Gerald Horne

To complement an excellent post on Horne's book The End of Empires at Lenin's Tomb

Immortal Technique

Easier to imagine the end of the world…

…than the end of capitalism.

This remark is often attributed to Fredric Jameson. The attribution is not entirely without reason as it is in Jameson’s oeuvre that the suggestion first* appears. In "Future City" in the New Left Review in 2003, the mot does not appear as an observation of Jameson’s own, however, but as the disavowed reported insight of "someone" whose identity has slipped Jameson's mind:

But cyberpunk is not really apocalyptic, and I think the better coordinate is Ballard, the Ballard of the multiple ‘end-of-the-worlds’, minus the Byronic melancholy and the rich orchestral pessimism and Weltschmerz.

For it is the end of the world that is in question here; and that could be exhilarating if apocalypse were the only way of imagining that world’s disappearance (whether we have to do here with the bang or the whimper is not the interesting question). It is the old world that deserves the bile and the satire, this new one is merely its own self-effacement, and its slippage into what Dick called kipple or gubble, what LeGuin once described as the buildings ‘melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great creamy smears.’ Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.

Irony and false modesty aside,  is Jameson evading credit for a reason (other than a dig at Zizek)? Did someone in fact once say this? Not exactly. What Jameson imperfectly recalls here – a faint memory perhaps stirred up by the topic of J. G. Ballard and apocalypse – is almost certainly the Marxist militant and literary critic H. Bruce Franklin’s 1979 essay “What Are We To Make Of Ballard’s Apocalypse?” In it Franklin never suggests that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" but observes that because of his condition within imperialism, white supremacism and capitalism – his position as white petty bourgeois intellectual in the core of a challenged and crumbling empire – J. G. Ballard is predisposed to "mistaking the end of capitalism for the end of the world". The type of thinking and ideological indoctrination which would characterize someone for whom it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" is fairly simply described:

Underlying the elaborate verbal structure of the late fiction are some fairly simple, in fact simple-minded, ideas about social reality. Indeed, the formal pyrotechnics disguise as much as they reveal of the ideational content. Clad in an elegant costume is the tired old idea that human nature is basically brutish and stupid, that people are inherently perverse, cruel, and self destructive, and that's why the modern world is going to hell. High-Rise, his latest novel, is virtually a parody of this notion. Such a vision, I believe, is merely a projection of Ballard's own class point of view, a myopia as misleading as the national and racial point of view in the earlier novels and intimately related to that narrow outlook.

The essay, much discussed at the time of its publication, concludes with a potent question that one must assume engraved it into Jameson's memory, though not so deep that a couple of decades couldn't obscure it:

Ballard's imagined world is reduced to the dimensions of that island created by intertwined expressways on which individuals in their cellular commodities hurtle to their destruction or that apartment complex in which the wealthy and professional classes degenerate into anarchic tribal warfare among themselves. And hence Ballard accurately, indeed magnificently, projects the doomed social structure in which he exists. What could Ballard create if he were able to envision the end of capitalism as not the end, but the beginning, of a human world?

One immediately notices how the revision accomplished by Jameson performs the same depoliticisation and idealisation of critical product that more deliberate misreadings and misrepresentations in the 80s and onward undertook in a more systematic way as a central part of the successful effort to eradicate Marxist practise and replace Marxism as a method of interpretation with the new post-structuralist flavours of liberalism/neo-liberalism. The transformation of H. Bruce Franklin’s Marxist analysis of the ideology of Ballard and his genre into Jameson’s vague quip in Hegelese regarding the disposition of some amorphous and unspecified Geist of the Zeit perfectly exemplifies the relentless, Orwellian cultural strategy which characterized the Reagan era’s political reaction in culture.



It’s not very surprising that this maximally vague observation that no one ever made, with its infantile solipsism resembling that of Ballard’s protagonists (while watching Independence Day , I of the imperial core petty bourgeoisie feel it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, therefore it is easier for everyone) and its occlusions (of class, of property relations, of the non-homogeneity of the material situation of all humanity) which match that of his novels, should become so popular an adage, at the same time that it becomes common for self-described radical critics of mass and pop culture to cease to regard the objects of their study as concrete products produced in definite historical conditions and encrusted with meanings accessible to interpretation and attribute to them instead the status of miraculous messengers of encrypted eternal, universal truths.


*The origin of the quip seems to be as Zizek's misquotation, in the early 90s, of Jameson's '89 text.

Jameson wrote:

Even after the ‘end of history’ there has seemed to persist some historical curiosity of a generally systemic – rather than merely anecdotal – kind: not merely to know what will happen next, but as a more general anxiety about the larger fate or destiny of our system or mode of production. On this, individual experience (of a postmodern kind) tells us that it must be eternal, while our intelligence suggests this feeling to be most improbable indeed, without coming up with plausible scenarios as to its disintegration or replacement. It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.

I have come to think the word 'postmodern' ought to be reserved for thoughts of this kind.

The portrait of cultural and ideological 'postmodernity' is elaborated further on:

What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer. This is the sense of the revival of that ‘end of history’ Alexandre Kojève thought he could find in Hegel and Marx, and which he took to mean some ultimate achievement of democratic equality (and the value equivalence of individual economic and juridical subjects) in both American capitalism and Soviet communism, only later identifying a significant variant of it in what he called Japanese 'snobisme', but that we can today identify as postmodernity itself (the free play of masks and roles without content or substance). In another sense, of course, this is simply the old ‘end of ideology’ with a vengeance, and cynically plays on the waning of collective hope in a particularly conservative market climate. But the end of history is also the final form of the temporal paradoxes we have tried to dramatize here; namely that a rhetoric of absolute change (or ‘permanent revolution’ in some trendy and meretricious new sense) is, for the postmodern, no more satisfactory (but not less so) than the language of absolute identity and unchanging standardization cooked up by the great corporations, whose concept of innovation is best illustrated by the neologism and the logo and their equivalents in the real of built space, ‘lifestyle’ corporate culture and psychic programming.

The Antinonmies of Postmodernity (1989) republished in The Seeds of Time (1994)


Zizek (perhaps while drunk) took this to be nothing but "the old 'end of ideology'" rehashed (and endorsed the sentiment):

...as Fredric Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming ‘breakdown of nature’, of the stoppage of all life on earth – it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.

The Spectre of Ideology (1995)

Jesus ♥ Goldman

“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district.

Michael Hudson: Forever Blowing Bubbles

Shame and Fear Benefit Banks

Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis (PDF)

Did the UK annex Slovenia?

