ZNet Update
Hello, Here is a free ZNet Update. You can add or remove your address from our mailing list at the top page of ZNet = http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm We are hard at work on the upgrade of all our online oeprations. It has been a long time coming - and it is a long time finishing, too. But soon, we hope, we will have new sites for your benefit. They will include new content, navigation, design, blogs, forums, and many many other new features and facilities including for basic users, for those who sign up as free members, and especially for those who sign up as supportive sustainers. The changes, in short, are enormous, which is why the upgrade is taking so long. Meanwhile, in this message, we have two articles from our top page for you. The first is by Justin Podur and titled Global Warming Confusions. Podur, who works with ZNet, has written partly in response to our times and their complexities, and partly in critical response to two recent essays, one by Alexander Cockburn, the other by David Noble. The second article is by Paula Rothenberg and titled Snatched from the Jaws of Victory: Feminism Then and Now. It criti8cally and highly insightfully addresses the current condition of both women and the women's movement. Global Warming Suspicions and Confusions by Justin Podur In recent years, a number of important contributions have influenced the growing debate on global warming. Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou's book, Dead Heat, from a few years ago, was excellent. Noam Chomsky's latest book, Failed States, mentions global warming as one of the three more urgent problems humanity faces (the others being war and the lack of democratic institutions to deal with problems). George Monbiot's new book, Heat, provides a workable set of proposals for stabilizing the climate without draconian sacrifice (except commercial flight). Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth cuts back and forth between cogent explanations of climate science and self-aggrandizement (Gore on the farm, Gore walking to the stage, Gore changing planes at the airport, Gore doing product placement typing on his Mac computer). Properly filtered, however, it provides an excellent introductory lecture on climate change. I wish that it had come from someone else, someone who hadn't vice-presided over the Iraq sanctions regime and the bombing of Yugoslavia. But the fact that Gore made it popular doesn't make it a sham. The terms of discussion for any major problem are usually set by elites, with the rest of us trying to sort out truth from falsehood and sensible policy from corporate propaganda after the fact. Scientific issues, like any issues, take work and time to understand. Those who can't take the time to delve into the issues, and no one can delve into everything, look for credible sources. To leftists, Gore is simply not a credible source. He is seen as an apologist for the powerful interests he served while in office and callous about the people who suffered under his rule. Furthermore, leftists are suspicious of any elite consensus, including a scientific one. They know that dubious science is often trotted out to state why some regressive policy or other is justified. Leftists therefore need people credible to them to go back and do what Gore and Flannery did - to explain the basics of climate science. Much of what they would explain would be the same as Gore does, and the same ways - but it would not come from a tainted source, nor would it be tainted by political campaigning. Both Baer/Athanasiou's Dead Heat and Monbiot's Heat accept the scientific consensus on global warming and do not spend much time on the basic science, leaving that field to people like Gore and popular science writers like Tim Flannery, who wrote The Weather Makers. The first problem for leftists trying to understand climate science is that they cannot trust Gore and they cannot automatically trust the scientific consensus. The next problem is that the best-known proposed solutions for dealing with the problem are flawed. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, is completely inadequate for stabilizing emissions. Carbon emissions trading and markets are designed to provide incentives to corporate emitters. Biofuels, in the form of palm oil and sugarcane plantations, are helping to displace peasants through paramilitary massacre in Colombia, contributing to dangerous food shortages, and in any case cause CO2 emissions just like fossil fuels do. If credible science is mixed with dubious pro-corporate policy, which is what Gore has to offer, leftists might feel the sensible thing to do is reject the whole package. They need not do so, however. Monbiot's book, Heat, is principally about climate policy, and what policies would be necessary in order to stabilize the climate. He is not an advocate for carbon markets, which he recognizes as providing incentives to corporate polluters. What he does
ZNet Update
Hello, Having sent out a rather formal announcement of my new book, Remembering Tomorrow and seen a large but not stupendous flurry of activity around it, it is hard not to wonder how to induce additional interest - and so here I give it a try. Please go to the book page (https://www.zmag.org/remtom.html . Please check it out and maybe order it. H, as I look over the above line of text I notice that perhaps it isn't a very compelling entreaty. But what more can I say? Well, Remembering Tomorrow uses provocative, personal, revealing, inspiring, laugh-inducing, gut-renching stories to relay the origins of Z, ZMI, and ZNet, including the ups and downs of their creation and maintanence. That seems like a natural topic for ZNet users to jump on, doesn't it? Maybe ... but wait, that isn't all. There is also an extensive very personal visit with a whole epoch from the Sixties Civil Rights Movement and SDS through the Vietnam War and the decades after that into the new century. Indeed, by all this, the book provides what Chomsky calls revealing and often surprising insights into the exciting history of the past forty years, the popular movements and the institutional structures that have sought to contain and undermine them, their successes and failures, and the prospects for moving on. Yet, I can see, perhaps that is still not enough inducement. Well,, Remembering Tomorrow also revealingly treats diverse publishing, organizing, and life experiences. It visits the experiences and ways and whyfors of authors and activists whose work you know. It examines the origins and tribulations and a few triumphs of parecon. It journeys overseas from Poland during Solidarity days to Venezuela during Bolivarian days, and much more. Still...you may not be rushing to get it. What more can I say... Well, I know that as a prospective reader I pay some attention to jacket and early reader comments about a new book - so it might well matter to me if I got a message, as you did, that Noam Chomsky says this book is truly remarkable, lively, and a great achievement or that Barbara Ehrenreich says it is not only relevant now, but it will be in the late Twenty First Century as well, or that Brian Kelly of SDS says it is a must read, wonderfully human and also inspiring and edifying, or that Cynthia Peters says it is poetic, analytical, provocative, tenacious, and hopeful, or that Brian Dominick says it is captivating. Still...though comments like that might get me to take a look at the book page to see if the 450 pages of it really have that much promise - it also might not. We are all very busy, after all. It is tough to get a nod from anyone toward anything, even reading an email message much less visiting a page to evaluate and perhaps order a book. Yes, the author interview - which we also sent you and which is now linked from the top page of ZNet - might tip the balance and motivate looking at the book page, or, then again, it might not. The interview shows that the author has high hopes, good intentions, and great eagerness. What else is new? Well, Remembering Tomorrow is among other things a chronicle of the events, people, feelings, motives, and especially the lessons, beliefs, and ideas that lay behind a web site and a broad organizational project that you often use - not to mention the book emotively and revealingly describing a whole panoply of organizing, demonstrating, schooling, teaching, movement building, funding, publishing, editing, writing, speaking, and just plain left living from the Sixties to the present, all of which is also, I hope, right up your radical ally. I mean, honestly, I just don't think I can do any better than this book. I poured everything I could generate into making it a highly engaging but still very worthy read for - well, yes - for you. So, what else is needed to get you to take a look at the book page and to at least consider the option of placing an order?Well, if I were in your shoes, I admit there is something more I might want to see to decide it I wished to take that plunge: The Table of Contents. That is, I realized while thinking about the difficult task of promoting this new book that I routinely use this easily perusable element, a new book's table of contents, as my key evidence for whether to plunk down for it or not. So, I figured, why shouldn't that be true of other people too? And if it is true of you, then why not direclty provide you Remembering Tomorrow's table of contents?So, since I regretably can't send the book itself - here is what may be the next best thing for deciding if Remembering Tomorrow is worth some of yout time: Remembering Tomorrow's table of contents with a bit of succinct annotation, too. And, by the way, if sending this table of contents, has a significicant effect, by all means, we will start sending this material for other ZNet authors too, supposing they make
