From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Sep 1 16:16:43 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] French Police Prevent GM Crop Destruction Message-ID: <022701c13333$c85be9a0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 1 September 2001. French Police Prevent GM Crop Destruction. SIGALENS, France -- Police clad in riot gear prevented activists opposed to genetically modified (GM) crops from hacking down three fields of experimental maize on Saturday. It was the first time French police have stopped GM crop sites being ransacked since protesters began a campaign in late June to rip up bio-engineered plants. The police action came after Prime Minister Lionel Jospin publicly criticized the destruction of GM crop tests on Tuesday, describing the protests as illegal and urging activists to stop. Some 100 activists from radical farmers' union Confederation Paysanne, anti-globalization movement Attac and other groups arrived at a site in Sigalens in southwest France, wielding sickles and scythes to chop down the maize plants. But between 100 and 150 police carrying riot shields and truncheons waited at the field, which belongs to French biotechnology firm Biogemma. The protesters placed their tools on the ground in front of the police but said they would be back. "There is no question of having a confrontation. If we can't act today, we'll come back another day," one of the protest organizers said. A similar police reception awaited the 100 or so activists who had planned to cut down two fields of maize near the village of Saint-Martin-la-Riviere, in west central France. The maize was being grown by U.S. biotechnology giant Monsanto, which has been the target of several anti-GM protests this summer. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Sep 1 17:13:34 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] What to do next June in Kananaskis? Message-ID: <027801c1333b$b9c0ec80$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Seattle was the "launch". The launch of the movement involved a problematic reality: what was inspiring people to take to the streets was a strategy of direct action to try and expose the institutions of what has now become known as the "anti-globalisation" movement. Just exactly how new this movement is can be demonstrated by the fact that the word "globalisation" itself sets off alarm bells in my word processing program, not known to the english language. Now, nearly everyone would recognise it. The movement started with three signature events: First, the Direct Action Network (DAN) organised the shut down of the WTO meeting on November 30, 1999, through arm locks, physical blockades, etc. Then later that afternoon, the AFL-CIO march broke the movement along lines quite familiar to many from previous generations (but still startling those, both young and older, who had not experienced such before) of the reformist and system-loyal Trade Union Bureaucrats selling out of the more radical sections of the movement. The DAN march and blockades had originally been slated to coincide with the official labour march. During the course of the afternoon, when the labour tops got wind of the tear gas and rubber bullets going on in the core of the city, they re-directed the entire march away from the original location, so as to make sure they would remain "respectable" (and receive a chance to negotiate at the table). The third event of significance is, of course, the emergence of the Black Bloc. The Black Bloc has also come to symbolise much of the movement, even if since Seattle it has remained physically a very small part. The BB represents, first and foremost, resistance. That it is, in the words of yesterday, "right to rebel". It also represents the "diversity of tactics" that has become a very large part of the movement up until this point. It also represents the "propaganda of the deed" that has succeeded so far in galvanising people in this movement. This has also given way to the "Tute Bianche" and other direct action coalitions (these "White Overalls" constitute an allegiance to Zapatism) which seek to challenge the legitimacy of locking us out of negotiations. In other words, their fighters are trying to defend democratic rights. Since that time, the state- whichever one was host to whichever conference- has not allowed people to actively stop their meetings. The movement has adjusted its tactics- very slightly and almost by accident- to enforcing the right to protest. In order to prevent people from disrupting the usual state of affairs (peaceful little meetings, etc), capitalist "democracies" have- the world over- removed our right to protest wherever we see fit in the name of "security". This has given the BB a very positive role to play in the demonstrations that have followed since Seattle. Then came the demo in Quebec, where the right of protest was single-handedly squashed by the state in an unconstitutional move. The Wall was built. The BB here helped tear it down, yet another manoeuvre that helped the movement with what has become the implicit strategy: the continuing delegitimation of the international ruling class and their murderous agenda of poverty, national and environmental subjugation, and the elimination of all restrictions on capital. The governments of globalisation and their masters have now got to contend with the fact that they can no longer hold a meeting to decide our fate without our response being immediate and clear. The Wall represented what lengths they will go to in defence of their number one agenda, even in Canada. Then came the G8 meeting in Genoa, Italy. The level of state repression involved in Italy was by far the worst that had been meted out so far. It was far more than simply murderous as well. The next G8 meeting is in Kananaskis, Alberta (near Calgary). Many people have begun to feel that the movement itself needs to confront the meeting directly. The first Spokescouncil meeting was held in Edmonton, Alberta recently. The basic tenor of the meeting fell around the two ideas: do we go into Kananaskis Valley and try to disrupt their meeting (where the location was obviously chosen for A) military purposes of how easy it is to defend, B) we would be dealing with a major demonstration on Nati0onal Park land that would inevitably cause major environmental damage. Or, the other choices are yet to be defined- from simply having a massive demonstration to taking on another form of direct action/confrontation of the G8 policies through another symbolic target. My bias is probably already clear: We need to steer clear of the Kananaskis Valley. It is highly admirable that people fear being seen as succumbing to retreat- but it is a false fear, UNLESS we do not go into "K Country" in order to do nothing. This movement has been successful around being as desperate in appearance (and as uncompromising) as the political and environmental situation warrants. However, thus far the major problem that we have faced as a movement has been the division among protesters into two march routes and two lines (reformist or revolutionary). The first speaker who spoke to what was needed was a unionist from Winnipeg. He was quite clear: we are not here to confront capitals' cops, but capital as enforced by cops. We have been a major influence on political discourse so far for all of the reasons outlined above, and not limited to just these reasons either. Mainly, the unifying features are all around things that coincide with why people feel increasingly disenfranchised; people are no longer receiving their leaders' cant about democracy and believing it. In the process of creating all of these international trade bodies, the international ruling class has threatened their talisman: democracy. Our defiance has caused them to repress increasingly- also giving the lie to their speeches about democracy. Finally, the results of "free trade" are becoming increasingly obvious as everyone continues to lose more and more from both their paycheques and their "democratic" franchise. As such, it would be utter suicide for the anti-globalisation movement to NOT be militant and confrontational. People have instinctively become vastly aware that capitalism's triumph is not beneficial to all- and people vote less and sigh petitions barely at all, since they know such actions are window dressing on the lie itself. The response to the total rejection of Oliver Twist politics of "please sir, can we have some more?" is so positive because people know that the directly defiant are the first hope since the collapse of the multi-polar world. The Wall in Quebec represented precisely the right target- it was an attack on democracy, and it was erected to shield their economic attacks on the entire hemisphere. Clearly, the reason so few people challenged the justness of tearing down the Wall was that it represented a "thus far and no further" statement by the population in Canada. Defiance resonates, and must continue. However- this is the key factor here- masses of people repeatedly throwing themselves into the machinations of the state, in order to protest the policies of global capital (when only one meeting means little) has now come very close to exhausting it's potential for further galvanisation of people. It was symbolic, and so be it: as Napoleon said (to paraphrase from memory) "the moral is to the material 3 to 1". The feeling that people do have a social power is wondrous and that lesson has been learned in the opening slavos of the struggle. But to repeat the tactic of trying to shut down the meeting- as the capitalists continue to move their struggles to more inaccessible places is utter suicide. It is a trap we must avoid at all costs. There are huge numbers of people who are going to fight the machinations of capital regardless. In these situations, we need to have targets that continue to be real and representative of the real issues. Stock exchanges cannot be moved out of city centres. Highways continue to be the major route for the transport of almost all goods across Canada. Finally, the best part is that the ports across the entire Western seaboard of North America are run by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), who have been the most actively supportive of direct action to confront "globalisation", having broken with Sweeney (and others) when they tried to sell-out the blockades at the front in Seattle and protesting through work stoppages the murder of our fighter Carlo Guiliani. We should consider immediately trying to arrange a total shut down of the ports, as well as a blockading of the transport highways. The target for the anarchists and others who want to take on a direct challenge to capitalism symbolically and militantly should involve the Stock Exchanges in calgary, the largest city in the same region as Kananaskis. We need not to "surrender" to the forces that be- but scare the Hell out of them, and give hope to others by changing our strategy to one of economic disruption. We need to be MORE militant, in that we move to a more disruptive symbol of what is wrong with globalisation- and finally: we need not to fall for the trap of being lured into fights which we cannot win, cannot survive and onto a plane in which the power of labour can be decisive and the Trade Union Bureaucrats, so far skittish and timid, will have but no choice to unleash the power of the worker or face an internal revolt. We can and will continue this struggle by advancing on our strengths: the targets we have chosen thus far (as well as the issues chosen- globalisation and trade packages decided by a few White Men in a small board room) have been absolutely correct- the line has given us global sympathy and international significance. The movement cannot move away from that at all. Here's to hoping we are becoming sophisticated enough to change our tactics to yet another area where the governments and capitalist that wish to smash us down cannot defeat us. Let us prove the most important lesson yet: That we have learned not to be a one track minded bunch- but that we know how to respond to their escalation. For an entire month of disruption- globally- next June in Alberta! Let us ignite the next series of sparks in the praries of Canada. Let us mature as rapidly as the economy is rotting the world over. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Sep 1 19:22:43 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] Cuban groups seek alternative trade gathering. Message-ID: <030c01c1334d$c47cdbe0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> AFP. 1 September 2001. Cuban groups seek alternative trade gathering. HAVANA -- Cuban trade unions and other groups are organizing a conference here to explore alternatives to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, newspapers reported Saturday. The conference will focus "on the channel of the extraordinary neoliberal antiglobalization movement that has shaken Seattle, Davos, Prague, Genoa and other scenes," the official Communist Party daily Granma said, citing places where violent antiglobalization protests coincided with meetings of world and financial leaders. The daily said the conference hoped to build on the protesters' concerns. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From debsian at pacbell.net Sun Sep 2 11:09:01 2001 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] hundreds of neo-nazis abotaged the protests at Genoa. Message-ID: <007801c133d1$f76a3a00$5201aace@oemcomputer> http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=61292&group=webcast It seems that the authorities deliberately allowed hundreds of neo-nazis into Italy to sabotage the protests at Genoa. http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=61352&group=webcast See also Six-hundred nazi infiltrators in Genoa. Ex-chief of Genoa Police confirms http://www.indymedia.org:8081 Six-hundred nazi infiltrators in Genoa. Ex-chief of Genoa Police confirms (english) by Wu Ming 1 11:04am Sat Sep 1 '01 (Modified on 11:36pm Sat Sep 1 '01) roberto.bui@libero.it Mr.Colucci interrogation by the parliamentary committe investigating violence in Genoa casts new light upon nazi infiltrations >From "Il Secolo XIX" (Genoa daily paper), saturday 1 September 2001: EX-CHIEF OF POLICE COLUCCI SAYS: 600 NAZI INFILTRATORS WERE IN GENOA He confirmed the same news he had denied one month ago. Camouflaged neonazis among the peaceful protesters of the Genoa Social Forum. Yet another resounding revelation, including even a precise figure: six-hundred infiltrators. The former Questore [local chief of police] Colucci (whom the Ministry of Internal Affairs sacked after the July 20-21 riots) stated this during the 7-hour long interview in front of the Parliamentary Committee investigating G8-related events. This officialy confirms the presence of groups of far-rightist provocateurs. The GSF had given the alarm in the days of the demonstrations. Even ten days before the summit, "Il Secolo XIX" had published confidential police files on potential infiltrations. For the first time Colucci was explicit about neonazis. He answered a question by PRC [communist] congresswoman Graziella Mascia: "You received intelligence reports on ultra-right groups planning to join the demonstrations, why did you not stop them?". The former chief of police said: "As far as I know the six-hundred ultra-right infiltrators did not take part to violent action on the territory". Those few words, "six hundred ultra-right infiltrators", open our eyes to a wider landscape. The previous report on the movement's street action, which Colucci himself delivered to the officers in charge, contained no such reference. The report is dated "July 12th", and the Committee has cited it several times. Not only it provided the police with the exact number of Black Bloc activists coming to town (there is a reference to "500 Britons"): it also went: "Some Turin members of Forza Nuova [the most "popular" Italian Neo-fascist party, t.n.] will form groups of 25-30 trustworthy militants in order to infiltrate the so-called White Overalls. These groups will attack the police with cold steel and discredit the left-wing". Never the less, on July 25th Colucci himself turned down dozens of eye-witness accounts on the presence of nazis, right-wing skinheads and hooligans. He said: "There is absolutely no evidence that far-rightists infiltrated the demonstrations. That report was prior to the G8 summit and was about _potential_ risks such as infiltrations. Nothing like that actually took place." Official denials were sent out by ultra-right groups Forza Nuova and Fronte Nazionale. And yet Biagio Cacciola, leader of neo-fascist FUAN, had admitted that 300 of "our boys" were in the streets of Genoa. And yet free-lance journalist Mauro Bocci had interviewed and photographed a young British nazi in the Black Bloc, nicknamed "Doggy", who told him: "I don't give a shit about the G8, our Italian brothers invited us and we came!". Moreover, during the demonstrations a social worker from Emilia-Romagna told Vittorio Agnoletto [spokesperson of the GSF, t.n.] she had seen some of the people she assisted (belonging to neo-fascist groups) on two coaches along with their fellows. According to the GSF, sixty of them camped at Valbisagno (where most Black Blocsters camped too). Some WWF members spotted a group of AC Inter tifosi approaching a demo. They wore fascist ornaments on their jackets, such as swastikas, celtic crosses etc. However, the most incredible news came from the Bolzaneto police station: the photocameras of two German men under arrest, who were charged with being part of the Black Bloc and are still in jail, contained films with pictures of the Genoa riots and... pictures of Nazi rallies recently occurred in Germany. Graziella Mascia said: "I asked Colucci why he did not warned the GSF about the presence of nazi infiltrators. He replied that that was not his duty. Now it is clear that he certainly underestimated the danger, either purposefully or not. Nobody was interested in protecting the citizens who were going to demonstrate. They only thought of the Red Zone." Giovanni Mari www.wumingfoundation.com add your own comments so, white overalls where infiltrated too (english) by papillon 3:33pm Sat Sep 1 '01 where is the people who spoke about the Black Block saying it was fully infiltrated? So, white-overalls and pacifists where infiltrated too, their police methods were not sucessfull. And now? who can criticize the Black Block anti-authoritarian methods? The original news report (Italian) (english) by . 