Don't you suspect a little bit that there's something of this in today's typical radical liberal - in today's anti-immigrant campaign for instance? The standard idea is to say, like my friend Alain Badiou in France, "those who are here are from here". That is to say, no check for roots, open to all of them.

Lunching With Noam

2002
Or take Chomsky. There are two problematic features in his work — though it goes without saying that I admire him very much. One is his anti-theorism. A friend who had lunch with him recently told me that Chomsky announced that he'd concluded that social theory and economic theory are of no use — that things are simply evident, like American state terror, and that all we need to know are the facts. I disagree with this.

2009
I met a guy who recently had lunch with Chomsky and he told me that Chomsky said something very sad: Chomsky said that today we don't need theory.

Terror!

So, to review. When Pakistani citizens watch their friends and neighbors blown up by missile strikes, it is the position of this administration that they should not view it as terrorism. On the other hand, when we receive a letter without a stamp, we shut down a portion of the most powerful government in the world out of a general hysteria over terrorism.

Plutonomics

There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

Down with transparency!

For some market participants, however, the openness and transparency of the equity market actually mean they are unlikely to achieve the best price.

A Social Event

When Paulson learned that Goldman’s board would be in Moscow at the same time as him, he had [Treasury chief of staff] Jim Wilkinson organize a meeting with them. Nothing formal, purely social — for old times’ sake.

For fuck’s sake! Wilkinson thought. He and Treasury had had enough trouble trying to fend off all the Goldman Sachs conspiracy theories constantly being bandied about in Washington and on Wall Street. A private meeting with its board? In Moscow?

For the nearly two years that Paulson had been Treasury secretary he had not met privately with the board of any company, except for briefly dropping by a cocktail party that Larry Fink’s BlackRock was holding for its directors at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi in June.

Anxious about the prospect of such a meeting, Wilkinson called to get approval from Treasury’s general counsel. Bob Hoyt, who wasn’t enamored of the “optics” of such a meeting, said that as long as it remained a “social event,” it wouldn’t run afoul of the ethics guidelines.

Still, Wilkinson had told [Goldman chief of staff John] Rogers, “Let’s keep this quiet,” as the two coordinated the details. They agreed that Goldman’s directors would join him in his hotel suite following their dinner with Gorbachev. Paulson would not record the “social event” on his official calendar…

“Come on in,” a buoyant Paulson said as he greeted everyone, shaking hands and giving bear hugs to some.

For the next hour, Paulson regaled his old friends with stories about his time in Treasury and his prognostications about the economy. They questioned him about the possibility of another bank blowing up, like Lehman, and he talked about the need for the government to have the power to wind down troubled firms, offering a preview of his upcoming speech.

He didn't ask

"We don't know where the $700 billion dollars is because the system was initially designed to make sure that we didn't know. When Secretary Paulson first put this money out into the banks, he didn't ask for 'what are you going to do with it.' He didn't put any restrictions on it. He didn't put any tabs on where it was going to go."

And So Naturally The Peace Prize

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to an article that Sy Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, where he says, “One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. ‘This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,’” said Tufts University professor Nasr, who went on to say, “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.”


Then Sy Hersh goes on to say, “The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to [the former CIA agent Robert] Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefiting from U.S. support.” That was Sy Hersh in The New Yorker.


I have been watching the mainstream media coverage in this country, and they are immediately dismissing the Iranian leadership’s allegations that this has anything to do with US or British or Pakistani support of Jundallah.


PEPE ESCOBAR: Well, Amy, the thing is, the brother of Abdul Malik Rigi, Abdulhamid, he was captured last year by the Pakistanis, by the way, in Baluchistan, and then he was extradited to Iran. He was executed in Iran, in fact. Last year—if I’m not mistaken, last year he gave an interview to Press TV, the semi-official Iranian TV network, where he explained in—I would say in a reasonable detail how the CIA approached his brother starting in 2003 and offering not only support, but cash. He specifically talked about a $100,000 cash advance by the CIA so Rigi could organize not only kidnappings, but starting to behead hostages live on camera and put it on YouTube. In fact, some of these tapes circulated on YouTube, in fact, some who were beheaded, if I’m not mistaken, in an attack in 2007, these hostages. So there is direct involvement of CIA.


It’s—obviously none of us can prove directly. We rely on sources from captured Jundallah soldiers, in fact, who volunteer their confessions, and many good Pakistani analysts, especially Baluchi analysts who have good connections with Baluchi separatist movements, which is not the case of Jundallah, by the way. Jundallah is a sectarian, anti-Shiite movement. They are not involved in Baluchistan nationalism, unlike many other Baluchi separatist groups. So if we take these confessions and some of this analysis, there’s a very good case pointing to direct US involvement supporting Jundallah, as the West supported the Mujahedin-e-Khalq based in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran, as the US supports, as well, separatists in Khuzestan province, where the oil of Iran is concentrated, as well.

Everybody Gets What They Want

Big Pharma is on the road to getting its deal: not only 25 to 30 million more paying customers, but also a continued ban on Medicare using its bargaining clout to reduce drug prices, a bar on genetic drug manufacturers introducing similar biologic drugs until the originals have been on the market at least twelve years, and no public insurance option to negotiate low drug prices. (...)

Big insurance is well on the way to getting what it wants: 25 to 30 million more paying customers (many of them young and healthy), a requirement that almost all businesses "pay or play," and no competition from a public option.

Doctors (that is, the American Medical Association) are on the way to getting what they want: Instead of a temporary patch on scheduled decreases in Medicare reimbursements to them, a permanent fix that would change the reimbursement formula altogether and reward them $240 billion over the next ten years.

But when they all get paid off, who will do the paying?

"All This Anger Against the Rich May Be Unhealthy"

The line from my last column that prompted the most responses was about how the wealthy weren’t sleeping well either. The vitriol in the e-mail showed just how deep the anger against the rich is.

Yet put simply, this is not healthy. After all, if you’re wealthy and no one likes you, you still have lots of money. But if you spend your free time obsessing about the rich, you could end up in worse shape emotionally, personally and financially.

“People who get caught up in this paranoia spend all night reading these blogs, and six months later they haven’t done anything to better themselves,” Dr. Dammann said. “Even if they’re right, there is a lot of wasted energy put into this. They need to look at the mistakes they’ve made in their life.”

Deformed babies in Fallujah

In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 new born babies, 24% of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75% of the dead babies were classified as deformed.

Il corpo delle donne

(Subtitled version, see also)

The Party Is Over

Wallace Shawn Reads Howard Zinn's Speech

The Profits Of Panic

Congressional Oversight Panel (pdf):

[I]t is likely that an overwhelming portion of the troubled assets from last October remain on bank balance sheets today.

