired over 175 public service announcements in which artists gave their frank views on democracy. Our favorite was Ice-T's. 'I'm as anti "the system" as you could possibly be,' he said. 'We've got two options--the vote or hostile takeover. I'm down with either one.'"

May 17, 2006

Multiculturalism: The Non-policy

Rocco Galati takes on the practice of Canadian "multiculturalism".

Does this mean a right to public funding of non-denominational schools other than those of the Anglo and Franco majorities? No. The Supreme Court of Canada slammed that door. Only the two superior races have those language rights.

Does it mean funding of hospitals, which serve "multiculturalism"? No. French-speaking hospitals have the right say the Courts, and obviously the rest will be English.

Does it mean any proportionate airtime on the publicly funded CBCs, TVOs, and other public airwaves? Not a chance. You have to struggle for "private" CRTC licenses.

May 16, 2006

Order and Kos

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos tells a Louisville paper about political movements in the US:

It's been a year since Dean took the helm of the Democratic Party. Movement-building isn't measured in months, it's measured in decades. It took the Republicans 30 years, from being way out in the wilderness in 1964, to take over, to start electing their conservative activists at the school-board level, at the county level. In 1980, 16 years later, they were able to get Ronald Reagan into the White House. And it took them another 14 years -- a total of 30 years -- to get the Newt Gingrich revolution and take over Congress. This is all a long-term process. We haven't even had one single election since Dean was elected. But the key is that we had nothing when Dean took over. Nothing in the states. There was no party in about 90 percent of the country. Did not exist. Suddenly you have Dean, who is putting money into the states. And we're slowly building. If we win in November, it's not gonna be because the movement is healthy and finished. Far from it. If we win in November, it's gonna be because the Republicans screwed up. People ask me, "How do you feel about 2008? Are you optimistic?" And I say, "I'm really, really optimistic about 2016." That's the year when we will finally have parity with the institutions and the on-the-ground organizing the conservatives have today.

May 12, 2006

Immigrant Rights Movement as New New Left

Brian Kwoba: "In LA, for example, despite the media's focus on flag-wavers to the exclusion of political messages, there were home-made signs saying 'Are our troops in Iraq illegal too?' and 'Your Foreign Policy Brought Me Here.' If those workers don't represent the inspiring potential for a radical challenge to neoliberalism and imperialism inside the movement, we'd have to be politically impotent. Or Democratic Party enthusiasts."

April 04, 2006

Schrodinger’s War

Jonathan Schwarz: "I guess everyone intuitively senses that the war's quantum superposition, in which it exists and does not exist at the time, can only be sustained as long as we don't observe the issue."

April 03, 2006

Korea

Evan has some interesting photos from Korea.

March 22, 2006

Paddy Public Enemy Number One

"You may take the shamrock from your hat and cast it on the sod/But it will take root and flourish there, though underfoot it's trod."

Daniel Patrick Welch looks at the political origins of Saint Patrick's Day through traditional Irish songs.

March 20, 2006

Anagram

Colby Cosh: "The other day, in a now-vaporized thread on Covered in Oil, I rearranged the letters in 'TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS' and found the phrase 'PLAN FOR TEAM TO LOSE'. In a just world this would guarantee my immortality..."

March 18, 2006

In support of Anti-occupation demonstrations

[An impolite question for Canadian anti-war activists, sent in by Stewart Steinhauer, and posted belatedly. It remains relevant. -- dru ]

March 18th is approaching. Plain ordinary folks around the world are getting ready to protest the 3rd anniversary of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. March 18th, 2003, was the first time in human history that a massive global human protest against war occurred on the day a war of aggression was launched.

Nechwamps was asked if he would speak at an anti-war rally in Red Deer, in 2003. He and I discussed it and came to the conclusion that, until the day came when ordinary Albertans recognized that they are guilty of invasion and occupation, causing, over time, an uncounted death toll amongst the indigenous civilian population, and unimaginable suffering for all those still living, it didn’t make much sense to protest the US/UK invasion and occupation in Iraq.

We can’t even effectively protest the Canadian invasion and occupation of indigenous lands, waged to gain non-market access to indigenous resources.

Since 2003, I have been asking this question about invasion and occupation of indigenous lands to secure access to indigenous resources, directing the question to Canadian antiwar activists, and so far, I haven’t had a single coherent response. If I could gain access to Health Canada’s cause of death records for the years 2003, 2004, and 2005, I could tell Canadian antiwar activists more or less how much collateral damage has occurred for indigenous Peoples inside of Canada in that interval.

Correct me if I’m right, but since 2004 Canada has been the main supplier of energy to the US, used to fuel the US war economy. The province of Alberta sits on the second largest single pool of hydrocarbon energy in the world, albeit costly to extract. The Alberta provincial government and the Canadian federal government are colluding with the US gas/oil junta to get that oil sands energy into a usable form, and get it pipelined to the US. Unfortunately, we all know what the US will use it for, a prodigious display of this use being broadcast 24/7 globally on every TV channel.

As an alternative to protesting the invasion and occupation of Iraq this coming Saturday, why don’t you well-intentioned Canadian antiwar activists protest your own invasion and occupation of indigenous lands, and your own benefits accruing from non-market access to the natural wealth of these lands? Why don’t Canadian antiwar activists protest Canada’s long history as a leader in world politics, providing over time, as Canada has done, a model for such developments as South Africa’s apartheid regime, and Israel’s Palestinian policies?

The Israeli Air Force joined the Canadian Air Force and the US Air Force for training exercises at Cold Lake Air Force base in 2005, so that the Israelis could teach the Canadians and Americans how to kill a single moving human target on the ground, from as high as 25,000 feet. The world’s largest NATO training base is right beside the world’s largest secure energy reserve.

Both the NATO base and the energy reserve is on invaded and occupied land; the Original Peoples of this invaded and occupied land are, in an incredible public show of genocidal racism, not even counted as human beings. Canada is the only nation in the world with legislation like Canada’s Indian Act. My question to Canadian antiwar activists as March 18th looms is:

When are you going to begin protesting your own invasion and occupation of my lands?

March 09, 2006

Irish times Chomsky

Interestin interview with Noam Chomsky in the Irish Times.

One of the most hopeful signs in the United States - I think very hopeful - is that there is an enormous gap between public policy and public attitudes. In fact the gap is so strong that the press literally does not report the studies of public attitudes, literally.
I'll give you an example. The federal budget comes out around February every year for the next year. After the last federal budget last February, one of the major polling institutions in the world, the Program on International Policy Attitudes based in the University of Maryland, which does in - depth studies, did a study of people's attitudes to wards the budget. They were the reverse of the budget. Where the budget was going up, the population wanted it to go down. Where it was going down, they wanted it to go up.

The public was strongly opposed to increased military spending, supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan. It was very strongly in favour of increases in social spending, health, education, renewable energy, support for United Nations peacekeeping operations... across the board. And it was almost the inverse of the budget.

Well I had a friend do a database search on that. Not a single newspaper in the country reported it. In a democratic society people should know what others believe. And it [the suppression of polls] is quite common. Right before the November 2004 elections, the same people, the Program on International Policy Attitudes in Maryland and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which does the main monitoring of attitudes on international affairs, published a couple of big joint studies. They came out right before the election. They were barely mentioned in the press but they were very striking. Again they showed that both main political parties are far to the right of the population on a whole range of important issues, ranging from the Kyoto protocol to the "right of intervention", which the public opposes. It [the government] takes a pretty conservative view of the UN Charter. Yet support for the United Nations was very strong.
In fact, to my amazement, a small majority of the population thinks the US ought to give up the veto and follow general world opinion even if it doesn't like it.
[Public opinion] Strongly support s more social spending. Take, say, health care. It's the leading domestic issue in the United States, by far. People are really worried about it and it's a huge fiscal crisis when you have to deal with the most inefficient system in the industrialised world. A strong, large majority of the population wants some kind of national health care. Neither political party will touch it. In fact, when the press ever mentions it, it's called "politically impossible" or "lacking political support" or something. It tells you something about their attitude to democracy. But this gulf has implications. It means if the democratic deficit can be overcome, if the public can somehow, if public attitudes have some influence on public policy a lot of things could change. That's very hopeful. The general population is a lot more civilised than it was back in the 1960s or 1950s.

March 07, 2006

Kirby and Ali

Kirby Puckett and Ali Farka Touré both passed away today. They will be missed.

February 08, 2006

Corporate Favourites

Chantal Hebert: "In fact, for a long time, corporate Canada did not feel a pressing need to look beyond Martin. It took Jean Chrétien's last year in office, complete with a high-profile feud with the White House on Iraq, to give new impetus to corporate efforts to force the two small-c conservative parties back together. Now Martin's matchmaking services are coming to an end and with corporate favourites for his succession already out of the running, a realignment is poised to take place."

February 04, 2006

Stewart on Chavez

Jon Stewart claimed offhand that journalists are put in jail for four years in Venezuela for "criticizing" President Chavez the other day. Babble, the discussion forum over at Rabble.ca, is on the case.

The basic fact is that the majority of the press and television stations in Venezuela are owned by the country's elite, which are not very pleased with their president, leading to coverage that's all-anti-Chavez, all the time. At least according to all the accounts that I've read. To my knowledge, none of them are in jail.

What one can say is that there was a law that human rights watch drew attention to. The law was changed before being passed. So the worst you can say about Venezuela is that human rights groups have warned against the potential for abuse of press freedom.

If there were journalists in jail, it's a pretty fair bet we would have heard about it.

January 29, 2006

Osama's Book Club

From Rahul Mahajan's Empire Notes:

Osama's Book Club

Osama bin Laden's latest statement has been translated and transcribed. As often happens, different translations differ substantially (AP version BBC version).


The statement mentions Bill Blum's book, "Rogue State," by name and quotes from it. On the strength of that, he tells me, has was invited on to CNN tonight, the kind of thing that doesn't happen very often. I just checked his Amazon sales rank. On January 18, it was 205,763rd in sales; on January 19, it was 86th.


That kind of boost is up there in Oprah territory. And unlike James Frey in his so-called memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," Bill doesn't indulge in fabrication. His writing style is a lot better, too.

January 26, 2006

Draft Dion

There seems to be an incipient campaign to draft Stéphane Dion for the Liberal leadership on the move.

January 24, 2006

One Depressing Outcome

Justin Podur: "One depressing outcome: Michael Ignatieff got elected. Bright spot: maybe he'll be too busy to write?"

Colby Cosh reckons Stephane Dion might be a decent leadership candidate. Someone asked me a while ago who I'd like to see as Liberal Party leader. Since the candidates that have their hats in (Manley, Iggy, McKenna) are right wing imperialists of one variety or another (Carlyle Group or Harvard? Take your pick.), I couldn't think of an answer. So I settled on Dion, though I know very little about him, because the scuttlebutt is that he's a smart, hard-working, vaguely ethical and pretty moderate. But a Liberal or Conservative majority would seem to be a recipe for damage for the forseeable future.

