Revolution

Power cuts in Gaza as EU halts aid

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C90525FC-61F2-4BBA-85A2-E271F9D5C5E2.htm

War Has Made Baghdad Pre-Industrial

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20326315/site/newsweek/

US Media Curtail Iraq War Coverage: Study
by Jim Wolf

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/20/3294/

Protestors Rage Against North America Summit

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/20/3293/

A group of U.S. veterans fresh from Iraq describe the political debate in Washington on the war as "surreal."

http://www.alternet.org/asoldierspeaks/60290/?page=1

Whats up Endy?

I'm no religious man - but I think about that guy Jesus - turning over the tax collector's tables in a fit of anger at all the injustice.

I can understand his frustration

Beneath Heathrow's pall of misery, a new political movement is born


It was not flawless, but the climate camp was still the most democratic and best organised protest I've witnessed

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 21, 2007
The Guardian

There are plenty of people at the Heathrow climate camp who say they are campaigning on behalf of their children. But when Alf Pereira spoke on Sunday outside the church in Harmondsworth, we knew he meant it. His daughter died of bronchial problems caused, he believes, by pollution from the airport. She was buried in the graveyard behind us. He fears that if a third runway is built, the developers will disinter her.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,2153046,00.html

Lance Corporal Redpath is another victim of our apathy


The Lib Dems are right again on Iraq, yet outcry is muted as soldiers' lives are sacrificed for marginal political convenience

Polly Toynbee
Tuesday August 21, 2007
The Guardian

No one doubts the Iraq catastrophe will cast a long dark shadow when the history of these times comes to be written. But what will be made of British public attitudes towards this war? After one great anti-war demonstration, there has been little outpouring of outrage. As the last miserable dog days drag on in Basra, there is no clamour to end the agony faster. Where are the students on the rampage? Compare this inertia with the fury over Vietnam back in the late 1960s, when Britain had no soldiers in that war. Reasons can be found, excuses made, but this is a depressing sign of current political inertia.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Menzies Campbell, wrote to Gordon Brown yesterday: "The current level of British casualties is unacceptable. What is being achieved by the continuing British presence? Our troops are severely restricted in what they can do and they are subject to unreasonable risks. There is now a clear recognition that the objectives of their mission cannot be achieved ... Is it the case that our continuing presence in Iraq is now only to show solidarity with the United States? Were it so, could it be justified against the level of our casualties? It is time to set a framework for the complete withdrawal of all our forces."

Yet again, the Lib Dems are right on every point. When I talked to Campbell yesterday, he said he had spoken to top-ranking officers who want out of Iraq while there is still just a chance of saving the situation in Afghanistan. So, he asks Brown, are young men dying only to spare President Bush embarrassment? Soldiers have done everything humanly possible to keep the peace in Basra, but are now driven back into two small and dangerous strongholds from which they can do little: 90% of attacks in the city are now directed against them. Brave men are well-trained to take risks and to see their friends die around them. But Campbell says pleasing the White House is no legitimate war objective. Few disagree, on any side of the house.

Brown has already said we will be gone soonish, presumed to be some time next year. He will wait for the report by General Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, due to be given to Congress next month. But in the meantime what does the cabinet say to parents and children of soldiers dying for nothing? That they died making a noble stand to defend the credibility of a disastrous US president on his way out? Will there be a Last Days of Basra medal for that? Campbell is perplexed by Brown's willingness to submit to the timetable of a beleaguered White House. Is it, he asks, part of the price for intelligence-sharing and Trident? He points out that it would positively help the Democrats now if Britain withdrew rapidly.

If you have a son the same age as these boys, it does help concentrate the mind. It is also a crisp reminder that most of us live in worlds where no one has a boy anywhere near the armed forces, which have become dangerously detached from most people's ordinary experience - neither the Sandhurst types nor the squaddies drawn mainly from poorer places. When "we" go to war it can be as remote as a computer game to most voters and those at the cabinet table. Campbell complains that journalists say "Iraq fatigue" makes TV news editors avoid "another Iraq story". Even in a thin August, the carnage of the suicide bombings against the Yazidi sect made small impact. The name of each British soldier is reported: the latest was Lance Corporal Kirk Redpath, 22, from Romford - and yet this avoidable death, sanctioned by us, raises less indignation than a gang stabbing.