Chomsky

Like many other economic historians, Bairoch concludes from a broad survey that “it is difficult to find another case where the facts so contradict a dominant theory” as the doctrine that free markets were the engine of growth, a harsh lesson that the developing world has learned again in recent decades.

Poverty

Using data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and others about the likely trajectory of the recession, we find that, absent other changes, the poverty rate will increase rapidly through 2011 or 2012, at which point about 14.4 percent of the country will be in poverty, up from 12.5 percent in 2007. As the recession ends and employment levels increase, the poverty rate will begin to steadily decrease though it will not, at least over the next decade or so, reach its 2007 level. (...) There were 37 million people in poverty in 2007, so our results indicate that the recession would increase the number of people in poverty by about 8 million, or 22 percent. Our estimates for the increase in poverty amongst children are even more dramatic. There were about 13 million children living in poverty in 2007, and we estimate that the number of poor children could increase by at least 5 million, or 38 percent.

Voodoo Economics and Zombie Companies: Metaphors We Live By

A Tennessee rep formerly affiliated with AIG Financial Advisors Inc. spent time making voodoo dolls of his victims to ward off their damaging testimony, prosecutors said.

Moyers' Health Care Episode (with Sid Wolfe and David Himmelstein)

BBC

Malthusing

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

These billionaires, the ones who are taking up all the space, plastering the world with their private property signs, hoarding and claiming all the resources everybody else needs, are worried there are too many other people.

Icelandic heroes

This weekend’s pushback is a quantum leap that promises (or to creditors, threatens) to change the world’s financial environment. For the first time since the 1920s the capacity-to-pay principle is being made the explicit legal basis for international debt service. The amount to be paid is to be limited to a specific proportion of the growth in Iceland’s GDP (on the assumption that this can indeed be converted into export earnings). After Iceland recovers, the payment that the Treasury guarantees for Britain for the period 2017-2023 will be limited to no more than 4 per cent of the growth of GDP since 2008, plus another 2 per cent for the Dutch. If there is no growth in GDP, there will be no debt service. This means that if creditors take punitive actions whose effect is to strangle Iceland’s economy, they won’t get paid.

Iceland promises to be merely the first sovereign nation to lead the pendulum swing away from an ostensibly “real economy” ideology of free markets to an awareness that in practice, this rhetoric turns out to be a junk economics favorable to banks and global creditors.

As far as I am aware, this agreement is the first since the Young Plan for Germany’s reparations debt to subordinate international debt obligations to the capacity-to-pay principle.

No doubt the post-Soviet countries are watching, along with Latin American, African and other sovereign debtors whose growth has been stunted by the predatory austerity programs that IMF, World Bank and EU neoliberals imposed in recent decades. The post-Bretton Woods era is over. We should all celebrate.

What Does It Mean To Be A Revolutionary Communist?

AMY GOODMAN: Carl Dix, what does it mean to be a revolutionary communist?


CARL DIX: Well, what it means, first and foremost, is to understand and to act on the understanding that this capitalist imperialist system cannot—will not, but can’t even meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of humanity, that it thrives and exists on the chase after profit for a handful of super-rich capitalist imperialist exploiters, and that what that means for humanity is exploitation, disease, misery, starvation—you know, because Obama talked about, well, if those African countries would just get good governance, end corruption, more democracy, they could work their way out of it. Well, that will not happen, because as long as they’re enmeshed in the imperialist global entanglement of economic and political relations, the wealth that collects in the metropols of Europe and the United States is the other side of the misery that’s going to continue spreading. And then, acting on that means that what is necessary is to stop cold the system of capitalism and imperialism, dismantle its institutions through revolution, and put power in the hands of the people, build up new institutions that are based upon the initiative and involvement of people and will back up people to make the transformations that are made. And then the core of revolutionary communists who are at the core of that authority have to foster an atmosphere not only of involvement on the end of doing work, but also on the end of figuring out what needs to be done, how it should be done, taking up all the questions facing society. We have to put that before the people and create an atmosphere where even the people who disagree with the revolutionary authority feel free to raise their concerns and disagreements, because that’s the only way we’re going to know enough about reality in order to transform it in the desired direction—you know, because Cornel talks about speaking truth to power, and I love him for that, but the one thing about it is this power doesn’t care what truth you bring to it. They’re still going to go ahead with what’s in their interests.

Those Illusions: Update

CARL DIX: I’m a sixty-year-old black man, which means I have decades of experience with white supremacy. I remember when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in education, Baltimore, Maryland, closed down the public swimming pools, because they saw the writing on the wall, and they’d have to integrate them, and they could not—they were not going to subject white kids to the indignity of swimming in water that had touched the bodies of black kids. That’s how thick this racism has been, and it’s continued on the way down. But that’s just something I remember from my childhood.


So I understand why people got into it, but I did see where this could go. And see, a lot of people say, “Well, look, a lot of black youth are going to get inspiration and hope from Obama being in the White House.” But then, the question I pose to them is, what will happen to that inspiration and hope when it collides with the continuing reality of white supremacy, male supremacy, imperialist, you know, overseas adventures, that remain the defining reality of America?


And see, what is coming around on this is that black youth are more and more being blamed for the situation that the system puts them in. And you look at Obama’s last two Father’s Day speeches, he gets into this thing of, you know, the youth got to pull up their pants. The absent dads got to be involved in their lives. You’ve got—the parents got to turn off the TV and make sure the kids do their homework. In other words, the onus for the youth not achieving is being put on the youth themselves and their parents. And what’s disappearing in that are the continuing obstacles that this system puts in the way of black, Latino and poor youth who want to achieve. So, in other words, the people are being blamed, and who better than Barack Obama, the first black president, to blame black youth for their plight? If George Bush does it, people would say it’s racist. But when the first black president does it, it actually draws people into it.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you share that criticism, Professor West?


CORNEL WEST: Yes, I think Brother Carl Dix is hitting the nail on the head. I think, at the same time, there’s ways in which, at the symbolic level, to break the glass ceiling at the very top of the American empire, the White House. Powerful, symbolically. Brother Carl and I are saying there’s too many brothers and sisters—red brothers and sisters on the reservations, white brothers and sisters poor working class, brown brothers and sisters in barrios, black brothers and sisters in chocolate cities—who are stuck in the basement. You’re stuck in the basement, you break the glass ceiling at the top.


