"His Master's Voice...

Bush's Mystery Bulge"
MusicCoop.Org

The Bush administration insisted on a condition that no cameras be
placed behind the candidates. An official for the Commission on
Presidential Debates, which set up the lecterns and microphones on
the Miami stage, said the condition was indeed real, the result of
negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn't stop Fox from setting
up cameras behind Bush and Kerry. The official said that "microphones
were mounted on lecterns, and the commission put no electronic
devices on the president or Senator Kerry." When asked about the
bulge on Bush's back, the official said, "I don't know what that
was."

So what was it? Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and the owner of the
Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance shop in Spokane, Washington,
looked at the Bush image on his computer monitor. "There's certainly
something on his back, and it appears to be electronic," he said.
McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge could be the inductor
portion of a two-way push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a
system makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that is
pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is virtually invisible.
He also said a weak signal could be scrambled and be undetected by
another broadcaster.

"Judging Judges:
A Few Pages from The Mirror of Justices (c. 1290)
Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch

With the Supreme Court nicely toying once again about who is to live and who is to die as it considers the death penalty for juveniles and as the American casualties in Iraq yesterday included three teenagers, it is well past the time to chop legal logic, or merely vote for the dime's worth of difference between Bush-Kerry troop levels.

Turning a forgotten page from the annals of time, let us review a selection from the thirteenth century London fishmonger, Andrew Horn, whose underground classic, The Mirror of Justices, was not printed until 1642 nor translated until 1646, those revolutionary years preceding the beheading of the sovereign.

Chuck Zlatkin writes:

Kerry and Bush, but Ralph Nader Too?

Chuck Zlatkin

I watched the third debate and I had this vision that I was watching Lyndon Johnson debate Lyndon Johnson. No matter which LBJ wins the debate or the election, this war will continue to escalate. This part I’ve lived through before.

In the current version, John Kerry is playing the part of the Great Society LBJ. The role of the good ‘ole boy Texan LBJ is portrayed by George W. Bush. It is the 1964 election all over again except this time we get an echo not a choice.

The beauty of watching this election as something scripted is that it makes it real easy to see the truth of it.

"The Resort to Force"

Noam Chomsky

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said while explaining the National Security Strategy (NSS) of September 2002 to a hostile audience at the World Economic Forum that Washington has a "sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves" from nations that possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and cooperate with terrorists, the official pretexts for invading Iraq. The collapse of the pretexts is well known, but there has been insufficient attention to its most important consequence: the NSS was in effect revised to lower the bars to aggression. The need to establish ties to terror was quietly dropped. More significant, President George W Bush and colleagues declared the right to resort to force even if a country does not have WMD or even programs to develop them. It is sufficient that it have the "intent and ability" to do so.

"A Contribution on Foucault"

Toni Negri

Question 1
Are Foucault's analyses of actualité useful to understand the movement of societies? In which fields does it seem to you it that they should be renewed, readjusted, continued?

Answer 1
Foucault's work is a strange machine, it actually makes it impossible to think of history as other than present history. Probably, a great deal of what Foucault wrote (as Deleuze rightly underlined) should be rewritten today. What is astonishing — and concerning —, is that he never ceases to seek, he makes approximations, he deconstructs, he formulates hypotheses, he imagines, he makes analogies and tells fables, he launches concepts, withdraws them or modifies them… His is a thought of a formidable inventiveness. But this is not its essence: I believe that his method is fundamental, because it enables him to study and describe at the same time the movement from the past to the present and that from the present to the future. It is a method of transition where the present represents the center. Foucault is there, between the two, neither in the past where he does archaeology, nor in the future whose image he sometimes sketches — “comme à la limite de la mer un visage sur le sable.” It is starting from the present that it is possible to distinguish other times. Foucault has often been reproached for the scientific legitimacy of his periodizations: we I can understand the historians, but at the same time, I would want to say that this is not a real problem: Foucault is where the questioning lies, which always originates in his own time.

Sally Ramage Dabydeen writes

"Trafficking of Women and Children for Prostitution".

This article is a critical analysis of this transnational organised crime. It explores the problem through the business entity and illustrates how this could be researched so that its real extent is measured for the sake of history. The writer explains how traditional forensic techniques can be used to gather the evidence necessary to assess it rationally and to develop strategies and techniques to bring restitution to these women and to eventually eradicate it from the face of the earth.