5:31pm Sat Sep 1 '01 http://www.ilsecoloxix.it/giornale/pagine.asp (Il Secola XIX Home page) http://www.ilsecoloxix.it/giornale/frames/paginecorpo.asp?ultdata=20010901& s ezione=pri (Box Story) http://www.ilsecoloxix.it/giornale/frames/paginecorpo.asp?ultdata=20010901& s ezione=ita (Full Story) Other interesting stories on the police violence in this paper also. Nazis could not infiltrate the white overalls (english) by Wu Ming 1 8:22pm Sat Sep 1 '01 roberto.bui@libero.it A few days before the Genoa demonstrations, we all decided not to wear the overalls and swich back to plain clothes, as everybody who was in Genoa perfectly knows. This must have puzzled the fascists who where about to mimic our sartorial style. Try to figure out nazis in white injuring or even killing a cop! I guess they had to throw their jumpsuits in the trashcans. They infiltrated the Black Bloc, instead, as witnessed by numberless people. The concrete evidence of this is the presence of Liam "Doggy" Stevens, a 26-year-old nazi from Birmingham, UK, in the middle of the riot in via Canaregis, and the two German fake Black Blocsters under arrest had a shitload of pics from nazi conventions recently held in their beloved fatherland. Soon after the two German guys were arrested, some lawyers of the GSF got suspicious. They got to know that the German counsels hired by the families were notorious ultra-right lawyers, who usually defend NPD militants, nazi skinheads etc. In plain words, the Black Bloc WAS infiltrated. No way anyone can deny this. I understand that, in the hot days after the police raided the IMC and the schools in via Battisti, people who weren't in Genoa might suspect we were spreading yet another crazy conspiracy theory, but now, nearly two months have passed and the evidence is coming to the surface. ******** ****** The A-Infos News Service ****** News about and of interest to anarchists ****** COMMANDS: lists@ainfos.ca REPLIES: a-infos-d@ainfos.ca HELP: a-infos-org@ainfos.ca WWW: http://www.ainfos.ca/ INFO: http://www.ainfos.ca/org -To receive a-infos in one language only mail lists@ainfos.ca the message: unsubscribe a-infos subscribe a-infos-X where X = en, ca, de, fr, etc. (i.e. the language code) From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 00:38:25 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] hundreds of neo-nazis abotaged the protests at Genoa. References: <007801c133d1$f76a3a00$5201aace@oemcomputer> Message-ID: <002201c135d5$5e20d240$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" This list has, thankfully, maintained a healthy and comradely debate among varying tendencies. I prefer this low (and apparently- I mean LOW!) volume of this to a sparring match among a small but growing radicalism in the First World. With that in mind, I wanted to ask people here to posit what we can suggest to the most militant at these demonstrations against globalisation. What has happened in Genoa can be seen as a warning; only one dead body could be viewed as our chance to clean up (or, better put, refine) our act before another act by the state of this variety. My prejudice should be quite clear by now: The only way one can be sure they will not meet with murderous repression of the Genoa variety is simple. Never attack capitalism. Do not challenge the fundamental structures of the corporate elite and we have no problem- there is no counter attack by the capitalists. It is simply reality that has my thinking challenged on this question: we have no movement if the key component of "resistance" is removed. As such, we need to find a way to offer a way out of the situation that is emerging: The ability of the state to assault us with little we can do. In the course of the debates we carry on- even those of us who debate these matters with respect vis-a-vis "Black Bloc" and other resistance comrades- we tend to approach the matter as if we are the only people who have noticed the great challenge faced by those who practice such a tactic as carried on by the Black Bloc, and that these people don't see a difference the next day. I remain of the mindset that the signature Black Bloc tactic- the symbolic smashing of corporate property- is wholly counter-productive now (if it wasn't to begin with- something I'm not as sure of any longer). Essentially what is going to happen is simple: "Anarchists" (which involves a catch phrase including many many people- such as the Turkish Comrades in Genoa) who are going to militantly assert the right to protest, even inside a previously demarcated zone by the police. This is simply a statement of fact, it will be seen in three weeks in D.C. We need to excel at the main task, then: A synthesis of understanding/actions that will allow these comrades the maximum protection while they carry out their chosen front (one that remains at the heart of the "attraction" for the movement for much of the population)- and one that demands and includes some assurance that A) they can deal on the ground with infiltrators, and B) allow no one to divide us on any other level nor attack other parts of the grouping. I wish to think in terms of strategy in a follow up post. Macdonald ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 00:59:53 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] Strategy for an international movement. Message-ID: <003601c135d8$5e1929c0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> There has been- thankfully- a lot of talk about strategy for the anti-globalisation movement among at least the Red lists as of late. I can't believe this is a singular phenomenon. What the tendency is- one that has always been correct in my view, until now- has been to try very heavily to draw on prior movements and lessons (both of successes and failures) for today. What is needed first- is tom realise something certain comrades (and sisters and brothers) don't really want to come to terms with, for egoistically selfish reasons. We are witnessing a movement emerging throughout the entire first world. It's charachter cannot be defined in national terms. Unlike the silliness I've heard about Hardt -Negri (and I will read this silliness myself for the nuggets that might be contained within), I do see the US as the major Imperialist State, and I do think we can rightly call the enemy far more than logos (ala N. Klein), and that it can indeed be given a physical form. All else is empty theorising, quite frankly. This rebut to the H-N stuff, however, if it stops there- from the point of view of the anti-globalisation movement- is weak and desperately needing of more input. We have people emerging who see themselves as part of something far bigger than the limitations of the nation-state, a supra-national consciousness is emerging. This is the most powerful and dare I say for the bourgeois- most frightening- aspect of the entire movement(s) as we see them now. That's why I am viciously opposed to protectionistic crap about China/WTO more than usual. How can such a movement, still operating on the fronts that exist within nation states, continue to advance and refine itself into something closer to the monolithic power it will need to be in order to smash the Imperialist blood drenched machinery? This is where we need to begin talking. As such, all strategy needs to remain in the mind clearly supra-national, but the question is around what? (I balk at using the term "Internationalist"for two reasons: 1: the movement remains mired in the first world- and with such a placement in the collective consciousness- despite the murder of our comrades in Papau New Guinea- the participants and actors are not Internationalist in the sense of the word that I demand from those who use it, 2: The movement has almost ZERO theoreticians yet who properly understand what Imperialism actually does, such as the IMF conquering of Yugoslavia was the first anti-globalisation war- led by the SPS....and now Tahir is going to yell at me :-)) What I find over and over again, is that the movement is already on top of what seems the best strategic orientation: the institutions of globalisation, such as the G8, IMF, WTO, etc... that are impoverishing us all, and creating the Third Worldisation of the first world. Nothing short of this can do both the maintaining of a broad "popular front" of peoples that we need to maintain- such as (In canada where I live keeping the Council of Canadians people working along side anarchists from many Black Flag traditions). I am coming to a conclusion that seems like I'm copping out or being defensive to me- and it's my conclusion, so I can imagine the impact it has on others- but nonetheless, it seems that what is needed is some basic honing of the anti-"globalisation" education (in the form of carrying out mass teach-ins of differing varieties), while working towards some singular demands that capture both the institutional, supra state target and confront the very existence of the whole machinery itself. I'd love to hear some other ideas on this. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 01:35:43 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] forwarded from Socialist Register Message-ID: <006a01c135dd$5f684cc0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Not that I endorse the post in it's entirety, but that it is in our interest to further debate... Macdonald ---- : COMMENT: : Some things never change. During the 1960s, the Monthly Review : routinely tail-ended the student-based Maoism that destroyed the : radical movement and now it refuses to take a clear Leninist position : against ultraleftism. My guess is that Epstein was part of this : milieu 30 years ago and feels comfortable coddling the Black Bloc : today. The notion that they have "MODULATED THEIR ACTIONS" is utterly : preposterous, especially after Genoa. If somebody at MR had exercised : a little editorial discretion, this howler might not have made it : into print. Interesting. I didn't realize Monthly Review had a duty to take a "clear Leninist position" for or against anything (not that publications that do can seem to agree on what such clarity entails). But how did you take it that Epstein was "coddling" the Black Bloc? Except for the lack of an outright denunciation, I didn't read that in her article. (And I'm not sure how your guesswork about her milieu in the 1960s contributes to the critique here...) : BARBARA EPSTEIN: : It seems to me that the importance of the current debate over : violence, in the anti-globalization movement, lies less in whether or : not the opponents of violence to property prevail, and more in what : kind of ethical guidelines the movement sets for itself. What is : important is whether the movement establishes an image of expressing : rage for its own sake, or of acting according to an ethical vision. : : COMMENT: : This misses the point entirely. The polarity of "expressing rage for : its own sake" or "acting according to an ethical vision" omits the : most important question of all for Marxists--namely, the potential of : the movement to involve the heavy battalions of the working class. To Hold on a minute -- the question of the movement's potential to involve the working class is not the same question as the debate over violence. One may as well criticize my desk lamp for not brewing my coffee. Or, is the *only* point to be had that of whether or not the working class is or can be involved, such that other questions and debates only make sense through this one? So for example violence is okay, but only if the working class is doing it? Or, it's not okay, but only if it's the working class that's not doing it? More seriously though, this begs the question of whether we should give any movement an A+ for just involving the "heavy batallions of the working class"... the fascists and National Socialists most immediately come to mind. I agree with Epstein that there *has* to be an ethics involved here beyond the class identity of those being violent. : do so, tactics will have to be geared less to the appetites of : frustrated middle-class youth and more to the needs of less : politicized people. Furthermore, the "anti-globalization" movement : will have to evolve a demand that has the kind of cutting-edge : clarity of the Vietnam antiwar movement of the movement to legalize : abortion. As long as the goals remain a hodge-podge reflecting the : needs of reformist NGO's, the protectionist bureaucracy of the labor : movement, and impatient post-adolescent boys, it will inevitably be : dragged into whatever militant tactic the more audacious fragment of : the movement cooks up on the spot. If there was a clear demand, then : more attention would be paid on drawing in new forces rather than : titillating the media through adventurist tactics. Essentially this The trouble is that this movement *can't* formulate a clear demand. Those you mention above are easy: a war is an easily-conceivable, singular issue in the popular consciousness that many people can be "clearly" in opposition to for vastly different reasons. Liberals might not like the tactics of the military in this instance only; Christians might be holding out for a Just War; pacifists don't like it regardless; some people might support the other side; the war could be imperialist; etc. etc. etc. The abortion issue is similarly singular, and success in either case means a relatively small change in the overall stability of the economy and the political system for those involved in the movements. In the instance of *this* movement, it's so disparate that in most instances they haven't even named themselves but have been labeled by the press, such that in Mexico they're "globalifobicos", in the U.S. they're "anti-globalization" (which was a coup for the G-8 et al, IMHO, as it makes them sound more luddite and unreflective than most of them are), and in the UK they're "anti-capitalist" (which is probably more accurate for European protesters than for the Americans). They only broadly know what they're in agreement against -- several particular institutions of global finance -- but it's unclear whether or not most are even opposed to the institutions as such, or merely the particularly harsh structural adjustment and anti-environmental policies they are currently imposing on the rest of the world. Ought we to welcome the splintering and disunity that would occur if they were made to clearly articulate a specific target (and, presumably, a detailed alternative model of globalization they can all agree on) before they're ready? Or should we hope that the greater clarity of vision and purpose develops organically through participation in the movement itself? : BARBARA EPSTEIN: : The traditional socialist left in the United States now mostly : consists of several magazines and journals, a few annual conferences, : a small number of intellectuals. : : COMMENTARY: : The tunnel vision found in the above sentence makes me spitting mad. : Basically what she is saying is that the socialist left in the USA is : equivalent to the ingrown pack of tenured professors who publish in : MR, SR, etc. and speak at the Socialist Scholars Conference. This is : a fucking slap in the face to all those people who did not get : dissertations and cushy jobs in the 1970s or 80s but who went out and : did the messy and frustrating job of defending Nicaragua, El Salvador : or the African revolution. Or who built militant trade union caucuses : in auto, teamsters and urban transportation unions, etc. Or who work Sure, but note that she said "now", not in the 1970s and 1980s, and "mostly" -- a qualifier which may or may not be correct, but is an important qualifier nonetheless. And as I was listening to the Teamsters cheer President Gump on Labor Day, and the President speaking fondly of his relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, I wondered where the militant, "Traditional Left" component of the Teamsters was... I'm sure it's there, but I think what was meant by this section of the article (I think it's reasonably clear in context) was that academia and certain media outlets are the places the Left is most prominent today -- NOT in the streets, and it is there that it is in need of revival. : movement. As we used to say in the Trotskyist movement, it doesn't : challenge the system to break a window. It is far more important to : break illusions. For that patient explanation is requred. Okay -- well, it *can* challenge it, but it sure won't change it. Yet -- and I'll mention Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the African revolutions, since they were brought up above -- sometimes the first crack in the illusion *is* a broken window. (And in some places -- Chiapas, for example -- the windows had to get broken before anybody even paid attention.) As a sidenote, I'd also suggest that the American public has become quite adept at ignoring the patient explanations of Trotskyists. (In fact, they've become quite adept at ignoring the patient explanations of anyone, about anything... but a discussion of social ADD is for another time.) :[...] : When tenured left professors who have not made a leaflet in the past : 30 years or sat at a table on a Saturday afternoon collecting : signatures against contra funding end up speaking in the name of the : left, they are kidding nobody but themselves. Oh, boy -- I trust these hypothetical professors in question wouldn't include Epstein?? Of course, one could make a similar assumption, that folks privileged enough to be spending much of their time on computers sending daily email messages to lists of other computer-enabled leftists must be isolated, wealthy individuals who haven't made a leaflet in the past 30 years, didn't actively oppose the wars in Central America or Iraq, and are sitting comfortably in their leather desk chairs speaking for Marxism without having any real contact with existing social struggles. But then, I have a strong suspicion that this too would be mistaken. : BARBARA EPSTEIN: : Though the anti-globalization movement has developed good relations : with many trade union activists, it is hard to imagine a firm : alliance between labor and the anti-globalization movement without : firmer structures of decision-making and accountability