The obsession is keeping track of Obama in the White House, a white house primarily built by black slaves. What about those who are still locked at the bottom, when you have policy team—neo-imperialist policy in foreign policy, neoliberal in economic policy—that’s reproducing the conditions of those stuck at the bottom across race? And at this point, you see, you can’t allow race and him being the first black president to hide and conceal the very ugly class realities of poor and working people. And that’s precisely, I think, why we’re trying to generate some motion, some momentum and some movement.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you share Carl Dix’s criticism of President Obama’s Father’s Day speeches?


CORNEL WEST: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think that it’s quite telling that he would give personal responsibility speeches to black people, but not a lot of personal responsibility speeches to Wall Street in terms of execution. And when you actually look at the degree to which issues of accountability for poor people—but where’s the accountability when you’re bailing out these Wall Street elites, $700 billion? That’s socialism for the rich. That’s your policy. Don’t then go to these folk who are locked into dilapidated housing, decrepit school systems, many on their way to a prison-industrial complex, and talk about their fathers didn’t come through. And we know the fathers got problems. We understand that. But there are structural institutional challenges that he’s not hitting, hitting head on.


And I should say this, too, I think, in terms of style, that the Obama administration is obsessed with the wrong Lincoln. They are obsessed with the Lincoln who they think moved to the right and was trying to create bipartisan consensus with conservatives, whereas we know there’s no Lincoln without Frederick Douglass. There’s no Lincoln without Harriet Beecher Stowe. There’s no Lincoln without Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner. That was a social movement.


Lincoln supported the slave trade when he was in the House. He supported the Fugitive Slave Act. In the first inaugural lecture he gave, he supported the first proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which said there would be slavery forever in America, the unamendable amendment. That was Lincoln. If it were not for the abolitionist movement, the courageous black and white freedom fighters, from John Brown to Douglass, who put pressure on Lincoln, we would have been dealing with a white supremacist Lincoln.


Lincoln became great, because a social movement pushed him against slavery in that regard. And Obama is looking to the wrong Lincoln. And if he doesn’t understand the greatness of Lincoln was responding to the social movements of working people and poor people, he’s going to end up with a failed presidency, with a lot of symbolic gestures, but, on the ground, everyday people, those Sly Stone called “everyday people,” suffering still.

It's Really A Lot Of Money

Under the worst of circumstances, the report said, the government's maximum exposure could total nearly $24 trillion, or $80,000 for every American.

Obama's New Style - Decently Covert

This past weekend in Buenos Aires, an American acquaintance presented me with page 9 of Saturday’s Buenos Aires Herald, the English-language daily, such that I might join the ranks of those who understood the approach of the US government to the current crisis in Honduras. Page 9 consisted of two Reuters articles, one on top of the other, with the essence of the US approach excerpted in a quote in orange print at the center of the top article: “This is part of Obama’s new style of doing things in Latin America.” How well my acquaintance had read the rest of the article was called into question by his reference to Costa Rican President Óscar Arias as Óscar Asturias.

The top article, entitled “US treads softly as region weighs in,” begins:

“Latin America was for decades seen as the United States’ ‘back yard’—a theatre where it imposed its will often at the barrel of a gun.

“But since Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was snatched from his home in his pajamas and spirited out of the country by the military on June 28, Washington has played an uncharacteristically low-key role.”

It apparently does not occur to Reuters that there is no need for gun barrels when the US is content for Zelaya to remain in his pajamas and out of the country, or that covert support for right-wing Latin American death squads might also have been described as low-key.

...The Reuters article on Honduras continues in the tradition of imbalance by asserting that “[t]he last Democrat in the White House, former President Bill Clinton, sent troops to put ousted Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power in 1994,” without specifying that former Republican governments had frozen development aid to Haiti during Aristide’s subsequent presidential term—a low-key maneuver obligingly legitimated by the OAS—or addressing Aristide’s claims that he was kidnapped to Africa by the US and France in 2004.

Óscar Arias had confirmed that conservative Republicans in the US preferred Aristide’s departure to prospects of Haitian democracy and had responded negatively to Haitian rebel leader Guy Philippe’s March 2004 announcement that the country was in his hands, an announcement backed up by his supporters’ claims that they had executed opponents and by the fact that Philippe had received US military training in Ecuador. Arias’ negative response is recorded in Paul Farmer’s April 2004 article in the London Review of Books: “Nothing could more clearly prove why Haiti does not need an army than the boasting of… Philippe last week in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian army was abolished nine years ago during a period of democratic transition, precisely to prevent the country from falling back into the hands of military men.” Arias’ failure thus far to draw parallels between countries starting with H may be an effect of the fact that the current non-Republican State Department is still debating the definition of the word “military.”

The US has also still failed to freeze the bank accounts of Honduran coup instigators, which would presumably be more complicated than freezing drinking water loans to Haiti and would jeopardize American entrenchment “firmly in the background.” While not involving gun barrels, such economic maneuvers are nonetheless incompatible with antidemocratic objectives; the implication that the perceived inaction that characterizes “Obama’s new style” is somehow more benign than previous presidential styles is meanwhile offset by the fact that US government contact with Honduran coup plotters up until the day before the coup cannot be characterized as inactive.

"Conspiracies do exist"

Untouchable

Taken altogether, what all of this means is that Goldman’s profit announcement is a giant “fuck you” to the rest of the country. It is a statement of supreme privilege, an announcement that it feels no shame in taking subsidies and funneling them directly into their pockets, and moreover feels no fear of any public response. It knows that it’s untouchable and it’s not going to change its behavior for anyone. And it doesn’t matter who knows it.

What Zizek knows about Election Fraud

In light of this, a reminder of what he was writing in 2004:

Democracy – in the way the term is used today – means that, whatever electoral manipulation takes place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the US presidential elections of 2000 were, despite appearances, effectively ‘democratic’: in spite of obvious electoral manipulation, and of the absurdity of the fact that a couple of hundred votes in Florida decided who would be president, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat. When, in the weeks of uncertainty after the election, Bill Clinton said, ‘The American people have spoken; we just don’t know what they said,’ the remark should have been taken more seriously than it was meant: even now, we don’t know the ‘true’ result – and maybe this is because there was no substantial ‘message’ behind the result.

Why The Anthrax Letters Were Forgotten

(CBC Documentary, Part one of seven)

LIVE-BLOGGING CHILD-MURDER

Sorry about the screaming all-caps, but this is an emergency:

January First: Notes from Calalini

About Me

Michael Schofield is killing his six-year-old daughter slowly and doesn't even realise it. It is obvious that he himself desperately needs help. He is getting none. And his child is being martyred while he blogs about it.

