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Analysis & Polemic

October 4, 2003 - 1:26pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

nolympics writes


"Interview with Paul Krugman"

Buzzflash

This interview with New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman appeared in Buzzflash. We republish it here as it represents a fairly popular trend these days of activists for the ruling class: jumping ship and denouncing the chief executive and his cabal.

Paul Krugman to BuzzFlash.com: "Well, a couple of things. The first is that a good part of the media are essentially part of the machine. If you work for any Murdoch publication or network, or if you work for the Rev. Moon's empire, you're really not a journalist in the way that we used to think. You're basically just part of a propaganda machine. And that's a pretty large segment of the media.

As for the rest, certainly being critical at the level I've been critical –- basically saying that these guys are lying, even if it's staring you in the face –- is a very unpleasant experience. You get a lot of heat from people who should be on your side, because they accuse you of being shrill, which is everybody's favorite word for me. And you become a personal target."

October 2, 2003 - 2:21pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Rush Limbaugh"

Louis Proyect, Marxmail


Rush Limbaugh, the dean of rightwing talk radio, was forced to resign as football commentator for the ESPN cable sports station (he actually got his start in broadcasting in sports) after stating on a pre-game show last Sunday:

October 2, 2003 - 2:05pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

"Is It Just About Schwarzenegger?"

Mike Davis

LOS ANGELES — Voters in California are set to go to the polls on October 7. The two-part ballot will ask whether state governor Gray Davis should be removed. It will then ask voters to choose from among 135 candidates, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, to replace Davis. Every candidate in California's dark recall election comedy should be obliged to answer the question, “Whither Duroville?”. Duroville is the California visitors never see and that pundits ignore when they debate the future of the world's sixth-largest economy.

October 2, 2003 - 12:42pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Ned Rossiter writes: Here's a report on creative labour that I've written for the
fibreculture [fc] list.


"Creative Labour and the Role of Intellectual Property"

Ned Rossiter, September 2003

Here's my report based on the survey I conducted for the fibrepower
panel initiated by Kate Crawford and Esther Milne -- Intellectual
Property—Intellectual Possibilities (Brisbane, July 03). I wanted to
explore in some empirical fashion the relationship between
intellectual property and creative labour. Why?

October 1, 2003 - 9:44am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

Anonymous Comrade writes

"American Psycho"

John Chuckman

No, I did not read the book, but what words more perfectly describe George Bush making one of the oddest speeches ever made at the UN? There he was -- with his designer suit, costly watch, and constantly-manicured haircut -- stone-faced and unrepentant for the violent destruction he caused, for his obvious lying, and for his rage against the thoughtful objections of others. Actually, unrepentant seems an inadequate description, unaware or uninterested being closer to the mark.

September 27, 2003 - 10:23am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

radicaleyes submits:

"The Multitude and the Metropolis"*

Toni Negri

1. ‘Generalising’ the strike.

It is interesting to note how, on the occasion of the Spring and Summer 2002 struggles in Italy, the project of ‘generalising’ the strike of the movement of precarious and socially diffuse workers, men and women, seemed to be harmlessly and uselessly subsumed beneath the workers’ ‘general strike’. After this experience, many comrades who participated in the struggle began to realise that whilst the workers’ strike was ‘damaging’ to the employer, the social strike passed without notice through the folds of the global working day. It neither damaged the masters nor helped the mobile and flexible workers. This realisation raised a series of questions: how do we understand how the socially diffuse worker fights; how can he concretely subvert in the space of the metropolis his subordination to production and the violence of exploitation? How does the metropolis present itself to the multitude and is it right to say that the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory used to be to the working class?

September 25, 2003 - 3:22pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

"Edging Away from Anarchy:

Inside the Indymedia Collective,

Passion vs. Pragmatism"

Gal Beckerman, Columbia Journalism Review, September 17, 2003

"Who wants to be design coordinator this week?" The question comes from
Nandor, a red-bearded trollish man moderating an evening meeting of New York
City's all-volunteer Independent Media Center. He is composing the table of
contents for the next issue of the collective's biweekly newspaper, the
Indypendent.

September 24, 2003 - 5:16pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

"Implications of Cancun"

Walden Bello, September 23, 2003

The collapse of the Fifth Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, Mexico, last Sunday, Sept. 14, was an event of historic proportions.


Cancun has several massive implications.

September 24, 2003 - 4:37pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking"

William Rivers Pitt

"That's the spirit, George. If nothing else works, then a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through."
-- General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, 'Blackadder Goes Forth'

There is not enough grammar in the entirety of the English language to describe the incredible international humiliation that has befallen the United States of America. That this humiliation was brought down upon the American people by the man supposedly in charge of the country is, in all honesty, no big surprise for those who have been watching this all unfold. The layers of crushing embarrassment have been building like river sediment for months upon months upon months. On Tuesday, however, George W. Bush managed to completely obliterate the hard-won standing the United States has earned within the global community.

September 22, 2003 - 2:50pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"You already know that things have gotten bad. Our democracy was drunkenly crashed and never sent to the repair shop. The government is preaching liberty but imprisoning a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country on earth. Now it is trying to evade the few remaining protections the courts will enforce by "disappearing" people indefinitely in cages on foreign soil where the Constitution won't reach. It is condoning, and even participating in torture -- in the twenty-first century: torture! It is using bald-faced lies to justify world-dominating ambitions of a sort we used to like to claim we were defending the world against.

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