January 22, 2006

The Left that's left

Chantal Hebert says what I said here a little while ago, but more diplomatically, in Left's missed opportunity.

Is the New Democratic Party a flag of convenience to be waved only when nothing stands in the way of a Liberal parade? In the dying days of the campaign, it certainly seems that way.

If Jack Layton wins more seats on Monday, it will be in spite of the best efforts of a vocal section of the Canadian left. In the lead-up to the vote, many of his party's natural allies are joining their voices with that of Paul Martin to beg NDP sympathizers to abandon Layton for the Liberals for the second election in a row.

Maude Barlow responds:

The reason we chose to speak out this election was our collective concern about the past policies and statements of both Stephen Harper and many of his candidates. After extensively researching Harper's past, we came to the conclusion that a Harper government would dramatically set back the cause of social equality, workers rights and environmental stewardship in Canada. We shared these concerns from a variety of perspectives at the press conference and continue to share them with the Canadian public. We did not tell anyone how to vote. We simply reminded Canadians of our shared values and asked them to think twice before letting their desire for change result in a government that would destroy decades of social progress.

I may be wrong, but I simply don't remember there ever being a lefty fear campaign about Martin, who sliced and diced social programs at twice the rate of Brian Mulroney. I'm certainly not noticing one now.

Either it's about policy, in which case the Think Twicers should be going after Paul Martin, or it's about their collective preference for Paul Martin for reasons independent of policy, in which case they should come out and be honest about what those are.

That, and looking at the Liberal train wreck, one is left to wonder under what conditions, exactly, progressives are willing to support a progressive party?

Hebert says it better:

When the Canadian left does its post-election soul-searching, it should ponder whether some of its leading voices allowed their fears to make them lose sight of an unprecedented opportunity to advance their values.

January 17, 2006

Think Twice about Think Twice

Here's a summary of the following: The progressive coalition is more loyal to Paul Martin than his own staff is.

* * *

I sent the following note to Paul Wells (who is a productivity-is-more-important-than-people right winger), but has been thwapping people with NDP interests who keep getting scared into voting Liberal. And now, getting scared into scaring other people into voting Liberal.

...I agree that the Think Twicers are being completely pathetic. In the last election, maybe. In this one, they should be calling loudly for the NDP to take every Liberal seat as the only credible party that represents the interests they're supposedly standing up for. I'm curious as to when, exactly, their plan calls for actually voting in their own interest.

Bizarre. Cowardly. Typical.

I honestly don't get these people. There's a basic lack of understanding of how power works. You get concessions from those in power by threatening their electoral viability, forcing them to rely on your support. Not by following them around giving them awards (as the Sierra Club just did for Stephane Dion, whose government has done, oh, nothing to curb Canada's carbon emissions, though they sure talk alot about Kyoto).

Let's look at the situation: the Liberal campaign has fallen apart, the Conservatives are entering majority territory. Top Liberals are abandoning their leader in mid-campaign. Jack Layton is working at presenting the NDP as the credible alternative to the Conservatives because the Liberals are headed to Kim Campbell land. The NDP is picking up points in polls. You're the leader of a (pick one) trade union, antipoverty organization, human rights organization, citizens' coalition.

What do you do?

Is it just me, or would the obvious thing to do not be to throw everything behind the NDP, given that this is a fricking golden opportunity to make huge electoral gains and actually have a serious progressive presence in Parliament?

No!

Instead, you try to prop up the corpse of the Liberal party loyal to the end to a party that did all of nothing for you while in power.

When, exactly, do you have an opportunity to take a serious dent out of the Liberals and forcing them to earn back every bit of the support they had before? When do you have the opportunity to position a party that actually has shown a willingness to implement policy that you like for being a credible competitor to form a government the next time around?

So when one comes along, the first thing you'll want to do is urge everyone to vote for the party that's imploding, and which has done nothing to earn your support.

I know that the conventional wisdom says that the Liberal Party is the "natural ruling party", but do we have to act like it all the time? Apparently even the suggestion that it might not be the case is just too insane to contemplate.

Disclaimer: Yeah, they're actually just saying "don't vote Conservative", but no matter who the audience is, there's a pretty obvious way that one can expect that to be interpreted.

January 16, 2006

Thoughts on Sudan, Congo and other difficult cases

Interesting and urgent injunction from Rahul Mahajan:

Part of the reason activists haven't really talked about Congo is that there are no easy solutions to offer. With the sanctions on Iraq, the remedy was very simple – remove the sanctions and allow Iraqis to use their oil revenues to rebuild the country--but here it's hard to know what to say.

The West has benefited from the plunder carried out by Uganda and Rwanda in eastern Congo. The mining of coltan, an ore that provides tantalum, a key element in so-called "inhead capacitors" used in cell phones, was a major source of profits to those armies and a major reason for their continued operations -- of course, they received mere pennies for every dollar the cell-phone makers made.

Human Rights Watch has chronicled and denounced the links between the international mining conglomerate Anglo American and the brutal Nationalist and Integrationist Front, an armed group that controls much of the gold mining in the Ituri district.

The West is, of course, also responsible for the brutal history of Congo that led up to this. Belgium essentially turned the entire country into a massive slavery and forced labor plantation, killing an estimated 10 million in the process. After independence, Belgium and the United States collaborated in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, a leader who held out genuine hope to the people of Congo, and his replacement by the tyrannical and corrupt Mobutu.

After doing so much to create Congo's problems, the West has no interest in trying to fix them. There is no imperialist imperative to control the country; why should there be when resources flow freely without requiring any trouble on the part of the West? The UN peacekeeping force was recently increased to 16,700, or one person per 60 square miles, but in 2004 the UN was only able to raise half of the funds allocated for them. Nobody is pushing to get control there any more than they were in Liberia or than they are in Darfur.

The left has been very reticent to try to address such questions, out of fear that any call for humanitarian intervention will serve imperialist ends. This abdication is not only morally questionable, it is strategically unsound; indeed, the absence of a sensible way to deal with such problems helps to feed the kind of human rights imperialism that the left is (rightly) so afraid of.

The international community must devise a way of dealing with such problems, and the left must be involved in that devising. Any such method must in turn obey the twin principles of not increasing Western influence and holding the West at least financially if not morally accountable for what it has done. Easier said than done, but right now nobody is even saying it.

January 07, 2006

Dear Colby, take II

I somehow managed to miss that Colby Cosh responded to my "admonition" for saying that "one may be certain" Chavez's government is headed the route of Stalin. A few words in response to his response to my response to his post. (Wow, that sort of sounds like sustained dialogue.)

1. Without engaging in a debate about basic political principles (which would be pointless unless we were seriously dedicated to that as an end in itself, which we aren't), I think I can summarize the difference of opinion thus:

   Mr. Cosh believes that a leftist government being in power is sufficient evidence that "Venezuela is going to hell", and is a short ways away from a Stalinist worst-case scenario. I think that evidence of repressive measures like shutting down newspapers and jailing dissidents is sufficient evidence that things are going awry. (But I don't see any such evidence.)

2. The debate about "state owns everything" seems to be getting into basic-philosophical difference territory, and thus unfruitful, so I'm going to avoid it.
3. It's worth noting that sadly, Andy Grove's maxim "only the paranoid survive" applies to leftist states. The ones that are willing to take the necessary measures to survive an attack by much more powerful states seem to be the ones that continue to exists. For state to repel terrorist or military threats, they have to (or at least tend to) take unsavory measures. This seems to be the case in Canada and the US, though the threats to these have been far less serious than their lefty counterparts.

   Cuba, for example, has a central government that enforces laws against taking money from the US by imprisoning people, and executes terrorists. Furthermore, there is a surveillance culture there and there is centralized control over the media. That said, the people of Cuba are materially better off collectively than their oligarchic third world counterparts. The question for Cubans, unfortunately, is whether they would be better off as a US colony. So far, the answer seems to be no, and evidence points to the vast majority supporting the government. If the US hadn't spent the last 50 years trying to overthrow the government, there would be no way to justify the measures employed. The only thing keeping Castro and the commies in power is popular support.

4. Venezuela is different in that they control a lot of oil, and seem to be able to get a lot done despite the fact that the newspapers and TV stations are broadcasting all anti-Chavez propaganda, all the time.
5. What, exactly, are the measures that Chavez has taken to date to "criminalize dissent"? I keep hearing about them, but I don't know what they actually consist of.
6. It's interesting, by which I mean hypocritical, that the right tends to hold lefties to leftist standards, while reverting to capitalist standards for Pinochet, giving Indonesia the go-ahead in East Timor, Iraq, and so on.
7. If Venezuela started funneling millions of dollars to left-wing groups within the NDP (under the guise of "building democracy", of course) and, say, the Dominion, Rabble.ca, Seven Oaks and Indymedia, how would the Canadian government react? Assuming the lefties didn't implode into infighting about how the money should be used, whether it should be accepted, etc., and assuming that it was used somewhat effectively, I don't doubt that attempts would be made to shut them down. Historically, this is certainly the case with Canadian commies who were seen as a threat. But maybe everything is different now? (Not really; political activists are systematically harassed by the justice system, and jailed for five days (for example) for things like heckling Paul Martin.
8. I submit the obvious point that lefty governments that last more than a few years end up taking repressive measures because powerful capitalist "democracies" find them to be threatening and tend to attack, rather than because leftists are inherently authoritarian. I also submit that this is getting way, way too long.

In conclusion, Chavez is far better than Stalin in many ways. Hmm. That's not exactly progress, and Colby Cosh still seems to disagree, choosing to not differentiate between left governments that use state power.

Also, I'm not sure what the objection (by right-wingers or anyone else) would be to defending the right of a democratically elected government not to be overthrown by US-backed thugs. If that's "support for Chavez", then sign me up.

January 01, 2006

Dear Colby

I wrote the following note to Colby Cosh in response to a post on his weblog about Venezuela. I didn't receive the usual dismissive reply. [I'm told a reply is on the way. --d] And I thought it to be worth sharing.

On another note, happy new year.

* * *

Colby,

Regarding your recent post about Venezuela:

Chavez's backers are a diverse bunch, including old-school communists, social democrats, anarchists, social movements, poor people, etc. etc. I could go to Venezuela tomorrow and "circulate a paper in pro-government circles" advocating the mandatory wearing of pink hats. That doesn't make it government policy. Given the number of blatantly inaccurate hitpieces that have been written about Chavez and co., one might be wise to wait for more substantial evidence than "some people who support Chavez support X" before whipping out the Mao and Stalin comparisons. Few others get held to that standard.

I have no doubt that some of Chavez's supporters want to follow the Cuban path, but there is little evidence that Chavez himself, or the folks ultimately making the decisions, are interested in a state-owns-everything approach. They seem to be more in the workers-own-the-means-of-production school, providing a lot of funding to cooperatives, backing worker takeovers of factories, etc. See, for example, Michael Albert's account.