We tried everything. Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement. Hitting her back (I won't tell you how many people told us that all she needed was a good beating). We took all her toys away. We gave her toys away. We tried starving her. We did EVERYTHING we could to try and break her. Nothing worked.

It goes on like that forever. And it gets worse, much worse.

Worst of all, he is being assisted in his efforts by the grotesque US psychiatric profession and praised incessantly in the US media. This brutally sanctimonious claptrap appeared in the LA TImes on June 29th:

Jani's at the mercy of her mind

She is in fact at the mercy of her father and the quacks and the hacks. The diagnosis of "schizophrenia" (sic) is a sick joke.

At his blog and all over the web, comments boxes are filling up with messages of fawning, awe-struck admiration and support - for him, not for his helpless kid.

Urgent request: Does anyone one know anyone in the LA area (or elsewhere) who could intervene effectively to help this child?

She is one of millions, but her current prominence makes her a kind of test-case. She is being put through hell as we speak.

Thank you.

Glen Ford speaks on Barack Obama's selection/election at African Liberation Day 2009

Neverending Civilising Mission

"Wars, Guns and Votes is, in some ways, a darker argument," he says. "The guts of it is that the international community has been naive by denying reality and imagining that security and accountability among the countries in the bottom billion can be readily achieved by just introducing elections." Democracy is about much more than that, he says. "It's very easy to steal an election if there are no checks and balances." Like a free press? "Absolutely; that makes a big difference. But we also need some sort of international standard about what constitutes a decent election."

The EU already offers a monitoring service, but, he says: "The problem is that it's not linked to any consequences." Collier's suggestion that the developed world should be prepared to intervene more often militarily could lead to charges of neo-colonialism, I point out. There's a long pause before he responds: "The citizens of the bottom billion share the planet with us and have needs, some of which have to be met by the international community. Those who want to put up a sign saying 'Keep Out' are not generally the ordinary citizens. They are the entrenched elites who have been exploiting them. In all of these societies there are internal struggles between brave people trying to effect change and powerful vested interests opposing them. We should be supporting the strugglers for change.

Legitimacy

"The likes of [President Robert] Mugabe will call us neo-colonialists, but I have no aspirations to govern Africa. What the international community does have is legitimacy for military intervention, where necessary, through institutions like the UN. America has legitimacy, too, since the election of President Obama." Because of his African heritage? "Very much so. Africans are proud of him and see him as one of them.

"What we have seen are wild policy lurches on anything to do with security," Collier goes on. "We left Somalia without government for 15 years because 18 American soldiers were killed there. The lesson was seen to be: 'after Somalia, never intervene'. So we allowed 800,000 people to be butchered in Rwanda. Then we over-reacted the other way in Iraq. Getting it right doesn't mean going to either extreme. British troops, for instance, have done a hugely beneficial job in Sierra Leone. And I've just come back from Haiti, where 7,000 Brazilian troops are keeping the peace."

Paul Collier interviewed by an admiring Chris Arnot in The Guardian

The Peace empire keeps -

McKinney From an Israeli Prison

Goldman Sachs

Lastly, he says that the bank is “painfully conscious” of the importance of being a force for good, which I noted with amusement is not quite the same thing as saying that that bank is a force for good, or wants to be.

Israel Attacks Free Gaza Boat

Israel attacks boat, kidnaps human rights workers aboard including Cynthia McKinney, and confiscates olive trees, medical supplies and toys destined by donors for Gaza:

"The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of "Cast Lead". Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone" said fellow passenger Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.

Just before being kidnapped by Israel, Huwaida Arraf, Free Gaza Movement chairperson and delegation co-coordinator on this voyage, stated that: "No one could possibly believe that our small boat constitutes any sort of threat to Israel. We carry medical and reconstruction supplies, and children's toys. Our passengers include a Nobel peace prize laureate and a former U.S. congressperson. Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters."

Arraf continued, "Israel's deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release."

Twitter

What Zizek knows about Iran

Iran is the only large Arab state which not only does not diplomatically recognize Israel, but resolutely denies its right to exist as a state.

(Hat tip)

Revolution is the Main Trend in the World Today

Cornelius Cardew's Piano Music of the 1970s

Relentless

(AP)

June 18, 2008, UN soldiers gunned down Haitian mourners outside the Church - Port au Prince Cathedral - in Haiti during the funeral for Father Jean Juste in Haiti.

(Marguerite Laurent)

Twitter psyop?

Why would a news organization post a story about 3 people who JUST JOINED TWITTER hours earlier? Is that newsworthy?

Hoooo?

Baka Music

Soviet propaganda

“Thank God my husband is dead and can’t see me in a situation like this,” she says, looking down at her feet. “My old neighbor shakes her head in disbelief every time she comes to check on me.” For most of their lives spent in the Soviet era, Vorfolomejeva and her elderly neighbors only heard about the homeless in the Soviet propaganda as an example of the evils of capitalism abroad.

Stop the EXECUTION of Troy Davis

Stop the execution of Troy Davis.

Innocence Project.

Amnesty USA


Amnesty France

Reverse Nuremberg

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.

Thunk

« La classe ouvrière n’existe plus. Mais elle prend tout sur la gueule »

The working class no longer exists. But it's still taking it in the chops.

« Le communisme c’est le seul contrepoison le seul antidote le seul remède la seule alternative à la société d’exploitation au capitalisme qui jamais n’a le visage humain. Tous les damnés de la terre savent ça qui sont de plus en plus nombreux et de plus en plus damnés. Seuls les salauds ne sont pas avec eux et c’est comme ça qu’on les reconnaît. »

Communism is the only antitoxin the only antidote the only remedy the only alternative to the capitalist society of exploitation which never has a human face. All the wretched of the earth who are more and more numerous and more and more wretched know it. Only the bastards aren't with them and that's how we recognise them.

Georges Labica, Démocratie et révolution

Convenient Suicide

The accused terrorist who said he was tortured into making a false connection between al Qaeda and Iraq has died in a Libyan prison, human rights monitors said Tuesday.

Not A Spoof.

La Chinoise

The rest...

The Spring of the Zombies

Stiglitz

The Economic Homeless

For the economic homeless, the American ideal that education and hard work lead to a comfortable middle-class life has slipped out of reach. They're packing into motels, parking lots and tent cities, alternately distressed and hopeful, searching for work and praying their fortunes will change.

The Day Ronald Reagan Was Elected...

"The day Ronald Reagan was elected, this crisis was locked in as something that was going to happen, maybe not precisely on September 15 2008, but it was going to happen."

Evidence

This is exactly what affirmative action is meant to correct: People coming to the arbitrary conclusion that someone is "an idiot" despite all evidence to the contrary, except if you consider not being a white man evidence.

