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"UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Rants Against Trotskyism"
Ann Talbot, World Socialist Web Site
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sent an extraordinary letter to the Independent newspaper on November 16. It was in reply to an article by Robert Fisk the previous Saturday. In a description of Yassir Arafat’s funeral, Fisk had disparagingly referred to Straw, who attended on behalf of the British government, as a former Trotskyist or “an old Trot.”
Straw responded to Fisk’s factually incorrect aside like a man accused of a heinous crime, stating that to call him a Trotskyist was “a malicious libel.” Far from being a former Trotskyist, Straw indicated that his political sympathies and training could be traced back to Stalinism.
"25,000 US Casualties in Iraq; 9% of Troops Put in Hospital or Killed
Over 2000 Iraqis Killed in Fallujah"
Juan Cole
CBS has elicited from the Pentagon the real figure of US casualties in Iraq, which is more like 25,000. That number includes the 1230 or so killed and the 9300 classified as "wounded in battle," but also 17,000 classified as non-combat sick or injured, of whom 80 percent do not return to their units in Iraq. Although some of the 17,000 are victims of disease, some unspecified number have actually been injured as a result of being in a theater of war. If you have an "accident" while guns and bombs are going off all around you, is it really an "accident"?
"Who Needs Ends When We’ve got Such Bitchin’ Means?"
Andy Cornell
The years since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks have been an incredibly difficult time and context for radicals of any stripe to organize in. The situation has been that much more difficult for the global justice movement, emerging and picking up steam, as it did, little more than a year before 9-11. Since that time, the movement has been working—albeit slowly—to reconstitute itself and rearticulate its purpose. However, it has retained a focus on mass mobilizations, continuing to rely on direct action tactics despite their dwindling effectiveness. Unfortunately, instead of honestly assessing the diminishing returns wrought of this narrow focus, many global justice activists have incrementally lowered their goalpost, redefining success to match their modest accomplishments. Hence the ass whooping delivered by Miami’s finest in November 2003 became, in Starhawk’s words, “a dangerous victory.”
"Steve Kurtz and the CAE Defense Fund Still Need Your Help!"
Toni Nelson Herrera Back in May of this year, like many of you, I read about the case of an artist in New York whose wife had suddenly died and he was subsequently suspected of being a bio-terrorist. I first caught the story on the AP wire, so as you can imagine it wasn’t immediately sympathetic so much as sensationalistic, but I picked up on the fact that an artist was being hassled by the state so I turned to Counterpunch to see if anyone had the real story. Sure enough, in the pages of Counterpunch, I found the kind of analysis I was looking for.
Steve Kurtz was an artist being hounded under the Patriot Act and feeling the full effects of the dangerous changes we’ve all seen in civil liberties during this bogus War on Terror. I read the story, was again angered by all that now passes for “normalcy” in this country, but ultimately the story slipped out of my mind as the daily news keeps piling up on one’s mind. I believed, perhaps foolishly, that most likely this would be cleared up— after all it was totally preposterous for the government to persecute an artist who was just doing art— “that doesn’t happen that often does it?” I consoled myself. But of course, any time is one time too many, and “an injury to one…”
"What Palestinians should do now"
Ali Abunimah Electronic Intifada
The first priority for Palestinian leaders now must be to defend their people against Israel's relentless colonization and violence and not to negotiate with Israeli guns to Palestinian heads. They must formulate a national strategy to regain Palestinian rights enshrined in UN Resolutions, clearly explain this strategy, and organize Palestinians and allies everywhere to struggle for it, starting with full implementation of the ICJ decision on the West Bank wall. Palestinians should seek to emulate the success of the African National Congress that freed South Africans from apartheid by confronting and defeating injustice, not seeking to accommodate it.
"Chapter 39, Order 30:
Torture and Neo-Liberalism with Sycorax in Iraq"
Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch
Reviewing: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive AccumulationBy Silvia Federici Autonomedia 2004 The new U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, disregarded torture in his infamous, post 9/11 memorandum to Bush: "In my judgment, this new paradigm [the 'war on terrorism'] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." "Quaint," eh? It might more aptly be applied to Magna Carta, the epitome of quaintness, though Professor Huntington of Harvard tells us in his screed to rid the nation of Hispanic cultural influence that the American creed, its cultural core, is Anglo, "going back to Magna Carta," which he thinks is somehow Protestant (Magna Carta 1215, Protestant Reformation 1517)! Furthermore, although it is such a quaint part of the Anglo core, it is not even written in English. Its most powerful part is chapter 39:
Nullus liber homo capiatur vel imprisonetur aut disseisietur de libero tenemento suo, vel libertatibus, vel liberis consuetudinibus suis, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terræ.
Edward Coke provides the classic translation.
eh writes:
Chavez Meets Workers in Madrid
Emilia Lucena, El Militante
It is nearly five o’clock. A shy autumn sun bathes the
Prado Avenue on our way to the headquarters of the
Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) in Madrid. When we arrive
there are already more than 300 people queuing to get
into the meeting hall. They patiently wait to attend
the meeting with Chavez which is scheduled for 7 pm.
Anonymous Comrade writes:
"J20 Inaugural: A Day of Vulnerability for Power"
No one needs reminding that the latest episode in the demolition of American “democracy” has been a hard blow to those in that unfortunate land who are still awake and clinging to sanity, as well as to everyone in the rest of the world, for whom this election is obviously no laughing matter either. However a day of real and unavoidable vulnerability for the Bush junta and its claim to a popular mandate is approaching.
Inauguration day — January 20 — is that moment of condensed, ritualized spectacle toward which all the machines for the production of consent and legitimacy still have to aim. On this day the succession of power — and thus the processes behind it — must expose itself to view in order to become its own self-affirming image, and this moment of exposure cannot be avoided. For this reason January 20 is a real opportunity to denounce that which threatens us and possibly to do it damage on its own symbolic terrain.
"A Very Haitian Story"
Edwidge Danticat, New York Times
Miami — On Sunday, Oct. 24, United Nations troops and Haitian police forces launched a military operation in Bel-Air, one of the poorest and most volatile neighborhoods in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. Their stated goal was to oust armed gangs, some of which are still loyal to Haiti's deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
duckdaotsu writes
No Thanksgiving at My House
Remembering
Wesley BadHeartBull
Hot Springs, South Dakota is a small town located in the southernmost tip of the Black Hills. Wesley BadHeartBull started the sixth grade at Hot Springs Junior High School; he died just outside of town at the hands of a couple of cowboys — stabbed to death because he had the audacity to ask for drink at the bar. He was 22 years old.
Wesley's murder was not the first Native American murder I had heard about. It was just the first one that had happened to my friend and classmate. I was in that sixth grade class with Wesley BadHeartBull. Wes and I grew up together. We partied with the rest of the kids in town, drove recklessly on back country roads together like the other kids, and sat out for endless nights under the Black Hills sky counting stars and talking about our futures.
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