"Kerry Won"

Greg Palast

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided — known as “spoilage” in election jargon — because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Hex writes:

"Multitude and Empire, Civil War Everywhere:
Towards a Communist Response"

Sphinx

"For months the leading weekly and daily papers of
the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil
War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend
themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states of
the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which
they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks
on the North." — Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War"

Everyone seems to agree! The left, the neo-Nazis, the isolationists, bringing
war to Iraq was a farce and a scam, a power-mad dash for resources that’s
just a mask for the mass murder of Iraqis and the schemes of the Neo-Conservative
cabal. Amid the fire and brimstone of the invasion, the Iraqi people are getting
nowhere, and the occupiers are clearly the oppressors in the situation. While
few would actually claim affinity with the tyrannous Saddam Hussein, opposition
to the war and occupation are inherently legitimate because people
are dying. The Iraqi resistance is an imperfect but just response
to the Coalition’s rapacious greed for oil and never mind the former
Ba’ath parties and Islamic fascists behind the curtains, full speed
ahead! The Iraqi puppet state should be drowned in blood and the cosmopolitan
capitalism of the west should retreat from the desert; each and every glorious
beheading, the murders of collaborators and police, the assault on parasitic
contractors, each and every resistance to occupation becomes justice because
the people should rule Iraq, not the corporations.

"Marx, Hegel, Ricardo:
The 'Inverted World' in the Heart of the Critique of Political Economy"

Loren Goldner

[This article was written for Wildcat (Germany), #73.]

“Yet the way that surplus-value is transformed into the form of profit, by way of the rate of profit, is only a further extension of that inversion of subject and object which already occurs in the course of the production process itself…This inverted relationship necessarily gives rise, even in the simple relation of production itself, to a correspondingly inverted conception of the situation… It is, as one can study in the case of the Ricardian school, a completely inverted attempt to want to attempt the laws of the rate of profit as laws of the rate of surplus value, or vice versa.” — Marx, Capital, vol. III, London, 1981, p. 136. [Translation slightly modified. All Marx quotes from Capital are from the Fowkes and Fernbach translations; page references without quotes are from the German edition (vols. 23–25 of the Marx-Engels Werke). Quotes from Theories of Surplus Value are from the MEW, Berlin 1956-1975; my translation.]

In the past forty years, it has become easier to draw a sharp line between Ricardo’s and Marx’s theory of value and between Ricardo’s economics and Marx’s critique of political economy.

Ricardo was for Marx the “most advanced capitalist viewpoint” in political economy. Marx’s “sensuous transformative activity” is, in the "Theses on Feuerbach," the “active side developed by idealism”, and in particular by the other “most advanced capitalist viewpoint”, the work of G.F.W. Hegel (1770–1832).

"Democrats in End Time:

Republicans Gain Shattering Victory; Who to Blame This Time?"

Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch

The crusade that George Bush called for in 2001 against terrorism from abroad came to fruition yesterday in a more homely context as Christians flocked to the polls in stronger numbers than in 2000 to battle against such manifestations of post-modernity as gay marriage.