The following is an article published as a feature on Indymedia Ireland, reposted for its lucidity in the moment when the proverbial 'carnival of reaction' is in full swing. To read the accompanying comments, check the original article.

Dublin Riots: What Happened and Why

by Indy Photographer - 1 of Indymedia Ireland Editorial Group

A political analysis of the Dublin riots and why nobody saw them coming

I, like almost everybody I know, didn't predict the events of Saturday. In fact the only person I know who did predict a major riot was a friend of mine who happens to hail from the wee North - in retrospect I should have realised that he had his finger on the pulse, for not only does he have much more experience of sectarian marches, but through his job he knows many of the people who were involved and has an unusual insight and sympathy for those people who most Dubliners write off as 'scumbags' and 'knackers'. This article is an analysis of what happened and why almost everybody got it so wrong. This article is a companion piece to the photo essay which I published yesterday.

"Eat, Drink And Be Merry, For Tomorrow..."

Philip Greenspan, Swans

The sole superpower's economic condition continues to deteriorate to levels that can only presage major problems ahead. The once number one creditor has now descended to the number one debtor. Last year's trade deficit hit an all-time high of $725.8 billion. The savings rate — there ain't none — has become negative, at minus 0.5 percent. Americans are now digging into their capital or are borrowing more heavily, spending $42 billion more than they earn. Only twice before in the depths of the depression, 1932 and 1933, did the savings rate become negative for an entire year. Bankruptcies rose to an all time high. The federal deficit with the increasing wartime expenses keeps soaring as well, now exceeding eight trillion dollars.

The Circle of Greed: Who Wants to be a Congressman?

Mark Faulk, The Faulking Truth

Call it what you want. Naked short selling. StockGate. Fail to delivers. Stock counterfeiting. Financial terrorism. By any other name, it’s still the same thing. Fraud. Millions of Americans being robbed by hedge funds and multi-millionaires utilizing loopholes built into our stock market system.

This is no longer news. No one in Congress can claim plausible deniability, no one in the SEC can say that is doesn’t exist. The White House, and even President Bush himself, can no longer claim ignorance when it comes to the financial raping of our country that has driven thousands of young companies into bankruptcy and ruin, the same companies that our economy depends on to provide the jobs of the future, the same companies that we depend on to keep our workers and our money right here in America. Even the media, who, controlled by the brokerage firms, investment banking companies, and New York Stock Exchange representatives who sit on their Boards of Directors, until recently has either turned a blind eye to this massive scandal or actually seemed to side with the criminals, has begun to realize that this is an issue that, to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, will “not go quietly into that good night”.

How long have our country’s elected officials known about stock counterfeiting, how long have they turned a blind eye while countless retirement accounts, college funds, and small businesses have been bled dry by an industry that seems to care only about its own, and by “its own” I don’t mean the millions of investors who they are pledged to protect and represent, I mean the chosen few who have a large enough net worth to buy influence and control, and the industry itself, who profits to the tune of billions of dollars a year from buying and selling shares of stock that don’t exist?

The Circle of Greed: Who Wants to be a Congressman?

Mark Faulk, The Faulking Truth

Call it what you want. Naked short selling. StockGate. Fail to delivers. Stock counterfeiting. Financial terrorism. By any other name, it’s still the same thing. Fraud. Millions of Americans being robbed by hedge funds and multi-millionaires utilizing loopholes built into our stock market system.

This is no longer news. No one in Congress can claim plausible deniability, no one in the SEC can say that is doesn’t exist. The White House, and even President Bush himself, can on longer claim ignorance when it comes to the financial raping of our country that has driven thousands of young companies into bankruptcy and ruin, the same companies that our economy depends on to provide the jobs of the future, the same companies that we depend on to keep our workers and our money right here in America. Even the media, who, controlled by the brokerage firms, investment banking companies, and New York Stock Exchange representatives who sit on their Boards of Directors, until recently has either turned a blind eye to this massive scandal or actually seemed to side with the criminals, has begun to realize that this is an issue that, to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, will “not go quietly into that good night”.

