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"Free Vermont!?"
Peter Lamborn Wilson
Should Vermont secede from the USA and declare itself independent again (as it was from 1777 to 1791) under the name Second Vermont Republic? This question was posed to attendees at a conference and a town meeting, both held in Middlebury, VT on the weekend after the national election, Nov. 5–7; and in both cases the answer was a nearly unanimous YES.
The conference — Rad.Con 2 — was organized jointly by the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) and the UK-based Fourth World Organization (publishers of Fourth World Review), which sponsored the first "Radical Consultation" in Britain in September, 2001. American historian Kirkpatrick Sale contributes regularly to Fourth World and made the keynote speech at Rad.Con 2 in Middlebury.
"A New Opium War"
Yoshie Furuhashi
If you look at the changes in the political economy of Afghanistan, you may conclude that this is neither a "war on terror" that Washington says it is nor a pipeline war as some of its critics allege. It looks as if it is the latest Opium War, regardless of intentions of all parties (Afghans, Americans, Europeans, and others) involved.
According to the Afghanistan Opium Survey 2004 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), opium cultivation has increased 64% since 2003. The opium industry now employs 2.3 million in Afghanistan (compared to 1.7 million in 2003), i.e., 10% of the Afghan population. The export value of Afghan opium is estimated to be $2.8 billion, a 22% increase since 2003. The opium export today accounts for more than 60% of Afghanistan's Gross Domestic Product.
Saroj Giri writes: "Against ‘Reality’
The Maoists in South Asia"
Saroj Giri
In his essay "After the Orgy", Jean Baudrillard, the French post-modernist philosopher, talks about the coming into circulation of revolutionary forces and ideas and their subsequent castration into another marketable social configuration or politically correct idea. So lots of once-revolutionary ideas have today become part of daily parlance, completely punctured of not just their original force but also their meaning. Rather, the perverse recycling of these ideas into the melting pot of liberal discourse has gone on to provide it with an undeserved moral strength and legitimacy. Thus today, with everything from feminism and gay rights to post colonial discourse having gone on to serve the liberal multicultural consensus of global capital, we see that we are living in a hegemonic world order where any attempt to go beyond and concretely envision another world is dismissed by invoking the spectre of 'totalitarianism': that any project for radical transformation of society will almost invariably lead us to totalitarianism.
"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.
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