Introduction
Trafficking of women and children is part of organised crime activity in which these women are transported from Africa, South America, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe to Western Europe and North America to be used as prostitutes and for child pornography, slave labour, automobiles couriers, body parts couriers, fauna and flora couriers, for thieving of nuclear material , drugs couriers , arms couriers, even ordinary thieving as pick-pocketing for gangs as part of transnational organised crime

"Between Disobedience and Exodus"

Flavia Costa Interviews Paolo Virno

Perhaps it is distance, combined with a doubtlessly original thought,
that allows Paolo Virno to see a link, a principle of
comprehension, that unites the Argentinian cacerolazos with
antiglobalization protests. "There is a line that connects the
Argentinian revolt with the protests in Seattle and Genoa in 1999 and
2001", he affirms. And he adds that, beyond the singular, the
Argentinian case shares with the antiglobal movement the eruption of a
new political subject, the multitude, which emerges with the
postfordist mode of production and resists delegating its powers to
the state.

"Unlike the people," explains the Italian philosopher, "the
multitude is plural, it refuses political unity, it does not transfer
rights to the sovereign; its resists obedience and is inclined to form
non-representative democracy."

"Guide to the Patriot Act"

Century Foundation

The Century Foundation has just put out an
excellent, concise guide to the Patriot Act — what it does, to what degree
it's been enforced, and efforts in Congress to roll it back. It's
available in .pdf (here). The overriding concern that pops up again
and again in the text: While the provisions of the act themselves are bad,
what's worse is that the degree to which they're actually being used is
shrouded in mystery: The act itself contains language that allows the
Justice Department to hide what it's doing under the law, and what's not
in the act, Justice is managing to finesse anyway.

hydrarchist writes

Precarity and n/european Identity:
an interview with Alex Foti (Chainworkers)


…………..

This interview took place in July 2004 at the Mill Squat in Amsterdam, during the period it was liberated from the destiny of selling 'traditional' Dutch parephenalia to tourists. Merijn Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan from the Greenpepper magazine spoke with Milano-based organiser Alex Foti - formerly of the Italian flexwork syndicate ChainWorkers (www.chainworkers.org) - about precarity, european labour conflict, and the spread of new syndicalist modes of subvertised collective action across Neuropa. Alex Foti is guest written editor for the upcoming Precarity issue of the Greenpepper Magazine and will be part of the PrecarityPingPong! launch and critical debate during the London ESF at Middlex University, White Hart Lane Campus, Tottenham on 15 October 2004 between 3:00 – 5:00 pm. See www.greenpeppermagazine.org for details.


…………..

GreenPepper: Alex, can you introduce yourself, and the Chainworkers?

Alex Foti: I am a union and media activist from Milan, Italy and have been part of the ChainWorkers CreW since it’s inception in 1999 - 2000. Most noteworthy, we are associated with the MayDay parade - which this year reached its fourth edition, bringing around 100,000 temp workers, partimers freelancers and other types of non-standard workers onto the streets in a joyful (but angry) expression of dissent around sub-standard conditions of work and living. This year the MayDay parade took the form of a major picket line throughout the shopping arteries of Milan. In fact, within the city limits of Milan, no major chain store or retail outfit was open for trading – either because they had become scared by the campaign we had developed in the months prior to MayDay, or because of the flying pickets that 2000-3000 people did in the morning prior to the start of the MayDay parade. This year, the parade was a EuroMayDay parade because it was done together with sisters and brothers in Barcelona, and organised in assemblies that took place throughout Milan, Barcelona, Rome, and (most crucially) Paris - with the participation of the Intermittents: the temp stagehands and part-time actors that recently blocked the Cannes film festival.

Radha Vij writes:

"The Colonization of Perception:
Government Seduction Blocks Visions of Truth"

Radha Vij

Over two hundred and fifty thousand voices sung over fifty different protest songs in discordant harmony at the RNC in New York City, opposing what some have termed the Bush Dictatorship. Torn t-shirts, designer handbags, good will bargains, high heel stilettos, jeweled necks, and college hemp-wear paraded from Midtown to Union Square defying conventional “convention behavior.” Though there were umbrella concepts tying together the rally — the end to the war, a women’s right to chose, gay rights, the failing economy, etc. — the protesters were just as diverse in their political opinions as they were in their background and fashion style — testament to the fact that the true beauty of New York City is its insuppressible diversity.