ZNet Update Albert article on Chavez, the Devil, Chomsky, and Us
Here is another ZNet Update, this time assessing the recent Chavez UN Speech and its aftermath. We hope you will regularly visit the site - www.zmag.org/weluser.htm - and also consider becoming a ZNet supporter. Here is the essay about the recent events...--Chavez, the Devil, Chomsky, and UsBy Michael Albert What can leftists learn from Chavezs UN speech and its aftermath? That the U.S. is the worlds most egregious rogue state. We already knew that and, in fact, so does most everyone else. That Bush and Co. engage in repeated acts of amoral, immoral, and antimoral behavior such as a devil would enact, if there was such a thing as a devil. We already knew that too. That the emperor has no morality, integrity, wisdom, or humanity. We knew that as well. So is there anything in the episode for us? I think there may be. I suspect many leftists would have been happier had Chavez torn into Bush and U.S. institutions by offering more evidence while employing a less religious spin. Perhaps Chavez could have called Bush Mr. War, or Mr. Danger as he has in the past, and piled on evidence to show how U.S. policies in the world, and grotesque domestic imbalances as well, obstruct desirable income distribution, democratic decision making, and mutual interpersonal and intercommunity respect. Chavez might have given evidence how U.S. elites and key institutions impede living and loving and even survival, from Latin America to Asia and back. He might have said that George W. Bush, as the current master purveyor of the most recent violations by the U.S., is, in effect, doing the work of a devil because he is the spawn of a devilish system. And I suspect many leftists would have probably been happier had Chavez added chapter and verse evidence for his assertions, though I suspect time limits precluded that. But, hey, we cant always get exactly what we want. And more, the dramatic smelling of sulfur formulation that Chavez used may have been exactly what got the sentiment in any form at all in front of millions of readers and viewers. The pundits wanted to use Chavezs words to discredit him but, in doing so, they put his claim before hundreds of millions of people. Perhaps without the dramatic formulation, we would have heard nearly nothing. My guess is that Chavez treated the event as he does pretty much all his encounters. He said what he thought. He gave it a passionate, aesthetic, and humorous edge. He calculated that forthrightness would accomplish more than it cost. Content-wise, the speech was typical Chavez, even if most hadnt heard him saying such things before, due to having not heard him say anything before. Here is Chavez commenting on Bush last March, for example, in a televised Venezuelan address: "You are an ignoramus, you are a burro, Mr. Danger ... or to say it to you in my bad English, you are a donkey, Mr. Danger. You are a donkey, Mr. George W. Bush. You are a coward, a killer, a genocider, an alcoholic, a drunk, a liar, an immoral person, Mr. Danger. You are the worst, Mr. Danger. The worst of this planet." The cost of Chavezs more recent and far more global forthrightness about Bush is dismissal of Chavez as a crazy lunatic by many people who already felt that way but were restrained in saying so, and by some people swayed by media ridicule of him, who had had no prior opinion. The gain of Chavezs more recent and far more global forthrightness about Bush is establishing that one can say the truth about the U.S. and less importantly about George Bush, and showing that doing so is in accord not only with truth but also with integrity. It is providing an example for others to be inspired by and act on. What is poison in elite eyes can be vitamins for us, and vice versa. In that respect, what Chavez did reminds me a little of what Abbie Hoffman and some others did in the U.S. to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, known more familiarly as HUAC, decades ago. Abbie and some others aggressively and dismissively ridiculed HUAC as beneath contempt and unworthy of respect. They laughed at obeying it and via their dramatic stance they moved the prevalent attitude toward HUAC from being primarily fear and trembling to being primarily disdain and dissent. Chavez tried something similar, I think. He voiced what others, even others in the room at the UN, also knew but kept quiet about. He hoped, I assume, that others would take strength and begin to voice their needs and insights too. Bush is a vengeful, greedy, violent, but even more so, obedient thug. Yes, obedient, as in Bush obeys the dictates of the system he has climbed and now administers for the rich and powerful. Bush perfectly exemplifies the adage that in capitalism garbage rises. My guess is that Chavez felt that the benefits of standing up to the U.S. and its most elite garbage outweighs the costs of seeming to many people to be an extremist from Mars. So was Chavez right? Did the benefits outweigh the debits?
ZNet Update DemRep amusement, McMurtry and Rolling Stone incitement
Hello, Another ZNet Free Update. You can add or remove email addresses via the ZNet top page, please: http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm We hope you will visit the top page frequently, as well, for its regular updates. Coverage of the Katrina aftermath continues, and of world relations, domnestic dynamics, etc., as usual. Today though, I thought I would send some amusing and uplifting material. Enjoy. First, the Democratic Party is one of two parties in the U.S. serving corporate interests. It makes war, routinely, as do the Republicans, much less the fundamentalist thugs now in power. Still, at least as far as hypocrisy is concerned, or perhaps as far as self preservation is concerned, there seems to be a marked difference between the parties. I received today an email that was quite amusing, in that respect. It listed lots of Republicans and Democrats indicating their past service in the military. I didn't check it and so can't vouch for it, yet I have the distinct feeling few errors will show up. Here it is: Democrats: * Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71. * David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72. * Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72. * Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade. * Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam. * Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII. * John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts. * Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star,Korea. * Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star Bronze Star, Vietnam. Paraplegic from war injuries. Served in Congress. * Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53. * Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74. * Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91. * Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons. * Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76;Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal. * Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit. * Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant,! 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart. * Bill McBr ide: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V. * Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star. * Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57 * Chuck Robb: Vietnam * Howell Heflin: Silver Star * George McGovern: Silver Star DFC during WWII. * Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311. * Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy. * Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953 * John Glenn: WWII andKorea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters. * Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg. Republicans * Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage. * Dennis Hastert: did not serve. * Tom Delay: did not serve. * Roy Blunt: did not serve. * Bill Frist: did not serve. * Mitch McConnell: did not serve. * Rick Santorum: did not serve. * Trent Lott: did not serve. * John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business. * Jeb Bush: did not serve. * Karl Rove: did not serve. * Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. Bad knee. The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism. * Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve. * Vin Weber: did not serve. * Richard Perle: did not serve. * Douglas Feith: did not serve. * Eliot Abrams: did not serve. * Richard Shelby: did not serve. * Jon! Kyl: did not serve. * Tim Hutchison: did n! ot serve. * Christopher Cox: did not serve. * Newt Gingrich: did not serve. * Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor. * George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got assigned to Alabamaso he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty. * Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies. * B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea. * Phil Gramm: did not serve. * John McCain:Vietnam POW, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. * Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve. * John M. McHugh: did not serve. * JC Watts: did not serve. * Jack Kemp: did not serve. Knee problem, although continued in NFL for 8 years as quarterback. * Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard. * Rudy Giuliani: did not serve. * George Pataki: did not serve. * Spencer Abraham: did not serve. * John Engler: did not serve. * Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer. * Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base. Pundits Preachers * Sean Hannity: did not serve. * Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.') * Bill O'Reilly: did not serve. * Michael Savage: did not serve. * George Will: did not serve. * Chris
