==politics

Alex Cockburn's great review of three biographies of Che Guevara: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/cockburn.shtml (27 Jan)

"What really terrifies me is your lack of comprehension of all this and your advice about moderation, egoism, etc. . . . that is to say, all of the most execrable qualities an individual can have. Not only am I not moderate, I shall not try ever to be . . ."

"Told ya so!" In a new Progressive Review, Sam Smith reviews the Clinton scandals the media ignored: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/ (26 Jan)

The White House lawyer's response: "If you can't look an FBI agent straight in the eye and [lie], you don't belong here."

This shy, genial woman, dressed as usual in a frumpy skirt, mud boots and bandana, seems committed to reminding voters that the real divide in American politics isn't Left vs. Right -- it's Up vs. Down.

An impressive rant against teachers' unions: http://www.salonmagazine.com/feb97/columnists/horowitz970217.html (24 Jan)

Unlike the rest of us, teachers are tenured after two years and thus have lifetime job security, are guaranteed raises and are not accountable for their performance (or lack of it).

I find presidential sex scandals a big yawn, but Camille Paglia makes some intriguing points (mostly blaming Hillary): http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/22news_pagl.html (22 Jan)

Salon's first decent look at the Unabomber: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/21news.html (21 Jan)

And a nice look at the Oprah suit: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/20news.html (20 Jan)

And a nice look at East Timor's hopes in the Asian crisis: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/hitc/1998/01/nc_19hitc2.html (20 Jan)

It is now almost a quarter century since, with the frank encouragement of President Gerald Ford and his unspeakable valet, Henry Kissinger, the Indonesian military moved to annex East Timor, just after it received its independence from Portugal. They brought to the task the same fascistic ruthlessness with which, a decade earlier -- and with the help of the CIA -- they wiped out a million or so of their fellow countrymen unfortunate enough to be labeled communists.

And several new long essays, including one on Washington's "culture of impunity": http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/impunity.htm (20 Jan)

The federal government no longer effectively regulates corporate greed. Republicans no longer combat Democratic greed and vice versa. Liberals and centrist Republicans have become pathetically ineffective forces within their own parties. The local bar largely devotes itself to undermining decent government. The media has lost both its will and skill for keeping others honest. And, increasingly, law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies make their own rules.

The editor's long look back at his 1960s in DC isn't as winning as I expected, but it covers some important ground: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/30year.htm (20 Jan)

Sometimes the meetings broke up in pandemonium. One was literally turned around after the chair declared it illegal. The vice chair, a minister and cab driver who wore a clerical collar around his neck and a coin holder on his belt, stood up in the back of the room and announced that the meeting would go on and requested everyone to turn their chairs around. Most did, leaving the chair speechless in what was now the rear.

The first two hours of "Surviving the Bottom Line" Sunday were also very welcome, drawing attention to ValuJet as (literal) Wall Street murder: http://www.pbs.org/bottomline/html/running.html (19 Jan)

Do US gov't agencies run the illegal drug industry? There's a new video that collates the evidence: http://www.madcowprod.com/drugtimes/review.html (16 Jan) And Gore Vidal on various topics: http://www.salonmagazine.com/archives/to/books_feature.html (14 Jan)

If you were president, what would be your first executive decision?

I would cut Pentagon procurement (around $250 billion) by two-thirds. Taxes for the middle class need never be raised again in the next 50 years. Then I would tax corporate profits, something hardly done nowadays. Then we could have national health and even an intelligent, accessible school system.

In the USA, there'd be a line around the block: (5 Jan)

TEHRAN (Reuters) - A man sentenced by a court in Iran to be blinded for blinding another man may be spared because no doctor has agreed to help carry out the sentence, a newspaper said on Sunday.

In Asia and Russia, the events of the great reversals of 1997 will begin the long process of logical consequences. Asia will become increasingly xenophobic and insular. So will Russia. As a result, friction will increase and security will decline.

Some 3,000 base stations across the country track the location of mobile phones as soon as they are switched on, not just when customers are having conversations, it said.