If they were to implement a system outside of "currency relations", I doubt it would be government controlled or government-centred.

While it's possible that a government like Chavez's could take a turn for the worse at any point (especially if the US bombs, or keeps trying to overthrow the elected government), it seems a little premature to conclude that "one may be certain" that a massive Stalinist infrastructure of oppression will be put in place. Such things are very difficult to justify without some kind of external threat. And if Chavez was going to shut down newspapers or tv stations (much less create massive forced labour camps), he could have done so by now. In fact, it would have made his life a lot easier. But he didn't, choosing, as usual, to create alternatives that are more compelling.

To say with certainty (your word) that he's going to reverse course on that and his government's entire MO seems, to me, to be lacking in evidence and justification. At least at this point.

dru

October 24, 2005

Chomsky on Iraq

Noam Chomsky: "An independent Iraq would
probably take steps to gain a leading position in the Arab world, which would mean confronting the main enemy, US-backed Israel. hat would mean rearming, probably with WMD, to counter Israel's. It might also lead to improving relations with Iran. Not impossible is a Shi'ite alliance with Iran and a majority-run Iraq, which might further stimulate moves towards independence in the nearby Shi'te areas of Saudi Arabia, where the oil is. That would
lead to domination of the world's energy resources by an independent Shi'ite alliance. Nothing inevitable about any of this of course, but hardly impossible. Can you imagine the US tolerating anything like this? These are among the
reasons why permitting democracy in Iraq, even if the rhetoric were meant seriously by Washington and Western commentators, is hardly a likely prospect."

October 23, 2005

Other Regional Battles

Colby Cosh hypothesizes that Albertans seem smarter than Ontarians due to their school system and then gets a whole bunch of mail from readers.

October 17, 2005

Kidnapping, Gaza style

Dion Nissenbaum: "You know your kidnapping is probably going to turn out all right when your abductors give you souvenir baseball caps to take home. And when they serve you fresh dates while channel-surfing. Doting hospitality isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of being held in captivity, but that's pretty much what British freelance photographer Adam Pletts and I got after being snatched Wednesday afternoon by an obscure group of Palestinian militants apparently looking for work."

October 12, 2005

Srebrenica, myth and reality

Diana Johnstone has a long, interesting piece on the propaganda uses of the Srebrenica massacre. To wit:

A left that retains any capacity for critical thinking should regard the lavish public breast-beating over "Srebrenica" (the quotation marks indicate the symbol rather than the actual event) with a certain skepticism. If mainstream media commentators and politicians are so extraordinarily moved by "Srebrenica", this is because it has become an incantation to justify whatever future foreign war the U.S. government and media decide to sell under the label of "humanitarian intervention".

October 09, 2005

The Political Mind of J. Stewart

The Guardian has an interesting profile on Jon Stewart.

If the parties and the media serve the country so badly, why do Americans put up with it? "Because for the majority of Americans life is pretty tolerable," says Stewart. "It's very hard to organise reasonable people with moderate views. Reasonable people with moderate views don't usually light their torches and head out to town with pitchforks shouting, Be reasonable. Shit has to get really bad before people stand up and take notice."

October 01, 2005

Monbiot on Peak Oil

looks at the likelihood that oil supply has peaked.

"If the figures have been fudged, we're stuffed. That might sound extreme, but it is not my conclusion. It is that of the consultants hired by the US Department of Energy."

The result? Don't expect gas prices to go down.

And longer term, the global economy is going to look a lot different.

September 07, 2005

But why do they hate you?

Lots of good history and commentary at Counterpunch.

Jonathan Feldman: "We now must ask ourselves, isn't the U.S. a failed state?"

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: John Wayne and the New Orleans Indians

For days I have been thinking of Sitting Bull's observation that the United States knows how to make everything, but doesn't know how to distribute it. He was being generous in attributing the lack of equitable distribution of goods to benign ignorance rather than to design. But, he knew better. Once in Chicago while performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West, Sitting Bull spoke through his translator to the huge crowd of ragged white men, women, and barefoot children: "I know why your government hates me. I am their enemy. But why do they hate you?" The U.S. Cavalry, the 7th to be exact, Custer's old regiment, massacred Sitting Bull's unarmed, starving people in December 1890 at Wounded Knee, a few days after Sitting Bull himself had been shot and killed by the federal Indian police.

Being Poor.

Body and Soul: Being poor

Must read.

August 28, 2005

Effects of Inequality

Peter Wilby: Forget Raw Fish And Berries, It's Equality That Saves Lives

Not all such differences in life expectancy are attributable to differences in lifestyle, such as smoking, drinking, drugs, exercise and diet. Poverty and inequality induce stress: one survey in the 90s showed that families living on less than £10,000 a year were more than twice as likely to have daily arguments as those on more than £20,000. We look admiringly at high life expectancies in Japan and Sweden and debate if raw fish or lingonberries would do the trick for us, too. It never seems to occur to us that the longevity may be connected to these being two of the most equal societies on Earth.

May 20, 2005

Tariq Ali's Novels

Seven Oaks Magazine has an interview with Tariq Ali, wherein he discusses his two series' of novels: "Fall of Communism" and the "Islam Quintet". I confess that I didn't know Tariq Ali wrote novels, much less quintets of novels. But apparently, they're bestsellers in Spain and Turkey.

April 24, 2005

The NGO-ization of politics

Arundhati Roy on the NGO-ziation of politics, from her talk Public Power in the Age of Empire:

It will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an indictment of all NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges, of course there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context. read more...

April 19, 2005

CBC:RSS

Not exactly news, but it's worth noting that the CBC, at long last, has RSS Feeds for national and local coverage.

April 15, 2005

One of the better...

...email forwards of recent memory.

An old Arab lives close to New York City for more than 40 years. He would love to plant potatoes in his garden, but he is alone, old and weak. His son is in college in Paris, so the old man sends him an e-mail. He explains the problem:

"Beloved son, I am very sad, because I can't plant potatoes in my garden. I am sure, if only you were here; you would help me and dig up the garden. I love you, your father."

The following day, the old man receives a response e-mail from his son:

"Beloved father, please don't touch the garden. It's there that I have hidden 'the THING'. I love you, too, Ahmed".

At 4pm the US Army, the Marines, the FBI, the CIA and the Rangers visit the house of the old man, take the whole garden apart, search every inch, but can't find anything.

Disappointed, they leave the house.

Another day later, the old man receives another e-mail from his son.

"Beloved father, I hope the garden is dug up by now and you can plant your potatoes. That's all I could do for you from here. I love you, Ahmed."

Dworkin, take II

Susie Bright has an interesting retrospective on Andrea Dworkin's effect on feminism.

Here are a bunch of her writings, online. Intercourse is probably worth reading first.

April 13, 2005

"Global Credit Scam"

More from Stan Goff's highly recommended book
Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century, this time on the "global credit scam" known as dollar hegemony, the bubble on which the whole world economy sits, and on which US power is entirely dependent:

The citizens of the United States are only indirectly paying for our military adventures. In fact, the source for funding U.S. wars is also the fountainhead of the U.S. standard of living. The true source of funding for American adventurism is to be found in the central banks of Europe, China, Japan, and elsewhere. They are paying for U.S. wars. Since the U.S. abandoned the gold standard in the wake of Vietnam (where U.S. gold reserves were depleted almost to their legal limit), these central banks—holding U.S. Treasury bonds, which are basically IOUs—have been tied to U.S. currency. The dollar is effectively shored up by oil state investments in dollar-denominated assets and slaked like a vampire by the external debts of ruined economies. No country can afford to wean itself without risking the collapse of the whole house of cards. The U.S. is in the unique position of being able to print as much money as it wants to cover current account deficits, which has indebted the U.S. to the point that they know, and their creditors know, that they will never pay it back.

In 1972, Saudi Arabia said it intended to buy up U.S. companies—productive capital instead of bonds. The U.S. showed its sword, telling the Saudis in no uncertain terms that this would be considered an act of war. The deal was subsequently sealed that the Saudis could invest as non-controlling stockholders and in Treasury bonds, in exchange for certain “security” arrangements. The Saudis helped establish the petro-dollar, and the U.S. was safe in the catbird seat.

Now Europe, for example, had to pay for its oil in dollars, loaning their own value, as it were, to the U.S. for dollar paybacks through Treasury bonds. Europe was being forced to maintain large reserves of dollars to defend themselves from currency speculators, after the U.S. also abandoned fixed currency exchange rates. But this meant that the U.S. could pay for oil in money that it could print, which it did—a practice that would normally devalue the currency in an open market, were it not for the fact that the same devaluation would now wipe out creditors like Europe. This catch-22 remains the basis of dollar hegemony, which is the basis of U.S. economic hegemony. And it means that the U.S. government's debt is now a kind of Mafia arrangement, where Europeans and all the rest are essentially being “taxed” by this practice. They know the U.S. will never pay back its debt, but if they try to sell off their Treasury bonds, the dollar will crash down around all of them, beginning with their own central banks. So they are making “loans” via Treasury bonds that they already know they'll never get paid for. This is what is financing U.S. militarism.

Upping the Anti #1

Upping the Anti, a journal by the folks at Autonomy & Solidarity, recently released its first issue.

The Dominion weblog's own Dave Mitchell has a review of Hardt and Negri's Multitude in there.

April 12, 2005

Andrea Dworkin RIP

Andrea Dworkin passed away yesterday.

April 06, 2005

Pontifications

The excellent and enigmatic weblog Body and Soul has a whole string of posts linking to various arguments about the legacy of the recently deceased Pontifex Maximus, if that kind of thing is your cup of communion wine.

Rah Rah Wolfowitz?

George Monbiot thinks that Wolfowitz as World Bank President is a good thing. His argument: the world bank is designed for the express purpose of controlling the third world for the benefit of creditors in the US and Europe. Being profoundly undemocratic, he argues, it is unreformable. ("The US can veto any attempt to revoke its veto.") Thus, having a neocon psycho will make it harder, not easier, for it to continue its fundamentally damaging program of exploitation.

It also demolishes the hopeless reformism of men like George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz who, blithely ignoring the fact that the US can veto any attempt to challenge its veto, keep waving their wands in the expectation that a body designed to project US power can magically be transformed into a body which works for the poor.(16) Had Stiglitz's attempt to tinker with the World Bank's presidency succeeded, it would simply have lent credibility to an illegitimate institution, thus enhancing its powers. With Wolfowitz in charge, its credibility plummets.

Multipolar vs. Imperialist

ZNet has an interesting article entitled Venezuela at the Crossroads of the New Humanity Century

In order for the countries of the periphery of the world capitalist system to survive, they have to start claiming their resources for themselves. They must first meet the needs of their local populations. Only after these needs have been met, can they then consider trade. This trade cannot be based on petrodollars, or, even petroeuros. Both of these currencies were created by colonialists to assure a trade imbalance that provides the core countries with real goods in exchange for debt. Since countries at the core of the system cannot be trusted to help bring a stop to a model that has been so fruitful to them, the countries of the periphery have to start organizing and integrating in such a way as to form new economic and development blocks or "poles".