The weirdest bicycle since The Third Policeman

"Bosnia and Herzegovina is like a bicycle," says Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, who served as the country's UN high representative between 2002 and 2006. "If it is in constant motion, the chances of things going wrong are avoidable. As long as there is momentum. If it stops or is pedalled backwards, that is when I fear the prevalent mood becomes one of pessimism. Then there is the risk that it turns in on itself. And it has lost momentum.

Realists v. Neo-Cons

Blue corner:

...Petraeus expressed the view that the Pakistani army could survive the fall of the government of President Ali Zardari and that the army, led by Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, is “superior” to the civilian government.

This statement echoed the position indicated by President Barack Obama at the Wednesday evening press conference marking his first 100 days in office. Obama said he was confident that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would remain secure, “Primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” He added, “We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.”

In contrast, the American president described Zardari’s government as “very fragile” and lacking “the capacity to deliver basic services” or “gain the support and the loyalty of their people.”

Obama concluded by saying of Pakistan, “We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”

Red Corner:

To prevent catastrophe will require considerable American effort and unquestionably provoke resistance from many Pakistanis, often for widely differing reasons. We must strengthen pro-American elements in Pakistan's military so they can purge dangerous Islamicists from their ranks; roll back Taliban advances; and, together with our increased efforts in Afghanistan, decisively defeat the militants on either side of the border. This may mean stifling some of our democratic squeamishness and acquiescing in a Pakistani military takeover, if the civilian government melts before radical pressures. So be it.

May Day

Into the Streets May First!


Alfred Hayes


Into the streets May First!
Into the roaring Square!
Shake the midtown towers!
Shatter the downtown air!
Come with a storm of banners,
Come with an earthquake tread,
Bells, hurl out of your belfries,
Red flag, leap out your red!
Out of the shops and factories,
Comrades, these are our tools,
A song and a banner!
Roll song, from the sea of our hearts,
Banner, leap and be free;
Song and banner together,
Down with the bourgeoisie!

Sweep the big city, march forward,
The day is a barricade!
Pour forth like a second Flood!
Thunder the alps of the air!
Subways are roaring our milllons --

Comrades, into the square !!!


Alfred Hayes, May 1, 1934

AMY GOODMAN: Why would any library agree to give over their work to a private company?

BREWSTER KAHLE: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Because Google was going to pay for the digitization of these books. And what they said originally is that they would—like a web search engine, they would go and index these books and then allow people to see bits and pieces, but direct people back to the libraries or direct people back to bookstores to be able to get them. What we now find through this suit is Google’s ambitions were far greater than just directing people back to where they came from; they wanted to be the library or the bookstore themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: So they will make money on these libraries?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Not only will they make money, they will be the sole organization to control access to these works.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “control access”?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Well, if they want those books to be available to people, they can have it in their search engine and rank it high. If books are things they don’t want to have available, I don’t know, for any reason that corporations might want to do that, they can take it effectively out of the library. If they get to be the library that the next generation grows up with, then they get to decide who has access to works, and if you happen to be reading a book, they’ll know about it.

Speaking Of Swine

The Gospel of the Creole Pig by Michelange Quay

The NAFTA Flu

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

Tell her he's a liar. Tell her he's an anti-Semite. Tell her we'll ruin his life.

Everyone involved in the dispute over William I. Robinson talks about lines being crossed.

A tenured professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Robinson said that his critics have crossed lines of fairness by equating his criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and that the faculty judicial system is crossing lines that are supposed to protect academic freedom by investigating him.

His critics say that he crossed a line of professionalism by sending e-mail to all of the students in one of his courses material about "parallel" images of Nazi and Israeli attacks. Some students view the material as anti-Semitic, and they quit the course and filed a grievance against him.

Faculty members are in the process of selecting a panel that will consider the charges against Robinson and determine whether to recommend that a standing faculty panel conduct a full investigation of the incident. While no action has been taken against him at this time, he views the inquiries as an attempt to quash criticism of Israel. Robinson is consulting with lawyers and may sue to block the coming proceedings.

At issue is an e-mail message that Robinson sent to the approximately 80 students in January in a course about sociology and globalization. The e-mail contained an an article criticizing the Israeli military's actions in Gaza. Part of the e-mail was an assemblage of photos from Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews and from Israel's actions in Gaza. Students were invited to look at the "parallel images." A message from Robinson argued that Gaza would be like "Israel's Warsaw."

For Gaza? Honestly?

Seven Jewish Children - a Play for Gaza.

Now what could Gaza want with this play I wonder?

Someone in a haloscan somewhere "was struck by how powerful and moving it was". Yes.

The crazed, positively illiterate reactions of Jacobson and Goldberg of course incite one to defend the play from their absurd, cynical, malicious comments.

And that's a pity because the piece is not only anti-Semitic (in a distinctively British philoSemitic way) but, more disturbingly, contemptuously Orientalist, Eurocentric (racist) and Imperial-apologetic. And of course a very competent piece of theatre. Engaging, moving and entertaining.

Did the British public really need yet another piece of deft kitsch of this sort, another compelling statement of the comfortingly familiar white British viewpoint which shoves Palestinians to the barely glimpsed margins of their own calamities, reduces them to silhouettes loping along the background horizon on camels and bloodied corpses flashed on television, while preferring to examine (as foil for its own righteous self) the endlessly fascinating collective psyche of an AngloAmerican-mass-culture-produced Jewish Tribe as the ultimate Type of victim-perpetrator, a compelling figure of traumatised imperialist, and to remind us that history arrived in Palestine with European Zionists in the early 20th century? “For Gaza”, yet another solemn account of how terribly some previous incarnations, less ancestors than earlier avatars of the Type, of the agents of white supremacist imperialism besieging and bombarding it once suffered? Gaza needs yet another reiteration of how really the Middle East came under European imperial domination and so remains because of some anguished parental protectiveness taken to extremes? Another acknowledgement that the path to Palestinian Liberation must lie through the therapeutic mass psychoanalysis and cure of the only true protagonist of Palestinian history: "The Jewish People", that is, generations of identically loving parents of little girls?

