Radical media, politics and culture.

"New Tax Ideas from John Kerry"

Juriaan Bendien

Sitting here in wintry Amsterdam, it looks to me the US tweedle-dee
tweedle-dum elections are really about nothing very much yet, the main
reason being that the federal government is heavily in the hock, and really
cannot deliver very much to voters, except through a radical restructuring
of federal operations, but this is a politically highly charged issue, which
cannot really be tackled before the votes are cast.


This is the problem of politics in the age of futures economics: you have to
build confidence in what you will do in the future, before you can even know
what you will have to do in the future This helps explain the political
commercials trying to convince voters that the election is really about
something else instead, such as terrorism possibilities which might or could
exist.

"Magic of the State?"

Michael Taussig

George Bush comes to NYC today. Will he wear a mask?


I see people clapping the police, the firemen, and the construction workers along the West Side Highway down at Christopher Street and outside St. Vincent's Hospital. They have American flags and crudely lettered cardboard signs saying "We Love You," and "The Bravest." There is a feeling of carnival in the air and the cars honk back. Foucault is famous for his idea of bio-power, that the modern state is dedicated not to punishment or violence but to life, that it practices a sort of manipulative altruism. Don't think of the hangman. Think of the fireman. An older wisdom than Foucault's has long maintained that war is the health of the state. A professor of history on NPR says he is encouraged that this will put an end to criticism of the police in NYC. Dawn of a new era.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Kerry vs. Kerry-Lite
Stephen Gowans

Some advice to politically Left Americans. Most of you will cast a vote for John Kerry in November. There's not much doubt about it. And the reason you'll be backing Kerry is (a) you assume nothing could be worse than Bush, (b) the Democrats must be marginally better, because.well, because they're Democrats, (c) pressuring elites doesn't seem to be working and you can't think of anything else to do to stop "Bush's" drive to war, and (d) all those people who keep warning you about lesser evilism, can't seem to come up with anything better. So Kerry's your man. Oh sure, some of you admire Kucinich. Others even think well of Nader. But you know Kerry's going to be your go-to-guy come November.

NOT BORED! writes:

"When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease"

What's being sold here [in the Budweiser radio commercials that use the music of Squeeze and the Dave Edmunds Band] is not name or personality but style. The familiar but chart-poor groups are not announced, and that anonymity provides an aural itch that you scratch when you remember the product with which the style is associated. The spots take the language of a performer and reduce it to two or three constituent elements; the result is that the performer's language — made of incipient cliches that, by means of a confrontation with a specific occasion of performance, are sometimes dissolved into an efflorescence that transcends cliche and extends language — is now reified into a single cliche hard enough to dominate any mere occasion. From now on, this is all the performer will have to say. His performance will communicate in terms of how well it approximates the reification of the commercial, not necessarily because the commercial will have been more widely or intensely heard than any other work by the performer (though it probably will have been), but because the commercial will have completed — in fact, realized — the performer's career. When one hears an old Squeeze or Dave Edmunds record, it will sound like an attempt to formulate a cliche — to produce a style so recognizable and narrow that it can be marketed as an object, as a thing — which is what the record will have been.

Greil Marcus has changed his mind since he wrote these words, back in 1987, when his "Real Life Top Ten" column was published in The Village Voice. He now says, "I think all songs should go up on this block [...] It's a way of finding out if songs that carry people with them, songs that seem tied to a particular time and place, can survive a radical recontextualization, or if that recontectualization dissolves them" (see "Bob Dylan After the 1994 Congressional Elections," in Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, published in 2000).

"Billionaires for Bush? Well, Yes and No"

Donovan Slack, Boston Globe


There was a fraction of a moment when no one knew how to react. Outside the Park Plaza Hotel — where a boisterous crowd of protesters was chanting, beating drums, and bristling with antiwar signs meant for President Bush — a group of about a dozen approached. They were in ball gowns and suits and drinking champagne. "Bush and Cheney are good for us," they chanted.
 

"Look at all these liberal hippies coming around with their boo-hoo signs," said one of them, a woman in a silver lame wrap and designer sunglasses.