And:

Venezuela has proposed and is actually pursuing concrete projects for South American integration (PetroSur: a South American Oil Company, TeleSur: a 24-hour news and cultural channel with a South American perspective, and energy-goods trade that bypass the petrodollar). It is also bolstering already existing integration agreements such as Mercosur (created by Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay to establish a common market), CAN (Community of Andean Nations) and had a main role in the creation of the CSN (South American Community of Nations). All of these efforts are serving to make the South American pole a reality.

April 05, 2005

Blow the Bank Down

Here are a few choice readings aimed at clarifying the significance of Paul Wolfowitz's appointment as President of the World Bank.

First, from back in April 2003, a remark that highlights the audacity of the neocons' wolfish assault on multilateralism in their recent choice of WB Honcho -- one wolf eating another:

The World Bank, under the direction of James Wolfensohn, is posing a problem for neocon Wolfowitz. The World Bank, though dominated by the U.S. which has 16.2% of voting shares, has an institutional loyalty to multilateralism. As U.S. unilateralism advocated by U.S. neocons gives the back of the hand to the very foundation of the U.N., which is the institutional manifestation of multilateralism, there is predictable conflict between the two Wolfs. The World Bank Wolf is a neo-liberal, while the Defense Department Wolf is a neocon.

(Henry C. K. Liu, quoted in Stan Goff's Full Spectrum Disorder)

Second, a penetrating analysis by the Global Justice Ecology Project on the renewed synergy of military and economic domination within US foreign policy:

In 2002 Wolfowitz was one of the primary authors of the Bush administration's National Security Strategy. In it he advocated pre-emptive war with Iraq. It further calls for U.S. economic and military domination in every corner of the world and promotes the idea of pre-emptive attacks on any nation that in some way threatens American interests. These ideas are not new, however, and were preceded by two others, a September 2000 document put out by the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century (which Wolfowitz chairs) and a Defense Department report Wolfowitz co-wrote in 1992.

The 1992 and 2000 reports are very similar. Both promote a global missile defense system; budget increases for the U.S. Defense Department; small, deep penetrating nuclear weapons; and the specific targeting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In the 1992 report, Wolfowitz argues that the U.S. should be active in "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." And the Times Online (of the UK) writes that in this report, Wolfowitz, "envisaged the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry pre-emptively, 'even in conflicts that do not directly engage U.S. interests.'" In its 2000 document, the Project for a New American Century promoted the idea that U.S. global dominance could be advanced by "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

With this history, the nomination of Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank is a clear sign that the Bush Administration is determined to use whatever avenues it can to pursue its goals of "full spectrum dominance" over the rest of the world. Under current World Bank President Wolfensohn, the Bank has been somewhat resistant to advance the agenda of the Bush administration by financing projects in Iraq. With Wolfowitz at the helm, however, Vallette projects that "the World Bank may be able to complete what the Iraq Invasion started two years ago: U.S. corporate control over the world's second-largest oil reserves."

[...] While Wolfowitz has been promoting violence to force populations into subordination, as the new head of the World Bank, he will be mastering the art of economic coercion as well.

And finally, a razor-sharp piece by George Monbiot challenging the faulty assumptions of those who decry Wolfowitz's nomination to an institution that's been morally bankrupt since its inception:

Wolfowitz's appointment is a good thing for three reasons. It highlights the profoundly unfair and undemocratic nature of decision-making at the bank. His presidency will stand as a constant reminder that this institution, which calls on the nations it bullies to exercise "good governance and democratisation" is run like a medieval monarchy.

It also demolishes the hopeless reformism of men such as Stiglitz and George Soros who, blithely ignoring the fact that the US can veto any attempt to challenge its veto, keep waving their wands in the expectation that a body designed to project US power can be magically transformed into a body that works for the poor. Had Stiglitz's attempt to tinker with the presidency succeeded, it would simply have lent credibility to an illegitimate institution, enhancing its powers. With Wolfowitz in charge, its credibility plummets.

Best of all is the chance that the neocons might just be stupid enough to use the new wolf to blow the bank down. Clare Short laments that "it's as though they are trying to wreck our international systems". What a tragedy that would be. I'd sob all the way to the party.

...and a late addition from Simon Helweg-Larsen:

Also check out IRC's Right Web profile of Wolfowitz.

Reactionary in Shepherd's Clothing

Green Left Weekly has an interesting article about the former Pope that brings us back to some recent history:

Reagan, as president, quickly moved to form a united front with John Paul II against liberation theology. The pope fought the theology while the Reagan administration nd its Latin American allies murdered the liberationists.

April 01, 2005

Legalize it, part II

Here are a whole bunch of critiques of Swedish Prostitution Law.

While there are no doubt a lot of faults with Swedish (as with any other), attacks on one system or another inevitably have--to some extent--the effect of distracting from the fundamental issues. Until someone provides a pretty serious alternative analysis, I'll stick with the basic (obvious!) principles from the other post. Namely, that policy must...:

...aim to eliminate, not perpetuate, violence against women

...take into account the socio-economic situations that make prostitution necessary or appealing, including histories of abuse, lack of decent jobs, lack of pay equity

...reach out to all of those (arguably the vast majority) who are working as prostitutes who not by choice, but by necessity

...not criminalize the activities of those being exploited (which often intensifies their exploitation

And I should add: take into account that we live in a society that is violent and exploitative towards women.

On that last topic, Robert Jensen's Just A John? Pornography And Men's Choices is essential reading.

Commodify your alienation?

Cuddle Parties, Reform and Revolution

The intrigue of the cuddle party phenomena is it is a commercial response to the experience of alienation. While one can not fault the Cuddlers for this (indeed, what other response could there be in this commodified world?), the interest is too look at it as an attempt to remedy the social experience of alienation. The hetero-normative nuclear world limits options for people to have a variety of kinds intimacy in their lives and the cuddle party provides a way out- provided you have a ticket to play.

March 17, 2005

New Seven Oaks Magazine Up

*The March 15-22 issue of Seven Oaks is now available
at www.SevenOaksMag.com*

This week includes:

-Am Johal's Middle East Powder Keg: Israeli-Iranian tensions

-Seth Sandronsky's Freedom 55 disappearing in Bush's USA

-Derrick O'Keefe's Liberal 'star power' reloaded

-Charles Demers' A review of Crude: The Story of Oil

-March 19: Still Fighting the Empire

-Plus, 7 Questions with Judy Rebick, who discusses her
new book and the history of the women's movement in
Canada.

Rachel Corrie in memoriam

Two years ago today, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old American volunteer with the
International Solidarity Movement, was crushed to death by an Israeli Defence
Force bulldozer as she sought to prevent it from demolishing the home of a
Palestinian doctor. Her family's efforts to find justice have so far been
unsucessful, and her story now all but forgotten by the mainstream media.

To honour her memory, please take a moment to read the writings of, and about,
this woman who died for her conviction that we all have a responsibility to
stop preventable injustices, and who thought her body and her passport would be
enough to stop a man in a bulldozer from going forward.

Rachel Corrie Memorial

Rachel's letters home (which were published in both the Guardian and the Globe and Mail):

The International Solidarity Movement

Background on Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

March 14, 2005

The Essentials of Post Cold War Deterrence

A perfect read for anyone wanting to get inside the mind of those "policy wonks" who churn out endless reports and studies leaving you with the question: "Who ever thought war would be a good idea."

February 20, 2005

First Newspaper

Someone scanned and translated some pages from the first newspaper in Scandinavia and put the results online. The date: 1749.

February 15, 2005

Slow day in the science dept.

The Guardian: Saturn's moon is the double of Star Wars space station

Canada: Copyright Test Case

Canada's copyfight explained, demystified

For example, Canada's rightsholders want to replace "notice-and-takedown" (an ISP has to remove material when someone complains that it might be infringing) with a "notice-and-terminate" regime (an ISP has to kick off its customer if anyone, anywhere accuses them of infringing).

The speech referred to above was webcast, though it would be nice to get a text version.

February 14, 2005

V-Day?

If you're looking for a good Valentine's Day gift, I suggest 2/15: The Day The World Said NO To War, from AK Press. Perfect for reading on the second anniversary of the day over 11 millions people on seven continents took a day to reject the planned US invasion of Iraq.

It was a day unique in human history. There's pretty much no precedent that I know of.

Check out these photos and these, and download and print this poster and display it to commemorate the two year mark.

February 04, 2005

Useful for any Canadian writer

Dave's Truly Canadian Dictionary of Canadian Spelling

January 25, 2005

Machiavelli

From the Philosophy- "Squashed Machiavelli" (part of squashed philosophers):

V: THE WAY TO GOVERN CITIES OR PRINCIPALITIES WHICH FORMERLY LIVED UNDER THEIR OWN LAWS

On acquiring states accustomed to living in freedom under their own laws, there are three courses open; to ruin them, to reside there in person, or to permit them freedom under a friendly oligarchy, drawing a tribute. He who would keep a formerly free city will hold it more easily by means of its own citizens.

For example, the Spartans established oligarchy in Athens and Thebes, nevertheless they lost them. The Romans dismantled Capua, Carthage, and Numantia and held them. They attempted to hold Greece as the Spartans held it, free with its own laws, and failed. For in truth he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for it will always rally to the watchwords of liberty and its ancient privileges.

But when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being accustomed to obey, cannot decide how to govern themselves. Such are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can secure them easily.

January 17, 2005

I've Been To The Mountaintop

Happy Martin Luther King Day....

Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy in his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It's always good to have your closest friend and associate say something good about you. And Ralph is the best friend that I have in the world.
I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow. Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.

read more...

January 05, 2005

What do you believe, but can't prove?

"What do you believe, but cannot prove?"

That was the question asked of a whole bunch of "name" scientists and thinkers, mostly white men. The answers are varied and interesting.

January 04, 2005

Michael Albert and Conspiracy Theory

Since you've spent the past two weeks being badgered by your Brother-in-law on your political beliefs and called, "Conspiracy Theorist", by your Uncle at Christmas dinner, check out this piece by Parecon author, Michael Albert.

"Actually Uncle Dick, I'm an Institutional Theorist, thank-you very much."

December 31, 2004

Chomsky and Carter

Just to revisit some old chestnuts from the past, I redirect your attention to an excerpt of Chomsky from "Radical Priorities".

Happy New Year!

December 25, 2004

Wake up to Colonial Realities in Canada and elsewhere

A great recirculated piece by Aziz Choudry "Bringing it all Back Home: Anti-globalization Activism Cannot Ignore Colonial Realities"

"Among anti-globalization networks there is widespread coinage of the
terms “colonization” or “recolonization” to describe the
current manifestations of globalization. But does that mean that the
mobilizations and activism against globalization are anti-colonial? For the
most part, I don't think so.