Znet Update Herman Commentary
Hello, This is a ZNet Update. Today we want to bring to your attention a major article by Stephen Shalom, The Anti-War Movement and Iraq, that explores contentious issues of debate about the occupation, Iraqi resistance, and the antiwar movement. It is long so please set aside some time when you go to read it. You can find the essay linked prominently from the ZNet top page which is at http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm Also please check out and participate in the ZNet Action of the Week and ZNet Book of the Week projects. ZNet's search facility has been greatly improved, should you wish to do any research on the site. ZMI - our summer media institute is only a couple of weeks off and we are busy preparing and looking forward to seeing all the many faculty and students who will attend. Meanwhile, here is an essay for today from Edward Herman... Daniel Okrent's Revealing Closeout as Public Editor of the New York Times by Edward S. Herman In his final column as Public Editor of the New York Times, Daniel Okrent discusses 13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did (May 22, 2005). His list is interesting for what it tells about Okrent's biases, and indirectly those of his bosses, who knew what they were doing when they selected him as public editor. In his first item, he mentions his newly discovered reservations about the First Amendment, which he still prizes but wishes that journalists did not depend on so much. He would rather see them invoking more persuasive defenses: accuracy, for instance, and fairness. He goes on to discuss the legal problems of Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper and others, who have been relying on the First Amendment in the Plame case but may end up in jail. Nowhere in his list of 13 does he mention Judith Miller any further, and it is interesting that his list of defenses (accuracy, fairness) fails to include scepticism and unwillingness to use sources that are contaminated and not subject to cross-examination and independent verification. In short, he excludes the fatal weakness of Miller and other Times personnel that allowed them to be managed by the Bush administration and to be collaborators in disinformation contributing to an illegal war based on lies. His second item is a denunciation of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, and to a lesser extent William Safire. Krugman, he says, has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults. He is also ideological and unfair. Dowd is chastised for citing Alberto Gonzales' use of quaint as applied to the Geneva Convention limits on torture, long after it had been shown that he used the word only about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess. It is interesting that Okrent gives not a single illustration of Krugman's abusive use of statistics, so this is a cheap-shot, hit-and-run attack, and perhaps a bit ideological. While calling Krugman ideological, Okrent never explains what the word means. Krugman no doubt has a set of beliefs that underpin his work, but to an extraordinary extent for a regular columnist he appeals to fact and builds an argument based on fact. This is in contrast with a columnist like Thomas Friedman, obviously highly ideological, but whose ideology-to-fact ratio is vastly greater than Krugman's. Friedman is not listed in Okrent's 13-apparently his ideology is OK, and his regular call for the United States to commit war crimes doesn't bother Okrent either (see my Thomas Friedman: The Geraldo Rivera of the New York Times, Z Magazine, November, 2003 ). What this tells us is that Okrent simply doesn't like Krugman's views. And I suspect that Okrent is expressing the views of his bosses here. When they brought Krugman on as a columnist Times officials thought they were getting a free-trade-friendly economist who would stick to his free trade guns and possibly offer some modest criticisms of rightwing economics. But Krugman blossomed, and became a liberal-left critic of broad scope and exceptional intellectual force. It would have been hard to fire him, so one compromise solution was to add the rightwing David Brooks as an offsetting regular and perhaps hope that Krugman would some day make an error that might justify termination. He hasn't done that yet, but Okrent's smear may be an early step in a termination process. In criticizing Maureen Dowd Okrent makes a tiny technical point. The Gonzales language reads: In my judgment, this new paradigm [the war on terror] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip,...athletic equipment, and scientific instruments. So
Znet Update Venezuela Commentary
Hello, This is another Free Update mailing from ZNet. As always, you can add/and or remove addresses from our mailing list via the ZNet top page: http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm In addition to noting our regular daily updating of content, and to sending you tonight's ZNet Sustainer Commentary, we need to do some serious heart to heart and mind to mind communicating about two new facilities on ZNet. We have a new book facility. It is at http://www.zmag.org/BookWeek/BookWeek.cfm It is conceived to enable ZNet users to propose, vote on, comment on, and review books. Proposals that get most votes as book of the week would display prominently on ZNet's top page. The site would at least generate, over time, a useful archive of supported titles, with comments and reviews, for people to consult. Ideally, with large numbers of users/voters, the site might lead to very large numbers of people simultaneously reading books that users have chosen for highlighting, in turn leading to collective discussion, refinement, and perhaps advocacy. The second new facility is called Action of the Week. It is at http://www.zmag.org/ActionWeek/ActionWeek.cfm It is very similar to the book facility. Users can propose, comment on, vote on, and later report on possible actions. The actions with most votes get elevated to prime top page visibility. The idea, is that large numbers of voters would pick good and worthy actions which would then garner wide support among users. With a lot of participation, the facilities have tremendous potential. With modest participation - modest relative to a few hundred thousand ZNet users - the facilities would be quite valuable. BUT, with very meager and even minuscule participation, with rejection or passivity by our users, the facilities become barely valuable at all, and perhaps even counter productive. It makes no sense for ZNet to highlight an action of the week that is chosen by a very few users. Likewise for a book of the week. We cannot give prime space and an implicit sanction to the value of the choices in these facilities if participation remains low. On the other hand, if participation jumps way up, we think the book of the week and action of the week would be very valuable parts of ZNet. It costs nothing for you to participate. It takes only modest time. It registers your views. It creates momentum to further participation by others. Seems like a small risk for a potentially large pay off. While I easily understand particular individuals not having time, or not finding entering or voting on books or actions their priority or even interest - I do not understand virtually the entire community ignoring the possibility of democratically registering preferences to elicit widespread involvement in consciousness raising and/or activism. We don't want to choose books for you. We don't want to propose actions for you. We think it would be vastly better for the ZNet community to undertake its own agendas, bottom up. We hope you will agree, and that you will partake. Propose, vote (especially vote), comment, report, review! Thank you, Michael Albert --- And here, for a little parallel motivation, is a report from Venezuela. This essay is, by the way, to be tonight's ZNet Commentary. We mail a ZNet Sustainer Commentary each night to all our Sustainers. If you aren't a ZNet Sustainer, we hope you will consider becoming one. You can read about and if you so decide you can join the program at: http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm Venezuela - the country of parallels I - The parallel revolution By America Vera-Zavala On a parallel street, within walking distance from the presidential palace, you can find a squatted building taken over and run by communities. It is an old office building, very close to one of the most touristic squares in downtown Caracas: Bellas Artes and the huge hotel Hilton, which nowadays also hosts Bolivarian conferences and friends of the revolution. A theatre rehearsal is the activity on the Saturday afternoon when I visit the building. People of all ages are represented on that main floor built to be a fancy reception and not a centre for community activities. The building was squatted one year ago, and apparently there seems to be quite a few central squatted buildings, but no network exists between them to serve you with more facts. This one has been flourishing ever since it was taken over. In this building people live, eat, make political and cultural meetings and most of the campaigns the president has set off are functioning there. El proceso, the process, as the revolution is popularly called is at work there. The proclaimed Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela is a revolution made up of parallels. To win elections is not the same as to take state power and in Venezuela opposition still holds many posts in the various departments, state owned companies and media, and control much
ZNet Update, Chomsky on U.S., Albert on Churchill...
