"Dollar's Decline Is Reverberating"

David Streitfeld, Los Angeles Times

During a routine sale of U.S. Treasury bonds in early September, one of the essential pillars holding up the economy suddenly disappeared.

Foreigners have been regularly buying nearly half of all debt issued by the U.S. government. On Sept. 9, for the first time that anyone could remember, they stayed home.

"Thoughts of panic flickered out there," said Sadakichi Robbins, head of global fixed-income trading at Bank Julius Baer.

"Henri Lefebvre’s Youthfulness of Heart"
Andy Merrifield, The Brooklyn Rail


I never met Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, nor saw him lecture. Some of my friends who did said he was a real knockout. Others who had contact with him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his boyish passions, his virility—even in old age—and the posse of young, attractive women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him as a Rabelaisian monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one. I’m sorry I missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct, live. But I did see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s. The series, “The Spirit of Freedom,” was strictly for insomniacs and appeared in the wee hours. Each of the four programs tried to assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the twentieth-century. The cynical tone throughout wasn’t too surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard-Henri Lévy—BHL, as the French media know him—Paris-Match’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. The night I watched, an old white-haired man sat in front of the camera, dressed in a blue denim work shirt and rumpled brown tweed jacket. In his ninetieth-year, it was obvious to viewers Lefebvre hadn’t long left to live. Even Lévy described his interviewee as “tired that afternoon. His face was pallid, his eyes blood-shot. I felt he was overwhelmed from the start and clearly bored at having to answer my questions…I’d come hoping he would play a certain role, and this he did with a show of goodwill I hadn’t expected. I have to admit he also did it with elegance and talent.”

"UK Media and 100,000 Iraqi Civilian DeathsS"
Media Lens

Part 1
The Nicest Guys You Can Imagine

In their film, The Corporation, Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan describe how in the mid-1800s the corporation was declared a "fictitious person" in law and granted the same legal rights as real individuals. So what kind of 'person' is a corporation?

The filmmakers assessed the corporate 'personality' using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organisation and standard diagnostic tools of psychiatrists and psychologists:
"The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social 'personality': It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism... Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a 'psychopath.'"

Justin Gerber writes

This is an excerpt from my 14,000 word Manifesto at GayNation.INFO

GAY NATION

Love, Freedom, Democracy And Human Potential

Preamble

When I finished the emotional crusade of creating this Manifesto, which is based
on quite a few years of nightmarish experience, I was still unsure that the
united states is the best choice for the City on the Hill. City on the Hill
is a modification of a cult reference, to mean a state/country acting as a vanguard
base for planetary Anarchy and The Second Epoch of Homo Sapiens: The Real California
Dream. When I came out in the late 1970’s, in los angeles, there was a
magic ether. We were becoming supermen because we were coming out. I had Gay
license plates on my car. But I did not find any other supermen. The closet
was still the most popular self-destruction, closely associated with the most
pathetic supplication/capitulation to every fascism imaginable and beyond. And
it continues: “HIV stops with me” makes me wanna puke. We can only
escape the cesspool by reaching for the stars. The netherlands promises marriage
certificates for Faggots and Dykes. And the dutch promise to be pro-Gay in general.
But the pictures of amsterdam Gay pride that I saw were vapid and pathetic,
even by american standards. My part dutch grandmother from missouri could have
organized a more radical event. It seems that Party Capital of Europe is a euphemism
for Faggots Too Cowardly to Climb Out of the Sewer (Closet). Perhaps dutch faggots
do not measure up to challenging queen what’s-her-swastika. It is the
Anarchist responsibility of those nominally free to liberate those still in
chains. Freedom in the closet is a delusion. If you do not believe in yourself,
if your society does not follow your instinct and passion, then you are a slave.

"The Optimism of Uncertainty"

Howard Zinn, ZNet

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay
involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The
metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any
chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of
changing the world.

"Guzman's Fist:

The Sendero's New Trial"

Gary Leupp, CounterPunch

He hadn't appeared in public in 12 years, this former professor and university provost, Marxist philosopher specializing in the thought of Kant, and Chairman of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP, popularly known as Sendero Luminoso or "the Shining Path"). From 1980 he had led what became the most powerful communist insurgency in the Western Hemisphere. By the time of his capture in 1992, U.S. intelligence analysts estimated that up to one-half of Peru was more in the hands of the Senderistas, fighting their Maoist People's War, than those of the Peruvian state. He was regarded by his followers as the "Fourth Sword" of Marxism, and by his foes and the mainstream press almost everywhere as a "terrorist" responsible for all 70,000 deaths in a long civil conflict. Abimael Guzman (aka Presidente Gonzalo) met the press and the people in a Lima courtroom November 5.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"God Bless America"

John Chuckman

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." — Alexis de Tocqueville

The international view of Bush's election was nicely summed up by the reaction of a group of my students from China. I teach economics at university part-time, and many of my students are from China. Lest you think their judgment clouded by communist ideology, please note the many Chinese students studying in Canada come from that country's bright, hardworking business class in the so-called New Economic Zone. American visions of rabid communists in China are as uninformed as American visions of realities in most places. These are practical, sensible people.

"Four Times Falluja Equals?"

Mark LeVine, Left Turn

As American forces penetrate ever deeper and more destructively into the city of Falluja, each of the major players in this violent drama is engaged in a complex, constantly shifting calculus involving ways of turning events to their advantage. Of the many possible outcomes to the battle of Falluja, the four which seem most plausible follow, starting with the one that might be viewed most positively by the Bush administration. In sum, they offer us a grim picture of how the window of success has closed on American strategists in Iraq. Even the "best" outcomes below (from the administration's point of view) have lost the trappings of freedom and democracy that helped justify the invasion nineteen months ago.

Communiqué of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq on:
The transgressions of groups of Islamic terrorism against people of Iraq
 
 Day after day the bloody hands of terrorist Islamic gangs are reaching to and destroying new aspects of life of the Iraqi society. Everyday they violate the civility of the society and stamp upon its secularity and all the gains in form of freedom, equality, prosperity and humanism achieved by the masses over decades. Everyday, we hear the news of crimes committed by Islamists which disgust and stun everybody for the amount of violence and wickedness embedded in the methodology use by their perpetrators.

The following is extracted from A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno, published last year by Semiotext(e).The text is in two parts, the second of which you can find here.

"Ten Theses on the Multitude

and Post-Fordist Capitalism"

Paolo Virno

I have attempted to describe the nature of contemporary production, socalled post-Fordism, on the basis of categories drawn from political philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. I
have done so not as a professional exercise, but because I am truly
convinced that, in order for it to be described clearly, the mode of
contemporary production demands this variety of analyses, this
breadth
of views. One cannot understand post-Fordism without having recourse
to a cluster of ethical-linguistic concepts. As is obvious, moreover,
this is where the matter of fact lies in the progressive
identification between poiesis and language, production and
communication.