If those of us living in colonial settler states like New Zealand, Australia,
Canada and the USA are prepared to take on transnational corporations,
the Bretton Woods institutions, and the neoliberal agenda we must also
address Indigenous Peoples' struggles for decolonization and
self-determination."

December 21, 2004

The Sha is Dead

Limited, Inc. is at it again. This is a must read.

December 20, 2004

Democracy in Venezuela

A while ago, Dave Mitchell passed along this interesting analysis of the tensions between social movements and the Chavez-led government that owes its power to their support. It seems that there are plans to move Venezuela to a system of participatory democracy, but the plans are pretty tentative for the moment.

Exciting to see that the (idea of) neighbourhood-based self-governance that became prominent in Argentina has legs, and seems to be slowly spreading.

November 08, 2004

Iraq, Haiti, U.S. "elections," and the Canadian Settler-State

Please read Dahr Jamail's update from Iraq: "Carnage and Martial Law".

A report from jailed Haitian priest/political prisoner Gerard Jean-Juste, and an appeal for continued solidarity with Haiti.

The Jamaica Observer's John Maxwell writes powerfully about the U.S. "elections" in "A Lobotomy for Democracy"

Another must-read for "Canadians," Devin Burke of the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement argues the necessity of "Building a "Canadian Decolonization Movement".

Macdonald Stainsby's latest on Canadian imperialism in the Arctic North.

September 15, 2004

DEA whistleblower exposes CIA's 'war of pretense'

"Some people will find it easy to dismiss as a whacked-out conspiracy theory any suggestion that the CIA is complicit with drug-traffickers. But it's not a conspiracy theory, according to law enforcement sources. It's a marriage of convenience, with each side getting something of value in the exchange: money and protection in the case of the traffickers; information and access in the case of the CIA.

It may well be a pact with the devil, but it's an old bargain in a big game that is not likely to end without a major reshuffling of the status quo. However, when that game starts to reach into this country's courts and subverts the ultimate U.S. interest, the Constitution, it may be time to start drawing some lines."

From the latest Online Journal

September 13, 2004

Working Class Perspective on NB's Irving Family

by Aaron Doncaster

In the anticapitalist movement, you hear much about the uscupulous
Practices of the companies like Enron ,worldcom, Nortel, Wal-Mart, Mcshites
And Arthur Anderson to name a few, but there is not much written about the
uscupulous practices of regional monopolies like Irving, Sobey's and Mccain(
all from the Maritimes in Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to be exact)

read more...

August 24, 2004

Ward Churchill in Vancouver

Transcribed August 8th Keynote Speech at the 15th Annual Under the Volcano in occupied Vancouver, B.C.

"So what I'm suggesting to you right now is that in order to combat in an effective fashion this process that now goes under the name of globalization we have consciously to restore our understanding of the necessity of being - as a first priority - anti-imperialist. But we need to be anti-imperialists who have learned from the past mistakes of anti-imperialism, and that is: you don't find the symptoms when you are approximate to the cause. If you want to stop globalization you have to stop it where it lives. You do not purport to be a revolutionary in the context of an internal colonial construction. To be a revolutionary is to overthrow the existing apparatus of the State and replace it with yourselves. If you do that you perpetuate the problem. The State is contingent on its existence both in the United States and in Canada, upon the perpetual colonization, subjugation, subordination, exploitation, expropriation, of Indigenous peoples, it will continue to be illegally occupied territory until the principles of anti-imperialism are applied here not only analytically, but forcefully. The decolonisation of North America is the absolutely essential ingredient in halting the process of globalization and making it impossible ever to resuscitate it again. See it clearly for what it is, and understand the implications."

Read on at Znet

August 09, 2004

Ward Churchill Interview

Dismantling the Politics of Comfort : The Satya Interview with Ward Churchill

Satya: Some argue that the ten million people who gathered last year on February 15th to stop a U.S. invasion of Iraq didn’t really amount to much in terms of tangible results. Is there a precedent of experimentation you think people are not looking at?

Churchill:If you conduct your protest activities in a manner which is sanctioned by the state, the state understands that the protest will have no effect on anything.

You can gauge the effectiveness—real or potential at least—of any line of activity by the degree of severity of repression visited upon it by the state. It responds harshly to those things it sees as, at least incipiently, destabilizing. So you look where they are visiting repression: that’s exactly what you need to be doing.

People engaged in the activity that is engendering the repression are the first people who need to be supported—not have discussion groups to endlessly consider the masturbatory implications of the efficacy of their actions or whether or not they are pure enough to be worthy of support. They are by definition worthy. Ultimately, the people debating continuously are unworthy. They are apologists for the state structure; [and] in [effect], try to convince people to be ineffectual.

Nonviolent action can be effectual when harnessed in a way that is absolutely unacceptable to the state: if you actually clog the freeways or occupy sites or whatever to disrupt state functioning with the idea of ultimately making it impossible for the state to function at all, and are willing to incur the consequences of that. That’s very different from people standing with little signs, making a statement. Statements don’t do it. If [they] did, we would have transformed society in this country more than a century ago.

Check out this must read interview...

July 15, 2004

Without global democracy, national democracy is impossible

A wonderful bit of strategy and speculation by George Monbiot that I somehow missed before: The Age of Consent (summarizing bits of a book by the same name).

It is often said that if you owe the bank $1000, you're in trouble; while if you owe the bank $1 million, the bank is in trouble. So what if you owe the bank $2.2 trillion? What if, between them, the poor nations own the global financial system? If they were to threaten a sudden collective default on their debt unless they got what they wanted, they would transform their greatest enemies - the financial markets - into their allies. The banks would be forced to go to their governments and say: if you don't give them what they want, we, and therefore you, are ruined. This is by no means the only weapon the poor world possesses, but this is the scale on which we have think if we are serious about a global transformation.

June 26, 2004

Contrary to What You've Heard...Chomsky and Zinn to Vote for Nader

Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn Plan to Vote for Ralph Nader

By GREG BATES

"Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn have stated many times that they favor ousting Bush this election, even if John Kerry is “Bush-lite.” And that stand has been repeatedly used by progressives opposed to Ralph Nader’s campaign.

However, Chomsky and Zinn, both residents of John Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts, say they plan to vote for Ralph Nader...."

http://www.counterpunch.com

June 23, 2004

Economic Unorthodoxy: An Interview with Doug Henwood

Check out this interview with Doug Henwood, of Left Business Observer.

The interview was conducted by Political Affairs - A Marxist Monthly

Here's but a sample:

"One of the reasons insider trading is illegal and prosecuted is that it helps preserve the appearance of legitimacy of the securities markets. It gives people some kind of sense that these are, as the cliché goes, level playing fields. It obscures the fact that the financial markets are really the institutions that organize ownership and really are instruments of class power. They are institutions by which the ruling class stake sits claim over the productive power of an economy and asserts its policy preferences. A lot of the economic restructuring that we’ve seen over the last twenty years, the endless rounds of downsizing, outsourcing and speedup, all of these things that have made economic life difficult even in what looked like fairly good times came out of Wall Street people who were demanding higher profits and higher stock prices. The whole point of prosecuting insider trading is to make the securities markets look like democratic institutions when in fact they are anything but that."
Read On...

June 22, 2004

PAXMAN INTERVIEWS NOAM CHOMSKY - PART 1

Check out this MediaLens analysis of a recent interview between a British 'New Mandarin' and Noam Chomsky...

June 22, 2004

MEDIA ALERT: JEREMY PAXMAN INTERVIEWS NOAM CHOMSKY - PART 1

Media Bleat Points, Herd Traps, Herd Clichés, And Other Exotica

On May 21, BBC2's Newsnight programme contained an 8-minute interview with Noam Chomsky hosted by Jeremy Paxman, the country's premier political interviewer.

"If George Bush were to be judged by the standards of the Nuremberg Tribunals, he'd be hanged. So too, mind you, would every single American President since the end of the second world war, including Jimmy Carter...."

June 07, 2004

Media Alternatives - Part 1 and 2

Yes, there are alternatives. MediaLens "Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media," explores this radical notion.

In considering the development of honest media, we begin from the premise that truth telling should be motivated by compassion for suffering rather than greed for wealth, status and privilege.

[...]

It is this capacity for self-deception - for lying without consciously realising we are lying - that ultimately lies at the heart of the propaganda system afflicting modern democracies.

June 03, 2004

Latest Issue of Black Commentator

Issue 93 - June 3, 2004

"Genuine journalists and sincere activists seek out an audience that can change the world for the better. In a real sense, The Black Commentator is not about us, the publication's creators, but about you, the visitor and reader.

The Internet has provided a marvelous tool for social change. Those of us with access to this medium have been enabled to act as social demographers with a mission. Using the Internet as a kind of map, we can gather together groups and individuals who share a common interest and communicate with them, directly and instantaneously.

The Black Commentator's core audience is African Americans and their allies in the struggle for social and economic justice. It is also important to share Black American perspectives with the rest of the world, a mission uniquely suited to the Internet.

Our focus is commentary, analysis and investigation, elements of political dialogue that are absolutely essential to the creation of movements for social change. Without regular forums for advocacy and debate, a people are at the mercy of their adversaries. "

Check out the Black Commentator...

March 25, 2004

Skip and Miss

Kuro5hin: How to Fix Your CD Player

March 22, 2004

Seven Oaks

The excellent Seven Oaks magazine has a new issue online. Original work on the impact of missile defense on East Asia, Noam Chomsky's celebrity status, and an interview with Amina Sherazee.

February 24, 2004

Sex and Silence at Yale

Naomi Wolf: "In the late fall of 1983, professor Harold Bloom did something banal, human, and destructive: He put his hand on a student’s inner thigh—a student whom he was tasked with teaching and grading. The student was me, a 20-year-old senior at Yale. Here is why I am telling this story now: I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren’t still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge."

January 21, 2004

We are the Walrus

The Walrus is a new Canadian magazine for smart people.

Anyone willing to predict how long it will last before meeting the fate of Elm Street?

December 22, 2003

Against genocide in general, but for it in particular

Juan Cole, Informed Comment:

It turns out that Don Rumsfeld actually went to Iraq twice, once in 1983, and again in 1984. The work Rumsfeld did in 1983 of beginning a rapprochement between Reagan and Saddam was detracted from by a strong State Department condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war. Schultz told Rumsfeld to explain to Saddam [warning: PDF] that the Reagan administration did not actually, really have any serious objections to, like, exterminating Iranian troops like cockroaches with poison gas. It was just a general, unspecific blanket condemnation of that sort of thing, you know, to keep up appearances. Sort of like when the US was against genocide in general but didn't really mind so much the one conducted in Indonesia against hundreds of thousands of leftists in 1965. So, Saddam should feel comfortable about Reagan's desire to continually improve bilateral Reagan-Saddam relations at a pace of Saddam's choosing, and not be put off by the unfortunate but necessary pro forma condemnations of him as a war criminal issued at silly old Foggy Bottom.