Hello, Here is a new ZNet Free Update. As always you can add or remove addresses to our email list via the link on the ZNet top page at http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm So far 670 new subscribers have signed up to get a print issue of Z Magazine each month for the ridiculously low price of $12 a year. The offer is prominent on the ZNet top page but we can only provide this low rate for another few days. You can get a year of Z Print for the price of two issues in a store or a good lunch. It is too good a bargain to ignore. Please sign up now if you haven't already done so. To help you decide if you want to receive Z print, here are two articles. One is from Z February, now available. The other is from Z March, upcoming. The first, Imperial Presidency: Strategies to Control the Great Beast, is by Noam Chomsky and addresses the situation in Iraq, the machinations of Washington, and the responsibilities of dissent. The second, Raise Your Voice, Keep Your Head Down, is by Michael Albert and addresses the recent attacks on Ward Churchill, implications for free speech, and some related ramifications. -- Imperial Presidency: Strategies to Control the Great Beast By Noam Chomsky It goes without saying that what happens in the U.S. has an enormous impact on the rest of the world-and conversely: what happens in the rest of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the U.S., in several ways. First, it sets constraints on what even the most powerful state can do. Second, it influences the domestic U.S. component of the second superpower, as the New York Times ruefully described world public opinion after the huge protests before the Iraq invasion. Those protests were a critically important historical event, not only because of their unprecedented scale, but also because it was the first time in hundreds of years of the history of Europe and its North American offshoots that a war was massively protested even before it was officially launched. We may recall, by comparison, the war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity would escape extinction as the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size-particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the U.S. assault. When protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina-hideous crimes, but lesser ones. It's quite important to remember how much the world has changed since then. As almost always, not as a result of gifts from benevolent leaders, but through deeply committed popular struggle, far too late in developing, but ultimately effective. One consequence was that the U.S. government could not declare a national emergency, which should have been healthy for the economy, as during World War II when public support was very high. Johnson had to fight a guns-and-butter war, buying off an unwilling population, harming the economy, ultimately leading the business classes to turn against the war as too costly, after the Tet Offensive of January 1968 showed that it would go on a long time. There were also concerns among U.S. elites about rising social and political consciousness stimulated by the activism of the 1960s, much of it reaction to the miserable crimes in Indochina, then at last arousing popular indignation. We learn from the last sections of the Pentagon Papers that after the Tet offensive, the military command was reluctant to agree to the president's call for further troop deployments, wanting to be sure that sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control in the U.S., and fearing that escalation might run the risk of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions. The Reagan administration assumed that the problem of an independent, aroused population had been overcome and apparently planned to follow the Kennedy model of the early 1960s in Central America. But they backed off in the face of unanticipated public protest, turning instead to clandestine war employing murderous security forces and a huge international terror network. The consequences were terrible, but not as bad as B-52s and mass murder operations of the kind that were peaking when John Kerry was deep in the Mekong Delta in the South, by then largely devastated. The popular reaction to even the clandestine war, so called, broke
ZNet Update, Chomsky offer Bill Moyers article
Hello, This is another ZNet Free Update. We include below an article by prominent U.S. TV personality Bill Moyers, but first The NewStandard has been struggling to attain a stable working condition. They are more than halfway to their goal of having 600 monthly donors contribute to sustaining and growing their project but they need to get an additional 200 supporters now to be able to continue. 200 new people sign up or the NewStandard disappears. It is just that simple. I want to urge ZNet update recipients to please take a look at the NewStandard. Please consider what they have accomplished so far with incredibly limited funds. Please contemplate what they might accomplish with more sustained support. Can we make that happen? Here's what Noam Chomsky had to say to support their effort: It is hard to exaggerate the significance these days of independent, careful, probing and thoughtful news reporting. The NewStandard has set a very high standard in that regard. It has already won an important place among those who want to understand the world and to act to change it. And the prospects ahead are exciting. I hope you will join in helping The NewStandard achieve these critically important goals. More, Noam and I, along with a number of other long-time NewStandard readers and supporters, have pledged donations to a matching fund to entice you to help TNS out. Whenever a new person signs up to donate regularly, our fund triples that person's first monthly donation. So if you sign up to donate $10 a month, TNS gets an extra $20 from the challenge fund! For more about The NewStandard's membership drive: http://newstandardnews.net/promo2/index.cfm/action/challenge For the NewStandard Top Page: http://newstandardnews.net/ Please give it a look! Michael Albert No Tomorrow Bill Moyers One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts. Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back. Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans. Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its biblical lands, legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow. I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where
ZNet Update and Essays on Aceh and Racism
Hello, Here is another free ZNet Update. You can add and remove addresses via the link on the ZNet top page. OF course there is much that is new up on ZNet since last message. For example, there is the January issue of Z Magazine for sustainers and online subscribers, and also two articles accessible to all, one by Noam Chomsky on the Election and one by Eleanor Bader on Sex Education and Bush. There is also our usual steady flow of new articles, etc., but my reasons for sending this ZNet Update are different and twofold. First we have tonight's Sustainer Commentary which I would like you all to see, from Andre Vltchek about conditions in Aceh. And second, as you know, every so often a regular ZNet writer publishes a book and we send an announcement of it in the form of a brief interview with the author. This time the book is White Like Me: Reflections o Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise. Both these essays follow below. ACEH GOES TO HEAVEN! By Andre Vltchek Resting in a comfortable seat of super-express speeding towards northern Japan, I was admiring the snow-covered beauty of the rural countryside. It was getting dark and the wheels of the train were gently drumming against the rails in a monotonous and reassuring rhythm. The world seemed harmonious and safe. Then suddenly my eyes caught sight of the letters of a news bulletin passing through the digital display above the door. Strong earthquake shook northern Sumatra. There were dozens of casualties. Just that - no further information was provided. I checked the news, one hour later, on the internet in my hotel in Sendai. It seemed that hundreds of people lost their lives in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. An earthquake off the coast of Aceh, reaching magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, was followed by a tsunami - a monstrous 10 meters high tidal wave - which crashed mercilessly and with unimaginable force against the shores of several unfortunate countries. In the next few days the number of victims grew to thousands, then to tens of thousands. Whole villages and entire towns disappeared from the map. Hundreds of thousands of refugees hit what was left of the roads, but the roads were leading nowhere; as bridges were washed away/ Floods were fragmenting the entire North of Sumatra Island. Electricity and water supply collapsed (limited and unreliable everywhere in Indonesia even before the disaster); there was no food, no blood for the injured and no medicine. There was no reliable information either, since the foreign press was banned from traveling to the province, for its own safety. The Army - a tremendous contingent of it based in the province in order to suppress insurgency - did close to nothing. It was ordered to clean corpses and it cleaned some, but it otherwise showed no initiative, leaving a desperate population with almost no help. The government did close to nothing. Instead of ordering special military units to travel immediately to the province, instead of using hundreds of military helicopters and aircraft to supply food and medicine, instead of ordering all seaworthy vessels to the area of disaster, the President of Indonesia urged the citizens to scale down New Year's celebrations and pray instead. Huge transport planes were sitting on runways all over Java, waiting for the order to take off - an order which never arrived. Instead of employing professionals trained to cope with emergency situations, vice president Jusuf Kalla used military planes and commercial aircraft to shuttle Muslim militants (they called themselves volunteers) from Majelis Mujahedeen Indonesia and Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Muslim - better known as its acronym FPI - militant Muslim group from Jakarta devoted to enforcing Islamic law against drinking, gambling, and prostitution), a fact later reported by The New York Times. Then Laskar Jihad, one of the most militant Muslim groups in Southeast Asia made inroads into the province. Hundreds of Christians, mainly of Chinese origin, were forced to flee Aceh. The presence of volunteers - directly sponsored by the government - had one main purpose: to secure Indonesian and religious order (already the strictest in entire Indonesia) in the province which was fighting for independence for almost thirty years, at enormous cost. Practically speaking, these untrained urbanites were only taking precious space in scarce flights to the province, although the propaganda machine fired the stories how some of them single- handedly managed to restore electric supplies and telecommunications in Banda Aceh. And the dead kept mounting, diseases were spreading, hunger began to kill those who miraculously survived the brutality of the nature. At one point the refusal to help Aceh began to look like a vengeance killing by the government and the military. Then Aceh suddenly appeared in the spotlight of interest of the international community and after some hesitation, the government
ZNet Update Pilger Commentary
