"A Separate Peace:

America Is In Trouble,
and Our Elites Are Merely Resigned"

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

Peggy Noonan is a former speechwrtier for George H. W. Bush.

It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see.
It's
harder to speak of what you *think* you see, what you think is going on
and
can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It
involves
hunches. But here goes.

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture
right
now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot
of
people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in
some
cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and
the
trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things
have
broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That
our
pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but
missing the
number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in
America?" is
"Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."

I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come
up.
I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax.
Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge
that
there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving
our
kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so
deep
that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall;
our
media institutions imploding -- the spectacle of a great American
newspaper,
the *New York Times*, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear
of
parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls
actually
imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them.
Senators who
seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a
financial
entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all
authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think
so.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"No Justice and No Peace:

A Critique of Current Social Change Politics"
Selina Musuta and Darby Hickey, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest #4 ue4.php

As two people actively involved in movements for social justice, we are constantly discussing and critiquing what we see happening in the name of “changing the world”. Having resided in DC for several years, though not originally “from” the city, we have a particular perspective on the current culture of the mass mobilization for social change. Additionally, as two individuals living at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, citizenship, and more we struggle to understand what paths can be charted to a future that will liberate every part of us.

"Judy, Come Home!

Miller’s Return
on Times’ Table"

Gabriel Sherman & Anna Schneider-Mayerson, New York Observer

Reporter Judith Miller may be returning to the New York Times newsroom this month. According to sources familiar with Ms. Miller’s negotiations, she has signaled that her potential homecoming could happen as early as next week.

“I am not commenting on my discussions with the paper,” Ms. Miller said by phone on Nov. 1. “No decisions have been made. I can’t comment any further.”

Ms. Miller is still involved in talks with the paper—whose executive editor, Bill Keller, publicly lamented her “entanglement” with now-indicted Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case.

But even as The Times has sought to isolate Ms. Miller, she has gathered powerful friends to her side. And those talks appear to be turning from severance toward reconciliation, according to Times sources.

El Kilombo writes

"Dialogue with the Philosopher Toni Negri:
The Defeat of the United States is a Political Defeat”

Veronica Gago, for Argentina’s Pagina/12

Translation By: www.elkilombo.org

The Italian philosopher Toni Negri analyzes the United States’ invasion of Iraq as a “defeat.” He spoke to Pagina/12 from the recuperated Hotel Bauen, expounding an auspicious perspective for Latin America and criticizing the “traditional” European left.

The Italian philosopher and militant Toni Negri is in Argentina for a second time. He is arriving from a trip to Chile and is now headed to Brazil. After having launched a worldwide polemic with his book Empire, about the end of the age of classical imperialism, he is now convinced that we find ourselves in an anomalous period for Latin America because it has finally ceased to be “the back porch” of the United States. From the Argentine crisis in 2001 to the current crisis in Brazil, passing through the failed coup in Venezuela and the Andean revolts, Negri reads a profound continental change capable of giving way to a multilateralism that will dispute North American pretensions toward an imperialist sovereignty. In his dialogue with Pagina/12, he insists that Latin America is further along than Europe with regard to its ability to think the relation between social movements and governments through the experimentation of a democratic radicalism.

Headlines of the Future

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The following quotes are from Bush's speech about the War on Terror, as given October 6, 2005, and largely repeated October 28. It was a speech especially dense with Bushspeak, a dialect which never means what it seems to say. Perspective and the occasional translation follow the quotes.

"All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness; innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. "

You might ask how is it possible to choose victims more indiscriminately than by
bombing cities? The Pentagon doesn't even attempt to count Iraq's dead, civilian or military. Two serious efforts have been made to count the civilian toll of the barbarism called "Shock and Awe." One, an effort to count bodies all over the country in morgues, hospitals, and other likely places, came up with more than 25,000 killed. Another scientific study of Iraq's national mortality tables, published in the British medical journal Lancet, came up with about a 100,000.