Why so little public revulsion? Various reasons are floated: the defenestration of Blair was cathartic political blood-letting, and the two main parties are equally implicated in the war. George Galloway and Islamist supporters give the impression they rejoice at seeing Britain crushed in the field, which may dampen enthusiasm for the Stop the War coalition. Voters know forces are on the way out anyway: they are bored with the whole thing. In Ipsos Mori's Blair exit poll, his worst ratings were for foreign and defence policy. But voters are fickle and they deceive themselves. Despite a million marching in protest, a majority backed Blair's invasion on the eve of the war. However, by April 2005 only 30% admitted that they had ever supported it. When Blair left two years later, only 11% admitted that they had supported it.

The Lib Dems have been right, right and right again about the Iraq war - yet they are suffering in the polls as Labour rides high with a cabinet full of men and women who obediently voted for this calamity (with the honourable exception of John Denham). There have been no apologies. Menzies Campbell says wistfully: "For the life of me I cannot understand why the cabinet of the time did not stand up to the prime minister when the risks of military involvement were so plain." There was huge hidden disquiet on both Labour and Tory backbenches, he says: "How did the House of Commons let it happen?" But Iraq has slipped down the public's agenda, and the Lib Dem vote has slipped with it.

Why so little anger, about war or climate change? Political activism seems moribund, students voting on cheap beer in their union bars. A gentle camp-out in a field near Heathrow offers signs of life, but looking back on the anti-Vietnam movement, where is the real passion now? Ipsos Mori's Simon Atkinson says: "We are just not as political as we were. Now we worry about enough fire engines in Cornwall or ... our local district general hospital."

Ipsos Mori finds most people no longer think politically, detached from parties, tribes and unions that were once the great political educators, as if the end of the cold war bleached out left/right gut political instincts. Instead consumer politics rule: what will politicians deliver for me; whose fault is this? These days politicians never dare challenge individualistic what's-in-it-for-me voters, hugging the middle ground, afraid to speak out boldly on difficult things - gross excess at the top, standing up to America and inequality, standing up for Europe and, most urgently, climate change action. Offered nothing clear to believe in, who can blame people for not bothering to rally to party or cause? At least the war is nearly over - for us, if not Iraqis. But it is unbearable to let one more soldier die for marginal political convenience - and this time the cabinet must say so.

[email protected]

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,2153068,00.html

August 21, 2007

"What will end this war?" asked Aaron Hughes, an Illinois National Guardsman who drove trucks in Iraq in a mission he once supported. "I'm not waiting for an election to end this war. We elected candidates to Congress and we really had faith that funding would be cut and they played this line that said 'we can't cut funding because that would mean we are not supporting the troops.' Excuse me? We can't keep listening to these politicians and believing in them. We need to listen to each other."

As you can imagine, for Hughes and other Iraq veterans the war is something less than a "gift." At our Yearly Kos event, Hughes and his IVAW colleagues -- Garett Reppenhagen, Josh Lansdale and Geoffrey Millard ­answered questions for more than an hour. These vets study how the Vietnam War was ended, and they well know the power of their words and actions.

IVAW was founded in 2004 and today it is a rapidly growing, grassroots, independent anti-war group with members active in 43 states and deployed on bases in Iraq. These rank and file soldiers are not partisans; they are Americans who have seen first hand the greatest political betrayal of our lifetime, the US attack on Iraq and the long occupation.

Iraq Veterans Against the War are not the concoction of a liberal think tank or PR firm; they have very little funding; they are not avoiding criticism of Democrats; and they are not playing political games trying to bank-shot Democratic candidates into the White House and Congress in 2008. They are in open non-violent revolt against US foreign policy, criticizing politicians of all stripes who would exploit the war for political gain.

Many IVAW soldiers are on active duty opposing the war openly and at personal risk; such is their conviction. On Saturday August 18, 90 IVAW soldiers demonstrated in St. Louis against a recruiting exhibit at a business expo, conducting the largest single action yet organized by anti-war veterans of Iraq. IVAW is stepping up its "truth in recruitment" efforts this September.

Watch the YouTube video of Iraq Veterans Against the War speaking out at Yearly Kos. Go to the IVAW website at http://www.IVAW.org and contact them directly. Support our troops' own opposition to the war. These American soldiers are determined to end the war. For them it has never been a "gift." They are not waiting for an election, nor should anyone else.