Hello, Here is another free ZNet Update...and remember, please, that you can remove or add addresses for receiving our updates at the ZNet top page (www.zmag.org/weluser.htm) at any time. We now have about 200,000 recipients. And please also note, we are going to begin sending these periodic updates a bit more frequently in coming weeks. ZNet News includes that we have modestly redesigned the ZNet top page to facilitate ease of use and are in the midst of updating all our Watch Sites to a new and far more reliable system of posting. It should be an excellent improvement for navigation and for comprehensiveness. Of course there is regular updating of the top page going on all the time, plus frequent addition of new features (such as the recently added China Watch, etc. We have also put information about the Z Media Institute 2005 online, and an application form for those interested in applying. As always, we hope those of you who enjoy ZNet and benefit from it, will consider becoming ZNet Sustainers. People in the Sustainer program donate on a regular schedule that they choose, an amount that they choose, and receive in return access to the Sustainer online Zine of over 2000 commentaries, a commentary each night by email, and access to the Sustainer forum system. This program is what keeps all our operations running. Please consider joining via the links and information at: http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm And as a little further inducement, here is tonight's ZNet Commentary, by ZNet Commentator John Pilger, an example of the kind of mailing our sustainers get every night... --- HOW SILENT ARE THE 'HUMANITARIAN' INVADERS OF KOSOVO? John Pilger Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq, the international humanitarian war party ought to be called to account for its largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's onward march of liberation. Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war. Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country. Like the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with US Defence Secretary William Cohen's claim that we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing... they may have been murdered. David Scheffer, the US ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and the spirit of the Second World War. The British press took its cue. Flight from genocide, said the Daily Mail. Echoes of the Holocaust, chorused the Sun and the Mirror. By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history. Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one - mass grave. In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation, dismissing the mass grave obsession. Instead of the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active. The Journal concluded that Nato stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs ... The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage; genocide it wasn't. One year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body effectively set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's mass graves was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction, the figures used by the US and British governments and echoed by journalists were inventions - along with Serb rape camps and Clinton's and Blair's claims that Nato never deliberately bombed civilians. Code-named 'Stage Three', Nato's civilian targets included public transport, hospitals, schools, museums, churches. It was common knowledge that Nato went to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks], said James Bissell, the Canadian ambassador in Belgrade during the attack. Otherwise, they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons and market places. Nato's clients were the Kosovo Liberation Army. Seven years earlier, the KLA had
ZNet Update and Article on Venezuela by Jonah Gindin
This is another ZNet Free Update. As always, you can add or remove email addresses from the updates mailing list via the ZNet top page at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm This mailing we would mostly like to let you know that the September issue of Z Magazine is now on newsstands, in the mail to subscribers, and posted at the Z Magazine Online pages at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/curTOC.htm. This month's featured article is an interview Michael Albert conducts with Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, entitled Why Run?. It is available at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Images/albert20904.html. Subscription information and links for the print edition of Z Magazine, now in its 17th year of monthly publication, and for Z Magazine Online (ZMO) as well is available here: http://zmagsite.zmag.org/zmagsubscribe.htm. The full contents of the most current issues of ZMO are available only to subscribers. Earlier this year, however, we also started offering ZMO access to Z Sustainers. Info on the Sustainer program is available here http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm. Z Magazine publishes more than 60 pages of articles, reviews, commentary, photos, cartoons, and activist resources each month--all without paid advertising. We appreciate the ongoing support of our readers and subscribers over the years. Of course, as usual, ZNet is being updated often each day, and we hope you will take a look soon. Please check out the ZNet blogs too, also updated very often. Here is an article by Jonah Gindin on the referendum process in Venezuela: Overlooking the mass of revellers outside the Presidential Palace at 5am on August 16th, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías made the declaration that his followers were waiting for: The recall referendum was not just a referendum on Hugo Chávez, he announced, speaking in the third person, it was a referendum of the revolutionary process, and a majority of Venezuelans articulated their support! It is time to deepen the revolution! Thus, Venezuela's experiment in revolution has entered a new phase. The reaffirmation (as Chavistas have begun calling the recall referendum) of both Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution by 60% of the population marks a historical moment in the evolution of radical politics in Venezuela. Never before has Chávez or 'el proceso' been so widely supported in Venezuela, nor so widely accepted - albeit reluctantly - by the international community. For many, the upcoming regional elections, now tentatively scheduled for late-October, provide the first opportunity to deepen the revolution. With the momentum from the referendum and the opposition in disarray, Chavista candidates have the potential to gain important political territory. Many current members of the opposition in key positions were originally elected as Chavista candidates in the regional elections of 2000, only to switch sides in 2002-03 when they felt the political winds turning against Chávez. They guessed wrong, and may now lose their posts for their base opportunism. Yet Chavistas stand to do more than merely re-gain positions that 'should' have been theirs for the last 4 years. The 'No' vote in last month's referendum-a vote against recalling Chávez-won in 23 of 24 states, including the 8 states currently governed by the opposition, though the vote was close in some cases. If those who voted 'No' in August, will vote for the Chavista candidate in October, this will reinforce the threat to the opposition in these states. Yet it is appearing more and more that this may not necessarily be the case. Though the opposition as a national conglomeration of anti-Chavists was roundly defeated in the referendum, individual candidates for governor and mayor may maintain local support. Furthermore, while a large percentage of Chavistas will likely vote for the official candidate in the regional elections, there is also an unknown number of Chávez-supporters, varying greatly from community to community, who may not. This is a problem with roots deep in the gestation of the practical defensive-politics that have necessarily dominated in Venezuela since the attempted coup against Chávez in April 2002 (if not before). During the coup, when the Venezuelan people flooded the streets all over the country, and hundreds-of-thousands surrounded the palace to demand Chávez' return, a siege-mentality set in. This mentality was further entrenched in the following months when Venezuela's economy was effectively (if temporarily) destroyed by the oil-industry shut-down. The threat to the Bolivarian revolution was especially grave since this general strike was led by the communion of Venezuela's corporatist union confederation, the CTV, and the largest Chamber of Commerce federation; between the two of them they were able to effectively shut down oil production for several months in 2003. No one, least of all the Venezuelan people benefiting from
ZNet Update Book Info
Hello, A year ago Verso books released Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Now the paperback is available as well. The Parecon book page which includes comments, reviews, excerpts, and some interviews and debates, is at: http://www.zmag.org/ParEcon/pelac.htm Last May, after a few mailings like this, the cloth bound edition shot to number 13 on Amazon. Yes, 13. It was an incredible performance defying all expectations. Can the paperback do as well at the cloth did? How high can we move up from our starting position = 1,871,970th? And can we sustain momentum by sticking to our promotional mailings sufficiently long so that parecon gets serious public evaluation? I am asking you to please consider buying and reading Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Of course I think Parecon is a viable, worthy alternative to capitalism and that the distribution of this book can help debate and advocacy. But don't rely on my view. Instead, consider these comments from others: Noam Chomsky, linguist, dissident, and ZNet commentator says... There is enormous dissatisfaction, worldwide, with prevailing socioeconomic conditions and the choices imposed by the reigning institutions. Calls for change range from patchwork reform to more far-reaching changes. ...Participatory economics outlines in substantial detail a program of radical reconstruction, presenting a vision that draws from a rich tradition of thought and practice of the libertarian left and popular movements, but adding novel critical analysis and specific ideas and modes of implementation for constructive alternatives. It merits close attention, debate, and action. And here is a quote from Chomsky from 1970 that helped motivate my unrelenting concern for vision. I hope that it will motivate you as well... If the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what has been accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace and in the community, should become a dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary society, and, as a mass movement develops, speculation should proceed to action. Arundhati Roy, writer, dissident says... The structure of capitalism is flawed. The motor that powers it cannot but vastly increase the disparity between the poor and the rich globally and within countries as well. Parecon is a brave argument for replacing that flawed machine and offers a much needed -- more equitable, democratic, participatory -- alternative economic vision. Howard Zinn, Historian, dissident says... I can't count the number of times when serious critics of our social system would say to me: 'Why can't we come up with a vision of what a good society would be like?' This is what Mike Albert