Radical media, politics and culture.

"The Empire Changes Gears"
James Petras Counterpunch


The history of US empire-building in Latin America has combined a great deal of political flexibility along with extremely rigid economic principles. Washington in its political dealings has come to terms, on a grand scale and for over two decades with a great variety of regimes, which to less knowledgeable observers would seem eminently pragmatic. Over the past 15 years, Presidents from both parties have established strong ties and positive relations with "nationalists" in Argentina (Peronist President Menem), "socialists" in Chile (Socialist Party President Lagos), "populists" in Ecuador (President Gutierrez), "laborites" (President Da Silva of Brazil). The key to understanding this apparent contradiction is to recognize that the political labels reflected pre-presidential or past political commitments, and were totally irrelevant to the operational behavior of these politicians once they took office (or even when they were campaigning for office).

"Mormons In Space"

George Caffentzis & Silvia Federici


Space is but Time congealed. An arrangement of Work/Life in integrated sequences. The Earth is another Matter however. So why this urge to get out of Earth? To simultaneously destroy it and transcend it?


Is this capital's nasty little secret: the destruction of the final recalcitrant Body? The in-itself of capitalist functionality, the residue of a billion years of noncapitalist formation . . . why should there be Mountains here, Rivers there and an Ocean exactly here after all?

Letter from a GI in Falluja:
"This wasn't a war, it was a massacre"


[THE FOLLOWING letter from a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq, known as hEkLe, powerfully conveys the terror of the U.S. assault on Falluja. It was published in
militaryproject.org. GI Special, a daily Internet newsletter that gathers news and information helpful to soldiers and military families. You can find an archive of the GI Special updated with each new issue at militaryproject.org. hEkLe and several fellow soldiers have a Web log that they regularly update with essays at ftssoldier.blogspot]

THESE ARE ugly times for the U.S. military in Iraq. It seems everywhere you turn, more and more troops are being killed and maimed in vicious encounters with determined rebel fighters.

The insurgency is mounting incredibly in such places as Baghdad, Mosul and Baquba, using more advanced techniques and weaponry associated with a well-organized guerilla campaign. Even in the massively destroyed city of Falluja, rebel forces are starting to reappear with a callous determination to win or die trying. Many critics and political pundits are starting to realize that this war is, in many aspects, un-winnable.

"On the 2004 Elections"

Noam Chomsky, ZNet


The elections of November 2004 have received a great deal of
discussion, with exultation in some quarters, despair in
others, and general lamentation about a "divided nation."


They are likely to have policy consequences, particularly
harmful to the public in the domestic arena, and to the
world with regard to the "transformation of the military,"
which has led some prominent strategic analysts to warn of
"ultimate doom" and to hope that US militarism and
aggressiveness will be countered by a coalition of
peace-loving states, led by — China! (John Steinbruner and
Nancy Gallagher, Daedalus).

We have come to a pretty pass
when such words are expressed in the most respectable and
sober journals. It is also worth noting how deep is the
despair of the authors over the state of American democracy.
Whether or not the assessment is merited is for activists to
determine.

"An Economic 9/11"

Patrick C. Doherty, TomPaine.com

When the chief economist at Morgan Stanley says we have a
one-in-10 chance of avoiding economic Armageddon, one tends
to take notice. When America's second-largest creditor tells
us to get our economic house in order the same week, two
points begin to determine a line. But the Bush administration
has not so much as flinched.


'Democrats play for lunch. We play for keeps.' — Grover
Norquist

Last week, America received two pieces of monstrously bad
news. First, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley (along
with Robert Reich, Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, China and the
currency markets) warned us that the U.S. economy is about to
collapse. Second, we learned that the Bush administration is
willing to ignore the likelihood of collapse and will push
ahead aggressively with tax and Social Security reform. Put
these two pieces of information together and you get a
nightmare scenario.


John Chuckman

We are getting stories about increasing anti-Americanism in Canada, mainly coming from sources that are the Canadian equivalent of the Voice of America. They are pretty much the same people who told us we must support a friend who goes to war, neglecting to distinguish the case of a friend who has gone stark raving mad and decided to burn down someone else's house.