than now : exist. An alliance among the anti-globalization movement and : organizations of color, and labor, would require major political : shifts within the latter. But it would also probably require some : relaxation of anti-bureaucratic and anti-hierarchical principles on : the part of activists in the anti-globalization movement. : : COMMENT: : This is an evasion of the central question. You now have a stubborn No, it's a different question. Not everything is an evasion... : tendency as represented by the Black Bloc (and the white coveralls to : a certain degree) to turn each of these demonstrations into a kind of : street theater version of an insurrection. This is their sole : interest. Unless the broader forces come to terms with the kind of : impasse this has led to, then the movement will face more and more : provocations. And more and more police attacks. That the Monthly : Review cannot put this into unambiguous terms is singularly : depressing. Why? Except for the agreed opposition to the existing WTO/World Bank/IMF policies, there is nothing unambiguous about this movement, especially not the anarchist participation in it (which goes far beyond the Black Bloc into the loose structure of the movement itself -- the Black Bloc was not the focus of Epstein's article). : In contract, the latest Canadian Dimension has such an : article and more credit to them for having the guts to go against the : current. Can you post the article? -Justin Paulson Eugene, OR ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 01:44:04 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] Globalization's Diverse Foes Message-ID: <007e01c135de$898e49e0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Globalization's Diverse Foes Wide Range of Protesters Unites Against IMF, World Bank By Manny Fernandez Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, September 5, 2001; Page B01 Dave Zirin and Pete Capano have never met, but they share a common struggle. Zirin has been organizing meetings with his Latino neighbors in Washington's Mount Pleasant community, talking to them about fighting the Goliaths of globalization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Capano has been spreading the word about the two institutions in Lynn, Mass., arranging a bus caravan to head to Washington with fellow union members eager to give the world's bankers an earful. Zirin is 27 and a D.C. public elementary school teacher taking a year off in large part to devote more time to fighting global capitalism. Capano is 43 and an air-conditioning mechanic at a General Electric Co. plant in Lynn. He took a 12-hour bus ride to Quebec in April to protest a summit of trade leaders, and it turned into a family outing -- his 16-year-old daughter marched alongside him. "We used to look at it as a bunch of old union guys trying to save their jobs, but it's really more than that now," Capano said. "It's sort of becoming one large movement against globalization the way it's practiced today." Zirin and Capano are but two faces of a population that defies categorization -- anti-globalization protesters. As the gulf between the rich and poor widens nationally and abroad, the racial, economic and age diversity of the demonstrators has increased. There is no stereotypical globalization buster; those who rally against the gatekeepers of global finance are as likely to wear wedding bands as they are to wear nose rings. Tens of thousands -- no one knows exactly how many -- plan to turn the nation's capital into a melting pot of dissent at month's end to show opposition to the IMF and World Bank during their annual meetings. The issues sparking such a turnout center on the lending policies of two international financial institutions that organizers say strangle developing countries with debt and benefit multinational corporations at the expense of the impoverished and the environment. The international move to change those policies has grown in size, sophistication and diversity, building strength by attracting union organizers, churchgoers, environmentalists, high school and college students, left-leaning activists, neighborhood leaders and anarchists. "This is the early stage of the first-ever global revolution," said Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based group at the forefront. "It's a values revolution, shifting from money values to life values." Protesters are drawn for various reasons. Some have spent a lifetime in social activism, protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s and South African apartheid in the 1980s. Many newcomers were stirred by something they read and then researched. What unites them is a sense that something has gone wrong in the 21st century and that it can be traced directly or indirectly to international economic bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank or the World Trade Organization. Danaher said: "There are two basic world views: Their world view is that you subordinate society and nature to the economy. And we say, subordinate the economy to society and nature. It's understandable that bankers would have trouble with this concept." The IMF and World Bank dispute such arguments. Officials have said that the demonstrators' characterizations are grossly inaccurate, and they point to a program that provides billions of dollars in debt relief to impoverished countries as one of many ways that they help reduce poverty. The protesters' arguments have shaped a movement that has its own intellectual culture and jargon. Activists think up jokes and write chants. The Internet serves as their bulletin board, telephone and door-to-door fundraiser. They post scores of e-mail manifestos about where the movement is or isn't headed. These are bookish dissenters, speaking not of the Man or the System, but of the Economy. Virtually everyone knows the names of the IMF managing director and World Bank president, and some could write informed essays on the effect of bank user fees on primary health care in Tanzania. Some have. Nathan Wyeth, 16, has been busy lately, juggling conference calls with fellow student activists and attending organizing meetings. It's easier to handle in the summer, when he doesn't have homework, he said. Wyeth is a junior at St. Albans School for Boys in Northwest Washington and a national coordinator of the student-run arm of the Sierra Club. "These rules are being written for the new global economy, with these trade agreements being written with corporate interests at heart, and they're written to facilitate the movement of money and to facilitate corporations doing business," said Wyeth, who got involved after developing an interest in environmental issues about two years ago. When the Sierra Student Coalition organized a trip to the Quebec demonstrations, his mother told him the only way he was going to spend a weekend at an international protest was if she went with him. He took her up on the offer, and he was back in school the following Monday. Jen Cohn, 24, manages her class work and organizing similarly. Cohn is a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania who is helping set up health clinic tents for protesters who might suffer from dehydration or might be injured in run-ins with police. "Use of chemical weapons -- any police weapons, whether it's tear gas or rubber bullets -- is a public health issue and should be addressed as such," said Cohn, who has worked for several years in the HIV/AIDS community. Cohn traveled to Washington in April 2000 to demonstrate during the city's first major battle over global capitalism, the A16 protests, named after the main day of the demonstrations. She said a police officer sprayed her with pepper spray. "A medic came and washed out my eyes," she said, adding that she was grateful for the help of someone she never saw again. Daniel Holstein, 26, is a Washington waiter who lectures co-workers about the perils of free-market theory. Holstein, an organizer with the Mobilization for Global Justice, one of the main protest coalitions, has participated in demonstrations involving D.C. General Hospital and the commission that sponsors presidential debates. He sums up his philosophy: "Life is not about the endless pursuit of money. Period." Spreading the Word Wyeth, Cohn and Holstein are just a few helping to plan this year's round of demonstrations, organizing that is now in high gear in Washington. Anarchists seeking capitalism's extinction, Unitarian Universalists concerned with social justice and high school students who, like Wyeth, are still taking driver's education courses have been spreading their messages. David Taylor, 23, a Unitarian Universalist, traveled from Oakland, Calif., to take part. He moved in with friends in the District last week to help the Mobilization. He now staffs the coalition's phone line. "Our economic and political systems place more value in the accumulation of wealth than in the dignity of people," Taylor said. "I found a real contradiction between the values I was taught in my religious community and the values I saw portrayed not just by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, but by our political system and the parties involved in them." Other activists who are planning a Latin American solidarity march on Sept. 29 say they have seen shared strength in calls from Kansas and Ohio, from supporters who plan to come. Online donations and e-mail requests for housing assistance keep flooding the Internet site of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, said a member of the District-based network of anarchists who seek the abolition of the IMF and World Bank. Members of the Mobilization have met virtually every day in small and large groups to discuss logistics and to craft props, including a big cardboard dragon and various signs and puppets being built in the garage of a Takoma Park home. The last weekend of this month is the focal point for organizers; IMF and World Bank officials decided to drastically consolidate their meeting schedule because of security concerns. The International Action Center, an organization based in New York City with offices across the country, plans a march that is to surround the White House on Sept. 29. And on Sept. 30, several groups plan to rally at the IMF and World Bank headquarters off Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Events geared toward area issues are also part of the bill, including the People's Repo, a four-day squatters summit to focus on gentrification issues. Panel discussions, concerts, candlelight vigils and teach-ins are scheduled as well. Protesters say they hope the gathering turns out to be the biggest anti-globalization demonstration in the United States since tens of thousands disrupted a summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999 and gave the movement momentum. Organizers said they plan peaceful rallies, but some say that a movement rooted in anti-authoritarianism is not about to start policing its participants. Law enforcement agencies say that worries them. They say they have gathered intelligence that the Washington demonstration -- like those since Seattle that have rocked Prague, Quebec and Genoa, Italy -- have the potential for violence. They are taking unprecedented precautions, tentatively planning a nine-foot-high fence around a section of downtown Washington to keep protesters out. Organizers have called the proposed security zone and police buildup -- including recruiting thousands of outside police -- a waste of tax money and an attempt to keep protesters away. Activists say it won't work. And they are trying to shift focus from the police to District neighborhoods, where they seek to increase support. Some African American leaders who fought against privatizing D.C. General Hospital have joined the global battle, the result of protesters pushing to form alliances with area activists. When D.C. General protesters shut down a meeting of the D.C. financial control board this year, IMF and World Bank protesters were there to pitch in people and attitude. Zirin has been spending his days turning the global into the local on the Unite the Fight tour, an attempt by the Mobilization to reach out to neighborhoods. One evening last month, Zirin and others brought the tour to a Methodist church auditorium in Columbia Heights. Zirin hoped that a half-dozen community activists would show up, but by the start of the meeting, about 50 sat in folding chairs, a mix of neighborhood leaders, health care workers, death penalty opponents and anti-capitalists. Sonia Umanzor, of El Salvador's left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), said she wanted finance ministers to face crowds so large that they would have to use the back door to get to their meetings. After the meeting, Zirin lingered outside the church, grinning. "You had black, white and Latinos, all in the same room," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen, the United States has a Left. Call mom." Zirin studied labor history at Macalester College in Minnesota but tired of reading about it and wanted to make it. He joined the International Socialist Organization at 19. "I see this movement as a vehicle for creating a different kind of world," Zirin said. Capano sees his involvement in much the same way: "It seems like there's this economic battle brewing within each country . . . where workers everywhere suffer the effects of the policies that they're implementing." Capano, a leader of the electrical workers union, is only one of many labor organizers coming to Washington for the protests. The AFL-CIO, which has spoken out against the IMF and World Bank for undermining labor protections in developing countries, has thrown its support behind the demonstrations, helping to organize the massive Sept. 30 rally. A Dramatic Shift It will be a dramatic change from the early years, said Washington activist Njoki Njoroge Njehu. She remembers when only a few dozen gathered outside the IMF and World Bank headquarters to protest the institutions' policies in April 1999. A year later, more than 20,000 demonstrators protested on those same streets. What happened was largely due to the spirit of Seattle, protesters say. More than 30,000 demonstrators succeeded in shutting down the WTO meeting in November 1999. For many, Njehu said, the movement runs far deeper than the television images that most people saw. Njehu, 35, says she visits her family in Kenya, and while everything crumbles -- roads, schools, reliable health care -- international debt remains. Canceling such debt for poor countries is an economic as well as moral issue, she said. "What is at issue here is the heart and soul and the morality and values of the international community," said Njehu, director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, a longtime critic of the IMF and World Bank. In July, more than two months before the upcoming protests, Njehu wasn't surprised to find about 40 men and women from a smattering of ages and races at a general meeting of the Mobilization for Global Justice, of which she is a member. Everyone gathered in a community room at a Mount Pleasant church, where the evening's handwritten agenda was taped to a pillar in the center of the room. The discussion included fundraising, logistics and the environmental racism that members of the group said was inherent in the care of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. At the meeting, they passed around an envelope hastily scrawled with a dollar sign to raise cash for the Washington protests. And despite the talk of revolution that filled the room, they put away the chairs before heading home. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Wed Sep 5 01:50:24 2001 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa Message-ID: <002701c135df$6d8b2820$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Here is the statement of the 'League for the Revolutionary Party/ Communist Organization for the Fourth International' (LRP-US/COFI) on Genoa. The statement will be published in the upcoming LRP-magazine 'Proletarian Revolution': > > > Protest and Repression in Genoa > > > > > > The leaders of world imperialism met in Genoa, Italy in July to render > > > more orderly their profit-grubbing exploitation and bloody repression of > > > working people across the world. Given the deepening crisis of > > > capitalism, they have redoubled their attack upon us. > > > > > > But we are not just victims. In response to the accelerated capitalist > > > attack, the struggle spearheaded by the working class has burst out in > > > renewed fury all across the "South," from Argentina to Zimbabwe. And it > > > is spreading to the imperialist North. The recent "anti-globalization" > > > demonstrations are symbols, reflections and byblows of the mass > > > uprisings now developing across the planet. > > > > > > The protests in Genoa against the G8 summit marked a turning point in > > > these demonstrations. In size, political consciousness and combativity, > > > they qualitatively outstripped all other "post-Seattle" eruptions. Most > > > significantly, for the first time angry young workers turned out on > > > their own volition in large numbers. > > > > > > In turn, the repressive brutality by the mercenary tools of the > > > imperialist statesmen massively escalated. The conclave took place > > > behind a huge steel-reinforced wall and was "protected" by > > > surface-to-air missiles, helicopters, tear gas, water cannon, live > > > ammunition, armored vehicles and thousands of police thugs. Provocateurs > > > infiltrated the ranks of the protestors. Cops mercilessly beat pacifist > > > as well as militant protestors in an indiscriminate orgy of violence. > > > Bought-and-paid-for police scum were joined by openly fascist police > > > scum. Even before the protest, the imperialists signalled their > > > willingness to use armed power; they clearly were sending a message. > > > > > > Carlo Giuliani was not the first comrade to be killed in the current > > > round of struggles. Class warriors in Latin America, Africa and Asia > > > have been murdered as well; but of course the capitalist media take more > > > account of the death of a white European. In spite of that, Carlo's > > > death is very important; he was a young working-class fighter and his > > > life was precious. And it symbolizes the class struggle being waged in > > > the imperialist countries. He was not murdered for his particular views, > > > but because the imperialist rulers, forced to cower behind their walls, > > > were delivering their message to the workers of the world: "Continue to > > > assert your human dignity and rise up against our pillage and we will > > > crush you without mercy!" > > > > > > The reason the imperialists can accelerate exploiting the > > > international working class is due to the capitulatory conduct of the > > > labor bureaucrats around the world. By restraining the masses, they have > > > allowed the ruling classes to boost its attack. > > > > > > The power of the labor bureaucracyt derives from its domination over > > > the strategically vital and organized centers of the working class. It > > > is not simply numbers alone. Workers are organized by the work process > > > itself and brought into direct clash with the bosses and their > > > profit-making. The inevitability of capitalist state intervention in > > > defense of property and profits inexorably poses the question of which > > > of the two basic class forces in society will rule. > > > > > > Crucially, such struggles develop class consciousness and fit the > > > working class to rule. The bureaucrats are capitalism's labor > > > lieutenants acting to preserve the system by undermining the only > > > struggle than can overthrow it and create a better world. The > > > bureaucracy cripples not only the struggles erupting in mines and mills > > > around the world, but also protests like Genoa. > > > > > > By omission and commission, the labor bureaucracy has undermined the > > > potential impact of the series of anti-globalization protests. In Genoa, > > > instead of stepping up their efforts in the wake of Carlo's murder, the > > > Italian CGIL labor bureaucrats cancelled their promised mobilization. A > > > general strike and a massive display of force on the streets of Genoa > > > could have turned the whole event around. If the unions had fighting > > > leaders, they could have mobilized and led the protests in the first > > > place. Organized, armed and trained battalions of workers present on the > > > scene, leading the 300,000 demonstrators, could have forced the > > > mercenary troops to back down. > > > > > > Such workers' legions could do what thousands of middle-class elements > > > (and even thousands of unmobilized and untrained young workers) could > > > not do. The middle class lacks social cohesion and power. In the power > > > vacuum left by the bureaucracy, this inherent lack of discipline has > > > been turned into near-chaos in Genoa. Do-your-own-thing "diversity" and > > > "affinity group" policies were perpetrated by the reformist NGO and > > > campaign group chieftains, as well as by the autonomist Ya Basta and the > > > anarchist Black Bloc leaders. Such tactics were a boon for the organized > > > police hoodlums. In Genoa, although the imperialists' intentions were > > > broadcast beforehand, the failure to warn the young protestors in > > > advance, along with the lack of a disciplined response, was particularly > > > criminal. The "far left" leaderships and their "red blocs" acted no > > > better. > > > > > > The idea of an assault on the "red zone" around the conclave was > > > particularly dangerous. The more adventurist leaders sought to take > > > advantage of the ardent desire of some of the best militants to take the > > > imperialist summit apart by urging an attack which, given the balance of > > > arms, could only have been suicidal. Cannon fodder do not make > > > revolutions; conscious and disciplined fighters do. > > > > > > The present leadership of the working class, the trade union > > > bureaucrats and their camp followers in the reformist parties are more > > > frightened of mass upheavals than they are of the imperialist police. > > > Revolutionaries will fight side by side with their fellow workers in > > > every struggle that they can against the capitalists - including in > > > symbolic protests like Genoa. At the same time, they will point out the > > > lessons of those struggles - the necessity for united mass actions and > > > general strikes - through which the international working class can lead > > > all the exploited and oppressed and really challenge bourgeois state > > > power. Authentic communists will never fail to expose the present > > > misleaders of our class and to raise the cry of the revolutionary > > > proletariat to re-create the Fourth International!? > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 02:41:21 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa References: <002701c135df$6d8b2820$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Message-ID: <00f201c135e6$8a67e760$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Sorry, Johannes but: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Johannes Schneider" > Authentic communists will never fail to expose the present > misleaders of our class and to raise the cry of the revolutionary > proletariat to re-create the Fourth International!? Is a hopelessly misplaced final call. We need not to ressurect the titles and traditions of these projects. We need to get way-y-y-y-y beyond this kind of stuff. It is really gratifying to see people who call themselves Marxists (aside from the almost always agreeable WWP) stop with the "blame yourselves" stuff (although it edges on it a little) and call the murders just that. It is high time that we all moved onto a level of Internationalism- as the article gets at- based on revolutionary thinking, but not in the shackles of a third or fourth international. That, thank goodness, is de facto dead. Macdonald _______________________________________ ________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From twood at uwc.ac.za Wed Sep 5 02:47:28 2001 From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] Strategy for an international movement. Message-ID: >>> mstainsby@tao.ca 09/05/01 08:59AM >>> The movement has almost ZERO theoreticians yet who properly understand what Imperialism actually does, such as the IMF conquering of Yugoslavia was the first anti-globalisation war- led by the SPS....and now Tahir is going to yell at me :-)) Tahir: Me yell? No I want to raise a much more fundamental question with you Mac, one which we debated on aut-op-sy a little while back. Should we be anti-globalisation at all? Frankly I'm a convert to the pro-globalisation position, precisely because of the type of argument that your statements above reflect. 'Anti-imperialism' is a defence of repressive regimes of various kinds ranging from Iran, Iraq to North Korea, etc. It's not all about your cuddly little Cuba. Most of these countries have slaughtered communists in thousands. The movement that I'm seeing, as opposed to what you're seeing, is not an anti-imperialist one in some Leninist sense, but an anti-capitalist one. And at least there I am in agreement with Negri. People are and should be globalising against capitalism. This is not yelling, this is a theoretical and practical question of the greatest importance. And all your heartfelt pleas for common strategy etc will mean nothing without some agreement on such fundamental issues. If anything will destroy the movement it's having to march alongside people who are saying Viva Saddam, Viva Milosovec, etc. From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Wed Sep 5 02:51:28 2001 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa References: <002701c135df$6d8b2820$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> <00f201c135e6$8a67e760$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <009601c135e7$f3ccfe60$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> > Sorry, Johannes but: > Just for the record: I merely forwarded the LRP statement. Johannes From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Wed Sep 5 03:43:23 2001 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:54 2006 Subject: [R-G] Courting ATTAC? Message-ID: <00d401c135ef$34a578c0$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> The piece below is from the Financial Times webpage. I am not sure, what to make out of it, but I tend to agree with the last paragraph. Any comments? Johannes Schr?der calls for debate on currency speculation By Haig Simonian in Berlin and Tony Barber in Frankfurt Published: September 4 2001 18:48GMT | Last Updated: September 4 2001 22:11GMT Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der has called for Germany and France to lead a debate on speculative international capital flows, thereby putting one of the main demands of the anti-globalisation movement on the European political agenda. Speaking on the eve of an informal dinner in Berlin on Wednesday night with French president Jacques Chirac and premier Lionel Jospin, Mr Schr?der said there was a need to recognise "weak spots" in the international financial system, such as offshore centres, hedge funds and derivatives. "So I want to discuss with our European and especially French partners how we can react to these relatively autonomous speculative financial flows," he said. The chancellor stopped short of supporting Mr Jospin's recent espousal of the so-called "Tobin tax". The tax, proposed by James Tobin, the American economic Nobel laureate, would put a levy on turnover in currency markets. The anti-globalisation movement has suggested the proceeds of such a tax could be used for global poverty relief. Addressing an international economic conference organised by his Social Democratic party, Mr Schr?der noted serious shortcomings with the Tobin tax. "For example, how do you distinguish speculative financial flows from those related to genuine trade finance?" he asked. But the chancellor's comments, ahead of a meeting of EU finance ministers in Belgium and a separate gathering of Social Democratic leaders in Sweden this month, marked an important shift in Germany's willingness to recognise the objections of the anti-globalisation movement. Describing the Tobin tax as one of many instruments which could be used, Mr Schr?der said such issues needed to be discussed by Europe's finance ministers "with all clarity". Only last week, Hans Eichel, the finance minister, rejected the Tobin tax on practical grounds at a meeting with Laurent Fabius, his French opposite number. Mr Schr?der's remarks also contrasted with criticisms from Ernst Welteke, the Bundesbank president. In a speech prepared for delivery on Tuesday in Dublin, Mr Welteke said the Tobin tax would come at too high a cost. "Foreign trade in goods and services is bound to suffer as well. In the end, the wealth-enhancing international division of labour will be hampered." Mr Welteke said that, in times of economic distress, a Tobin tax would be ineffective because profits from speculative capital movements would far outweigh the cost of any sensible tax on transactions. He also praised the increasing integration and liquidity of world financial markets, saying this made them more attractive to international investors. Mr Welteke made clear the Bundesbank regarded any attempt by governments to "throw sand in the wheels of the foreign exchange market" as unrealistic. The chancellor's remarks - and notably his clear distinction between collectivist European social values and the more individualistic US ethos - were also in line with his markedly greater emphasis on social issues of late. With national elections only a year away, such themes, geared to the SPD's core centre left supporters, have become increasingly prominent in recent speeches. From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 04:43:24 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa References: <002701c135df$6d8b2820$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> <00f201c135e6$8a67e760$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> <009601c135e7$f3ccfe60$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Message-ID: <01a301c135f7$97058480$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Johannes Schneider" Also, for the record-- I normally remember where to put commas. Macdonald > > > > Sorry, Johannes but: > > From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Wed Sep 5 04:56:57 2001 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa References: <002701c135df$6d8b2820$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> <00f201c135e6$8a67e760$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <012301c135f9$7c3bb0a0$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Here is what Anton Holberg the German representative of the COFI has to say about Macdonald's criticism of the call to recreate the Fourth International. Please keep in mind that I (Johannes) am only the postman in this issue. Begin quote: =================================================== "Before it is possible to really answer MS's criticism of the LRP/COFI's final call for a recreated Fourth International it is necessary that MS tells us what he thinks the bad traditions are. Maybe - and I even assume that this is the case - we agree on some bad traditions of what is generally hold to be the 4th International, but I also think that COFI has a considerable different view of what the authentic 4th International (this is before its degeneration in the early 50s) stands for. Beside that I feel that there will be no moving foreward to genuine internationalism but on a sound theoretical/programmatic basis. The much spread idea that we should stop referring to the legacies of the workers' and in particular the Marxist movement seems to me to be a very emotional and shortsighted attitude. Of course it doesn't help very much to just revive some odd titles. It's not a question of numbers but one of political contents, which is at stake here. This is why I think it would be very helpful if MS criticizes what the LRP-COFI-statement says on the essence of Genoa and the strategy to follow. Does he agree or does he disagree, and if so why? On this basis one might engage in a sound discussion." A.Holberg ================================================== End quote From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 05:22:37 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Courting ATTAC? References: <00d401c135ef$34a578c0$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Message-ID: <01d301c135fd$1539ebc0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Johannes Schneider" ; Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 2:43 AM Subject: [R-G] Courting ATTAC? > The piece below is from the Financial Times webpage. I am not sure, what to > make out of it, but I tend to agree with the last paragraph. Any comments? > Johannes > > Schr?der calls for debate on currency speculation > By Haig Simonian in Berlin and Tony Barber in Frankfurt > Published: September 4 2001 18:48GMT | Last Updated: September 4 2001 > 22:11GMT > > Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der has called for Germany and France to lead a > debate on speculative international capital flows, thereby putting one of > the main demands of the anti-globalisation movement on the European > political agenda. Yes, and they all cry tears over global poverty- except they blame the victim, they cry over racism- calling anti-Zionism anti-semetism, they cry over AIDS, except they won't do anything for Africa.... All to "put one of the main demands of the anti-globalisation movement on the European political agenda". > Speaking on the eve of an informal dinner in Berlin on Wednesday night with > French president Jacques Chirac and premier Lionel Jospin, Mr Schr?der said > there was a need to recognise "weak spots" in the international financial > system, such as offshore centres, hedge funds and derivatives. Speaking as a very, very weak economist (in fact, aside from reading Capital once, I'd deny any attachment to the title economist at all- my personal failing...), It seems that it has become en vogue for everyone within respectable (and some not so "respectable", such as Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, http://www.bangla2000.com/News/Archive/International/6-17-2000/news_detail3.html ) bourgeois society wants to blame the over-production (and speculation) crisis on "hedge funds". It's a standard diversionary tactic for the impossibility of capitalism to reform itself and deliver anything. > "So I want to discuss with our European and especially French partners how > we can react to these relatively autonomous speculative financial flows," he > said. The chancellor stopped short of supporting Mr Jospin's recent espousal > of the so-called "Tobin tax". The tax, proposed by James Tobin, the American > economic Nobel laureate, would put a levy on turnover in currency markets. > The anti-globalisation movement has suggested the proceeds of such a tax > could be used for global poverty relief. Such a program seems infeasible to me for global capitalism. It seems far more likely that the talk of maybe someday, if the economy recovers and it wouldn't be too disruptive, blah blah... will be what we get treated to. Trying to undo the effects of imperialism while maintaining imperialism is impossible and fantasy. Then, so is opposing globalised institutions- IMF, etc- but as a means to an end, it can be appropriate to push and explore the very depths of such a seemingly "reformist" demand-- even such an impossible one. *snip* > The chancellor's remarks - and notably his clear distinction between > collectivist European social values and the more individualistic US ethos - > were also in line with his markedly greater emphasis on social issues of > late. With national elections only a year away, such themes, geared to the > SPD's core centre left supporters, have become increasingly prominent in > recent speeches. I defer to Johannes here, location wise- but this man is the leader of a "new middle" party, and the election is always on the way when such plastic left-wing rhetoric is fouling the air in front of their faces. Macdonald From twood at uwc.ac.za Wed Sep 5 05:24:02 2001 From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa Message-ID: >>> Johannes.Schneider@gmx.net 09/05/01 12:56PM >>> I think it would be very helpful if MS criticizes what the LRP-COFI-statement says on the essence of Genoa and the strategy to follow. Does he agree or does he disagree, and if so why? On this basis one might engage in