boldly does in Parecon: Life After Capitalism, and the result is an imaginative, carefully reasoned description, persistently provocative, of how we might live free from economic injustice. Cynthia Peters, writer, activist, ZNet commentator, and member of SEIU Local 285 says... As an organizer, writer, and union-based educator, there is a certain refrain I hear over and over again. That is, `Why bother struggling for social change? We can't really do any better than this.' Too often our reply is simply that `another world is possible.' But we don't say what might this world look like. How would we design institutions? How would we structure society? These are reasonable questions, and progressives lose credibility when we have no real answers. Participatory economy (parecon) offers a vision of how we might organize production, consumption, remuneration and distribution in ways that foster the values we believe in, such as justice and solidarity. Albert gives us what we need to imagine and debate what `another world' would look like. Albert's writing is clear, and his case for parecon has been fine-tuned by many years' experience writing and speaking. This is an important book, not just because it does economic vision so well and so credibly, but because it is a model for all the vision work that needs to be done. From the Italian edition's dust jacket -- the first to appear internationally: After the triumph of neoliberism worldwide, many believe that market laws are nothing more nor less than natural laws, and that their luggage of injustice and unequally is an inevitable ill. However, the failure of historical alternatives to capitalism does not rule out the possibility that the principles of equity, solidarity, self management, and diversity may replace free trade, whose failures are
ZNet Update Chomsky Commentary
Hello, Here is still another of our Sustainer Commentaries -- this time from Noam Chomsky -- sent to Free Update recipients in hopes that you will take a look at the Sustainer Program as a way to support ZNet and Z Magazine and hopefully, the proposed Z Daily, as well. The Sustainer link is: http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm Last letter, and the one before that too, I asked folks who are holding back from becoming a Sustainer to please let me know your reasons for hesitancy. I got lots of mail -- but only one reason was offered, time and again: lack of funds. We of course know that lots of people can't afford to help. What I am looking for is to understand why those who do have good incomes and means to help and who do use and appreciate the system, and who perhaps have even indicated in the recent poll an interest in helping, aren't, in fact, choosing to become sustainers. Not one person in that camp has replied with some explanation. I wish some of you would...letting us know the situation so that we could perhaps relate to it more effectively. Here, in any case, is today's Sustainer Commentary... ZNet Commentary The Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy October 31, 2003 By Noam Chomsky Establishment critics of the war on Iraq restricted their comments regarding the attack to the administration arguments they took to be seriously intended: disarmament, deterrence, and links to terrorism. They scarcely made reference to liberation, democratization of the Middle East, and other matters that would render irrelevant the weapons inspections and indeed everything that took place at the Security Council or within governmental domains. The reason, perhaps, is that they recognized that lofty rhetoric is the obligatory accompaniment of virtually any resort to force and therefore carries no information. The rhetoric is doubly hard to take seriously in the light of the display of contempt for democracy that accompanied it, not to speak of the past record and current practices. Critics are also aware that nothing has been heard from the present incumbents -- with their alleged concern for Iraqi democracy -- to indicate that they have any regrets for their previous support for Saddam Hussein (or others like him, still continuing) nor have they shown any signs of contrition for having helped him develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when he really was a serious danger. Nor has the current leadership explained when, or why, they abandoned their 1991 view that the best of all worlds would be an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein that would rule as Saddam did but not make the error of judgment in August 1990 that ruined Saddam's record. At the time, the incumbents' British allies were in the opposition and therefore more free than the Thatcherites to speak out against Saddam's British-backed crimes. Their names are noteworthy by their absence from the parliamentary record of protests against these crimes, including Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, and other leading figures of New Labour. In December 2002, Jack Straw, then foreign minister, released a dossier of Saddam's crimes. It was drawn almost entirely from the period of firm US-UK support, a fact overlooked with the usual display of moral integrity. The timing and quality of the dossier raised many questions, but those aside, Straw failed to provide an explanation for his very recent conversion to skepticism about Saddam Hussein's good character and behavior. When Straw was home secretary in 2001, an Iraqi who fled to England after detention and torture requested asylum. Straw denied his request. The Home Office explained that Straw is aware that Iraq, and in particular the Iraqi security forces, would only convict and sentence a person in the courts with the provision of proper jurisdiction, so that you could expect to receive a fair trial under an independent and properly constituted judiciary. Straw's conversion must, then, have been rather similar to President Clinton's discovery, sometime between September 8 and 11, 1999, that Indonesia had done some unpleasant things in East Timor in the past twenty-five years when it enjoyed decisive support from the US and Britain. Attitudes toward democracy were revealed with unusual clarity during the mobilization for war in the fall of 2002, as it became necessary to deal somehow with the overwhelming popular opposition. Within the coalition of the willing, the US public was at least partially controlled by the propaganda campaign unleashed in September. In Britain, the population was split roughly fifty-fifty on the war, but the government maintained the stance of junior partner it had accepted reluctantly after World War II and had kept to even in the face of the contemptuous dismissal of British concerns by US leaders at moments when the country's very survival was at stake. Outside the two full members of the coalition, problems were more serious. In the two
ZNet Update Shalom Commentary -- The Philippine Model
Hello, This is a ZNet Free Update. As usual if you want to add or remove an address from our free update list you can do so at the ZNet Top page, in the upper left, which is at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm ZNet Free Updates are usually sent out to over 150,000 email addresses, three or four times a month. Instead, however, for the next few weeks I am going to send one message to you each day and I am going to include our Daily Sustainer Commentary. I am doing this in hopes that you will like the daily commentaries and consider becoming a ZNet Sustainer. You can find out more about the program at http://www.zmag.org/welusersupport.htm In a recent poll 10,600 of you said you would like to help support and enlarge our operations. Many wrote in saying likewise, but that you didn't like polls but just wanted to know when and where do we sign up. Okay, now is the time. This link is the place: http://www.zmag.org/welusersupport.htm To become a Sustainer you donate regularly an amount that you choose on a schedule that you choose. In return you get one nightly commentary now, and as many as three commentaries a night once more people sign up (and you will be able to pick your quantity and topics). You also get access to the online Zine of commentaries, which we hope in time will become Z Daily, and to the Sustainer Forum system which includes discussions with Chomsky, Albert, and other commentators and Sustainers. But mostly, you help an organization that helps you. And you help an organization that helps many other people around the globe who cannot afford to support it in return. Building alternative media, raising consciousness, and thereby building movement, is the heart of the matter. Please consider joining, and meanwhile enjoy the commentaries we will for a time send each day. Today's commentary, sent to Sustainers last night, is from regular ZNet Commentator, Stephen Shalom... --- The Philippine Model By Stephen R. Shalom Addressing a joint session of the Philippine Congress on Saturday, President Bush said to skeptical critics of his Iraq policy, Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia. Much in Bush's speech was utter nonsense -- such as his claim that the war in Iraq had resulted in the closing down of a terrorist sanctuary, when in fact the U.S. has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one, in the words of terrorism expert Jessica Stern. But Bush was right when he suggested that looking at the U.S. record in the Philippines can help to illuminate what is in store for Iraq. What does the historical record tell us about the U.S. commitment to promoting democracy? A hundred years ago, the United States defeated the Spanish colonizers of the Philippines only to take over the islands for itself. (In Bush's speech on Saturday this was summarized as Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule. And in the words of presidential press secretary Scott McClellan, national hero Jose Rizal's martyrdom in 1896 inspired the Philippines: And later, revolution broke out and Asia soon had its first independent republic. Well, yes, but that independent republic was promptly conquered by the United States.) When critics of the U.S. annexation of the Philippines charged that Washington had not obtained the consent of the inhabitants, Senator Henry Cabot Ledge replied that if consent of the inhabitants were necessary then our whole past record of expansion is a crime. What did Filipinos want back in 1898? What was their democratic wish? According to a U.S. general testifying before the U.S. Senate, Filipinos had so little notion of what independence meant that they probably thought it was something to eat. They have no more idea of what it means than a shepherd dog, he explained. But shortly afterwards in his testimony, the general stated that the Filipinos want to get rid of the Americans. They do? asked a confused Senator. Yes, sir, replied the general. They want us driven out, so that they can have this independence, but they do not know what it is. This U.S. inability to understand the real meaning of self-determination was not just a turn-of-the-century myopia. Consider the following scene from the 1945 motion picture Back to Bataan. In a 1941 Philippine schoolhouse, an American teacher asks the students what the United States gave to the Philippines. Soda pop! Hot dogs! Movies! Radio! Baseball! scream the pupils. But, the teacher and the principal correct the erring youngsters by explaining that the real American contribution was teaching the Filipinos freedom. At first, however, says the teacher with a straight face, the Filipinos did not appreciate freedom for they resisted the American occupation.
