"Hey You! Stop!"

Dave Segal

NYC activist Dave Segal reported to prison Monday, March 13th, where he will serve six months for actions he took to protest the war in Iraq. These are his words about the experience that took him there.

"Hey you! Stop!"

Those words marked the beginning of a year and two month journey that will end in three days when I report to the Fort Dix Federal Prison. In the dark, early hours of January 31st, 2005, I found momentum pushing me to go ahead with an action that I had very poorly prepared for. I had come to the Bronx that night after having scouted out an Army recruiting station next to Westchester Square in the eastern part of the borough. With a few lighter fluid soaked rags, I hoped to put some small dent in the huge military machine. I failed pretty miserably.

I arrived that night with no lookout and a poorly thought out escape plan. The feelings in my stomach, which I should have seen as a warning to turn back, I interpreted as general nervousness. I would just go ahead with the action and any kinks would work themselves out. After hammering out a section of the glass door of the building, I took out one of the rags, lit it, and tossed it inside on the carpet. I like to think it was the adrenaline that made me think that lighting the carpet on fire would burn the place down. No matter the reason, I was very, very wrong.

"Clausewitz on the Pampas:
An Argentine Snapshot as Latin America Moves Leftward"

Loren Goldner

(The following is based on a visit to Argentina
(February 2006) It makes no pretense to be comprehensive or anything beyond impressions. Most of it is based on conversations with militants and intellectuals. The main discovery of the trip was the current of the radical piqueteros,
who for nearly ten years have been grappling with the problem of strategy and tactics in the epoch of de-industrialization, precarious employment, temp jobs and mass unemployment, a period in which the old workplace-centered strategies no longer seem viable. The main aim of the article is to bring the rich Argentine experience of strategy and tactics to an international audience, to hopefully stimulate further discussion of its strengths and weaknesses.)

A left-ideological haze hangs over Argentina, and presumably much of Latin America. Figures as diverse as Castro, Guevara, Chavez, Sub-Comandante Marcos, and Evo Morales are viewed across the spectrum in a warm and fuzzy way, expressing an omnipresent populism, even by people who are critical of them politically. Argentine nationalism, and beyond that a palpable Latin American “continentalism”, are delicate subjects, laced with the hurt of centuries of imperialism, as is/was the 1982 Malvinas war. Even an older woman, self-professed anarchist and ex-lover of the (now deceased) interesting anarcho-Marxist theorist Abraham Guillen bristled when I suggested that Che Guevara had been a Stalinist. And Guillen’s life had been threatened by Castro and Guevara and he was forced to flee Cuba (ca. 1960) after falling out with them over their commitment to a rural foco guerrilla strategy (Guillen argued for an orientation to the urban working class).

Mathew G.H Toll writes:

"Australian Neo-Liberals Let Their Agenda Slip"

Matthew G.H. Toll

Senator Nick Minchin, leading member of the Australian federal government has been taped during a private meeting advocating further industrial relations reform if the liberal party is re-elected into another term.

"The fact is the great majority of Australians do not support what we are doing on industrial relations, they violently disagree," said Senator Minchin to HR Nicholls Society, a far-right wing group intent of the dissolution of the current IR system in favour a ‘flexible system’. Amounting to an IR system where workers rights effectively mean ‘take it or leave it’, lowering minimum wages and conditions.