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Analysis & Polemic

Anonymous Comrade writes:


The Gomery Report and Quebec Separatism

John Chuckman

Following the Gomery Commission Report, the question often is asked, "What do the Liberals have to do to be thrown out of office?"


But the question is politically naïve. Let's be clear just what the scandal Justice Gomery investigated involves. Except for a limited number of individuals who took advantage and who should be prosecuted, the scheme was not about the Liberal Party enriching itself. However inappropriate the method, it was an effort to fund the fight against separatism.

Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"Cliché-sous-Bois"
Hoipolloi Cassidy

"Couvre-feu ou cessez-le-feu?" Curfew or ceasefire? By reactivating a fifty-year old curfew law the French Government appears to have tamped the violence tearing apart Parisian suburbs and other parts of France for the past two weeks. Throw a few promises at the underprivileged and this could be the end of the story.

Not likely. It's more like a chess game between two skilled players where both opponents skip through the opening moves because they're all predictable. Or think of the joke about the guys who all know the same stories, so whenever someone calls out a number the rest all crack up. In a country with a political tradition as old as France the past two weeks couldn't help but follow the script. From a cycle of repression and rebellion the Right wing fashioned a narrative of France against the Un-French, order against disorder, while Center and Left begged for a return to containment, cooperation and gradual integration into "Frenchness."

Solve et Coagula writes:

"Bush Meltdown:
Belated Justice or Coup d'état?"

Carolyn Baker

Bush’s approval rating at under 40 percent, nearly two-thirds of Americans no longer in favor of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the vice president’s chief of staff indicted, the House Majority Leader indicted, the Senate Majority Leader under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Harriett Miers fiasco, and now the Democrats shutting down the Senate? It all feels so deliciously appropriate and so painfully overdue. Are the Democrats finding their spines? Will Cheney be indicted? Will Bush be impeached?


Before succumbing to ecstasy over these dramatic events, which sometimes seem too good to be true, it behooves progressives to look deeper into the wormhole that the criminal empire, the United States government, has become. Indeed, the next few months will be messy, and Bush & Co. are irreversibly in demise, but the hope these events might instill in us must be tempered by historical and political perspective.

The following letter was sent to an International Conference on Elisée Reclus, the 19th century anarchist geographer and political theorist. The conference, which was held in Milan on October 12–13, was one of several planned for this year to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Reclus’ birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. I was invited to do a presentation but couldn’t leave New Orleans to attend. Fortunately, our electricity, which had been out for almost six weeks, resumed shortly before the conference and I was able to write the letter hastily and find a place to email it. It arrived in Milan the day before the conference and was read during the proceedings, and it will be translated and published in the Italian anarchist magazine Libertaria.

A Letter from New Orleans

(Reclusian Reflections on an Unnatural Disaster)

John Clarke

Dear Friends,


I regret that I can’t be with you for the international Reclus conference in Milano this week. I was looking forward very much to seeing all of my good friends there and participating in the extraordinary event that you’ve organized. I decided that to help make up for my absence from my session tomorrow that I’d send you some reflections on what I’ve been doing recently and what has been occurring here in New Orleans.

Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"Making France and Influencing Media"

Hoipolloi Cassidy


I)
My own political Primal Scene: I'm, maybe nine years old, in Paris in the 'fifties, and my mother's hurrying me home because the police have cordoned off the street and started picking up all dark-skinned males. "Algerians," she says, as if that explained anything. Now, fifty years later, there are few Algerians living in the gentrified center of Paris. Some things have changed, some haven't, and there's a lot of explaining left to do.

For one thing, French distrust of North Africans has a long, bitter history, which is also a history of slow improvements. A few years back I wandered into a café in a lower-middle class area of Paris with a friend. My friend ordered at the counter but I didn't want anything. "Ah, said the owner with a smile, Monsieur is observing Ramadan!" This kind of comment was unthinkable fifty years ago.

Yet riots like those going on right now have been going on for years, on and off, in towns and suburbs far outside of Paris, led by disaffected children of immigrants, black, Muslim or both, and for the usual reasons: high unemployment, nothing to do, resentment of racism. The difference this time is that the trashing and burning and assaults that have broken out over the past ten days in the northern suburbs of Paris are too close to ignore. What's new is a desperate desire to make sense of these events. You might even say, in the grand intellectual tradition of France, that they exist above all in their own interpretation.