ZNet Update a new article from Noam Chomsky
Hello ZNet Free Update Recipient, Here is a new ZNet Update -- including an urgent note from us, and a full length new article (printed in the Boston Review, 8-03) from Noam Chomsky, titled Dominance and its Dilemmas. First the note. 9,150 people have taken our policy poll. If you have done so, we thank you very much. If you haven't...I am asking you to please do so soon. About 300,000 people visit ZNet each week. 150,000 people enjoy our free update mailings. About 6,000 Sustainers help pay for all our online work. In other words, 2% of those who use ZNet pay for its operations. Do you like ZNet and would you be happy to see our work enlarge and improve? If the answer is yes, our poll wants to determine how you might benefit from our plans and if you would help with donation support. The poll plus a proposal for Z Daily, a supporting letter, and a question and answer essay are all online prominantly at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm We want to know, among the 294,000 or 98% of ZNet users who are not now materially supporting ZNet's operations, how many of you are politically compatible enough to indicate a desire that we grow? And beyond hoping that we grow, how many of you are willing to help make it happen? Will those who can afford to help us provide dramatically higher quantities and qualities of audio, video, print, and of course online information, analysis, vision, and strategy, as well as enhanced tools of communication and discussion both via the free ZNet, and also the newly proposed Z Daily? The bottom line is will more people support our efforts? Will you? And will you appreciate and make use of Z Daily, as a premium for your support? If you already took the poll -- please don't take it again unless it is to register a very different position than earlier. The poll will require ten or maybe twenty minutes -- including reading the proposal or even just the q/a clarifying points, and then answering our seven questions. We hope you will understand why we ask you for that much...and then ask again, and again. At this point, our goal is 15,000 replies. Can you help us make that happen? Sincerely, Michael Albert === And now here is the promised article... Dominance and its Dilemmas* By Noam Chomsky The past year has been a momentous one in world affairs. In the normal rhythm, the pattern was set in September, a month marked by several important and closely related events. The most powerful state in history announced a new National Security Strategy asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently: any challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilize the population for an invasion of Iraq, which would be the first test [of the doctrine], not the last, the New York Times observed after the invasion, the petri dish in which this experiment in pre-emptive policy grew. And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would determine whether the administration would be able to carry forward its radical international and domestic agenda. The new imperial grand strategy, as it was aptly termed at once by John Ikenberry, presents the US as a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary advantages into a world order in which it runs the show, a unipolar world in which no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector, and enforcer. These policies are fraught with danger even for the US itself, he warned, joining many others in the foreign policy elite. What is to be protected is US power and the interests it represents, not the world, which vigorously opposed the conception. Within a few months, polls revealed that fear of the United States had reached remarkable heights, along with distrust of the political leadership, or worse. As for the test case, an international Gallup poll in December, barely noted in the US, found virtually no support for Washington's announced plans for a war carried out unilaterally by America and its allies: in effect, the US-UK coalition. The basic principles of the imperial grand strategy trace back to the early days of World War II, and have been reiterated frequently since. Even before the US entered the war, planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar world the US would seek to hold unquestioned power, acting to ensure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere with its global designs. They outlined an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States in a Grand Area, to include at a minimum the Western Hemisphere, the former British empire, and the Far East, later extended to as much of Eurasia as possible when it became clear that Germany would be defeated. Twenty years later, elder statesman Dean Acheson instructed the American Society of International Law
ZNet Update An Important Question and Answer Essay
Hello, This is a ZNet Update. You can add or remove addresses at the ZNet top page -- www.zmag.org/weluser.htm which, as always, is undergoing continuous additions. Please visit soon. A few days ago we sent our 150,000 ZNet Update Recipients a multi-author letter from the Z Staff plus Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Vandana Shiva, Susan George, Tariq Ali, Katherine Ainger, Dennis Brutus, Cunthia Peters, Sonali Kolhatkar, and Howard Zinn (which is still available at http://www.zmag.org/zdailyletter.htm) announcing a new idea - Z Daily - and asking you to please take a policy poll. A few thousand of you have already taken the poll, and we thank you very much. But we need a great many more to take the poll as well, and so we fervently urge you to do so if you haven't already. You can access the full Z Daily proposal and the policy poll anytime from ZNet's top page at http://www.zmag.org. Our incoming email reveals that collectively you have many questions about Z Daily. To reduce confusion here we offer (your) Questions and (our) Answers to quickly clarify Z Daily's purpose, content, cost, labor, and methods -- as well as why we want to do Z Daily and why we need to hear your reactions to it. We hope you will read through it. Thank you very much... Michael Albert Q A About Z Daily 1. What exactly would Z Daily include? Z Daily would include up to 20 new articles each weekday, and on weekends some reviews, interviews, debates, and personal and organizational profiles. There would also be forums for discussions among users and writers, plus various additional facilities and services like policy and politics polls, job search facilities, and audio files for listening. Z Daily would also include access to Z Magazine Online, as part of the package. Z Daily Sustainers could opt for email delivery of preferred daily essays, or might instead decide to receive emails which contain only a descriptive clickable list of offerings, or might just want to access the online displays of the essays. Sustainers could choose to get as few as one pre-selected essay a day (which would be the default), or as many as all of them. Sustainers could easily opt for material by topic or author, or even by style. Z Daily would also funnel substantial funds to an international community of writer/activists and provide a pool of material for free reprint by local school and community papers and magazines around the world. 2. Would Z Daily replace ZNet so there would no longer be a public site? I don't want to see that happen. ZNet would remain, just as now, a free and public site. Not only would Z Daily not replace ZNet, Z Daily would assist ZNet via strengthening our ties to writers and activists and providing essential revenues, just as the Sustainer Program does now, only more so. 3. Why does the Z Staff want to do Z Daily? Won't it mean much more work. Can you handle that? We want to do Z Daily in order to help build infrastructure for producing and sustaining left mass media, including benefiting and enlarging the international community of radical writers. We want to do Z Daily to support and enlarge existing alternative media, including enlarging support for all Z operations. We want to do Z Daily to distribute new essays in areas of interest and by authors who we appreciate. And we want to do Z Daily to facilitate wider discussion of the possible agendas we might share. Yes, to undertake Z Daily we would have to expand our staff, to carry the extra workload/ Indeed, that's one of the reasons why we must urge you to reply to our poll, so we can know whether desires for Z Daily warrant this choice. 4. But don't we have too much information already? And don't left writers write enough, and get paid enough as is? Almost anywhere you may live, if you pick up your local newspaper for today and count the number of articles, you will find many more than we are proposing to prepare and disseminate daily. For example, in the New York Times today, Friday, there are about six times as many. And there are thousands of such points of origination of mainstream daily articles, not to mention other venues of mainstream media. We are talking about undertaking an international project to add 20 essays of highly insightful and relevant analysis, news, vision, and strategy to the total pool of critical resources available. This is not too much new material. Indeed, it is only a modest though desirable step toward having barely enough. 5. But why should I want to add more information to the huge amount I already get? I can't keep up as it is. And what if I don't have time to select what I want, but would rather just receive good material automatically and without hassle? And, for that matter, why should I want to support generating more information than I will myself use? The default for Z Daily will be that if you make no selection, you will receive one pre-selected timely essay per
ZNet Update An Essay From Norman Solomon