How long have our country’s elected officials known about stock counterfeiting, how long have they turned a blind eye while countless retirement accounts, college funds, and small businesses have been bled dry by an industry that seems to care only about its own, and by “its own” I don’t mean the millions of investors who they are pledged to protect and represent, I mean the chosen few who have a large enough net worth to buy influence and control, and the industry itself, who profits to the tune of billions of dollars a year from buying and selling shares of stock that don’t exist?

Return of the Suppressed

Keith Sanborn, Art Forum

"Guy Deord made very little art, but he made it extreme," says Debord of himself in his final work, Guy Debord, son art et son temps (Guy Debord: His Art and His Time, 1995), an "anti-televisual" testament authored by Debord and realized by Brigitte Cornand. And there is no reason to doubt either aspect of this judgment. While Debord has been known in the English-speaking world since the 1970s as a key figure in the Situationist International and as a revolutionary theorist, it is only in the past decade that his work as a filmmaker has surfaced outside France. One reason is that, in 1984, following the assassination of Debord's friend and patron Gérard Lebovici and the libelous treatment of both men in the French press, Debord withdrew his films from circulation. Though the films were not widely seen even in France, four of them—by the time they were withdrawn—had been playing continually and exclusively for the previous six months at the Studio Cujas in Paris, a theater financed for this purpose by Lebovici.

The communiqué issued by Debord soon after Lebovici's death reads: "Gérard Lebovici having been assassinated, to the applause of a joyful press and a servile public, the films of Guy Debord will never again be projected in France." Three years later, in a letter to Thomas Levin, Debord amended this to: "I should have said: Never again anywhere."

CARY GRANT: STYLE AS A MARTIAL ART

A conversation with Wu Ming 1 (2005)

At the end of 2004, we took part in an international three-day conference on Cary Grant at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, organized by professor/script-writer Giaime Alonge, who teaches History of Cinema at the Università di Torino. The following interview took place a few months later and will be included in the book collecting that conference's papers and proceedings. If the first answer sounds familiar, that's because it's an extended version of an answer we gave to "3am Magazine" in the same days.

GIAIME ALONGE - What gave you the idea to include Cary Grant in 54? What do you find fascinating in this character?

WU MING 1 - The first chapter in which Cary appears includes a long pseudo-historical and pseudo-theoretical tirade, a sort of marxist analysis of the Grant-myth and his value in the proletarian struggle.

The purpose was satirical, it's a parody of the attempts to rationalize why we like something, or someone. We are inclined to think of other people as bidimensional figures, we don't grasp the depth, we see a square where there's a hypercube. We don't expect a person's ego to be fragmented; we point at inconsistencies and, in our turn, try to show ourselves as consistent, every part has to fit well with all the rest. If someone asks you: "How does your love for Country & Western music fit in with your ideas on the origins of stars-and-stripes reactionary rhetoric?"; or: "You claim to be an ecologist, how can you say you like that car?", the temptation is to force that passion of preference back under the umbrella of your ideology that passion or preference. "Radicals" go out of their way to prove that the music they listen is "radical", leftists explain why a certain kind of shoes doesn't belong to the Right etc.
In the above-mentioned chapter an indefinite omniscient narrator rambles on Cary Grant, the working class, and socialism. This is also a pre-emptive self-parody. It was like saying: when you ask us the reason why we included Cary Grant in our novel, our answer will be something similar to this. At the same time, we exaggerated and added a sentence by Marx turned into a joke ("In a classless society, anybody could be Cary Grant"). It's as we issued a notice: don't take this description too seriously. It makes sense, more or less. It's fascinating. But it came later. We included Grant - availing ourselves on a mistake by Wu Ming 2 - because we like him, we find him intriguing, we like his style. I met the not-yet Wu Ming 4 eleven years ago, he'd just graduated and was about to begin university. The first time I entered his room, I saw a big poster of Cary Grant on the wall. It's not the movie star you expect to find above the bed of a nineteen year old. We have always admired people with style, those who knew how to turn their style into a martial art. "Style as a martial art" is also the name of a column I used to write for a local small mag in the late Nineties.