December 09, 2003

Blue Gold

Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke: "We are taught in school that the Earth has a closed hydrologic system; water is continually being recycled through rain and evaporation and none of it leaves the planet’s atmosphere. Not only is there the same amount of water on the Earth today as there was at the creation of the planet, it’s the same water. The next time you’re walking in the rain, stop and think that some of the water falling on you ran through the blood of dinosaurs or swelled the tears of children who lived thousands of years ago. While there will always be the same amount of water, we can render water unusable for ourselves and for the planet."

And, they estimate, demand will exceed supply by 56% in 2025.

December 08, 2003

They didn't report, but you can decide

Counterpunch: Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of Anti-Semitism

December 07, 2003

The Proclamation of Baghdad

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places.

-- Lieut. General Sir Stanley Maude, shortly after the occupation of the city by British forces in 1919.

December 05, 2003

World AIDS Day

The anonymous author of the Body and Soul weblog has a great post about World AIDS Day that pulls together a lot of important material.

I was struck by the following passage, from an NYTimes article by Nicholas Kristof:

Even now, some governments in Central America choose to let their people die rather than distribute cheap generic AIDS drugs, which would save more lives but might irritate the U.S. And now America is trying to make it more difficult for these countries to use generic drugs.

That's why I decided to write about the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or F.T.A.A., not from Miami, where the negotiations were under way this week, but from rural Guatemala. Here it's easier to appreciate the stark choice that we Americans face: Do we want to maximize profits for U.S. pharmaceutical companies, or do we want to save lives?

But the rest of her comments are well worth reading and rereading.

November 15, 2003

Georgia: The Obscured Background

US Military bases in Central Asia, from a global map.

When the press starts paying a lot of attention to a crisis previously-ignored country, but leaves out any mention of the reasons for the crisis. Sentences like this are a good warning that there's an unstated reason for the coverage:

Accused by opposition leaders of rigging the results of Nov. 2 parliamentary elections, Shevardnadze declared in a nationally televised news conference that wherever vote-counting irregularities occurred, they could be corrected but that the new parliament should be allowed to open later this month. (Seattle Times)

...especially when they are not followed by any substantial information about the thousands of people demonstrating in the streets, or the justifications for calls for a 'civil disobedience campaign'.

There are dozens of civil wars in the world that get no coverage at all. So why did this nearly content-free story get in? The short answer is that US interests in central Asia are threatened. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but if the press was interested in understanding the situation in Georgia, they might drop the pretense of objectivity and say it outright: the only reason we're covering Georgia is because it forms a part of a major US military presence in the region.

A few Georgians and foreign journalists can fill in some of the missing bits.

Guardian:

'There are some problems in Pankisi, but I think it is mostly a social issue. I am not so worried about it. Anti-terrorism is not the only reason for the relationship between the United States and Georgia. Georgia is also the shortest route between the [oil reserves] of the Caspian Sea and Turkey.'

An international consor tium of oil companies including BP, America's Chevron, Russia's Lukoil and France's Total considers Georgia the ideal route by which oil from Azerbaijan and Central Asia can reach Turkey and the West.

BP recently sent a risk analyst to the area to explore opportunities for expansion. 'The pipelines will of course benefit from the military presence,' said a BP spokeswoman.

Vasily Streltsov: "In any case, one can affirm with confidence that the Americans have got their feet onto Georgian soil, and it is forever." (February 2002)

Gary Leupp: "The main body of U.S. forces began arriving on May 19, to refurbish two Soviet-era bases for indefinite American use and to implement 'Operation Train and Equip.' We should ask--as we should about the U.S. troops in the Philippines and Yemen--why are they there? ... Shevardnadze, in power since 1992, and now in his second term as president, retains few sentimental ties to the multinational union he once served. Instead, he has continuously sought to distance Georgia from Russia and to attach it instead to the U.S. camp."

Armen Khanbabyan: "The fundamental goal of Washington and the West as a whole is to establish firm and long- term control over the energy resources of Central and Upper Asia. This explains the appearance of their bases along the notorious 'arc of instability,' from Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan to Georgia."

The continued failure of US foreign policy to take long term consequences into account over short term corporate profits aside, there is a basic problem with this kind of journalism. Because it fails to note the obvious reason that Georgia is covered at all--US interests in oil, military presence, and regional influence--it is objectively non-objective.

(Objectivity is a misleading goal at best. What I wish to emphasize is that such reports leaves out obviously essential information.)

Most importantly, it fails fundamentally at what journalism is supposed to do: provide the means for readers to understand the subject under examination.

November 12, 2003

Sponsor of Outlaws

George Monbiot: Backyard terrorism

"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention.

For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.

Counterpunch Selections

Counterpunch runs a lot of interesting articles among other repetitive, but probably necessary, rhetoric. I try to do an occasional roundup of these.

In another path is possible, Robert Pollin thinks hard about practical, immediately available alternatives to US economic policy of the last 30 years. Among these is the always interesting Tobin Tax (a small tax on stock market trades), which Pollin sees as the principle way to cut across the complexities of regulating contemporary markets.

Ted Honderich, who is a sensible human being (and a philosopher) argues that "the Palestine suicide bomber does have a moral right to her act of terrorism". Before I'm strung up, I'll leave it to Ted. An excerpt:

There are two ways for a people to get and keep things, these being violence and negotiation. It has been said at every stage of the conflict in Palestine that the Palestinians must give up violence and negotiate.

That is typically to forget something. Negotiation is the means for getting and keeping things of the party whose position and ultimate power is stronger. Violence is the means of the other party, the party with no other means. It is in the interest of each party and their supporters to condemn or resist the means of the other. It is the responsibility of moral thinking to try to see what is right.

Benjamin Dangl and Kathryn Ledebur say that US inflexibility on Coca crop destruction is responsible for much of Bolivia's current mess.

Noah Leavitt discusses international law and the American legal system.

Robert Fisk talks about the fear and violence of American soldiers in Iraq, mentioning that one Captain Cirino refers to the enemy as "Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom fighters."

But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians--even when the fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities. No action has been taken, for instance, over the soldier who fired a single shot through the window of an Italian diplomat's car, killing his translator, in northern Iraq. Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim protesters in Fallujah in April.

Uri Avnery examines the credibility the Israeli military when it comes to responsibility for dead civilians.

Rick Giombetti interviews David Healy, the author of Let Them Eat Prozac. He's also the guy that U of T cancelled the job offer on after he came out as critical of the Pharmacos.

November 11, 2003

Remembering

Dead British soldiers, WWI.

When Remembrance Day rolls around, I usually make a point of re-reading Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Or my father Tom Jay's Bangor.

When it comes
it will be quick.

The heat will peel
your old sweetheart like a grape.
Light blinded
she searches bravely
for her moaning children.

If one wishes to remember those who fought and died, a repetition of the literary experience of their own all-too-real horrors seems appropriate.

I have trouble identifying with the many glorifications of war that are the dominant themes of remembrance day. It's quite possible that many did indeed die for the freedoms we now enjoy.

But if we value those deaths, do we not owe it to future recruits to thoroughly examine the ways in which they not necessary?

Were the deaths of 450,000 British troops lost in a single battle of the "Great War" necessary for eventual peace? Could most of World War II have been prevented if American corporations hadn't stuck around in Germany for so long? What freedom, exactly, was preserved by the invasions of Cuba and Vietnam?

Answering these questions ranges from complicated to dead simple, no pun intended. Scholars may debate what imperial motives exacerbated the conflict of World War I, but other cases don't need too much debate. For example:

After World War I, the United States went on a chemical weapons binge, producing millions of barrels of mustard gas and Lewisite. Thousands of US troops were exposed to these chemical agents in order to "test the efficacy of gas masks and protective clothing".

It is these unambiguous cases--which continue to perpetuate themselves with their own self-contained logic and fragmented priorities--that it is possible to combat here and now.

As remembrance goes, this is the least we can do today.

October 24, 2003

Atlantic Monthly spends 18 pages glorifying torture

"It's not torture when Americans are doing it" (CityPages): "At several points in his prose, and often in an obsequious tone, Bowden describes the various methods of psychological 'coercion' carried out by the U.S. military. There is 'sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fear for himself and his family.'"

October 22, 2003

Arundhati Roy (so it's worth reading)

Arundhati Roy: "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free"

Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are."

October 16, 2003

Shi'ites in Iraq

Juan Cole in the Boston Review: The Iraqi Shiites: On the history of America's would-be allies

The ambitious aim of the American war in Iraq—articulated by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservative defense intellectuals—was to effect a fundamental transformation in Middle East politics. The war was not—or not principally—about finding weapons of mass destruction, or preventing alliances with al Qaeda, or protecting the Iraqi population from Saddam’s terror. For U.S. policy makers the importance of such a transformation was brought home by the events of September 11, which challenged U.S. strategy in the region by compromising the longstanding U.S. alliance with Saudi Wahhabis. In response to this challenge, the Bush administration saw the possibility of creating a new pillar for U.S. policy in the region: a post-Baathist Iraq, dominated by Iraqi Shiites, which would spark a wave of democratization across the Middle East.

Juan Cole is a history prof, and apparently knows how to research beyond the usual sources. As a result, his account of the history of US involvement in Iraq is well worth a read.

September 22, 2003

Subtler Nazi Comparison

Edwin Black: "Hitler victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called 'Master Race.' The world thought Hitler was mad and barely understood his rationales. But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Adolf Hitler’s. The idea was created in the United States at least two decades before Hitler came to power. It was the product of the American eugenics movement."

Krugman Interviewed

An interview with Paul Krugman

There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.

Now if you ask what do the people who keep pushing for one tax cut after another want to accomplish, the answer is they are basically aiming to create a fiscal crisis which will provide the environment in which they can basically eliminate the welfare state.

September 05, 2003

On Neo-Imperialism

Ikram Saeed has an excellent review of Niall Ferguson's Empire: the rise and demise of the British World Order and the lessons for global power.

I counted three instances where he shows members of the subaltern races showing initiative. All three instances are ascribed to the white man's tutelage.

September 03, 2003

'a few years before the revolution'

George Monbiot: "The world is beginning to look like France, a few years before the Revolution. There are no reliable wealth statistics from that time, but the disparities are unlikely to have been greater than they are today. The wealthiest 5% of the world's people now earn 114 times as much as the poorest 5%. The 500 richest people on earth now own $1.54 trillion - more than the entire gross domestic product of Africa, or the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of humanity."

BBC: Hondurans riot over IMF reforms

Reuters: "Is it fair that every European cow laps up $2.50 a day in subsidies while half the people in the world live on less than $2 a day?"

This seems to be the big issue for the WTO-Cancun meeting: EU and US farm subsidies must fall, and developing countries need to have access to those markets. But it doesn't follow that the poor of the world will benefit from having more agriculture in their countries. They'll benefit a little bit, since some of them will have jobs, rather than nothing. But since the IMF and World Bank have been opening them up to the 'rigours of the market' (which they are, ten years later, realizing is completely skewed in favour of rich countries), the agricultural business in many developing countries has been fundamentally dismantled.