(taken from)


If Democrats Won't Stop the War, Perhaps Iraq Vets Will
Iraq: the Gift That Keeps on Bleeding

By JOHN STAUBER

http://www.counterpunch.org/stauber08212007.html


John Stauber is Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin and co-author of Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever. He can be reached at: [email protected]

Bring the Basra garrison back home

Brown is walking a tightrope over Iraq. He should remember that, down below, British soldiers are still dying.
Andrew Murray


August 10, 2007 9:00 PM | Printable version

The blood price keeps on rising. Four British soldiers (at time of writing) have died in and around Basra this week - some of them very young. No one can any longer even pretend there was a reason for their deaths. US security officials believe the British army in southern Iraq has been defeated, and even the army itself claims no better than "neither success nor failure".

They are not preventing violence in the region, since fully 90% of the attacks (again, according to the army's own figures) are directed against British soldiers themselves. Nor are they "holding the ring" for a local political settlement. The politics of Basra will be no different in a year to what they are today; they are no different today to what they were four years ago, and can anyway hardly be influenced by a garrison holed up at Basra airport that enjoys no confidence at all from local people.

The situation can only get worse. After all the lurid tales of Iranian gun-running, it now appears, in another revelation of the staggering incompetence and, doubtless, corruption that has attended the Bush occupation of Iraq, that almost every Iraqi who wants a weapon can find one, courtesy of the US itself. This new twist on "friendly fire" will be no consolation to its victims.

Nor are the troops helping to sustain a successful US "surge" strategy. There are contradictory reports on the military "achievements" of the surge. Overall violence has not diminished, though clearly the US army is able to score tactical successes on the ground when it concentrates its forces. However, the aim of the "surge" was to buy time for a political settlement. That seems no closer, and the Maliki government appears, in fact, to be disintegrating as both Sunni and Shia parties pull out.

The Iraqi parliament, the election for which was trumpeted as the greatest achievement of US-imposed democratisation, has sputtered to a virtual halt. Those neocolonialists who live by divide-and-rule will perish when the divide becomes too deep to any longer sustain the rule. And such unity as there is, is based on opposition to the rulers.

So the deaths of British soldiers in Basra are for one thing only: they are paying Tony Blair's famous "blood price" for the special relationship with Washington. More prosaically, they are our contribution to saving George Bush's political face at a time when even conservative newspapers in the states are urging that their troops be brought home.

Gordon Brown appears to be trying to walk a very fine tightrope here, balancing between a public opinion in Britain that wants troops out as rapidly as possible and pressure from the US to keep in line. That may work for a bit. But events in Basra are running ahead of him.

This rate of attrition in a hopeless cause is not politically sustainable, so the time for nudges and winks - a Malloch-Brown here, a coded speech there - is passing already.

It is time for the new prime minister to face facts. The occupation has been the catastrophe the anti-war movement always warned it would be and the hapless Basra garrison is on the way out, defeated. Bring it back now.

That would, of course, require facing down George Bush, Rupert Murdoch (is he still calling three times a week?) and British Aerospace (doing very nicely, thank you). But what better way to signal a real change in the way Britain is led?

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_murray/2007/08/bring_the_basra_garrison_back_home.html

The blame game
16.08.2007 LindseyGerman

When the going gets tough, blame Iran. Defence Minister Des Browne told the Guardian that he had 'no doubt' that the Taliban was getting weapons from Iran. George Bush is poised to announce that the US is to treat Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a 'global terrorist' organisation. Deaths in Iraq are now routinely blamed on Iranian weapons, expertise and general interference in the region.

You wouldn't think that it was the US which has lost nearly 200,000 weapons, including lorry loads of AK47s, in Iraq. Nor would it be diplomatic to point out that blame for the siting of weapons in Afghanistan or Iraq can be more justly be laid at the door of the US or Britain than pinned on Iran, which cooperated with the US in 2001 over the launch of the war on terror and played no role in the Coalition of the Willing back in 2003.

But being wrong has never stopped Browne and his ilk from continuing merrily on regardless of facts which contradict them at every turn. His predecessor, John Reid, did after all predict not more than 18 months ago that British soldiers might well leave from their present tour in Helmand without a shot being fired in anger. Some prediction. Seven soldiers have been killed there in the past ten days.