a sound discussion." A.Holberg Tahir: I might be missing something here, but I didn't see an argument for the 4th international in the original message. It just looked to me like a slogan tacked onto the end. So why, for example, should we have a 4th international, which I understand to be some kind of coalition of parties (with all the nationalist assumptions that underlies such a strategy) rather than one international party, as envisaged by say the IBRP? ================================================== End quote _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 05:35:23 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa References: <002701c135df$6d8b2820$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> <00f201c135e6$8a67e760$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> <012301c135f9$7c3bb0a0$431e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Message-ID: <01d901c135fe$da172600$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> > Here is what Anton Holberg the German representative of the COFI has to say > about Macdonald's criticism of the call to recreate the Fourth > International. Please keep in mind that I (Johannes) am only the postman in > this issue. > > Begin quote: > =================================================== > "Before it is possible to really answer MS's criticism of the LRP/COFI's > final call for a recreated Fourth International it is necessary that MS tells us > what he thinks the bad traditions are. I am simply not going into all of this. Itr would take years to clean up the ensuing mess- however- I want to smash two notions. One, a 4th international: why? There si no 3rd, no need for such a beast. They tend to operate in the tradition of opposition to whatever exists. People in grouplets called fourth internationals tend to enter this mindset of constant irrelevancy, that tends to mean that very little of the correct analysis is connected to the real world... > Maybe - and I even assume that this is the > case - we agree on some bad traditions of what is generally hold to be the > 4th International, but I also think that COFI has a considerable different view > of what the authentic 4th International (this is before its degeneration in the > early 50s) stands for. I'm going to just take your word on that. > Beside that I feel that there will be no moving foreward to genuine > internationalism but on a sound theoretical/programmatic basis. Yes and no. We are moving towards a "globalising" movement- but it needs to get the theoretical basis for itself from the lessons of leaders like Trotsky, sure- but let's not A) Fetishise his name, form and letterheads... B) Dream of an International that operates out of one centre (not accusing you or otherwise of this, Anton...I simply don't know...) and proceeds to give out orders and dictates based on this notion of "centre" for an International headed like a "party". The much > spread > idea that we should stop referring to the legacies of the workers' and in > particular the Marxist movement seems to me to be a very emotional and > shortsighted attitude. We are blessed and I consider myself lucky to stand in the tradition of the finest movements ever to speak of the working class. But I'm no fan of any fourth International- no matter how much I like Trotsky- and I also believe that one can be contemporary *and* part of a tradition of thought. The people who bang on about Lenin (again, not you Anton) seem often enough to have more in common with Kautsky. Study these ideas, do so vigourously- but let let them stand on their own weight without a masthead image. > This is why I think it would be very helpful if MS criticizes what the > LRP-COFI-statement says on the essence of Genoa and the strategy to follow. > Does > he agree or does he disagree, and if so why? Alright....simply put: I'm tired of hearing about soviets at the end of articles. There, I said it. Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 05:53:08 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Strategy for an international movement. References: Message-ID: <01eb01c13601$55dd05a0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> >Tahir: Me yell? No I want to raise a much more fundamental question with you Mac, >one which we debated on aut-op-sy a little while back. Was it not Rad Green? I've been on Aut-op-sy for like 12 hours..anyhow... ****Should we be anti-globalisation at all? Frankly I'm a convert to the pro-globalisation position, precisely because of the type of argument that your statements above reflect. 'Anti-imperialism' is a defence of repressive regimes of various kinds ranging from Iran, Iraq to North Korea, etc. It's not all about your cuddly little Cuba.*** Being anti-imperialist is precisely that- ANTI. It is not PRO anything, unless I (or the anti-imperialist in question) choose to be so. With the exception of the SPS, there is no government that has been recently bombed/militarily attacked that I really care to defend. However- here is where we get closest to agreeing- I see the distortions of states surrounded by a host of imperialist militaries inherently going towards decay. In that much, I agree there is no *final* solution here... However, breathing room can not be waited for patiently by a revolutionary during an attack on ther country they live for the sake of Imperialism- regardless of their opinion of such a state, it is simply suicide for the GLOBAL revolution to subordinate all to the "big picture". *** Most of these countries have slaughtered communists in thousands. The movement that I'm seeing, as opposed to what you're seeing, is not an anti-imperialist one in some Leninist sense, but an anti-capitalist one.*** My problem is with Leninists, not Lenin. He was busy sticking his nose into anything that cropped up in Russia, looking for a way out- as part of the world revolution. He didn't come up with stale formulae that one reads like a broken record. In the modern day on this level, I see Fidel as the current "leader" with such a vision. He speaks very highly of "our" movement against globalisation (using the very term constantly). *** And at least there I am in agreement with Negri. People are and should be globalising against capitalism. This is not yelling,*** I was teasing you. I didn't mean you were yelling- the computer has ben rather quiet all day. Anyhow, the questions are then back to two much earlier posts: tactics one, strategy two. Leninsim may be a whole lot of different things to a lot of different people, but it is clear what it means. Let us here your strategy and your tactics- and as concise as possible then. **** this is a theoretical and practical question of the greatest importance. And all your heartfelt pleas for common strategy etc will mean nothing without some agreement on such fundamental issues. If anything will destroy the movement it's having to march alongside people who are saying Viva Saddam, Viva Milosovec, etc.*** Tahir, this is not aimed at you but a large series of people in general: I'm really fucking tired of hearing people call others Saddam (or insert here) lovers for defending Iraq and her people from American bombs. Saying that Iraq successfully engaging in military defense would be a good thing is quite different than calling Hussein the father of all the people. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 05:59:39 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Native Youth Movement Blockade Message-ID: <021301c13602$3df22b40$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> http://www.cpcml.ca/tmld/TMLD151.htm#3 British Columbia: Native Youth Movement Blockade in Defence of Traditional Territory On August 24, members of the Native Youth Movement (NYM) staged a militant blockade of the Sun Peaks Resort in British Columbia. For three hours, the youth blocked vehicles from entering or leaving the resort with a fire and crates across the road. The blockade was followed by a march through the village. Since October 2000, native activists of the area have been protesting Delta Hotels' $70 million expansion onto their traditional territory. Among other actions, camps have been erected to block the expansion. Despite court orders and armed intervention by the RCMP to dismantle the camps, activists have continued to erect new camps to defend their traditional territory. The latest such attack came on August 24. Amanda Soper, a spokeswoman for NYM, said, "The RCMP are acting like the goon squad of the government to come in and forcibly remove us. This has to be exposed and this has to be challenged." "Everybody involved in bringing money into Sun Peaks area is involved in violating our basic human rights and is involved in genocide by driving our people off the land," Ms. Soper said. She reiterated the call for a nation-wide boycott of all Delta Hotels across Canada. In asserting their Aboriginal Title to the Sun Peaks land, the NYM has pointed out that the land lies within the Secwepemc Traditional Territory and the 1862 Neskolinth Douglas Reserve, both part of the Aboriginal Title land of the Secwepemc Nation. While Federal Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault has said that the issue must be resolved on the provincial level through the B.C. treaty process, the Secwepemc Nation is one of more than a dozen First Nations which have rejected that process. In Toronto, Ms. Soper pointed out that the Secwepemc "never signed treaties, we never ceded our land to anybody. That land is Indian land. B.C. is Indian land." State intimidation and attacks on the activists is continuing. RCMP officers flanked the native youth as they marched through the vilage. Following the actions the RCMP called for pictures and photographs, saying, "We're going to be forwarding recommendations of charges to the Crown against these individuals who were up here." Ms. Soper pointed out that state attacks and intimidation will not quell the determination of the youth to fight in defence of their rights, land and culture. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 15:13:26 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa References: Message-ID: <009301c1364f$9b15d4a0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tahir Wood" Tahir: I might be missing something here, but I didn't see an argument for the 4th international in the original message. It just looked to me like a slogan tacked onto the end. So why, for example, should we have a 4th international, which I understand to be some kind of coalition of parties (with all the nationalist assumptions that underlies such a strategy) rather than one international party, as envisaged by say the IBRP? --------- Me: So how would this party actually function, if not on a national level? How would such have any connection to, say- both me in Vancouver and you? Etc etc....I think you know where I'm going with this... By the way, what does this kind of theory have in common with autonomism? Feel free to take this answer elsewhere and cross post it- but I've never seen it. Mac From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Wed Sep 5 15:17:17 2001 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: New International Socialism Journal Message-ID: <002701c13650$293afda0$6664050a@atitech.com> > INTERNATIONALHSOCIALISM > the quarterly journal of socialist theory > > Genoa was the greatest battle of the anti-capitalist movement since its > inauguration in Seattle in 1999. International Socialism brings you Tom > Behan on the crisis of the Italian political system that has resulted and > Boris Kagarlitsky on why the movement now has to look to workers in factory > and office. Alex Callinicos develops a critique of Toni Negri, the theorist > of autonomism and the figure to which many of the Black Bloc anarchists look > for inspiration, and we reprint Jack Fuller?s dissection of the previous > phase of autonomist activity first published in International Socialism in > the spring of 1980. > > Goretti Horgan examines the fate of women in the global economy and Rumy > Hasan looks back at the 1997 South East Asian crisis and examines its > subsequent course and impact on the world system. > > Plus reviews of new books on Patrice Lumumba and the American Revolution. > > To get your copy send a cheque payable to ISJ for ?3.50 to ISJ, PO Box 82, > London E3 3LH or phone 020 7531 9810 for credit card orders > isj@swp.org.uk > From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 15:39:09 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: New International Socialism Journal References: <002701c13650$293afda0$6664050a@atitech.com> Message-ID: <00cb01c13653$337b7940$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Alex Callinicos develops a critique of Toni Negri, the > theorist > > of autonomism and the figure to which many of the Black Bloc anarchists > look > > for inspiration, ... *snip* I really don't like lines like this one. I have known at least one BB, but for obvious reasons that is all I will say....nonetheless, the idea that these people are looking to the H-N people is A) unprovable, B) treats them as something concrete, when the BB floats from here to there, and C) pre-supposes that Negri was around in Seattle, which is not the case (as far as his current upswing in popularity). We spend too much time talking about this Black Bloc. There are more anarchists and other activists, etc....that have far more social, on the ground attachments to the organisers of these demos. Some of the BB are also the organisers, but that isn't a reason to get too wrapped up in what they have to say/offer us. Even just as far as the militant people who tore down the affront to all our rights in Quebec- the Wall- they are still a small part. Perhaps it is funny that as more people become militant in the movement, less are dominated by the BB- excpet us in our talk shops. We should be the mirror image of the media less. Now, having said that- the BB will be undoubtedly mentioned in a post of mine in less than 24 hours... Macdonald From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Wed Sep 5 15:52:36 2001 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: New International Socialism Journal References: <002701c13650$293afda0$6664050a@atitech.com> <00cb01c13653$337b7940$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <003501c13655$15739160$6664050a@atitech.com> > > Alex Callinicos develops a critique of Toni Negri, the > > theorist > > > of autonomism and the figure to which many of the Black Bloc anarchists > > look > > > for inspiration, ... > *snip* > > I really don't like lines like this one. I have known at least one BB, but for > obvious reasons that is all I will say....nonetheless, the idea that these > people are looking to the H-N people is A) unprovable, B) treats them as > something concrete, when the BB floats from here to there, and C) pre-supposes > that Negri was around in Seattle, which is not the case (as far as his current > upswing in popularity). > Mac, perhaps the wording was guided by the marketing department, meaning at the moment everything that claims a connection with the BB is a hot seller. We should not overestimate this kind of hype. But what remains true that the idea that 'national liberation' is an obsolete concept is shared by Negri and a lot of anarchists (to avoid the B-word). To expect that Negri should have been around in Seattle is a bit strange, since he is still jailed for his political activities by the same state that killed Carlo Guiliani. Johannes From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 21:28:25 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] [WW] World Conference Condemns Racism Message-ID: <029501c13683$fd6a43a0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Sept. 13, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- AS U.S., ISRAEL WALK OUT: WORLD CONFERENCE CONDEMNS RACISM By Cecil Williams Durban, South Africa "Stop U.S. racism all over the world!" That was the chant of U.S. participants in the World Conference Against Racism as they marched on the International Convention Center here Aug. 3. They were protesting the Bush admin i stra tion's decision to withdraw from the United Nations-spon sored event. The State Department's representatives had earlier failed to show up at their own press conference for fear of having to face hundreds of outraged U.S. nongovernmental delegates. Seven thousand delegates from every corner of the earth have come to this port city on the shores of the Indian Ocean. They are here to speak out about racism and oppression. They were welcomed Sept. 1 by a march of 100,000 South African workers, organized by the Congress of South African Trade Unions. They were greeted by 20 heads of state and government, including Fidel Castro, Yasir Arafat and South Africa's own Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki addressed the conference one day after the death of his father, Goven Mbeki, 91, a founder of the African National Congress who had been imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. The Bush administration walked out on all of them. Israel followed. The U. S. State Department said the conference had sinned by "suggesting that Israel practices apartheid." Israeli spokespeople called the huge multinational gathering "part of a Palestinian political offensive." The corporate-owned media echoed that line. It is clear to any observer here that most WCAR participants do identify with the Palestinian people. That sentiment was also expressed by the South African workers who marched Saturday. Israel materially supported white-minority rule in South Africa, and the similarities between apartheid and Israeli racism are well known here. But many delegates feel that the prime motive for the U.S. walkout was to avoid facing the issue of reparations for slavery and colonialism. The State Department made it clear before the conference that if the transatlantic slave trade were labeled a "crime against humanity," it would take its bat and ball and go home. U.S. WEALTH FOUNDED ON SLAVE TRADE "The great wealth of the United States, as well as that of many of its European allies, is founded on the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and colonialism," said Adjoa Aiyetoro of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at a press conference denouncing the U.S. withdrawal. "In addition, the history of the United States is replete with systemic, structural, oppressive and violent forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. Yet the U.S. government has shown contempt and disrespect for the millions of people of color in the United States, especially Africans and African descendants, whose representatives are here seeking redress for historic and contemporary violations of their fundamental human rights. "Moreover, the United States government has shown contempt and disrespect for this World Conference against Racism from its inception and contempt and disrespect for the democratic process. It has rationalized its opposition to even a discussion of reparations by unfairly linking it to the demands of the Palestinian people that the national oppression and racial discrimination visited upon them by the state of Israel be condemned. "We declare the U.S. government's claims to be bogus, manipulative and insulting to the legitimate concerns of millions of the world's people." A statement by the United U.S. Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) condemned "U.S.-Israeli extremism and its blatant but failed attempt to hijack the agenda of this conference." A five-day forum of nongovernmental organizations preceded the "official" WCAR. That forum passed a resolution calling slavery and colonization crimes against humanity, demanded reparations for the people of Africa and their descendants in the United States, and called for unconditional release and amnesty for political prisoners in the United States. That resolution was affirmed Sept. 2 at a press conference of the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus. VOICES OF THE OPPRESSED Washington sent only a low-level delegation to the WCAR to begin with. The oppressed of the world are here in force. Dalits, so-called "untouchables," from India. Roma people, the so-called "Gypsies," from East Europe. Burakumein, the "low-caste" people of Japan, and Ainu people from Hokkaido Island. Palestinians from refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. Pygmy people from Congo. Native people from the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Migrant workers from many countries. African Americans by the hundreds from the United States, Brazil, the Caribbean and everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. People from all over Africa, including many South African veterans of the struggle against apartheid. People from every nation on earth, the majority of them women. There is Njeri Shakur of Houston, who came on behalf of the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement. "When he was governor of Texas, George Bush executed 152 people," Njeri said. "Some were innocent, like Shaka Sankofa. Some were old, like Betty Lou Beets, a 62-year-old grandmother, a battered woman, whom George Bush executed. "Some were young, like Kamau Wilkerson. Most were people of color, all were poor. Bush has gone forth from Texas; he's now visiting his violence and contempt on the people of the world. Well, we don't need his representatives here. We are here to join together with people from all over the world who are fighting the same enemy we are." Ethel LeValle, aboriginal vice president of the Canadian Labor Congress, came to raise the case of Native U.S. political prisoners. "We're calling on the U.S. government to free our brother, Leonard Peltier. It's been proven that he was convicted on false information, and he's done 24 years. I'm also speaking on behalf of Dudley George, an unarmed protester who was shot and killed in 1994 in Ontario, and to this day the Canadian government will not call an inquiry. This is discrimination and racism." Orinthal Lumumba is here from New York City for the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu- Jamal. "They want to execute Mumia, an innocent man, for no other reason than that he spoke out against their brutal system. Another man, Arnold Beverly, confessed to the crime of which he was convicted, and they still want to execute him. But they are the criminals. The Philadelphia police bombed the MOVE house in Philadelphia, killing 11 members of my family, including babies. The Pentagon killed one million Iraqi babies. They have no right to execute anybody." Sharon Eolis of the International Action Center in the U.S. was angered by the U.S.-Israeli efforts to depict solidarity with Palestine as "anti-Semitism." "I'm Jewish, and I support Palestine. Israel doesn't speak for me. It represents the interests of the Pentagon and U.S. oil companies. Jewish people should look twice when the 'old- boy' bigots who run the Bush administration claim to champion our interests." The U.S. and several West European governments pressured the UN leadership to stifle such voices. Appointed UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson did her best. "Insider working groups" were set up to edit conference documents. Arbitrary last-minute restrictions were placed on NGO delegates, and UN cops harassed some delegates. But they couldn't stop the conference from turning into an international demonstration against global injustice and inequality. CASTRO: 'USE CORPORATE AD DOLLARS TO PAY REPARATIONS' Twenty heads of state and government spoke, including Fidel Castro, Yasir Arafat and Mbeki. "'After the purely formal slavery emancipation, African Americans were subjected during 100 more years to the harshest racial discrimination, and many of its features still persist,'' Castro told the conference. ''Cuba speaks of reparations, and supports this idea as an unavoidable moral duty to the victims of racism.'' He called for the $1 trillion spent every year on corporate advertising to be spent instead on reparations to the poor of the world. Castro also addressed a rally of thousands of African National Congress members in a Durban stadium Sept. 1. Cuba is loved here for the aid it gave to the South African popular struggle against racist apartheid rule. "We say no to the continuation of the injustices of the past," Zimbabwe Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told a WCAR plenary Sept. 3. "The relationship of compensation to liberation is important to us in several respects." Chinamasa told how British colonists robbed Zimbabweans of their land and livestock, destroyed their homes and subjected them to forced labor, all without compensation. Chinamasa described how his government is trying to redress the colonial legacy by land redistribution inside Zimbabwe. He called on the conference to "come out emphatically in favor of a declaration of reparations." Chinamasa's words were met with a loud standing ovation from the nongovernmental delegates. "The world has seen many horrors, whole nations have been exterminated, but no one has suffered so much as the people of Africa," said Libyan Foreign Minister Ali Treiki. "It began when white men herded millions of Africans into slave ships for forced labor in the Western Hemisphere. We must adopt clear resolutions and unambiguous recommendations to compensate African people for colonialism and slavery. We can only be fully free today if we receive such compensation and a clear apology." Treiki called imposing famine by means of sanctions a form of racism. "Sanctions have killed one million Iraqi children," he said. Speaking of U.S. bombing of Iraq and Sudan and Israeli atrocities in Palestine, he said, "There are no safeguards for human rights in a world where there are oppressor and oppressed, master and slave, rich and poor." U.S. TRIES TO DERAIL CONFERENCE In an interview the morning of Sept. 3, Elombe Brath of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition and the December 12 Movement said that the U.S. and several West European powers had held a meeting at the Durban Hilton to work on the final conference language. No African or Asian countries were invited. He told how the U.S. had granted $5 million in aid to the government of Senegal the very day it reversed its position on reparations. "But most African countries are standing strong and talking about reparations, contrary to the impression given by the media." That night the U.S. walked out. Brath is one of the Durban 400, African descendants from the United States who are here to lobby for reparations. The group is united around three principles: declaration of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and colonialism as crimes against humanity; recognition of the economic base of racism, and reparations for the people of Africa and their descendants in the Americas. SLAVERY LIVES IN U.S. PRISONS Sam Jordan of the International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia came here to work for a resolution in support of framed political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Lynchings and slavery are not a thing of the past, he said. "The U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of the world's prison population," he continued. "Sixty percent are people of color and at least 250,000 are wrongfully convicted because of prosecutorial misconduct. "Many, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, languish on death row in spite of their presentation of exculpatory evidence, which the racist U.S. courts refuse to admit into the judicial record or order their release. This is part of the heritage of slavery, and the demand for reparations includes relief for the wrongfully convicted." Johnnie Stevens and other members of the U.S.-based International Action Center came to Durban with the delegation for Mumia. "We don't know whether or not the final declaration of this conference will reflect the sentiments expressed by the majority of people here. But whatever is written on the official stationery, this conference is historic," said Stevens. "It will do for the issue of reparations what Seattle, Prague and Genoa did for the issue of globalization. Whether you talk about repaying Africans and their descendants for centuries of unpaid labor and suffering, or the right of the Palestinian people to return to their land seized by Israel, you are raising the concept that the rich are rich because the poor are poor and that stolen wealth must be returned. "That concept does not divide us, it unifies us. And that terrifies Corporate America." - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://www.workers.org) From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 21:46:34 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] G8 movie Message-ID: <02db01c13686$86055ae0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> CNN. 5 September 2001. Now it's Genoa G8 -- the movie. GENOA, Italy -- A group of 25 Italian directors are planning to release a controversial movie about the violence at this year's Genoa G8 summit. The film, still being edited and as yet untitled, will show preparations for the meeting between the heads of the eight most prosperous nations, the summit itself, and the 250,000 who took to the streets in protest. "This film will not just be about the violence, but about the whole nature of the anti-globalisation movement in the build-up to the Genoa summit, and the experience of these people during the week they were in the city," Francesca Comincini, one of the directors, told a news conference at the Venice Film Festival, Reuters reported. The directors worked closely with Vittorio Agnoletto, the head of the Genoa Social Forum protest organisation, while shooting more than 260 hours of footage. They said their film would reveal the deep-seated passion that the demonstrators brought to their cause. It would also show the tough police response. "They have filmed and will reveal the truth," Agnoletto, a lawyer turned protester who is now the spokesman for the umbrella organisation representing about 700 protest groups, told Reuters. Ironically the Genoa summit has been something of a backdrop to the whole Venice festival. At the opening ceremony last Wednesday anti-globalisation protesters unfurled a banner in front of the movie palace at the Lido of Venice. It read "G8 Genoa, You will not cancel out the truth." The G8 film, which will be released in October in two versions, a 60-minute documentary for television and a 120-minute feature for cinema, is certain to attract huge controversy in Italy. Police chiefs have already come under fire, and some have lost their jobs, for the way in which the security operation was carried out. The head of the police has admitted to parliament that some officers used excessive force. Several of the directors, speaking to a packed audience that included dozens of veterans of Genoa, said they had been shocked by the brutality of the events at Genoa and had footage which showed Italy's military police making unprovoked attacks on peaceful protesters. Police have already seized footage shot by news agencies of the violence, including photographs of the moments leading up to the shooting of Carlo Giuliani, 23 by police. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 22:37:32 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Forwarded from Lysander Zimmerman Message-ID: <008801c1368d$a5785560$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> This is absolutely insane!! The police instigated the riots by surrounding and raiding a school full of protesters with vicious dogs and some protesters are given two and a half, and even FOUR YEARS in prison!! The police went on confirmed riots throwing stones back at demonstrators, even shooting three (one in the back as he turned to run) and the police violence is not even questioned! Behold the true fascist face of social democracy--in what is considered the best social democratic country in the industrialized world!! Fighting for the death of bourgeois social democracy, Lysander ----- Original Message ----- From: Jyrki Lappalainen To: Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 10:12 AM Subject: (en) Sweden, GBG prisoner info > ________________________________________________ > A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E > http://www.ainfos.ca/ > ________________________________________________ > > From: solidaritetsgruppen@hotmail.com > > > Hello all friends out there! > > We are still being over worked here in Gothenburg but we begin > to see the light of the of the tunnel now. The last trials has > started now, this monday, and will finish next Tuesday hopefully. > This is a group of people that are called the communication > group and are charge of being the leaders and organisers behind > EVERYTHING. Rather stupid. We still need money and books, mostly > in swedish but also in german, danish and english. We bring the > prisoners book packedes 1-2 a week and post as soon we reciew > anything. It takes about a week from that we deliver to the prison > before our friends have them in their hands. We also bring them > money every week to buy candy, fruit and cigarettes for. They can > also phone for these money. Here follows a summary of the people > in prison and their sentences. Look at > http://www.motkraft.net for more info: > > Accused: "SS", 19 year old German citizen, shot in the leg during riots. > Charge: 2 cases of Rioting > Sentence: 14 (6+8) months prison. Expulsion for 5 years. > Appeal by both the accused and prosecutor. > > Accused: 7 Danish citizens, "JB" "CWC" "RLH" "LJ" "JM" "KS" "JS" > Charge: Rioting > Sentences: "JB" 6 months prison > "CWC" 5 months prison > "RLH" 5 months prison > "LJ" 8 months prison > "JM" 1 month juvenille prison > "KS" 8 months prison > "JS" 6 months prison > Appeal by both accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "AA", 26 year old from Stockholm > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: Not guilty > Appeal by prosecutor > > Accused "GI", 30 year old from Gothenburg > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: 10 months prison > Appeal by both accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "EH", 19 year old from Stockholm, "IA" 19 year old from Dalarna > Charge: Rioting > Sentence, Both 8 months prison > Appeal by both accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "SB" JPJ" "KM" "JDR" "SKS", 5 Danish citizens arrested in an apartment > the week before EU Top Meeting > Charge: Preperation of assault and sabotage > Sentence: All not guilty > Appeal by prosecutor > > Accused: "LAL", 43 year old Italian citizen living in Norway > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: 2 years and 6 months prison, expulsion for 10 years. > Appeal by both the accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "JE" 20 year old from Stockholm > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: 2 years and 6 months prison > Appeal by both accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "PR" 33 year old English citizen > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: 1 year prison, expulsion for 5 years. > Appeal by both accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "MV" 24 year old from Malm? > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: 1 year prison > Appeal by both accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "J-BB", 24 year old German citizen > Charge: Rioting and preperation of assault > Sentence: 15 months prison, expulsion for 10 years > Appeal by both accussed and prosecutor > > Accused: "NTA", 38 year old from Gothenburg > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: 9 months prison > Appeal by both the accussed and prosecutor > > Accused: "TKK" 21 year old Finn from Gothenburg > Charge: Assault of civil servant, preparation to assault of civil servant, > robbery and assault > Sentence: 8 months prison > Not appealed > > Accused: "JB" 24 year old from Partille > Charge: Sabotage > Sentence: 1 year prison > Appeal by the accused > > Accused: "PP" 24 year old from Norsborg > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: Not guilty > Appeal by prosecutor > > Accused: "HH" 20 year old German citizen > Charge: Rioting > Sentence: 14 months prison > Appeal by both the accused and prosecutor > > Accused: "IJA" 19 year old from Gothenburg > Charge: Rioting and vandalism > Sentence: 2 years prison plus fines > Appealed by the accused > > Accused: "JP" 25 year old from Angered > Charge: 2 cases of violent rioting and theft > Sentence: 4 years prison > Appeal: > > Accussed: "PAB" "LMJ" "BMAL" "SJN" "SUN" "RSE" "MHRW" "HES" > Charge: Rioting or Assistance to Rioting > Sentence: > Appeal: > > > Send things directly