I hope this answer was intelligible. To avoid misunderstandings, I want to specify that I do listen to Country & Western, but I hate cars. I could never find them attractive. To me even the most glamorous Lamborghini is just a sad and lethal piece of plate.

GA - I beg your pardon? What was the misunderstanding with WM2?

WM1 - Well, leafing through a 1954 magazine, he found an article on the film stars preferred female readers loved the most. Gary Cooper topped the list. WM2 jotted in a hurry "G.C." on his notebook. A few weeks later, going through his scrawls he read "C.G." instead of "G.C." and thought: Cary Grant. At our meeting he told us: "Cary Grant was the most popular actor among the female readers of such magazine." Inspiration! Cary Grant! Lets get hold of the films and biographies!

Adam Roark writes

Pure Law and Bare Life in CIA Prisons

In November 2005, leaked top-secret information revealed the existence of a global network of secret CIA prisons wherein prisoners are held and processed “without judicial involvement” (Associated Press). Identified as ‘detainees’ or ‘enemy combatants,’ these prisoners are held without designation as citizens, who are subjects of constitutional rights and law, but rather as suspected terrorists who cannot be managed in a constitutional manner. While initially it appeared that the revelation of the CIA prison network would become the grounds for partisan fighting in the US, instead, the Washington Post reports “the CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held”. The aftermath of the media exposure of the prisons reveals that the creation, execution, and disappearance of the prison network demonstrate Agamben’s thesis of a ‘permanent state of exception’ and the emergence of pure law.

       

Pure Law and Bare Life in CIA Prisons

Adam Roark

In November 2005, leaked top-secret information revealed the existence of a global network of secret CIA prisons wherein prisoners are held and processed “without judicial involvement” (Associated Press). Identified as ‘detainees’ or ‘enemy combatants,’ these prisoners are held without designation as citizens, who are subjects of constitutional rights and law, but rather as suspected terrorists who cannot be managed in a constitutional manner. While initially it appeared that the revelation of the CIA prison network would become the grounds for partisan fighting in the US, instead, the Washington Post reports “the CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held”. The aftermath of the media exposure of the prisons reveals that the creation, execution, and disappearance of the prison network demonstrate Agamben’s thesis of a ‘permanent state of exception’ and the emergence of pure law.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Cartoons and Bombs"

John Chuckman

I wonder, are waves of angry protest, flag burning, and embassy burning in the name of religion any less rational than waves of B-52s, cluster bombs, and torture in the name of democracy?

So when I hear any American official speak about the worldwide protests against unflattering cartoons of Islam’s Prophet, it is difficult to credit the words, but surprisingly there is one statement by an American – someone who ranks third only after George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld for total number of career lies – that I do credit.

We Fight the Forum

Wladek Flakin

from Left Hook

Angela Merkel meets Angelina Jolie. Bill Gates meets Brad Pitt. States and corporations meet NGOs and media. That is the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has met every year in the Swiss ski resort Davos since 1971. From January 26 to 29, this year's WEF dealt with "projects in hunger, anti-corruption, financing for development and public-private partnerships" [i.e. the privatisation of public services].

2,300 participants, including executives from top companies, lots of ministers and a few heads of government like German Chancellor Merkel, chairpersons of charity organizations, religious advisors and a few celebrities, discussed "The Creative Imperative" (this year's motto) in "Improving the State of the World" (permanent motto). Representatives of Western aid organizations -- like Tombraider/UN goodwill embassador for refugees Angelina Jolie -- were there to speak in the name of billions of people suffering from hunger, who of course were not invited to speak themselves.

Like at the last G8 summit in July 2005, the policy makers in the political and economic sphere were very concerned about "the world's problems". The president of the European Central Bank admitted that the "developing countries finance the industrial nations", and he called this situation "intolerable in the long term." Even the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, professed alarm at the spread of tuberculosis and the inaccessibility of universities to three fourths of the US population. But they were unable to connect these problems to the concentration of wealth in the hands of ever fewer corporations, the massive debts of third world countries and so-called "preventative war" -- policies the WEF has advocated in the past and continues to advocate.