I think you can only have anti-Americanism if you first have Americanism, which is certainly not the same thing as simple love of country. Americanism is a cult centered on a belief in national exceptionalism. In modern times, there has been no better representative of the cult than George Bush, its current Imperial Wizard. Everywhere he goes, he projects the self-satisfied image of an America happy to dump its untreated effluent into the world's supply of drinking water so long as Americans themselves feel they are doing the right thing.

"The 'Dollar' Crisis, and Us

Loren Goldner, Break Their Haughty Power


Incredible as it may sound, ever since the late 1950’s, the world economy has been tossing around a “hot potato” of an ever-increasing mass of “nomad dollars” (dollars held outside the U.S.)  whose actual conversion into tangible wealth would plunge the world into a deflationary crash.

Even now, few people are aware of the extent to which this “technical” question of “economics” (and in reality a profoundly social question) has in fact cadenced 45 years of world history, erupting into view in key years such as 1968 (dollar convertibility crisis), 1973 (end of the Bretton Woods System), 1979 (runaway global inflation, gold at $850 an ounce) 1990 (Japanese deflation) or 1997-98 (Asia crisis, Russian default, “hedge fund” crisis).


We are clearly today at another key turning point, and perhaps (over the next few years) at the long-delayed culmination of the whole story, when that mass of dollars, now grown to gargantuan proportions (the $30 billion of 1958 have become at least $11 trillion today) will be deflated, one way or another.

"Greens Had Good Reason To Ask for This Recount"

David Cobb, Minneapolis Star Tribune

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Something went seriously wrong in Ohio on Election Day.
On Nov. 13 and 15, hearings conducted by the Ohio Election Protection Coalition in Columbus featured oral and written testimony from a number of voters, poll workers, precinct judges and legal observers.


The testimony confirmed numerous complaints tracked by election-watchdog organizations and investigative journalists since Nov. 2. Those who testified told stories of the obstruction and disqualification of legitimate voters, malfunctioning computer voting machines, and prohibitively long lines for too few machines.

"Dead Wrong on the Iraqi Elections"

Juan Cole, AntiWar.com

At least 12 persons died violently in the guerrilla war on Saturday
in Iraq. There was a major battle over control of police stations in
Khalis, and Marines found more bodies in Mosul. The U.S. military
said that guerrillas had launched a major campaign of intimidation
aimed at frightening Sunni Arabs into boycotting the forthcoming
elections.


Seventeen parties, mostly small Sunni Arab groupings along with the
two major Kurdish parties, made a plea Saturday that elections be
postponed. Some major Sunni Arab groups, such as the Association of
Muslim Scholars, had already called for a Sunni Arab boycott.

"Obituaries from the Future:

Former President George W. Bush Dead at 72"

Greil Marcus, CityPages

Policy Review, October 5, 2018 — George W. Bush, the
43rd president of the United States, died today at
Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. He was 72. The
cause of death was announced as heart failure.


Mr. Bush's always controversial presidency left behind
a changed nation and a changed world. Taking office in
2001 after a disputed election settled only by a 5-4
decision by a bitterly divided Supreme Court, and
decisively reelected in 2004, President Bush led the
United States into four wars, oversaw the dismantling
of Social Security and Medicare, and enforced a drastic
shrinking of elementary, secondary, and collegiate
education.


He spearheaded the transformation of
President Bill Clinton's budget surpluses of 1999 and
2000 into permanent deficits of more than a trillion
dollars a year, thus profoundly reducing the amount of
capital available to address the needs of the vast
majority of citizens and inhibiting the creation of new
jobs with any promise of advancement or financial
security, while at the same time pursuing tax
reductions that increased the differences between the
income and assets of, in his own terminology, "owners"
and "pre-owners" of "the American ownership society" to
extremes almost beyond measure. When he left office,
taxation of personal and corporate incomes, while still
legally extant, had been effectively replaced by a new
payroll tax, so that almost all investment,
inheritance, and interest income was left tax-free.

Pages