Anarcho writes:

Solidarity South Pacific

The following was written by a British activist who has been involved in Solidarity South Pacific since its beginning. The opinions expressed are his and cannot be viewed as an agreed SSP policy, however it is probable that most of what is said would find broad agreement within SSP.


“Solidarity South Pacific aims to provide active solidarity with tribal and ecological struggles, mainly in the Philippines, West Papua and Bougainville. (A brief background to the situation in these places is given in the boxes below). We are a network based mainly in Britain and the U.S but with other contacts elsewhere in the world. We are very much a part of the radical ecological movement, viewing our solidarity work as an extension of our ecological and liberation struggles at home. We are not an NGO and have no paid staff.


SSP can almost be viewed as 3 separate solidarity campaigns operating under the same name and it may seem strange that we choose to do this. From our point of view though it makes sense to organise like this as much of the work takes a similar form and we are able to share information, experience and resources. Also, although we recognise that situations vary hugely within and between countries, our desire to act in solidarity with tribal struggles and to protect eco-systems applies to them all. In their relations with the land and with each other, tribal communities can be an inspiration to anarchists and ecologists. Their fight against destruction is linked to our own.”


Click Here 2 read more www.a-manila.org

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Post (Liberal) Feminist Condition"

Anonymous Comrade

“They’ll throw the book at you in court. She’s the mother-the female. She’s got the tits. They’ll crush you.” — Sandor Himmelstein in Herzog by Saul Bellow.

The narrative of Bellow’s novel depicts a middle-aged philosophy professor, Moses Herzog, unluckily in love and on the edge descending into mental illness. Two broken marriages and estranged children; he feels the latter estrangement as death. Escaping from the pain into the arms of women he uses for sex, objectified he then begins to despise them. Though he remains conflicted on whether or not to remarry to a new lover, he withdraws yet again on a holiday. Catching a train from New York to the sea side, or rather lakeside, he reminisces upon his married life and the break up with Madeleine.

"A Separate Peace:

America Is In Trouble,
and Our Elites Are Merely Resigned"

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

Peggy Noonan is a former speechwrtier for George H. W. Bush.

It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see.
It's
harder to speak of what you *think* you see, what you think is going on
and
can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It
involves
hunches. But here goes.


I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture
right
now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot
of
people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in
some
cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and
the
trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things
have
broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That
our
pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but
missing the
number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in
America?" is
"Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."


I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come
up.
I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax.
Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge
that
there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving
our
kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so
deep
that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall;
our
media institutions imploding -- the spectacle of a great American
newspaper,
the *New York Times*, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear
of
parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls
actually
imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them.
Senators who
seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a
financial
entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all
authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think
so.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"No Justice and No Peace:

A Critique of Current Social Change Politics"
Selina Musuta and Darby Hickey, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest #4 ue4.php


As two people actively involved in movements for social justice, we are constantly discussing and critiquing what we see happening in the name of “changing the world”. Having resided in DC for several years, though not originally “from” the city, we have a particular perspective on the current culture of the mass mobilization for social change. Additionally, as two individuals living at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, citizenship, and more we struggle to understand what paths can be charted to a future that will liberate every part of us.

"Judy, Come Home!

Miller’s Return
on Times’ Table"

Gabriel Sherman & Anna Schneider-Mayerson, New York Observer

Reporter Judith Miller may be returning to the New York Times newsroom this month. According to sources familiar with Ms. Miller’s negotiations, she has signaled that her potential homecoming could happen as early as next week.


“I am not commenting on my discussions with the paper,” Ms. Miller said by phone on Nov. 1. “No decisions have been made. I can’t comment any further.”


Ms. Miller is still involved in talks with the paper—whose executive editor, Bill Keller, publicly lamented her “entanglement” with now-indicted Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case.


But even as The Times has sought to isolate Ms. Miller, she has gathered powerful friends to her side. And those talks appear to be turning from severance toward reconciliation, according to Times sources.

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