Radical media, politics and culture.
February 27, 2004 - 10:21am -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Work

nolympics writes:

This essay is from Confronting Capitalism, a new collection from Softskull edited by Eddie Yuen, George Katsiafikas and Daniel Burton Rose and to be published in the coming months.

"Insurgent Chinese Workers and Peasants:
The 'Weak Link' in Capitalist Globalization and U.S. Imperialism" (1)
John Gulick

The attacks of September 11 forced the worldwide movement against capitalist globalization into temporary retreat. But as the Bush II regime parlayed the mini-horror of Cold War blowback into the mega-horror of U.S. imperial conquest in Central and West Asia, savvier elements of the movement against capitalist globalization quickly regrouped. While the Cheney-Perle-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz axis in Washington plotted the invasion and occupation of Iraq, these elements of the movement appropriately preoccupied themselves with how to theoretically link capitalist globalization and U.S. imperialism, and how to recompose the movement accordingly. Given the urgency with which this reorientation had to be effected, and the tremendous stakes involved, it is no mystery why relatively obscure events unfolding in the "rust bowl" of northeast China in the spring of 2002 were missed by most opponents of capitalist globalization and U.S. imperialism. Yet these events that took place in the cities of Daqing and Liaoyang crystallized a much vaster pattern of events that may seriously wound both capitalist globalization and U.S. imperialism.

February 26, 2004 - 11:19am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"Reverse Imagineering:

Toward the New Urban Struggles,

Or: Why Smash the State When Your

Neighborhood Theme Park Is So Much Closer?"

Brian Holmes

"What are the steps in the creation of a Disney attraction?
According to literature sent out by WDW [Walt Disney World], the steps are: storyboard, script, concept, show models, sculpture, show set design, graphics, interiors, architectural design, molds and casting, wardrobe and figure finishing, electronic and mechanical design and manufacture, show sets and prop construction, animation, audio, special effects and lighting, and engineering." [The Unofficial Walt Disney Imagineering Page (www.imagineering.org).]


On October 17, 2003, seven groups of some 20 to 30 persons descended into the Paris underground, with paint pots, glue, rollers, brushes, spray cans, sheets of paper and marking pens in their hands. Their aim? To overwrite, cover up, deface, subvert, recompose or simply rip to shreds as many advertisements as possible, without violence to any individual or to any piece of property other than the images which impinge on our most intimate desires.

February 25, 2004 - 3:00pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"Democrats Nominate Hitler"

Ran Prieur

BOSTON -- After switching their allegiance from anarcho-communist Howard Dean to ultra-liberal John Kerry, and then to liberal John Edwards, on the final day of their convention Democrats switched one last time to extreme moderate Adolf Hitler, convinced that he's the man who has the best chance of beating Bush.


"This election has never been about issues," said Democratic Party spokesman Heinrich Himmler. "It's not about whether we go to war, about military spending, or taxes, or the federal budget, or the environment, or civil liberties, or even abortion. That's the kind of starry-eyed idealism that killed us in '72. This election is about one thing -- getting that bastard Bush out of there, that lying, draft-dodging, coke-snorting, beady-eyed, stupid, bad, bad person. Hate him! Hate him! Hate him!"

February 25, 2004 - 9:09am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"The Resurrection of Total Information Awareness"

Kirt Nimmo

Remember when we were told that the TIA (Terrorism Information Awareness) program was terminated? The Senate supposedly cut funding for the program last September, according to the Congressional Record. This followed the ditching of retired Adm. John Poindexter, Iran-Contra criminal and mastermind behind TIA, due to his "terrorism futures" idea, or Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP). It was just too "unorthodox" for the folks in Congress.


Here's the bill supposedly eliminating TIA. Note the caveats. I recall thinking at the time: intelligence agencies simply don't get rid of ideas like TIA, especially after money and work has been poured into them. Instead, they transfer the research and money elsewhere and continue to develop the programs.

February 25, 2004 - 8:38am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Sex

"A Breast That Changed the World"

Barbara Sumner Burstyn, dissidentvoice.org

In my living room in New Zealand, half-way through last
week's episode of the banal, overhyped The Osbournes,
it dawned on me what was so weird: you could hear every
word. Watch the same show in the US and you need to
lip-read your way round the almost continuous beeping-
out of bad words.