Exit strategies are daily put forward for Iraq but none of them comes to very much. There are still troops in Basra palace, the central base in the city which is under attack constantly _ 300 rockets have been fired at it over the past two months_ despite predictions that all 5000 British troops would by now be at the airport base on the edge of the city.

Despite the very strong impression given by the British media that most violent attacks are between different groups of Iraqis, in Basra 90 percent of attacks are against British troops.

As Iraq proves intractable so Afghanistan is moving up the political and military agenda. There are now more troops there than in Iraq and the rate of deaths is increasing with over 70 in total dead. There is growing Afghan disquiet about civilian casualties, mainly caused by US airstrikes.


It must be slowly dawning on Des Browne, let alone the more perceptive Cabinet members, that not only are all options in Iraq fraught with difficulties but that their troubles will not end there.
Despite talk of a turning point and attempts to blame Iran or Pakistan for the problems, this looks like a war which will get worse before it gets better. It has all the makings of a long, colonial war with increasing casualties, loss of support from the local population and a growing sense domestically that it is unwinnable.


In Germany next month there is a major demo against the Afghan war, and there is political discontent in countries as far apart as South Korea, Canada and the Netherlands. Washington's response is typical: dragoon as many countries as possible to fight there, blame the Iraqis for not being able to run their own country, and step up the rhetoric against Iran.


Meanwhile Des Browne tells us that any 'drawdown' of troops in Iraq depends on agreement with the US. No change there then.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=205&Itemid=139

Sign troops out message to Gordon Brown

See new Anti-war music video by Ian Brown with Sinead O'Connor
supported by Rose Gentle and the Military Families Against War

Lobby Parliament - 8th October

Public opinion: occupations have failed

Iraq: occupation creates chaos

NUS affiliate to Stop the War Coalition

Afghanistan war: A bloody failure

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

This one will get me called an idiot for sure- but oh well…somehow it wrote itself

(Inspired by Ernest Che Guevara's conviction (to borrow a line from else where) that "Love is at the Centre of Revolutionary Endeavour… "



Who Can Love?



Love is denied
to the chosen child
who stares at the sky
while bombs fall
like drops of wine

In the cold, cold corners
of a dead Emperor's fountain
Love brims like poison
on the cusp of drowning

We're so messed up
In this lonely space
Where voices fade
without a trace
of love

What can save us?

Love within
to guide and strengthen us?

Love without
to fulfill us?

Who can teach us?

Who can lead us?

Who can love enough to seek
the flag of peace?

To champion the masses
who stagger crushed beneath
the fascist boot of hate?

Who can love enough
to free us from our fate?




Endymion 2007

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11
Published: 25 August 2007

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience - just one - whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions - often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist - and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".

His - or her - question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth - that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows - that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) - who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then - the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd - left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument - a clincher, in my view - is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything - militarily, politically diplomatically - it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim - as the Americans did two days ago - that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas - which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But - here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster - which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C - would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower - the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering - very definitely not in the "raver" bracket - are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers - which could well have been the beams cracking - are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were - and still are - very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades - released by the CIA - mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family - which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder - let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now - we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.


http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit "9/11½" is being released next year

(only just heard about this)

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryID=89818

I can't wait

Edwards Goes After the 'Corporate Democrats' -- Is This a Turning Point for His Campaign?

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted August 26, 2007.

In a dramatic speech, John Edwards fired a major broadside against corporate America and, more significantly, "corporate Democrats," -- the likes of which hasn't been heard from a viable candidate with national appeal in decades.

Last week, John Edwards fired a broadside against corporate America and, more significantly, "corporate Democrats," the likes of which hasn't been heard from a viable candidate with national appeal in decades.

Edwards is en fuego right now, and if he keeps up the heat, his candidacy will either be widely embraced by the emerging progressive movement or utterly annihilated by an entrenched establishment that fears few things more than a telegenic populist with enough money to mount a credible campaign.

"It's time to end the game," Edwards told a crowd in Hanover, New Hampshire. "It's time to tell the big corporations and the lobbyists who have been running things for too long that their time is over." He exhorted Washington law-makers to "look the lobbyists in the eye and just say no."

Real change starts with being honest -- the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it's rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They'll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are -- not for the country, but for themselves.