"American Fascism"

Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's

"But
I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to
move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to
better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided,
unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength
in our land." — Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 4, 1938

In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged
metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on
coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of Umberto Eco's
essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry — a reference not to the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the pit of Hell but to the political
theories that regard individual citizens as the property of the government,
happy villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the
good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more
emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to say, "Everything in the state.
Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state."

Makhno writes:

Fetishizing Process

Mark Lance

If one were forced to explain consensus process in five minutes, one might begin with a

brief pitch about the kind of discussion that should precede the group taking a decision.

Such a pitch would be fairly vague, and would deal with such things as listening, including

all points of view, critical discussion and argument, and creativity in the formulation of

possible compromises and syntheses. But one would quickly switch from the topic of

discussion to the specific procedure that is used to take a formal decision. Here the

account is not at all vague, as precise as any sort of voting procedure. One would explain

how a position is proposed, how people have the choice of supporting, standing aside, or

blocking, how a position can only be adopted by the group if no one blocks, etc. (It is

likely, and relevant, that the majority of people who have been part of decision making

under the banner of "consensus process" have little more than such a five minute

understanding of what is involved.)

If one had much more than five minutes to explain consensus process, one would say little

more about the formal procedure for taking decisions. This part really can be defined in a

few minutes. One would, however, go into far more detail on the complex, less precise, more

deeply contextual business that precedes actually taking a decision. That is, one would

focus on the process of discussion, option formulation, argument, etc.

In what follows, let us call the complex process of discussion — a process about which much

can be said, but the proper functioning of which is unlikely to be definable via a set of

precise rules — "practice". The set of formal rules that define a method of taking a

decision will be referred to as "procedure". This distinction, in itself, is nothing

surprising or new, but I want to argue that it is of great import to the debate between

majority voting and consensus. Such debates are central to anarchist theory as they concern

the form and content of democratic inclusion. Indeed, if anything is essential to

anarchism, it is the idea that social decisions are to be taken by everyone affected, and

that this inclusion must involve substantive participation of each in deliberation and

decsion-making. Thus a dispute on the nature of such participation is a dispute about the

very essence of anarchism.

¡Viva San Precario!

In transit-Entránsito through MayDaySur

Colectivo Entránsito

1> Yes, we can! Determination and construction of a post-identitary common sense

It is no comfortable to inhabit a territory where the big truths are falling down to pieces, where impotency, conformism and fear are
tonalities that accompany contemporary life. In that very territory, we decided to grab strongly the proposal of MayDaySur without really knowing clearly how it would work. It was in fact a political experiment that arouse lots of doubts and some bad auguries. In the process of gestation of this creature we shared many moments of vertigo and indecision. However, some odd trust had installed among us. "Odd" because it didn´t provide us with a clearly defined plan, it was more a kind of instinctive gesture. and a "trust" due to the organizative capability of our
movements, to the intelligence, desire, creativity and strength that we are able to deploy when connecting and working together. We also did trust the "multitude", that experiences directly the "precarization" and still carries, in its ambivalence, the power of rebelliousness and disobedience. We think that the building process of this MayDaySur has proved us that the collective, excited about creating a new "common" and generous work, going beyond rigid identities is able to produce very powerful
connections. We celebrate the intuition and determination in the
beginnings of this process, as well as the generosity and enormous disposition to collective working demonstrated by the movements in Seville in particular, and by all those who composed this true event.

2> New political animals: flexgeneration

-"Not a single worker in here. We should have gone with the Unions. This is a 'botellón' (spanish term for young meetings to drink alcohol in the streets)!"- shouted indignant a union mate.

-"Behave yourself, fuck! This is no demonstration, this is a 'puterío' (disrespective Spanish term for sex work)!"- cried an overflowed policeman.