Now that that's done, international investors can swoop in to save the day, buying up land and tapping into workforces that are starving for any wage, no matter the working conditions. In that context, some money goes to the poor, but it's still very much the status quo in that most of the profits go to gargantuan multinational corporations. They might be different multinationals, but it's the same old story.

September 02, 2003

Blogosphere Interview

More than you ever wanted to know about Matthew Yglesias.

August 27, 2003

"Empire Builders"

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting online feature--entitled "Empire Builders"--which looks at neoconservatives, what they think, and who they are.

LOOKOUT

Naomi Klein writes about how Canadians have been enjoying their status as "Hippie Nation". Yet when Paul Martin comes into power he will undoubtedly try and cozy up to the Americans, perhaps at the expense of our new "coolness". As she puts it:

This much is predictable. The wild card is how the Canadian people will respond. Will we embrace obedience once again, or will we demand more of this whole independence thing? Well, so far there are no signs of retreat.

August 20, 2003

Palast without Power

When the lights went out, Greg Palast used the remaining battery power in his laptop to write about "The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights"

This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull created the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned power "trading" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates. Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit?

Damn right we did. Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.

But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a legacy he wanted to leave for his son, the gratitude of power companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000, seven times the sum they gave Democrats.

Or as Kellan put it, "argue with Palast's tone, but you can't argue with his facts."

August 19, 2003

The Effects of FTA and NAFTA

Mel Hurtig analyzes the actual effects of the FTA and NAFTA on Canada's sovereignty. He shows how politicians pushing free trade run counter to the general population's opinions, and assesses what effects Paul Martin will have on the continuing trend.

August 16, 2003

Orchard

David Orchard's take on conservatism (and Conservatism) in The Road to Power is pretty fascinating.

The opening on the political spectrum today is for a voice defending our sovereignty. This was the terrain of the Progressive Conservative Party, from the 1850s until the 1980s. I advocate we reclaim this powerful and successful position. The idea of “uniting the right” in Canada, one of the most stable and tolerant societies in the world, is doomed. Canadian politicians capable of holding the broad centre ground are those who succeed.

Good Reading

Some interesting articles, shamelessly lifted from Arts and Letters Daily.

The Guardian has an adapted version of Edward Said's new introduction to Orientalism

But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated third world dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened and reasoned for by orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.

Without a well-organised sense that the people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values - the very core of traditional orientalist dogma - there would have been no war.

Martha Nussbaum's analysis of Judith Butler's work is quite interesting.

If Butler should reply that her argument pertains only to speech (and there is no reason given in the text for such a limitation, given the assimilation of harmful speech to conduct), then we can reply in the domain of speech. Let us get rid of laws against false advertising and unlicensed medical advice, for they close the space within which poisoned consumers and mutilated patients can perform their resistance! Again, if Butler does not approve of these extensions, she needs to make an argument that divides her cases from these cases, and it is not clear that her position permits her to make such a distinction.

For Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics.

NYRB: The Decline and Fall of Literature

The field of English has become, to use a term given currency twenty-five years ago by the redoubtable Stanley Fish, a "self-consuming artifact." On the one hand, it has lost the capacity to put forward persuasive judgments; on the other hand, it is stuffed with dogma and dogmatists. It has paid overdue attention to minority writers, but, as Lynn Hunt notes in her essay in What's Happened to the Humanities?, it (along with the humanities in general) has failed to attract many minority students. It regards the idea of progress as a pernicious myth, but never have there been so many critics so sure that they represent so much progress over their predecessors. It distrusts science, but it yearns to be scientific—as attested by the notorious recent "Sokal hoax," in which a physicist submitted a deliberately fraudulent article full of pseudoscientific gibberish to a leading cultural-studies journal, which promptly published it. It denounces the mass media for pandering to the public with pitches and slogans, but it cannot get enough of mass culture. The louder it cries about the high political stakes in its own squabbles, the less connection it maintains to anything resembling real politics. And by failing to promote literature as a means by which students may become aware of their unexamined assumptions and glimpse worlds different from their own, the self-consciously radical English department has become a force for conservatism..

August 13, 2003

Hitchens on Said

Christopher Hitchens is a convincing writer. After reading his lambasting of Edward Said in The Atlantic, I feel the need to point out the components of his argument without the elegant but ultimately empty rhetoric.

read more...

August 09, 2003

Operation Quebec Freedom

Michael Century: A non-revisionist note on Operation Quebec Freedom, 1775

Hoping to snatch Quebec as a 14th colony in a swift pre-emptive strike, the first Continental Congress had sent a manifesto to the people of Quebec in March 1775 inviting them to "unite with us in one social compact, formed on the generous principles of equal liberty". The pamphlet begins by warning that under continued colonial administration, "even the Inquisition itself" could be re-established. Hardly a savvy insinuation to a mainly Catholic population to which King George had, in the Quebec Act of 1774, just granted re-establishment of all its customary legal and religious institutions. The American entreaty was to an "Unhappy people! Who are not only injured but insulted Nay more!" In a darker register, the Canadians are urged to "Join us as brothers in revolt, or to risk "becoming tools to assist the British in taking that freedom from us, which they have treacherously denied to you"". A small expeditionary force was sent north in the fall of 1775, for whose prospects Washington wrote that he had "the greatest Reason to expect that Quebec will fall into our Hands a very easy Prey."

August 03, 2003

Paul Martin's Canada Steamship Lines

CBC's Disclosure has an extensive bit of background on Paul Martin's company, Canada Steamship Lines (CSL).

On CSL's use of "flags of convenience":

For example, the CSL “Innovator” had a labour agreement, a Bahamanian flag and an Indian crew. But when CSL pooled some of its ships with a German company, it sold them the Innovator as part of the deal.

The Germans gave it a new name, a Liberian flag, and a Filipino crew. CSL then leased the ship right back – and its labour agreement no longer applied.
...
"It’s no different that dealing with sweatshops, he uses sweatships – same thing. He applies the same kind of rules –he may not apply them but he knows what they are– that is why he goes offshore with his vessels."

CSL responds:

"The re-flagging and the change of crews are all, were all required in order to remain competitive in the international market. All our competitors all employ foreign crews to – and we must be competitive."

I wonder if the executives took a pay cut in order to "remain competitive"?

July 27, 2003

Momentum

Anthony Lappé: Has Bush "jumped the shark?"

The phrase was coined by a popular web site that tracks the exact moment when TV shows pass their prime and devolve into mediocrity. The term derives from an episode of "Happy Days" in which Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis. Apparently, the show sucked after that.

The wave of negative coverage that hit the White House last week has many people asking if it's all downhill from here for the President.

The Administration is under attack from almost every quarter. Even Republicans and Fox News are asking hard questions. It's almost as if the mainstream media had cattle prods attached to the parts of their brains that stimulate critical thinking.

...

Ralph Nader writes in his 2002 book "Crashing the Party" that journalists are like birds on a telephone wire. They wait for one to take off and then follow en mass. There needs to be a critical mass of criticism before a story, or a line of inquiry, can become safe. Unlike Fonzie's ill-advised attempt at water sports, there is no formula to determine the precise moment when the mainstream media adopts a new master narrative that guides their coverage. It can come from pressure from partisan politicians, outpourings of public dissatisfaction, or when, as in the Niger case, the lies become an 800-lb gorilla that are simply impossible to ignore. Usually, it is a combination of all of the above.

July 23, 2003

Counterpunch Selections

Allan J. Lichtman: Why is George Bush President?

George W. Bush is president today because the votes counted in Florida's presidential election did not match the ballots cast by the state's voters. But the outcome in Florida--which determined the presidency--was not decided by hanging chads, recounts, or intervention by the Supreme Court.

Al Gore lost Florida's presidential vote because electoral officials tossed into the trashcan as invalid more than one out of every ten ballots cast by African-Americans throughout the state. In some counties, nearly 25 percent of ballots cast by blacks were set aside as invalid. In contrast, officials rejected only about one out of every fifty ballots cast by whites statewide.

Edward Said: Rule by the Blind: Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping of Arabs

Americans are sufficiently blind that when a Middle Eastern leader emerges whom our leaders like--the shah of Iran or Anwar Sadat--it is assumed that he is a visionary who does things our way not because he understands the game of imperial power (which is to survive by humoring the regnant authority) but because he is moved by principles that we share.

Almost a quarter of a century after his assassination, Sadat is a forgotten and unpopular man in his own country because most Egyptians regard him as having served the U.S. first, not Egypt. The same is true of the shah in Iran. That Sadat and the shah were followed in power by rulers who are less palatable to the U.S. indicates not that Arabs are fanatics, but that the distortions of imperialism produce further distortions, inducing extreme forms of resistance and political self-assertion.

Steve Kretzman and Jim Vallette: Plugging Iraq into Globalization

In early April, during the initial assault on Baghdad, soldiers set up forward bases named Camp Shell and Camp Exxon until Pentagon PR realized that didn't look very good and ordered them renamed. Those soldiers knew the score. Several months and dozens of lives later, Bechtel, Halliburton, and a host of oil companies are ensuring that the fledgling "free market" in Iraq will be particularly free for US corporations.

The ultimate prize in Iraq, of course, is oil, and the Bush/Cheney gang has uncoiled a vastly underreported legal and financial cord that plugs U.S corporate control into these resources at least through the year 2007. The basic wiring has two prongs and is already complete. The first part, created by the UN under US pressure is the Development Fund for Iraq– which is to be controlled by the US and advised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Unsurprisingly, this is looking more and more like a slush fund for corporate welfare. The second is a recent Bush executive order that provides absolute legal protection for U.S. interests in Iraqi oil. And a third and final prong is being crafted to ground the whole system and get as much profit as possible out of it.

July 21, 2003

Various

Social Design Notes has an exhaustive, descriptive list of the myriad ways that decks of cards have been used during the Iraq war, and in previous wars. Apparently, hundreds of thousands of these decks have been sold.

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The June edition of Harper's Index is amusing and informative.

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Some interesting research on the role of journalism in promoting gentrification.

Reporters' "gentrification-supportive" news stories, according to the researchers, tend to be rooted in "rhetorical representations" -- especially metaphors -- of neighborhoods. One dominant metaphor speaks of neighborhoods as living organisms, using words and phrases such as "thriving," "alive," "healthy," "robust," "on its deathbed." Another metaphor describes neighborhoods as places needing salvation from planners, developers and gentrifiers, and uses such phrases as "need for technicians" or for "fixers," "bold agents of change," "savvy progressive developers."

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The researchers found that both metaphors were used to describe gentrifying and gentrification-ripe areas, but were rarely used to describe low-income neighborhoods unlikely to ever become gentrified. Their findings suggest that reporters "apply this metaphorically laced way to see neighborhoods in order to legitimate gentrification at actual or anticipated sites of restructuring."

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Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force mapped out oil exploration areas in Iraq in March of 2001. The maps are available online. UNICEF says that over 1000 Iraqi children were killed by US bombs.