“For Gaza” yet another touching tale of the psychic pain and terror endured by the European overlords? “For Gaza” a play about the eternally well meaning compassionate innocent inheritor of expropriated wealth and land, a parade of little harmless helpless girl children, hiding from Cossacks, orphaned by Nazis in Europe, cherished by refusenik cousins in Israel? "For Gaza" another explanation of how all the propaganda fables under which Palestinian history is obscured - here on stage yet again - have been concocted to protect the ignorant naivety of a vulnerable little girl, to keep this innocent of genteel civilisation from being frightened? “For Gaza” yet another emphatic illustration that Palestinian suffering is endowed with what little significance it has – should it become too garish and bloody - only by the hazy disquieting reflections it leaves in the piquantly tormented psyche of this ordinary European family with its pretext children, giving rise to the familiar powerful poignant stories - so familiar they can be fully conveyed in this abbreviated way (the entire genre of Holocausterie transmitted by "don’t tell her what they did”) - that English people tell their children and their theatre audiences?

(I suppose it is what one expects of a British playwright whose Romania of 1989 hosts vampires and whose "critique" of British colonialism consists of a sex farce set in that old reliable "unspecified African country".)

Reality

Pynchon, Vineland

Justin found his father and Zoyd in the back of a pickup, watching “Say, Jim,” a half-hour sit-com based on “Star Trek,” in which all the actors were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled white redhead named Lieutenant O’Hara. Whenever Spock came on the bridge, everybody made Vulcan hand salutes and went around high-threeing. About the time the show ended, Prairie came by, Zoyd and Flash went off looking for beer, and she and Justin settled down, semi-brother and sister, in front of the eight O’Clock Movie, Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story. It was mostly Pee-wee talking in a foreign accent, or sitting around in front of some pieces of paper with some weird-looking marker pen, and the kids’ attention kept wandering to each other. “There’s the Movie at Nine,” Justin said, looking in the listings, “Magnificent Disaster, TV movie about the ’83-’84 NBA playoffs – wasn’t that just back in the summer? Pretty quick movie.”

“They’ve been getting quicker over the years, from what I remember,” Prairie said.

“Hey Prairie, would you like to baby-sit me sometime?”

She gave him a look. “Some baby. Maybe I’ll have to kid-sit you.”

“What’s that?”

“Involves some tickling,” Prairie already headed for her new brother’s armpits and flanks, and Justin squirming even before they touched.

Out under yellow bulbs at a long weathered table, Zoyd found himself trying to help flash with the shock of meeting so many in-laws in one place, both men from time to time looking around fearfully, like unarmed visitors in a jungle clearing, as out beyond this particular patch of light Traverses and Beckers went practising on scales, working on engines, debating, talking back to the Tube, sending up gusts of laughter like ritual smoke cast to an unappeasable wind. A Traverse grandmother somewhere was warning children against the October blackberries of this coast, “They belong to the Devil, any that you eat are his property, and he don’t like blackberry thieves – he’ll come after ya.” Even sceptical adolescents weaved in her voice’s spell. “When you see those unhappy souls out by the roadside, back up the lanes, in the ruins of the old farms, wherever the briars grow thick, harvesting berries out in the clouds and rain of October, why just drive by, and don’t look back, because you’ll know where they’ve come from, and who their labor belongs to, and where they have to go back to at the close of the day.” And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began – some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.

Krystian Zimerman

Sunday, making his Disney Hall debut in a recital sponsored by the Philharmonic, Zimerman, who has become arguably the greatest pianist of his generation, made the surprise and shocking announcement from the stage that in protest to America's military policies overseas and particularly in Poland, he would no longer perform in the United States.

“Get your hands off my country,” he said, soft-spoken but seething. He accused the U.S. military of wanting “to control the whole world,” and made a reference to the U.S. military detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Approximately three dozen in the audience walked out, some shouting obscenities. “Yes,” he answered, “some people when they hear the word military start marching.”

Court Of Appeals: Detainees Are Not “Persons” in Guantánamo Torture Suit

Court Agrees with Obama Administration that Detainees Still Have No Constitutional Right Not to Be Tortured

April 24, 2009 Washington, D.C. – In a suit brought by British men imprisoned for two years (without charge, without trial - Q.) at Guantanamo, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today reaffirmed its previous ruling that Guantanamo detainees lack the fundamental constitutional right not to be tortured and are not “persons” under a U.S. statute protecting religious freedom.

(...)

Last year, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a member of the Court of Appeals panel who issued the decision today, referred to the Court’s holding that detainees are not “persons” as “a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.” This statement is noticeably absent from Judge Brown’s substantively identical concurring opinion issued today.

The greater the destruction of wealth...

...the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation

Sshh! Waterboarded 183 times: the "admitted planner" (sic) of 9/11

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times and 83 times on another al Qaeda suspect, The New York Times said on Sunday.

One hundred and eighty-three times in one month, that is. So, does this mean they stopped as soon as Waterboarding Month was over? And does it mean they nearly drowned him only 183 times in total that month, or that they subjected him to 183 sessions, in each of which he was nearly drowned several times?

Let's not quibble. For KSM is, as Reuters and the NYT tell us, "the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks". (I thought that was the late Osama bin Laden, or rather Mohammed Atta, he of the Evil Eyes, but let's not quibble.) No doubt KSM, this quite exceptionally Bad Guy, also admitted to shooting Abe Lincoln. Who wouldn't, under the circumstances? I know I would, especially if my kids, like KSM's, were being tortured simultaneously.

Fuck it, I'd admit to being responsible for the Great Fire of London.

Fine things, admissions. And useful. Note that KSM's grotesque and utterly worthless "admission" was a major prop (in all senses of the word) of the worthless yarn issued by the grotesque 9/11 Commission, commanded by the equally grotesque Philip Zelikow, who is undoubtedly worth something to some grotesquely powerful and ruthless people.

Perhaps some fine day the opinionmakers of the Anglo-Saxon liberal left (from Cockburn to Corn to Taibbi to Monbiot to...) will finally have the minimal decency to admit, without being waterboarded, what everyone else in the world has long since noticed: that the official account of The Crime That Served to Justify Everything is an insult to the intelligence of a budgie, and that this still matters enormously, for many more reasons than one.

Much more likely, though, we shall hear not a tweet from those prominent pro- and semi-pro dissenters. They will continue to be a) prudently silent and b) very carefully and selectively ignorant, because it's safer that way, and by god they know it. (See Chomsky and Herman, passim.) So the torture of "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" (if indeed it is he) and his children, and what this entire filthy story tells us about the Trifecta administration and its universal casus belli, will remain discreetly unmentioned and wholly unmentionable.

Meanwhile, the "trial" continues, not that you'd notice if you restricted your reading to left websites, while the Fourth Estate continues to report with a straight face.

Well, we all have our trials. It would be too easy to cite Kafka here, and anyway, Beckett sums it up better:

"Human nature. Marvellous thing."