Some of the protesters turned, stunned. But then someone pointed to the signs the fancy-dresssed group was carrying — "Free the Enron Seven" and "Corporations are People Too!" — and the crowd erupted with shouts of approval. "We should let them get up front," somebody shouted, telling the crowd to part and let them pass toward the hotel.


Full story: Boston Globe

hydrarchist writes: "pinched from the excellent resource endpage".


"Sex, Race and Class"

Selma James

There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left.

"A Fragment on Kropotkin and Giuliani"

Stefano Harney, Social Text #72

Kropotkin's history of the French Revolution has a
revealing chapter on anarchists. (1) Kropotkin notes
that they were greatly feared by both the Girondins
and the Jacobins, and they dominated many key moments
of action and deliberation in the Revolution. Yet they
left behind little direct trace, except in the
pamphlets of others in which they were attacked. And
Kropotkin's great history enacts this presence.
Anarchists are given only one short chapter, but they
are present as a force in every scene. They were the
people willing to make revolution at every turn, "even
against themselves." These anarchists were precisely,
in Kropotkin's history, both the movement and limits
of the French Revolution.

"Zizek is not a Radical?"

Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey

In the world of radical theory, Slavoj Zizek has
attained the status of intellectual superstar. Terry
Eagleton claims Zizek "provides the best intellectual
high since Anti-Oedipus", and with good reason. (1)
Zizek's work is passionate, exciting, funny,
frustrating, all-consuming, interdisciplinary and
paradigm-shaking. Further, he endorses immediately
"political" positions and claims that seem
uncompromisingly "radical" when compared to rivals
such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Judith
Butler. He relentlessly unmasks those he sees as
closet liberals in his enduring war on the terrorism
of political moderation, from "radical democracy" to
multiculturalism, denouncing all attempts to improve
liberal capitalism from within its own horizon. (2)

Moreover, Zizek's radicalism seems refreshingly
original and relevant whilst daring to confront the
existing socio-symbolic system. But is this
appearance of a radical break with a flawed present
sustainable?

"Behind the Balaclavas of South-East Mexico"

Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeve, Paris, August 1995

"Because those who are too quick to admire and who are suddenly convinced are rarely the salt of the earth." -- B. Traven, In The Freest State In The World, 1919, Insomniac Edition, Paris 1995.

1.

 In the Golden Age of 'actually non-existing socialism' journeys were organised to the countries of the radiant future. Believers were then invited to express their enthusiasm for a reality staged by the lords of the manor. In this way people visited the soviet socialism of the USSR, the Maoist socialism of China, the miniature socialism of Albania, the bearded socialism of Cuba, the Sandinista socialism of Nicaragua, etc. Woe betide those who contested the objective, scientific and unquestionable character of these fabricated realities. Until the day these systems collapsed. People thought they had seen but had seen nothing!

THE TROJAN HORSE


Jay Bulworth
http://www.dissent.com.au


Katharine Gun is a 29 year old English woman who spent a part of her formative years in North-east Asia. As a result, she is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. She used to work as a translator at Britain’s super-secret GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the signals intelligence agency that violates privacy every day by eavesdropping on phone calls, emails and other communications. Katharine exposed US espionage against member delegations at the UN Security Council in the lead-up to the war on Iraq. Espionage at the United Nations is prohibited under the Vienna conventions on diplomatic relations. When charged under the Official Secrets Act, she signalled her intention to argue the defence of ‘necessity’ – the prevention of an illegal war involving the loss of thousands of lives. On Tuesday 24th February 2004, her legal team served documents demanding to see any advice given to ministers about the legality of the war. Two days later, all charges were dropped and Katharine Gun walked free.


It should be noted that the leaks showed a “surge” in US espionage against member delegations. The US engages in such activity every day. What was unusual was the “surge”, or increase, in surveillance as the US tried to manipulate the vote and obtain authorisation for its war on Iraq. There are people of goodwill who believe in the sanctity of international law, and who feel disturbed by this event, as they do about the US-led aggression against Iraq without UN authorisation.


This article is for those people. It is written in order to dispel illusions in the United Nations, which was created as an instrument of US foreign policy. Furthermore, the reader should understand that the US began spying on member delegations even before the UN existed.

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