Susan Faludi (the feminist) wants to interview men about the Waco holocaust as a broken American promise: http://www.waco93.com/interview.htm
You can read a background interview with her at: http://www.booknotes.org/transcripts/10096.htm (30 Dec)

How has the Newt Right so successfully blindsided the progressive Left? A dry-ish analysis in The Nation argues that we don't lack the funds, but we're spending them with self-defeating unfocus: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980112/0112shum.htm (28 Dec)

Can anyone say, with confidence, what our economic program is?

The same issue (12 Jan 98) offers a good editorial about poverty, and a sorry story about imported wolves by Alex Cockburn: http://www.thenation.com/ (28 Dec)

Garrison Keillor, quoted on newsgroup misc.activism.progressive: (28 Dec)

"We're in the clutches of a bunch of folks trying to turn the U.S. into a third world country. Two hundred billionaires, and 260 million poor people. And they haven't done enough damage yet to be beaten."

Michael Parenti is a GREAT political speaker who's put out a lot of tapes (on the net in RealAudio format, if you can handle that). His newest book, "Blackshirts and Reds", is an attempt to rehabilitate communism. From the preface at http://www.vida.com/parenti/blackshirtsPreface.html: (27 Dec)

U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.

This site also offers the book's first chapter, documenting the forgotten story of how Mussolini and Hitler were funded by rich capitalists, to crush the labor movement.
And there's a horrendous compilation of the statistics of American misery ("37,000,000 regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs"): http://www.vida.com/parenti/HiddenHolocaust.html
And a nice dismantling of the myth of free speech in the USA: http://www.vida.com/parenti/FreeSpeech.html
(27 Dec)

The three online chapters of his "Against Empire" give a taut portrait of recent US imperialism, http://www.vida.com/parenti/Imperialism101.html: (27 Dec)

In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor--and it is because of the pillage they have endured.

Among many outstanding essays on another site: http://www.wessman.com/~kennylee/ArchiveARCHIVE/M%20P/MP.html
Parenti spells out explicitly his prescription for healing the USA, and debunks terrorism hype especially against Libya. (27 Dec)

Custom spy pix from $300: http://www.digitalglobe.com/company/company.html (26 Dec)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With the launching of the world's first commercial spy-like satellite, just about anybody with a credit card may soon enjoy an eye in the sky.
``EarlyBird 1'' was designed to pick out features on the ground as small as 10 feet across from its orbit 295 miles above the earth.
It was successfully launched Wednesday atop a Russian rocket by its builder, EarthWatch Inc., of Longmont, Colo.

Cool new squat! (26 Dec)

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Actor Paul Newman is putting profits from his Newman's Own food products to a good cause by donating half a million dollars to a fund to buy up land around his Wesport, Connecticut, home to keep it from becoming golf courses and luxury condos.
"I think the developers are being very shortsighted. Fifty years from now, the people who worked to save this land will be remembered as heroes," Newman said.
Newman and other preservationists hope to buy the threatened land in nearby Easton, Connecticut, for 10 million dollars.

The Nation has a long, appalling, worth-reading-to-the-end piece on prisons for profit: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980105/0105bate.htm : (23 Dec)

The Cabot Market Letter compares the company to a "a hotel that's always at 100% occupancy...and booked to the end of the century."

There's a new issue of the Progressive Review, one of the few leftwing sources that's vigorously anti-Clinton: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/. The lead story this week is Judge Lamberth's condemnation of White House lies about the healthcare taskforce in 1993.
Its editor Sam Smith also offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow at: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/usat.htm. (23 Dec)

I enjoy "Dilbert" (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/) as much as the next nrrd, but FAIR's Norman Solomon is arguing that it's sneaky capitalist propaganda. See his regular column in the Portland Alliance for May 1997: http://www.teleport.com/~alliance/articles/may97/dilbert.html. (Many of Solomon's other commentaries are archived at DejaNews.) (18 Dec)

A thread about gangs on chi.general led me to this reference source on Chicago gangs: http://www.chitown.com/bigshoulders/gnghome.html which offers a ton of details-- names, symbols, alliances-- you never see anywhere else. In the newsgroup discussion, "Tommy the Terrorist" wisely suggests that if gangs have corrupt cops watching out for them, then their territorial boundaries ought to match those cops' precincts' boundaries as well. (17 Dec)

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