"Greens Had Good Reason To Ask for This Recount"

David Cobb, Minneapolis Star Tribune

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Something went seriously wrong in Ohio on Election Day.
On Nov. 13 and 15, hearings conducted by the Ohio Election Protection Coalition in Columbus featured oral and written testimony from a number of voters, poll workers, precinct judges and legal observers.

The testimony confirmed numerous complaints tracked by election-watchdog organizations and investigative journalists since Nov. 2. Those who testified told stories of the obstruction and disqualification of legitimate voters, malfunctioning computer voting machines, and prohibitively long lines for too few machines.

"Dead Wrong on the Iraqi Elections"

Juan Cole, AntiWar.com

At least 12 persons died violently in the guerrilla war on Saturday
in Iraq. There was a major battle over control of police stations in
Khalis, and Marines found more bodies in Mosul. The U.S. military
said that guerrillas had launched a major campaign of intimidation
aimed at frightening Sunni Arabs into boycotting the forthcoming
elections.

Seventeen parties, mostly small Sunni Arab groupings along with the
two major Kurdish parties, made a plea Saturday that elections be
postponed. Some major Sunni Arab groups, such as the Association of
Muslim Scholars, had already called for a Sunni Arab boycott.

"Obituaries from the Future:

Former President George W. Bush Dead at 72"

Greil Marcus, CityPages

Policy Review, October 5, 2018 — George W. Bush, the
43rd president of the United States, died today at
Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. He was 72. The
cause of death was announced as heart failure.

Mr. Bush's always controversial presidency left behind
a changed nation and a changed world. Taking office in
2001 after a disputed election settled only by a 5-4
decision by a bitterly divided Supreme Court, and
decisively reelected in 2004, President Bush led the
United States into four wars, oversaw the dismantling
of Social Security and Medicare, and enforced a drastic
shrinking of elementary, secondary, and collegiate
education.

He spearheaded the transformation of
President Bill Clinton's budget surpluses of 1999 and
2000 into permanent deficits of more than a trillion
dollars a year, thus profoundly reducing the amount of
capital available to address the needs of the vast
majority of citizens and inhibiting the creation of new
jobs with any promise of advancement or financial
security, while at the same time pursuing tax
reductions that increased the differences between the
income and assets of, in his own terminology, "owners"
and "pre-owners" of "the American ownership society" to
extremes almost beyond measure. When he left office,
taxation of personal and corporate incomes, while still
legally extant, had been effectively replaced by a new
payroll tax, so that almost all investment,
inheritance, and interest income was left tax-free.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Resistance or Retrogression?

The Battle of Ideas Over Iraq"
Peter Hudis, News & Letters

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a quagmire of nightmarish proportions, with many now calling it the most serious setback for U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War. This is seen in everything from the way western Iraq has come under the control of Taliban-like fundamentalists to the fact that jihadists from neighboring lands are flocking to Iraq to take advantage of hatred of the U.S. occupation and to further their effort to create a reactionary "Islamic state" upon its ruins. Clearly, the U.S. occupation of Iraq — which would have continued even if Kerry won the presidential election — created fertile ground for reactionary and terrorist forces to take root and flourish.

"Caliban & the Witch" Presentation
Silvia Federici

Listen to Silvia Frederici's talk about her new book, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

This is an audio recording from Federici's presentation at Fusion Arts in New York City on November 30, 2004. It's in five parts.

sgb writes:

"Who Killed God Pan?"
Christian Marazzi

Pan is a Greek God who lives on the zone between nature and culture, between beasts and humans. He inhabits the space that is neither that of history or community nor that of pure nature: the fields and meadows just outside the city walls are his dominion. He is two-formed and two-natured, human and animal, a man and a goat. When humans live inside the house and beasts in their dens or in their nests, Pan like a herdsman sleeps in a cowshed. And the herdsman is big, tall and a good warrior.

He is a messenger between the city and the fields. Plato equates Pan with language; like Pan, language has a snake’s tongue; it is good both in lying and in saying the truth. Pan declares all things and he is the perpetual mover of all things. Panic and the disorder that leads to panicking are due to the growing distance between the Gods and men. They destroy or deny communication between the Gods and the human community and between men and lead humans back to bestiality.

Pan transforms human being into a gregarious animal and lets the herd instinct proper to humans free so that it is possible to reorganize the community using ‘human nature’ as a tool in the reorganization. Panic, like terror, has been a privileged instrument in modern politics because it spreads fast without discussions and it is impossible to contest or go against it.

"Moving Forward In Palestine: Free Marwan Barghouti"

Zeev bin Natan

Palestinian freedom fighter Marwan Barghouti is Arafat's likely popular successor. He has been Fatah Secretary-General since 1994 and played a key role on the street in both the first Intifada and the present Intifada al-Aqsa. Marwan sits in Nafha prison in the al-Naqab/Negev desert, sentenced last June 6 and now serving five life terms plus 40 years on trumped-up charges of 'complicity' in multiple murder. He is kept in solitary confinement, separated from all other prisoners in Nafha, most of them Palestinian freedom fighters like himself. Marwan has repeatedly denied any involvement whatsoever with the deaths. During the proceedings against him, which began in 2003, he denounced the "show trial" as illegal, the Israeli court without any right to try him.

"Making Another World Possible?
The European Social Forum"
Les Levidow,
Radical Philosophy

The European Social Forum (ESF) has been inspired by the global slogan ‘Another world is possible’, expressing the need to create alternatives from out of the resistance to neoliberalism. Since its inception in 2002, the ESF has provided an opportunity to debate methods and strategies for turning that slogan into reality. Nevertheless the organizational process itself has become a site of conflicting political philosophies about progressive social change. At issue is how ‘another world’ can be made possible and thus how to shape the aims of the ESF. Although such conflict could be creative and instructive, it has largely marginalized alternative futures from the ESF itself. How did this happen? Such conflicts have been integral to Social Forum events and they were intensified in the preparations for the London event this year.

"China's Rising Reserves Are a Growing Problem:
Beijing May Be Wasting the Fortune It So Quickly Amassed"
Mark O'Neill, China Study Group

If China were to distribute its foreign exchange reserves to its 88 million poorest citizens, each would receive the equivalent of 78 years of their annual income of 625 yuan.

That astonishing statistic illustrates both the success and failure of how China has within two short years built up the biggest reserves in the world, second only to Japan.

At the end of September, forex reserves excluding gold stood at US$ 514.5 billion, triple the US$ 165.6 billion at the end of 2000 and more than double the US$ 212.2 billion at the end of 2001. They are likely to reach US$ 700 billion by the end of next year.

"Georgia Goes Full Throttle With Privatization:

Former Soviet Republic Hopes Sales Will Raise More Than $1 Billion"

Selina Williams, Wall Street Journal

As Georgia celebrates the first anniversary of its bloodless revolution, its leaders are telling foreign investors that nearly everything is for sale.

Airports, seaports and the country's entire telecommunications network are among 1,800 state-owned assets that will go on the block in the former Soviet republic over the next two years.