Another ZNet update... To remove or add email addresses to the 150,000 that we now have on file for ZNet Free Updates, please visit the appropriate link on our top page at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm ZNet News: As always, we of course have numerous new articles online, even since just a couple of days ago when we sent our last update mailing. We are also busy redressing some tardiness in updating various ZNet Watch Sites. We hope you will make the rounds to see the results. For example, you might wish to check out the updated Iraq Watch, Anarchy Watch, Interviews, and other Watch Sites as well in coming days. Web Announcement Brian Dominick, who has been a tireless and creative worker on ZNet since its inception, and Jessica Azulay, a current ZNet Commentator, are working hard to found a new, nonprofit, independent, online newspaper, called The NewStandard. They want to determine people's interest in their project and are also looking to hire two collective members, even as they are hard at work building a network of freelance journalists, artists, and photographers. The NewStandard will provide current events coverage (hard news), from a progressive perspective, as well as many diverse innovative features. It is an ambitious (pareconish) project and Brian and Jessica would very much like you to come visit their site and respond to their online queries even as the site is being built at http://newstandardnews.net We at ZNet hope you will take a look at their efforts and anticipate great things from the NewStandard. P.S. They even have a fancy Flash Interactive Preview for you to view. And now, to close out this update, here is a powerful essay from Norman Solomon .. . The Political Capital of 9/11 by Norman Solomon The Bush administration never hesitated to exploit the general public's anxieties that arose after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001. Testifying on Capitol Hill exactly 53 weeks later, Donald Rumsfeld did not miss a beat when a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the need for the United States to attack Iraq. Senator Mark Dayton: What is it compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous actions? Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: What's different? What's different is 3,000 people were killed. As a practical matter, it was almost beside the point that allegations linking Baghdad with the September 11 attacks lacked credible evidence. The key factor was political manipulation, not real documentation. Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack got enormous media exposure in late 2002 for his book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Pollack's book promotion tour often seemed more like a war promotion tour. During a typical CNN appearance, Pollack explained why he had come to see a massive invasion of Iraq as both desirable and practical: The real difference was the change from September 11th. The sense that after September 11th, the American people were now willing to make sacrifices to prevent threats from abroad from coming home to visit us here made it possible to think about a big invasion force. Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, with the London-based Independent newspaper, was on the mark when he wrote: Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 11 September. If the United States invades Iraq, we should remember that. But at psychological levels, the Bush team was able to manipulate post-9/11 emotions well beyond the phantom of Iraqi involvement in that crime against humanity. The dramatic changes in political climate after 9/11 included a drastic upward spike in an attitude -- fervently stoked by the likes of Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the president -- that our military should be willing to attack potential enemies before they might try to attack us. Few politicians or pundits were willing to confront the reality that this was a formula for perpetual war, and for the creation of vast numbers of new foes who would see a reciprocal logic in embracing such a credo themselves. One of the great media cliches of the last two years is that 9/11 changed everything. The portentous idea soon became a truism for news outlets nationwide. But the shock of September 11 could not endure. And the events of that horrific day -- while abruptly tilting the political landscape and media discourse -- did not transform the lives of most Americans. Despite all the genuine anguish and the overwhelming news coverage, daily life gradually went back to an approximation of normal. Some changes are obvious. Worries about terrorism have become routine. Out of necessity, stepped-up security measures are in effect at airports. Unnecessarily, and ominously, the USA Patriot Act is chipping away at civil liberties. Yet the basic concerns of September 10, 2001, remain with us today. The nation's current economic picture includes the familiar scourges of unemployment, job insecurity, eroding pension benefits and a wildly exorbitant healthcare
ZNet Update / Prashad Book and Chomnsky Interview....
Hello, Another Free Update from ZNet. As usual, please note that you can add and remove addresses from the ZNet top page -- www.zmag.org/weluser.htm -- there are about 150,000 addresses now in the system. Every so often one of our regular writers completes a new book and we do a brief interview that we send. This time it is Vijay Prashad, and the book is called Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare, and is published by South End Press. The interview is below. Also below is a recent interview with Noam Chomsky, about Cuba and Latin America, done by phone with Radio Havana. As always, there are many new essays on the top page of ZNet, including contributions by Giroux, Davis, Galeano, Monbiot, Chomsky, Roy, Bond, Sharma, Fisk, and others. Please take a look at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm We also hope you will take a look at our sustainer program ( http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm) as a way to positively support Z and ZNet and to receive, as a premium, a commentary a day. Thank you...and, now here are the promised interviews... ZNet Interviews Vijay Prashad ...about his new book (1) Can you tell Znet, please, what your new book, Title? What is it trying to communicate? The book is called Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare, and it is published by South End Press. A few years ago, Ravi Ahuja of a Marxistishe Blatter asked me to scribble some thoughts on the US economy and the struggle. I'm neither trained as an economist nor am I by profession an observer of the US economy. I gave it my best try. I found it useful to pursue the problem of debt, which is a central issue for the working-class in this country. It also helped me focus on areas where I am involved -- such as the fightback against welfare reform and its attendant issue, prison reform. Study of the question of prisons and welfare, as well as of debt, allowed me to show how the self-enforced structural adjustment of the US created a class of people who we generally call working class, working poor, poor, unemployed, underclass, underemployed, etc. I call them all the contingent class -- they are all either on the edge of unemployment, working several low end jobs, off the job train, in various illegal occupations, unable to work, etc. The frontlines of the struggle against US Empire is on the streets where the contingent hang out, and they are doing much to lead the struggle. The point that follows from this is that those of us who travel from demo to demo need to do more organizing among the contingent and we need to know that we are not the frontlines even if we garner all the press coverage. (2) Can you tell Znet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making thei book what it is? I wrote the book using documents created by the frontline organizations as well as the government. I spent a lot of time interviewing the women and men who work in the groups against welfare reform, and are a part of the GROWL network (www.ctwo.org/growl). They spent time with me, explaining what needed to be told to me, slowly and patiently. These conversations helped me frame the book. Government documents are a treasure trove, particularly the Bureau of Prison Statistics and the GAO. Activists need to use these more often. The state, in its contradictions, gives us a lot of information that can be used against the ruling elite's hypocrisy. (3) What are your hopes for Title? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort? Writing, for me, is always worth the effort. It is part of my contribution to the struggle and it is a lot easier than doing the tough work of going door to door, listening and signing up our neighbors for the big fights. It is in many ways an escape from organizing. I hope the book will be read by those who are involved in the anti-globalization efforts within the US, so that they can direct some of their energy to the creation of change within as much as without. We need to think programmatically about our struggle and that is what the book emphasizes throughout. I hope that it will be read by unionists and other activists who work among the contingent. I wish we could have a broader argument about how the work against welfare reform and to abolish prisons is really also about labor -- how the contingent class is disciplined not only by the wage and work rules, but also by the fact of welfare reform and the prison. These are not separate issues, and we need to be down on them at the same time. Radio Havana Phone Interview with Noam Chomsky Telephone interview by Bernie Dwyer for www.cubadebate.cu with Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 28th August 2003. The