July 14, 2003

Divide and Conquer: Welfare against Workers

Capitalists do not come right out and say (except occasionally in the business press) "let's lower social entitlements so we will be better off."  Instead, they divide and conquer.

If you work for a living, you're better off when welfare payments are high.  Sound Strange?  Only because truth is often ignored in a society where the narrow interests of wealth holders dominate over all else.

July 13, 2003

Selections from Counterpunch

After featuring a fair bit of dry and predictable articles, Counterpunch seems to have returned to the business of providing diverse and intelligent coverage of undercovered issues.

Arthur Mitzman: Prometheus Revisited: The Double Wall Before the Future

The author of Risk Society, Ulrich Beck, has called the attack on the World Trade Center "the Chernobyl of globalization," exposing "the false promise of neoliberalism" just as the Ukrainian catastrophe of 1986 "undermined our faith in nuclear energy." Viewing the shoddy privatized airline security as partly responsible for the suicide bombings, Beck saw in the pictures of the World Trade Center inferno "an as yet undecoded message: a state can neoliberalise itself to death." He decried "the capitalist fundamentalists' unswerving faith in the redeeming power of the market" as "a dangerous illusion," and called for a reinvigoration of the state. "We need," he wrote, "to combine economic integration with cosmopolitan politics. Human dignity, cultural identity and otherness must be taken more seriously in the future. Since September 11, the gulf between the world of those who profit from globalization and the world of those who feel threatened by it has been closed. Helping those who have been excluded is no longer a humanitarian task. It is in the west's own interest: the key to its security."

Robert Jensen: An Interview with Wes Jackson

Wes Jackson and his colleagues at The Land Institute are working on a 10,000 year-old problem -- agriculture. Not simply problems in agriculture, but the problem of agriculture.That fundamental problem is that no one has come up with a sustainable system for perpetuating agricultural productivity. High yields mask what Jackson has called "the failure of success": Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically -- primarily because of erosion and chemical contamination of land and water. That kind of success guarantees the inevitable collapse of the system.

Ali Abunimah: US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated

United States occupation forces in Iraq are refusing to treat wounded and sick Iraqis if their injuries are not directly caused by the United States. This shocking behavior is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Ron Jacobs: Resisting the Either/Or: Shades of Gray in Iran

Recently, as the question of Iran and its relationship to the United States has pushed itself back into the front pages of the west's newspapers, a debate has been simmering among antiwar and progressive types as to what their position should be on the threats directed at Tehran by the United States.

Standard Schaefer: An Interview with Economist Michael Hudson: The Coming Financial Reality

The banking system's cost of obtaining funds is now almost as low as it was after World War II. But long-term rates for mortgages and credit cards have not fallen. So the lending margins of banks have widened, increasing their earnings. This is why we don't face a Japanese-style bank collapse. U.S. banks have managed to avoid bearing the brunt of the stock-market losses by passing their bad stock investments and bad debts on to their customers, the pension funds and mutual funds. Labor and its savings have borne the brunt of the post-2000 market downturn. It's the people who put their trust in banks and other financial managers that are on the short end of the stick.

The rates that have responded most significantly to lower borrowing costs are short-term loans for financial speculation, above all for derivatives and related buying or selling of stocks and bonds on margin--enormous gambles on which way the dollar, the stock market and interest rates may go. This kind of lending does not help the economy invest more in fixed capital formation. It merely helps create a thriving and profitable new bank business.

Like Japan, the U.S. economy has painted itself into a debt corner that is locking in low interest rates. These rates can't go up without causing widespread distress. This "lock-in" is a second effect of the Fed's policy. As interest rates have fallen, home owners and businesses have found their income able to support a larger debt pyramid. A thousand dollars per month can carry twice as high an interest-only loan at 5% as it can at 10%.

July 07, 2003

Two From Bitch Magazine

Smart Girls are Scary!

In true "anything you can do, I can do better" fashion, girls across America are rapidly becoming the stars of academia, ruling their schools as honor-roll members, heads of student government, and captains of academic clubs. To most of us, this sounds like a good thing, but you wouldn’t know that from reading BusinessWeek’s May 26 cover story, "The New Gender Gap," which wrings its hands in concern over a "female lock on power" in America’s educational system that’s turning our nation’s boys into underachievers. The article asserts that schools have lost sight of boys, "taking for granted that they were doing well, even though data began to show the opposite." Boys, BW worries, have become "the second sex."

Pushed to the Margins: The slow death and possible rebirth of the feminist bookstore

It’s no secret that the number of independent booksellers has dwindled over the last decade with the growth of deep-discount bookstore chains and online book marts. Feminist bookstores have fared no better than their peers: In 1997, there were 175 in North America; now there are 44. BookWoman in Austin, Texas, and Charis Books & More in Atlanta, Georgia, will soon have large chain book retailers as neighbors. Chicago’s Women & Children First, one of the largest feminist bookstores in the country, has held its own against Barnes & Noble by attracting big-name authors for events, but there is now a Borders scheduled to open in a new development a mile away; W&CF’s owners are wary of the anticipated effect on their fiction sales. Ten-year-old Boadecia’s Books, which recently became the oldest women’s bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw its sales suffer last year when a Barnes & Noble opened a half mile away.

Although some feminist bookstores report steady sales and customer support despite the omnipresent chains, escalating costs are punishing many independents whose profit margins have always been slim. Now that sales can no longer support the community activism, events, programming, and workshops that have historically made feminist bookstores so much more than retail operations, the survivors are facing hard choices.

Imagination

Ammiel Alcalay in Al Ahram: Politics and Imagination: After the fall of Baghdad

How are those of us involved in transference and translation to react under such circumstances? Have we perhaps reached a point where NOT translating or providing access to works from the Arab world might be the more legitimate act? Have we all simply become lap dogs, ready to jump at the first opportunity given to peddle our wares as imperial curios? And when we decide to participate, how can we insulate and protect these works from subjugation, from being, literally, eaten alive?

My own sense of this is that, living, as we are, in the heart of the empire, we must discover new ways to both renounce and take up power. The insularity of American intellectual life presents very real political problems and writers have a crucial role to play in disturbing this deadly slumber. By repopulating cultural space with the banished and the obliterated, writers can reassert the absolute value of individual experience in a political context, as a political context, as a road block to be avoided or ignored at one's own peril. But even here, the act of transmission is not innocent and must be permeated with the kind of vigilance that recognises, as the American poet Jack Spicer once put it, that "There are bosses in poetry as well as in the industrial empire."

[...] experts continually tell us that the Arab world has no Solzhenitsyns or Havels. The facts, unfortunately, get very much in the way of such a patently misleading assertion but these facts are not at all that easy to get a hold of. The number of writers, intellectuals, and political activists in the Arab, Middle Eastern and Islamic world who have been censored, imprisoned, tortured, assassinated or disappeared constitutes one of the great human sagas of our times, but there is no single place to go and find this narrative. How did we get to this point? How have the real issues at stake in the contemporary Middle East been made invisible to the North American public? There is, of course, the usual villain, in the form of the media machine. But there is, as well, a massive failure and acquiescence on the part of American intellectuals, a true lack not just of responsibility but of response, on the human, creative, historical and political levels. As the US government and media prepare us to accept more and more perverse acts carried out in our names, the need to systematically excavate and represent this human archaeology is absolute and essential, and should be placed in the realm of public health. While those involved in cultural transmission and translation always face the risk of appropriating, trivialising or displacing a work from an environment of crucial importance to one of potential indifference, the risks of not doing such work, it seems to me, are far greater. Inaction, indifference and the lack of solidarity or even curiosity marks something much more ominous -- it marks the presence of a picket line that we have internalised and constructed in our very imagination, and that we either fear crossing or forget even exists.

July 03, 2003

Privatized Health Care

AlterNet: U.S. Healthcare: The Free Choice to Suck

Take healthcare corporations and insurance companies. Far from being "supple," "quality-oriented" and "intellect" organizations delivering better service at ever lower prices, these behemoths are more accurately described as massive for-profit bureaucracies offering shoddy care at inflated prices. When compared to "socialized" healthcare systems, like those in Canada or Germany, Americans pay twice as much per-capita in medical costs, roughly $4,000 per person. The extra cash paid out by Americans goes for "overhead." Private U.S. insurance companies on average take 14 percent in administrative costs while public healthcare systems like Medicare or the Canadian health systems spend only around 2 percent of their income in this manner. But it's not even accurate to describe the extra surcharge paid by Americans as "overhead" -- that implies some productive use. In reality, much of the America surcharge pays for bloated CEO salaries and boosting the value of medical stocks.

June 30, 2003

Stonewall History

Allison Gifford of Rabble.ca has compiled an interesting reading list on the history of the gay rights movement, starting with Stonewall (or disputing the recognition of Stonewall as the start).

June 28, 2003

Objectivity?

YellowTimes.org: 'American journalism: Objectivity and reverence''. A piece on the difference between American and British approaches to journalism.

As I observe it, the mainstream American approach to objectivity has two levels to it:

First, you have to choose a story. Since objectivity is important, you can't just make up a question and answer it (even if you do so objectively). You have to choose news that is objectively important. Otherwise, you're biased. Objectivity, though, is not a way of coming up with questions, but a method of answering questions, so it doesn't suit this purpose at all. But that would involve admitting bias, which makes things complicated, so they fudge it: whatever seems to be important to most people, is important.

This starts off innocently enough; it's almost democratic, in a hamfisted way. Everyone agrees that the president is important. Therefore, we cover what the president says.

The second level of objectivity has to do with answering the question that the report is implicitly asking. But the question has been obviated by the procedure of objectivity: it becomes a tautology. "The president is holding a press conference" becomes "what did the president say at the press conference?"

What remains of objectivity, then, is relegated to the accurate rendering of what the president said.

The problem with this, which should be completely obvious to everyone, is that what is objectively important to cover is what people with power and influence say. The reporter can't just ask a question, and answer it.

"Did Ari Fleisher just tell a lie on behalf of the President?" Even if there is a perfectly objective way to answer this question, the reporter can't ask it, because it's not objective. "What?" you ask, "how could a question possibly not come from one standpoint or another?" I don't know, but this is the inane justification for a large part of the complete toothlessness of our journalists.

Of course, much worse abuses take place on a daily basis. Entire reports are assigned and written just to placate advertisers or those with power or influence (boardroom pals, rotary club buddies... whatever the scale). This bizarre definition of objectivity doesn't make that happen. People make that happen. But the bizarre interpretation provides a structure that makes pleasing those in power a lot easier.

What's wrong with this: ask any question you think is worth asking, as long as you answer it in a way that is fair and well-documented. There would still be plenty of room to ask extremely limited or leading questions, but there would be just a bit less justification for not asking the really uncomfortable questions.

June 20, 2003

Weekly Chomsky #2

Weekly Chomsky #2 has been posted. Another nugget from Noam.

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