The composition and the way of being-in in a demonstration left many perplexed. All those fierce-looking people, that music, those
watchwords and, to make matters worse, demonstrating the 1st of May!, the traditional working day. These two personages share, everyone in his way, a feeling of strangeness towards the new and singular expression forms of the precariat. It gets difficult, both for the Order forces and for a certain leftist sector, to understand the codes and modalities of action of those bodies. What are we celebrating? The joy of taking back the streets and giving a contundent visibility to that precarity as conjugated in 1rst person. We demonstrate that we are blazing a trail to get things upside down. We feel that we are thousands who share similar situations and that together we can overcome them. For us the political practice, even at the hardest working time, is a joyful passion. In the words of Gilles Deleuze : "don´t you think that you ought to be sad to be militant, even if what you fight against is abominable. What does possess a
revolutionary force is the bond of desire with reality (and not its getaway under form of representation)". We talk about a new generation of workers and that means that those living today from their work cannot be reduced to an unique identity.

Today the soundsystem, the beats, the dj´s and the "speakers" are to the new generations what country orchestras, the bass drums, the noisy tracks and the megaphone were for the former ones. It would be a bit absurd to maintain that expressive forms, communicative codes, the "ways of feeling" and even the "class aesthetics" would remain the same throughout the history.

¡Viva San Precario!

In transit-Entránsito through MayDaySur

Colectivo Entránsito

1> Yes, we can! Determination and construction of a post-identitary common sense

It is no comfortable to inhabit a territory where the big truths are falling down to pieces, where impotency, conformism and fear are
tonalities that accompany contemporary life. In that very territory, we decided to grab strongly the proposal of MayDaySur without really knowing clearly how it would work. It was in fact a political experiment that arouse lots of doubts and some bad auguries. In the process of gestation of this creature we shared many moments of vertigo and indecision. However, some odd trust had installed among us. "Odd" because it didn´t provide us with a clearly defined plan, it was more a kind of instinctive gesture. and a "trust" due to the organizative capability of our
movements, to the intelligence, desire, creativity and strength that we are able to deploy when connecting and working together. We also did trust the "multitude", that experiences directly the "precarization" and still carries, in its ambivalence, the power of rebelliousness and disobedience. We think that the building process of this MayDaySur has proved us that the collective, excited about creating a new "common" and generous work, going beyond rigid identities is able to produce very powerful
connections. We celebrate the intuition and determination in the
beginnings of this process, as well as the generosity and enormous disposition to collective working demonstrated by the movements in Seville in particular, and by all those who composed this true event.

2> New political animals: flexgeneration

-"Not a single worker in here. We should have gone with the Unions. This is a 'botellón' (spanish term for young meetings to drink alcohol in the streets)!"- shouted indignant a union mate.

-"Behave yourself, fuck! This is no demonstration, this is a 'puterío' (disrespective Spanish term for sex work)!"- cried an overflowed policeman.

The composition and the way of being-in in a demonstration left many perplexed. All those fierce-looking people, that music, those
watchwords and, to make matters worse, demonstrating the 1st of May!, the traditional working day. These two personages share, everyone in his way, a feeling of strangeness towards the new and singular expression forms of the precariat. It gets difficult, both for the Order forces and for a certain leftist sector, to understand the codes and modalities of action of those bodies. What are we celebrating? The joy of taking back the streets and giving a contundent visibility to that precarity as conjugated in 1rst person. We demonstrate that we are blazing a trail to get things upside down. We feel that we are thousands who share similar situations and that together we can overcome them. For us the political practice, even at the hardest working time, is a joyful passion. In the words of Gilles Deleuze : "don´t you think that you ought to be sad to be militant, even if what you fight against is abominable. What does possess a
revolutionary force is the bond of desire with reality (and not its getaway under form of representation)". We talk about a new generation of workers and that means that those living today from their work cannot be reduced to an unique identity.

Today the soundsystem, the beats, the dj´s and the "speakers" are to the new generations what country orchestras, the bass drums, the noisy tracks and the megaphone were for the former ones. It would be a bit absurd to maintain that expressive forms, communicative codes, the "ways of feeling" and even the "class aesthetics" would remain the same throughout the history.