[The system is] controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don't stand a chance.

It's a structural argument, and Edwards didn't pull punches in calling out his fellow Democrats, saying: "We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other." The rhetoric was a clear signal that Edwards is going to beat the drums of reform as a contrast to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

About a third of the speech focused on the trade deals that Bill Clinton championed, and his argument that those "wedded to the past" can't provide the answers was a barely-veiled rebuke of the Clintonian arm of the party, and the media's chosen "front-runner" for the nomination.

If Democrats are engaged in an existential struggle between the party's establishment and its grassroots, Edwards is obviously betting that the grassroots' passion and energy will trump the Machine Democrats message' apparatus -- this was a speech that was not written by the usual coterie of Beltway consultants.

The most striking aspect of Edwards' speech was his implicit argument that class still exists. For years, both parties have obscured the divisions that are so prominent in modern American society, painting a picture of a country in which we're all part of an entrepreneurial class with more or less similar interests -- a key ingredient in the false "center" to which politicians and Beltway pundits kow-tow. "Let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience," Edwards said last week. "You cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power -- you have to take it from them."

It was an explicit rebuke of Obama's "new politics" -- Obama recently told the Washington Post that "the insurance and drug companies can have a seat at the table in our health-care debate; they just can't buy all the chairs." Obama's approach to "cleaning up Washington" is not bad, but ultimately tinkers around the edges of a corrupted legislative system.

Edwards is not so conciliatory on the subject. "For more than 20 years, Democrats have talked about universal health care," he said. "And for more than 20 years, we've gotten nowhere, because lobbyists for the big insurance companies, drug companies and HMOs spent millions to block real reform."

Contrast that naked confrontation of corporate power with the tepid appeals to working Americans that were a trademark of John Kerry's 2004 campaign. In announcing his candidacy, Kerry offered a bit of demagoguery about CEOs -- he segued from bashing Cheney and Halliburton --and boldly promised to end tax breaks "that help companies move American jobs overseas." Also in his plan for corporate accountability: "No more contracts for companies, no matter how well-connected they are, until they decide to do what's right."

Hillary Clinton's economic proposals track with the thinking popular among the ostensible "progressives" at the DLC and the Third Way -- policies that give Americans the "opportunity" to save for retirement, a decidedly centrist approach to spiraling college costs and other familiar policies from the 1990s. She's not a fair trader nor a free trader, she says -- she's for "smart trade," "pro-American" trade.

Edward's speech about the economy isn't the only time that he's strayed from the bounds of "respectable" discourse in Washington. In May, he said that the "war on terror" was a political "bumper sticker" that the administration used to "justify everything [Bush] does: the ongoing war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, spying on Americans, torture."

Edwards isn't the only candidate in the race making such bold statements, of course. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has long spoken of economic issues in the kinds of terms Edwards used last week. But John Edwards was the vice presidential nominee on a presidential ticket that won 59 million votes and he's raised $23 million in the current cycle (20 times what Kucinich has raised), and that means that corporate media is forced to cover him. So far, they've mocked him, written stories about his haircuts, pushed shadowy innuendo about his personal business dealings and suggested his focus on poverty is disingenuous or hypocritical, but they simply can't write him off as a member of the fringe. Unlike Kucinich, they can't ignore him.

John Edwards is becoming a very different kind of candidate, and his growing message of empowerment and attack on the corporate class may prove to be the most interesting story of campaign 2008.



http://www.alternet.org/story/60748/

Shriver says British television is guilty of 'patronising' viewers

By Ciar Byrne, Arts and Media Correspondent
Published: 27 August 2007

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2898455.ece


At Last

Hat off to Dave Ziran here - a moving piece of writing indeed, from counter punch



And Still They Rise
Confronting Katrina

By DAVE ZIRIN
August 29, 2007

"I'm scared to return. Too much death. Too many spirits." This is what a friend said to me the week before I left for New Orleans. I had never been to the Crescent City. He had traveled there many times - a "home away from home" - before August 2005 changed the course of the city forever. Now he fears it.

I felt the fear before my plane even landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport. As we began our descent, dark jagged shadows jutted across the verdant swampland. It was all too cinematic. I found out later that what I thought were dramatic shadows was wetland defoliation; the banal reality proving to be far more frightening than the supernatural.