No time for ideology sorry

WSJ:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Department chief Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America Corp. to not discuss its increasingly troubled plan to buy Merrill Lynch & Co. -- a deal that later triggered a government bailout of BofA -- according to testimony by Kenneth Lewis, the bank's chief executive.

...The Wall Street Journal previously reported, in a page-one story on Feb. 5, that Mr. Lewis agreed to proceed with the Merrill merger only after Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke said that he and his board would lose their jobs if Bank of America backed out of the deal. Mr. Lewis's testimony with the New York attorney general's office corroborates that account.

Mr. Cuomo's office says it has been unable to gather a full picture of the Fed's role in the December discussions because the Fed has invoked a regulatory privilege, allowing it to keep some documents confidential.

Mr. Lewis has previously said that he first considered backing out of the Merrill deal on Dec. 13, when he said his chief financial officer told him projected after-tax losses were "about $12 billion."

Shareholders of the Charlotte, N.C., bank voted to approve the purchase on Dec. 5, and the deal was completed on Jan. 1.

Bank of America agreed to accept $20 billion in new capital from the government and announced the injection, in conjunction with the Merrill losses, with its regularly scheduled earnings release on Jan. 20.

Mr. Lewis has since been vilified by lawmakers and shareholders for his handling of the purchase. Several investors, including TIAA-CREF, a major pension-fund manager, have said they intend to vote against his re-election as chairman. Some argued that Mr. Lewis should have informed shareholders of the potential losses at Merrill before the Jan. 1 closing of the deal.

During his testimony, Mr. Lewis described a conversation with Mr. Paulson in which the Treasury secretary made it clear that Mr. Lewis's own job was at stake. Mr. Lewis still was considering invoking his legal right to terminate the Merrill deal. Mr. Paulson was out on a bike ride when Mr. Lewis phoned to discuss the matter, according to the transcript.

"I can't recall if he said, 'We would remove the board and management if you called it [off]' or if he said 'we would do it if you intended to.' I don't remember which one it was," Mr. Lewis said. "I said, 'Hank, let's de-escalate this for a while. Let me talk to our board.' "

"It was political"

Social Media

Social Media Stories

View more presentations from Seth Goldstein.

China's New Left

Fan Jinggang, 32, Utopia's manager and a former graduate student in Marxism at Peking University, said sales of books about Mao have increased tenfold since the economic crisis began.

Helicopter String Quartet

Ancient history

The lone surviving gunman of the Mumbai attacks, Ajmal Amir Qasab, says his confession was a result of torture and thus false.

Qasab's defense lawyer, Abbas Kamzi, said Qasab had asked him to take back the confession on his behalf. Kazmi noted that the entire 'confession' was extracted through coercion and torture and as a result was not a voluntary confession and therefore had nothing to do with him.

This is while prosecutor Ujwal Nikam had described Qasab's involvement in the Mumbai attack as a plot planned in Pakistan to commit a series of attacks across India.

Background

Israel Rejects Vague US Calls for Peace Talks
The Israeli government is rebuffing mild US calls for peace talks with Palestinians toward reaching a two-state settlement. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Palestinians must recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” as a precondition for future talks. Palestinians have called the demand a non-starter, because it would mean not just acknowledging but legitimizing Israel’s takeover of their land and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who used to live there. Netanyahu announced the demand after meeting US envoy George Mitchell. Mitchell said the US will insist on pursuing a two-state solution.

George Mitchell: “It is in the United States’ national interest that there will be a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East that should include settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a two-state solution involving a Palestinian state living side by side alongside the Jewish state of Israel in peace, and hopefully stability and prosperity. And we’re going to do all we can during the rest of this visit and over the coming weeks and months to move toward that objective.”

Report: US Will Impose Two-State Settlement
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Achronoth is reporting, meanwhile, the Obama administration is prepared to force the Israeli government to accept a two-state peace deal. An unidentified Jewish leader quoted White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as saying, “In the next four years there is going to be a permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it doesn’t matter to us at all who is prime minister.” The Obama administration has yet to outline whether the two-state solution it favors would meet minimal Palestinian rights. Previous US-backed proposals would have still left Israel in control of the large West Bank settlement blocs on Palestinian land.

US: Israel, You Must Lose! We Don't Care How You Beg! You Must And Will Lose!
Israel: Just whatever you do, d-d-d-d-don't throw me in the Briar Patch!
US: Into the Briar Patch we will throw this loser! Loser! Ha ha ha!
Israel: Oh no no, not that! Anything but that! Anything but the Briar Patch!

Winter Soldier

(Viewer discretion advised)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Bubbles and Illusions

...skimming the top off of asset bubbles appears to have become the leading way to get rich in these United States in the past three decades.

...how much of the apparent US productivity miracle, a miracle not shared by Europe, was a statistical illusion created by our bloated finance industry?

Trans-Europ Express

Chomsky

In fact, if you look today, it's quite striking to see the advice that the Western powers are following, the programs that they're following, and compare them to the instructions given to the third world.

(...) Indonesia had a huge financial crisis about ten years ago, and the instructions were the standard ones: "Here is what you have to do. First, pay off your debts to us. Second, privatize, so that we can then pick up your assets on the cheap. Third, raise interest rates to slow down the economy and force the population to suffer, you know, to pay us back." Those are the regular instructions the IMF is still giving them.

What do we do? Exactly the opposite. We forget about the debt, let it explode. We reduce interest rates to zero to stimulate the economy. We pour money into the economy to get even bigger debts. We don't privatize; we nationalize, except we don't call it nationalization. We give it some other name, like "bailout" or something. It's essentially nationalization without control. So we pour money into the institutions. We lectured the third world that they must accept free trade, though we accept protectionism.

Somali Pirates

Two Piracies.

"Are you or are you not a communist?"

Denial

Naked Capitalism: "KBW, a firm specializing in bank stocks, expects Wells Fargo to show $120 billion in "stress test losses", meaning losses under the assumption of a supposed worst case of recession through the first quarter of 2010 and unemployment reaching 12%."


Time: "The initial TARP may also have provided time for the new Administration to put together its widely hailed bank "stress test" program meant to determine which of the big financial institutions have dysentery and which do not. Finally, the hundreds of billions of dollars that went into the largest banks late last year allowed Secretary Geithner to produce his public/private partnership to buy toxic assets off of bank balance sheets. All of those plans, no matter how well-intentioned they may seem, are unnecessary now. Wells Fargo (WFC) indicated that it made about $3 billion in the first quarter of the year and declared its buyout of the deeply troubled Wachovia to be a success. Wells Fargo (WFC) said that the low cost of money from the government combined with a surging demand for mortgages was all the medicine that it required."