to the prisoners: > > (name of the person) > Box 216 > 401 23 > Gothenburg > SWEDEN > > > To send stuff to us and then to prisoners: > > Solidaritygroup GBG > c/o Syndikalistiskt Forum > Box 7267 > 402 35 Gothenburg > SWEDEN > > To visit is a long and difficult prosess. Please let us know > atleast a week in advance and we will help with sleeping > place and contact with the prison. > > If you want to send us money pleas contact us and we help > you in the best way of doing this. > > > _______________________________________________ > Alter-EE mailing list > Alter-EE@most.org.pl > http://www.most.org.pl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/alter-ee > > > ******** ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From amandatatts at hotmail.com Thu Sep 6 04:48:39 2001 From: amandatatts at hotmail.com (Amanda Tattersall) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Strategy for an international movement. Message-ID: >What I find over and over again, is that the movement is already on >top of >what seems the best strategic orientation: the institutions of > >globalisation, such as the G8, IMF, WTO, etc... what is needed is some >basic honing of the anti-"globalisation" >education (in the form of >carrying out mass teach-ins of differing >varieties), while working towards >some singular demands that capture >both the institutional,supra state >target and confront the very >existence of the whole machinery itself. > >I'd love to hear some other ideas on this. I think an interesting question to ask is where and how are these demands to be created, and specifically, can they come through the anti-globalisation movement, or from the movements (such as working class, environmental, womens, indigenous) that operate within it. This is not to argue some sort of autonomous line - which, by the way, I disagree with, but rather to say that the demands arise from material circumstances, consciousness and conditions, rather than some abstract framework. The problem of the anti-globalisation movement is that although it is radically effective at mobilising and representing a gut hate of capitalism, it is abstracted from the specific manifestations of capitalist oppression. It is targeting groups of oppressors - symbolically, but not in a material sense. [although I note that stopping the WTO or WEF does materially affect the ruling class]. So to ask where will demands come from, I do not think that they will emanate from the anti-globalisation movement in and of itself. I actually believe that they will rise from its participants, and that is why I seek the participation of the working class in this movement. Only then can the demands really have transitional weight. The question becomes what is the anti-globalisation movement and what is its relationship to other movements. I think two things are important to note. Firstly, the anti-globalisation movement gets its teeth and passion from more concrete circumstances, and should not be reduced (in our minds) to the big rallies/blockades. In Australia our racist government is cracking down on asylum seekers and refugees. The campaign against this agenda is particularly connected to the anti-globalisation movement. Demands for the anti-globalisation movement come from this campaign. Outrage against the nature and form of globalisation arise from these specific issues. It will be these campaigns, that are far more tangible, that will provide us with a basis for demands. Secondly, I think that the role of the anti-globalisation movement strategically is to enhance militancy and provide hope. The movement gives legitimacy to more militant strategies, lowing the bar for mass action whether that be strikes, pickets or rallies. It can assist the union movement and militant activists within that movement by being a bench mark for radical activism. Furthermore the movement provides hope because it denies the end of history line of the right, and argues that there is mass dissent and parades this dissent around the world. I agree that the anti-globalisation movement needs demands. We need to have a framework from which we build the movement and attempt to achieve victories. But the construction of demands always falls within the dichotomy of reformism and more transitional ideas. I would hate to see us argue for a seat at the table at the WTO or for *reform* of that institution (we tried that with the state 100 years ago, and although it got the working class something, it also legitimated and facilitated their exploitation). I fear that these demands will indeed be offered to particular NGOs in the near future, depleting our movement. I have no answers for the demand question, just to say that they need to be transitional (and we must seriously consider what the WTO et al will do in the future and thus what is transitional), and they need to be possible (ending capitalism though desirable is not a particularly achievable goal in the short term, it also means very little as it is so abstract). Hope this is of interest - look forward to further discussion. Amanda _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 5 22:56:55 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] OCAP and the Trade Union Bureaucracy Message-ID: <00c101c13690$5a782ba0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Here's an article that appeared in the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review. WORKERS EVICT ONTARIO FINANCE MINISTER: CANADIAN AUTOWORKERS PRESIDENT SIDES WITH THE BOSSES by Jeff Shantz On June 12, 50 or so Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) members, Wobblies, students and rank-and-file workers of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and United Farm and Commercial Workers (UFCW) flying squads held a "mock eviction" at the constituency office of current Provincial Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Flaherty is a central figure in pushing the hard edge of the Conservatives neo-liberal agenda. As Labour Minister it was Flaherty who brought in legislation making it more difficult to organize service workers and easier for employers to interfere with organizing drives. During his time as Attorney General he drafted the brutal law which makes it illegal to panhandle or squeegee in Ontario. A driving force in attacks on workers and poor people in the province Flaherty has been ready and willing to serve wherever the Tories have needed to push through vicious pieces of legislation. Many who have suffered under his government's policies couldn't help but smile when Flaherty broke down in tears on national television while calling the actions at his office "un-Canadian." Shortly after the eviction twelve people, including myself, were arrested and hit with a number of charges including unlawful assembly, mischief over $5000 and cause disturbance. Bail conditions for those released included onerous conditions such as non-association and non-communication with any OCAP members and with each other (conditions which a higher court had already ruled were unconstitutional after the same conditions were given for people arrested after last year's June 15 OCAP action ended with a police riot). These conditions are nothing but a blatant attempt to interfere with and obstruct OCAP's daily work which includes helping people receive welfare checks, back pay or landed immigrant status. Cops have even talked of labelling OCAP a "terrorist organization" which would allow them to arrest and detain someone simply for being a member or seeking OCAP's assistance (assistance which is absolutely vital for the survival of many people in Ontario). One of those arrested June 12, Shawn Lee Popham, was held for over a month in jail and is still under house arrest. Since the action seven other people including OCAP organizers John Clarke, Sue Collis and Shawn Brant have been arrested. OCAP has been at the forefront of resistance to the neo-liberal form of capitalism in Canada. This year the coalition has been organizing in workplaces, schools and reserves throughout Ontario and beyond (as support has been expressed in Montreal, Detroit and Chicago). Rank-and-file unionists, Mohawk Warriors, homeless people, teachers, students and farmers have committed to a co-ordinated effort to make it impossible for the ruling governors to continue governing us. The range of actions which are being planned reflect local needs and the specific attacks which people have suffered: blockades of rail lines which cut through reserves, shutting down highways by truckers, closing the border points of the "NAFTA superhighway" and occupations of factories. These are not planned as symbolic acts designed to make a point (or shame a government which has no shame). The acts of disruption are acts of working class unity and autonomy aimed at making it impossible for the government and its corporate backers to carry through their agenda. While the Left in Canada has been almost universal in its condemnation of police attacks on OCAP, there is one unexpectedly loud voice of sympathy for Flaherty and his henchmen: CAW National President Basil "Buzz" Hargrove. Hargrove, who never misses a chance to play up the union's progressiveness on social issues, was quoted in the right-wing, and OCAP-hating, Toronto Sun as saying: " I do not support the Harris government (Tories) and I don't support any of the legislation they have passed since they were elected. But I sure support their right to do that. They were elected by the people. I don't have to agree with them, but I sure respect our democratic system, unlike a whole lot of people in political life today who don't respect it" (June 14, 2001: 15, emphasis added). Hargrove went on to say that the CAW, currently OCAP's major funder, would consider pulling its financial support. Apparently not satisfied that his masters' were sufficiently pleased by his grovelling act, Hargrove agreed to meet personally with current Labour Minister Chris Stockwell to assure him that the CAW will indeed pull its funding as Stockwell had publicly requested. This while OCAP members, including organizer John Clarke, were still languishing in jail having been denied bail. Chris Stockwell, by the way, is the same guy who drafted the legislation which once passed will change the legal workweek in Ontario from 44 to 60 hours and will allow companies to opt out of the Employment Standards Act (overtime, health and safety, minimum wage) if they can prove that it impedes their "global competitiveness." Sitting down with Stockwell (in his lap no doubt) to discuss CAW matters and OCAP is nothing short of a betrayal of not only CAW members but all of the working class. Hargrove should have refused and demanded the immediate release of all OCAP members. In fact it gets even better. Upon hearing about flying squad participation in the eviction, Buzz has moved within the CAW to bring the flying squads under control by the National Executive. The current flying squads were begun as autonomous, rank-and-file bodies to do strike solidarity work and to support OCAP direct action casework (actions at welfare and immigration offices). Begun in a few locals around Toronto the flying squads have spread throughout the province as victories grew and as word spread in and across workplaces. Workers chafing under conservative leadership in their locals turned to flying squads as a way to meet their needs directly and as a way for progressive and militant workers to overcome isolation in home locals and build alliances with other militants, inside and outside of their unions. So it's not surprising that sooner or later the National would turn on them. Buzz has ordered that any future flying squad actions must be approved by the National or by the local President. This is surely going to lead to an important showdown between the flying squad members, who have come to enjoy their autonomy, and the bureaucrats. Militant flying squads are one of the most important developments in this province in the last decade. The outcome of this struggle will be crucial for the left and the labour movement in this country especially as organizing for the fall economic and political disruptions grows. --- from list aut-op-sy@lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From twood at uwc.ac.za Thu Sep 6 01:05:29 2001 From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa Message-ID: >>> mstainsby@tao.ca 09/05/01 11:13PM >>> So how would this party actually function, if not on a national level? Tahir: What does it mean to "function on a national level", Mac? How would such have any connection to, say- both me in Vancouver and you? Tahir: What connection does Genoa have with you in Vancouver and me in Cape Town? Etc etc....I think you know where I'm going with this... Tahir: We'll see By the way, what does this kind of theory have in common with autonomism? Tahir: I'm not sure, since I am not a partisan of either. All I'm saying is that I would be opposed to the formation of national CPs, and the old type internationals were formed exactly on this basis. As for autonomism, well so far I'm sceptical about some of it and I very much doubt whether I'll buy into it as a whole. But I'm very pleased at the dialogue now happening between all the kinds of left tendencies that were condemned by Lenin in THAT text. The IBRP are kind of neo-Bordigist, and therefore unlike the autonomists they do campaign for one international revolutionary party. At this stage of my life I see value in all these tendencies. Feel free to take this answer elsewhere and cross post it- but I've never seen it. Tahir: No, what would be a better idea since you've got into big-time cross-posting yourself is to post on RG some of the responses you've now received on AUT. I presume you did post them there for some kind of debate, right? Don't keep the responses there a secret from this list. Mac _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From twood at uwc.ac.za Thu Sep 6 01:32:25 2001 From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: Fw: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa Message-ID: Thank you. I will follow up and acquaint myself with your tendency, although I am unlikely to convert to Trotskyism or any other form of Leninism at this late stage of my life. If I could also correct the statement below: It is true that I am a former Maoist, but I am not a follower of Negri, whatever that might mean - I don't know where this piece of information came from - I am quite content though to be described as a leftwing communist (the infantile disorder). Regards Tahir Wood >>> "KOVI.BRD" 09/05/01 06:03PM >>> PS: Tahir Wood ist Professor in S?dafrika, ehemaliger Maoist und heute > Negrianh?nger. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Tahir Wood" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 1:24 PM > Subject: Re: [R-G] LRP-COFI on Genoa > > > > > >>> Johannes.Schneider@gmx.net 09/05/01 12:56PM >>> > I think it would be very helpful if MS criticizes what the > LRP-COFI-statement says on the essence of Genoa and the strategy to follow. > Does > he agree or does he disagree, and if so why? On this basis one might engage > in a > sound discussion." > A.Holberg > > Tahir: I might be missing something here, but I didn't see an argument for > the 4th international in the original message. It just looked to me like a > slogan tacked onto the end. So why, for example, should we have a 4th > international, which I understand to be some kind of coalition of parties > (with all the nationalist assumptions that underlies such a strategy) rather > than one international party, as envisaged by say the IBRP? > > >Dear friend, it is true that the statement didn't carry an argument in favor of the need to recreate the Fourth International. This we have done at numerous occasions in other places, but it might have been better to say a few words about it instead of simply putting the slogan at the end of the statement. However I think that you are wrong as far as your idea about the Fourt International goes. While it is a fact that e.g. the 'United Secretariat of the Fourth International' (the followers of the late Ernest Mandel) more or less functions as you describe it this is not the way COFI conceives of a recreated FI. We think that the FI is the world party of socialist revolution with national sections and functioning on the basis of democratic centralism.If it is not, it won't be the Fourth International, but something with usurping the name. Let me add that COFI is of course no FI, but is workimng to recreate it on the basis of what we think are the true programmatic foundations of that world party of the working class. A. Holberg PS. If you want to know more about what we stand for please turn to our website From bstoller at utopia2000.org Thu Sep 6 05:42:34 2001 From: bstoller at utopia2000.org (Barry Stoller) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] More evidence of environmental distress Message-ID: <3B9760C2.6A1CAAC2@utopia2000.org> AP. 6 September 2001. Northern Hemisphere Getting Greener. LOS ANGELES -- Much of the Earth is getting greener, researchers say, but that's not necessarily good news for the environment. A study of satellite data covering a wide swath of the Northern Hemisphere found that most of the area -- especially in Europe and Asia -- has become more densely packed with vegetation over the past 20 years. But the growth could be the result of warmer temperatures, researchers said. "It's yet another bit of evidence of the human impact on climate," said Ranga Myneni, one of the study's authors and an associate professor of geography at Boston University. Increasing human production of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases is widely blamed for rising global temperatures. In the northern latitudes, the focus of the study, temperatures have risen about 0.8 degrees Celsius since the 1970s. Myneni and colleagues at Boston University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., analyzed data from weather satellites from 1981 to 1999 for Europe, Canada and most of the United States and Asia. They found that plant life north of 40 degrees north latitude -- roughly that of New York, Madrid, Spain and Beijing -- has been growing more vigorously since 1981. "When we looked at temperature and satellite vegetation data, we saw that year to year changes in growth and duration of the growing