The same day I read yet another attack on Janet
Jackson. Across America her supposedly sexually
explicit breast baring has unleashed a torrent of moral
effluvia. Book-ended with the "outrage, anger,
embarrassment and serious injury" Super Bowl viewers
were said to have suffered was the so-called scandal
being fanned round John Kerry, the Democratic
presidential hopeful with the allegedly sleazy past.

February 23, 2004 - 3:10pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
News

An anonymous coward writes:
"The Bloody Price"

Tariq Ali, OutLookIndia.com

Sooner than anyone could have predicted the occupation has become untenable.
Regime changes in Washington and London would be small punishment compared
to what is being inflicted on Iraq.

The whole world knows that Bush and Blair lied to justify the war, but do
they know the price being paid on the ground in Iraq? First, the blood
price--paid by civilians and others this week as every week. More than 50
people died on February 12 when a car bomb ripped through Iraqis queuing to
join the police force. The US military blamed al-Qaida loyalists and foreign
militants for this and other suicide bombings. But occupations are usually
ugly. How then can resistance be pretty?

February 23, 2004 - 11:42am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

An anonymous coward writes:

"Open the Debates"

Ralph Nader, CommonDreams.org

Last week, Open Debates (see Opendebates.org), a
nonprofit, non-partisan organization, whose purposes I
support, filed a complaint with the Federal Election
Commission (FEC) against the Commission on Presidential
Debates (CPD) which was created and is controlled by
the Republican and Democratic Parties. Open Debates
charged, with documentation, that the CPD is not non-
partisan but is deeply bi-partisan, serving and obeying
the dictates of the two major Parties.


Open Debates argues that such control is a violation of
FEC debate regulations. Corporate contributions which
could go only to an educational association are instead
going to a bi-partisan political organization which is
unlawful.

February 23, 2004 - 11:17am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

"A Bush Covert Operative Takes Over Al Sharpton's Campaign"

Wayne Barrett, Village Voice

Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.


Though Stone and Sharpton have tried to reduce their alliance to a curiosity, suggesting that all they do is talk occasionally, a Voice investigation has documented an extraordinary array of connections. Stone played a pivotal role in putting together Sharpton's pending application for federal matching funds, getting dollars in critical states from family members and political allies at odds with everything Sharpton represents. He's also helped stack the campaign with a half-dozen incongruous top aides who've worked for him in prior campaigns. He's even boasted about engineering six-figure loans to Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN) and allowing Sharpton to use his credit card to cover thousands in NAN costs -- neither of which he could legally do for the campaign. In a wide-ranging Voice interview Sunday, Stone confirmed his matching-fund and staffing roles, but refused to comment on the NAN subsidies.

February 23, 2004 - 2:17am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"A Wall as a Weapon"

Noam Chomsky, New York Times


It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else. Careful scrutiny is always in order. Israel's so-called security fence, which is the subject of hearings starting today at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is a case in point.


Few would question Israel's right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks like the one yesterday, even to build a security wall if that were an appropriate means. It is also clear where such a wall would be built if security were the guiding concern: inside Israel, within the internationally recognized border, the Green Line established after the 1948-49 war. The wall could then be as forbidding as the authorities chose: patrolled by the army on both sides, heavily mined, impenetrable. Such a wall would maximize security, and there would be no international protest or violation of international law.

February 23, 2004 - 1:12am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Matteo Pasquinelli writes:

"Radical Machines Against Techno-Empire"

Matteo Pasquinelli

Deleuze and Guattari took the machine out of the factory, now it is up to us to take it out of the network and imagine a post-internet generation.

        Everyone of us is a machine of the real, everyone of us is a constructive machine. -- Toni Negri



        Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction.-- Gilles Deluze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe
 

What is knowledge sharing? How does the knowledge economy function? Where is the general intellect at work? Take the cigarettes machine. The machine you see is the embodying of a scientific knowledge into hardware and software components, generations of engineering stratified for commercial use: it automatically manages fluxes of money and commodities, substitutes a human with a user-friendly interface, defends private property, functions on the basis of a minimal control and restocking routine. Where has the tobacconist gone? Sometimes he enjoys free time. Other times the company that owns the chain of distribution has replaced him. In his place one often meets the technician. Far from emulating Marx's "Fragment on Machines" with a Fragment on cigarette machines, this unhealthy example is meant to show how postfordist theories live around us and that material or abstract machines built by collective intelligence are organically chained to the fluxes of the economy and of our needs.

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