My second NOLA moment was leaving the airport, catching a glimpse of a man riding down the center strip of the highway in 100-degree heat, on a bicycle, with headphones, no helmet and his hands off the handlebars. At the time, I thought it was just local flavor, like seeing a cardinal in St. Louis. But later, after learning about the spike in the suicide rate over the last two years, I began to wonder if it was something else.

I was in the Big Easy as an invited speaker at a conference of NOLA bloggers called Rising Tide II. In most cities, bloggers practice a peculiar virtual cannibalism, tearing each other apart for sport. But at Rising Tide, among people young and old, black and white, I saw my first glimpse of what can be termed blogger solidarity. It stemmed, as one told me, from "the necessity of coming together after Katrina." They referred to each other in conversation by their blog names, more colorful than the mobsters in the film Goodfellas. There was Danger Blonde, MD Filter, my unflappable guide, Liprap, and Mom'n'em. (Mom'n'em is a man. The handle comes from a matriarchal New Orleans phrase. Instead of asking, "How's the family?" You say, "How's Mom'n'em?")

The bloggers represent the best of something beginning to bubble that you won't see on the nightly news, as the two-year anniversary of Katrina arrives today. Amid the horror, amid the neighborhoods that the federal government seems content to see die, there are actual people sticking it out. And they do it with gusto. As Valentine Pierce, a poet and journalist at the conference, said, "Bush's promises don't hold water. The only thing that holds water is the city."

They were also the perfect people for me to speak with to learn the ground-truth about post-Katrina New Orleans. They're not paid to write about the myriad of issues they confront - from mental health to public housing to the loan swindles to the state of art. They do it because they want everyone - those staying away, the transplants from the North, the ones who get their information from the mainstream media - who sees New Orleans as merely a symbol to know the facts: the good, the bad and the ugly.

And the ugly side is that the majority black city is still being left to wither slowly on the vine. There is a reason President Bush did not say the word New Orleans in the last State of the Union. This is Moynihan's "benign neglect" writ large. Butit has had a bizarre boomerang effect. Because the future of city is at stake, the neglect that guides federal policy is something that both whites and blacks have to confront.

Also, since New Orleans was far less segregated to my eyes than Washington, D.C., where I live, it puts the suffering of the black majority into people's faces where it can't be ignored. If Katrina wrecked and removed 40 percent of the city, it has, among a minority, also brought people together.

It is remarkable that a city can be both torn asunder and also find a measure of salvation in the same name: Katrina. To the people I spoke with, Katrina is a noun, an adjective and even a verb. But one thing it isn't is simply a hurricane. When locals talk about Katrina, they are very conscious of the fact that the hurricane itself barely dented this proud city. Katrina means the breaking of the levees. Katrina means loss of their homes. It's the politicians so fatally slow with aid. It's the spike in violent crime. It's the ever-rising suicide rate. It's the aged who have died of desperation.

Katrina is something ephemeral, a sadness seeped into the humidity. It gets in your clothes, your eyes, your hair. It's everywhere, even if you aren't staring at a house with a black X, with a number underneath, denoting a death at the hands of levees. It made me feel as if the city's almost satirically gothic above-ground cemeteries were monuments to August 2005, even though the graves have stood for generations. The only thing I can compare the experience to would be visiting Kent State University, another site with spirits that can't find peace.

But as spiritual as post-Katrina New Orleans feels, the ravages of the city are something that residents know were man-made. The people of New Orleans are the last ones to need a lecture about how horribly unnatural this disaster was. It wasn't an act of God. It was the product of a whole set of priorities that put their city last. Bumper stickers are everywhere that read, "Make Levees Not War." People have signs in their front yards telling the Army Corps of Engineers to take their eminent domain and back off their houses.

Make no mistake, there is anger and a sense of desperation among the city's poor. Sometimes it's inward, as the mental health and suicide studies show. Often it is outward, as the violent crime demonstrates. That feeling of being abandoned by this country and this criminal administration, of being left to die on a roof, remains. And yet, they still, so very inconveniently, continue to live, love and, most importantly, struggle and agitate. Everyone in this country should travel to New Orleans and be among a people supposed to perish, who act like they just didn't get the memo.

Dave Zirin is the author of "The Muhammad Ali Handbook" (MQ Publications) and "Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports" . You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by e-mailing [email protected]. Contact him at [email protected]

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