season of northern vegetation are tightly linked to year-to-year changes in temperature," Liming Zhou of Boston University said in a statement. The area of vegetation has not extended, but the existing vegetation has increased in density, he said. In an area from central Europe to Siberia, researchers found that more than 60 percent of the vegetated area has been growing more vigorously over the last two decades. In addition, the growing season in Eurasia lengthened by about 18 days, the researchers found. The changes were less pronounced in North America, which has seen average temperatures fall in some eastern areas. There was a fragmented pattern of change notable only in the forests of the east and grasslands of the upper Midwest. Researchers also found dramatic changes in the timing of both the appearance and fall of leaves over the two decades of satellite data. The increased vegetation found in the study might help cut greenhouse gases by drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but that depends on what type of vegetation is gaining ground, Myneni said. "What's good for the plants is not necessarily good for the planet," he said. The study is to appear in the September 16 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, published by the American Geophysical Union. Michael E. Mann, a professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study, said the study is important because it uses satellite data to bolster evidence for human-caused climate change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Sep 6 14:48:28 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] GWU to Partly Shut During Protests Message-ID: <01d801c13715$484c85e0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 6 September 2001. GWU to Partly Shut During Protests. WASHINGTON -- On the advice of police, part of George Washington University will be shut down for several days because of protests expected at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings. Students who live in dormitories will have to leave for the period. In a letter Thursday to students, faculty and staff, university president Stephen J. Trachtenberg said the main campus in Northwest Washington will close from Thursday evening Sept. 27 until Tuesday morning Oct. 2. The campus is located next to the World Bank and IMF buildings, where the meetings will be held Sept. 29-30. "The history of recent protests demonstrates that we face a potentially serious situation with risks for our students, faculty and staff," Trachtenberg wrote. The residence halls will not reopen until 11 a.m. Oct. 2. Parents are being encouraged to take in their children's friends who would have difficulty going home. Trachtenberg noted that police told university officials they plan to put up barricades that will run through part of the campus. "Even in a best-case scenario our proximity to the meetings and crowds would make it difficult if not impossible to operate on a normal schedule," he wrote. The university will be operating on a normal schedule at other campuses, satellites and administrative offices in Virginia and Maryland. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From pieinsky at igc.apc.org Thu Sep 6 15:32:43 2001 From: pieinsky at igc.apc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Guerilla Actions spreading in Colombia Message-ID: <000501c1372d$55a95020$c57df2d0@bypass.com> Wider War in Colombia As Military Steps Up Attacks on Rebels, Conflict Spreads to Once-Stable Areas By Scott Wilson Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, September 6, 2001; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/world/A48724-2001Sep5.html From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 7 01:32:34 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Strategy for an international movement. References: Message-ID: <000201c13795$55230de0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Amanda Tattersall" > I think an interesting question to ask is where and how are these demands to > be created, and specifically, can they come through the anti-globalisation > movement, or from the movements (such as working class, environmental, > womens, indigenous) that operate within it. This is not to argue some sort > of autonomous line - which, by the way, I disagree with, but rather to say > that the demands arise from material circumstances, consciousness and > conditions, rather than some abstract framework. Precisely a great way to describe why a huge part of these movements revolve around the demand to allow the right of assembly. The "concrete conditions" is a pun yet the best way to describe what happened in Quebec as well. That target- the Wall- came out of a strategic approach based on the demonstration of how far the Canadian state will actually take democracy. Such an approach allowed people to see what lengths Canada would go to in their attempt to crush the democratic movement(s). The point about multi-faceted demands is most probably a great one, unarticulated very often as yet- but I think it's worth pointing out that many demands continue to rise the entire way through. When has this *not* been the case, even where revolutions have succeeded? The problem of the > anti-globalisation movement is that although it is radically effective at > mobilising and representing a gut hate of capitalism, it is abstracted from > the specific manifestations of capitalist oppression. It is targeting > groups of oppressors - symbolically, but not in a material sense. [although > I note that stopping the WTO or WEF does materially affect the ruling > class]. > I agree more without the parenthetical comment- except that, as you note further on- they are losing their grip on the minds of the prison houses. This is a singularly great achievement. In fact, it had to be the first goal. Any and all who think that the movement has not been acting properly should ask themselves what this discussion would amount to if the population at large wasn't forced to take notice. Capitalist triumphalism is dead. Now, it is only damage control. Within the framework- we must continue to find ways of taking the high road, for we have won so much by simply being relevant and making capitalism a word in the vocabulary again. > So to ask where will demands come from, I do not think that they will > emanate from the anti-globalisation movement in and of itself. I actually > believe that they will rise from its participants, and that is why I seek > the participation of the working class in this movement. The 10 million dollar question: How do we get the workers, and- if we do- on what terms? This is my breaking point from traditional Marxism. It simply will not do to court the Workers' leaders at this pont. I have to make reference to the article I just sent out last night on Buzz Hargrove/OCAP. For all intents and purposes, OCAP- even though they are so very far away from me (I would need at least a week to get there hitchhiking, for example), they represent a local form of the international "anti-globalisation" movement. Hargrove has been at the fore of the left that is real in Canada for years. He is infinitely better as a leader than our old buddy Ken Georgetti of the Canadian Labour Congress- and had spearheaded a need for revival over several years. This was what made his reputation as "progressive" and sometimes almost a radical, as far as the Canadian Auto Workers (progressive comparatively by any standard). He has now attacked and tried to cut up the OCAP alliance with the CAW. The apologists among the ranks of the left for this will say it is because OCAP acted irresponsibly with their mock eviction. However, that is simply not the case. OCAP would be praised and defended by Hargrove if they were irrelevant. If they were not relevant -or even far less so- they would not be under assault. The assault simply comes from one place: Hargrove cannot allow the continued association with the OCAP tactics becuase they make a clear distinction as to a real alternativew tactics to the upturned, open hand. They do not allow him to be the top force for progress and workers values here. I was shocked by the union betrayal inseattle, disappointed by it in Quebec, and the more it happens the more it becomes the par for the course. Just like every position of privelege under capitalism, the motion of the working class- particularly labour- threatens these people immensely. That means, at the very least! The holiday will have to be put on hold. Such things mean, ultimately, that Buzz and his type- no matter how progressive in times of class peace- need to slam down on the side of "Order"! when the boat begins to rock. This will happen *every time*. Do we cut links with the workers marches? Do we stop trying to reach out them? Do we denounce the unions? None of these ideas are where I'm going. But that- at some point somehow- we *must* take these misleaders on and recognise their class position. Also, in the mean time- the radical elements of the movement that have done so much to bury TINA must stay at a friendly distance. Think of organised labour as a sea of radicals led by NGO's. Then we should also realise the difference involved between leaders and led. Do not be fooled as the unions continue their lurch left, either. They have to- their is a struggle in the streets, unions are under attack and glovbalisation wants the labour tops jobs- because they want rid of organised workers! So they aren't going anywhere. We will need to be very careful not to exclude or be led by these people. Meanwhile, we must continue to bring out every damn worker who isn't organised we can. Educate, educate and educate about globalisation. > Only then can the demands really have transitional weight. > I don't agree. They already have a lot of weight. The simple hysterical tone in the ruling classes' denunciations is clear evidence of that. However, I'd agree if we settled on revolutionary. The demands- backed by the working class and not simply "labour"- can change the world. We should not lose sight of the fact- no matter how much idiocy is spewed by people calling the movement young punks or whatever- these are mostly workers. I'm a worker in school, for instance. We cannot forget that. Guilt is never a revolutionary emotion. So many otherwise great revolutionaries are crippled by being frozen in some notion that "I'm not a real worker" "I'm a straight white male" "I live in an imperialist country", etc. This kind of thinkoing has absoluted devastated the left for thirty years. It is time to proclaim the right of all people, for their own reasons and for their own personal gain! ...to hate and fear the future under this society as is. Enough. > The question becomes what is the anti-globalisation movement and what is its > relationship to other movements. I think two things are important to note. > Firstly, the anti-globalisation movement gets its teeth and passion from > more concrete circumstances, and should not be reduced (in our minds) to the > big rallies/blockades. In Australia our racist government is cracking down > on asylum seekers and refugees. The campaign against this agenda is > particularly connected to the anti-globalisation movement. Demands for the > anti-globalisation movement come from this campaign. I'm interested to hear more from our Aussie comrades about this. I don't know anything about this other than what racist spittle comes through on the CBC here- mostly about a shipload of Afghanis off the coast. How is it being integrated? "Think globally, act locally" is one thing- doing more than repeating this absolutely vital mantra is another. So far, OCAP has been the best example of taking the essence of the anti-globalisation movement and making it into a fighting force against the Ontario Provincial government and their vicious "globalisation" agenda (neo-liberal?). OCAP sent a speaker here- the main theme of which was to preach the notion of not appealling but demanding. they came to this conclusion the same way that the A-G radicals are coming to it: Trying everything else and getting desperate. > Outrage against the > nature and form of globalisation arise from these specific issues. It will > be these campaigns, that are far more tangible, that will provide us with a > basis for demands. > > Secondly, I think that the role of the anti-globalisation movement > strategically is to enhance militancy and provide hope. The movement gives > legitimacy to more militant strategies, lowing the bar for mass action > whether that be strikes, pickets or rallies. It can assist the union > movement and militant activists within that movement by being a bench mark > for radical activism. Furthermore the movement provides hope because it > denies the end of history line of the right, and argues that there is mass > dissent and parades this dissent around the world. > It more than denies it, I dare say it has defeated and buried it. This is the true gift. it could wither now and we would not hear the same nattering again. > I agree that the anti-globalisation movement needs demands. We need to have > a framework from which we build the movement and attempt to achieve > victories. But the construction of demands always falls within the > dichotomy of reformism and more transitional ideas. Agreed. I have no idea *at all* how to explicate this, but I still say this is to come from a honing of the anti-(pick an acronym of death) campaigns. They are refromist in scope in that we don't ask capitalism to simply go away, but revolutionary in kernel in that they come from the very system of capitalism- and their highest echelons- and the phase of development that capitalism is currently producing. In other words- they started this process perhaps with a vengeance, thinking their own arrogance would saee them through. But just like so many aspects of the economy, what starts cannot finish in the same way. To undo what is called globalisation would be to undo corporate control. That will take a revolution. People who think otherwise? Let us prove it together- I still maintain another demand, perhaps better suited than for places like Canada in say, Ireland or Denmark- is a united call for a referenda on the XXX agreement. They cannot give us this. But this exposes their anti-democracy and further guts their bloated system (I love typing stuff like that). > I would hate to see us > argue for a seat at the table at the WTO or for *reform* of that institution > (we tried that with the state 100 years ago, and although it got the working > class something, it also legitimated and facilitated their exploitation). I think, thankfully, that day passed somewhere around the demos in Prague. They were present in Seattle, that much is for sure. Yet there was a lot less of that nonsense in Quebec- and I hardly think that Canada is that much more radical than the US (partly, but not really....). > I > fear that these demands will indeed be offered to particular NGOs in the > near future, depleting our movement. Any who want that, I'm afraid, will leave us all sooner or later. We should not fear that they betray us now, but fear they will betray us later when there are pitched battles in the streets *without* benefit of a conference.Bob Geldof, Bono- some of the Trade Unions (like Hoffa's Teamsters in the US) are already pretty much in this position. > I have no answers for the demand > question, Damn! :-) > just to say that they need to be transitional (and we must > seriously consider what the WTO et al will do in the future and thus what is > transitional), and they need to be possible (ending capitalism though > desirable is not a particularly achievable goal in the short term, it also > means very little as it is so abstract). I made the case above for something *impossible*. I think it is to our advantage to continue to peel away their "democratic" veneer. The propaganda we extend can be wholly social-democratic in the transitional demands (something many revolutionaries have done before building successful revolutions!), in that they would be not only possible, but likely if the country were the democracy they call it. But we, as revolutionary analysts, are fairly certain it will not hold up at all. Box them in and watch these dinosaurs try to act like Houdinis. They have been failing miserably thus far, and they know it. > Hope this is of interest `twas! Macdonald - look forward to further discussion. > > Amanda From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Fri Sep 7 07:26:12 2001 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] FBI "Anti-Terrorism" Raid on Arab and Arab-American Websites Message-ID: <000301c137a0$ab034da0$30a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Thursday September 6 5:38 PM ET FBI Denies Bias as Raid Shuts Arabic Web Sites By Marcus Kabel DALLAS (Reuters) - An 80-strong U.S. terrorism task force raided the Texas-based host of Arabic Web sites, including that of the Arab world's leading independent news channel, prompting charges on Thursday of an ``anti-Muslim witchhunt.'' But the FBI (news - web sites), which took part in the raid on Wednesday at privately held InfoCom Corp., in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, denied any anti-Arab bias and said it was executing an unspecified federal search warrant. The FBI declined to specify the target of the search warrant, which is under seal in a federal court, except to say in a statement that the search was ``one aspect of a more than two-year investigation that is ongoing.'' InfoCom's owners said the raid resulted in a temporary shut-down of Web sites it hosts for about 500 customers, including that run by Al-Jazeera television and the newspaper Al-Sharq, both based in the Gulf state of Qatar. Al-Jazeera is a major regional news source for Arabic speakers. Often dubbed ``the Arab CNN,'' it has emerged as a major force in a region where most broadcasters operate under direct state control. The Web sites were shut down while about 80 agents copied information from InfoCom's Internet servers, said Ghassan Elashi, brother of owner Bayan Elashi. He said many of the sites were able to start up again on other servers, while the task force continued to copy computerized information on Thursday. The office remained sealed off by FBI agents. ``We have nothing to hide. We are cooperating 110 percent with the FBI,'' InfoCom's lawyer Mark Enoch told reporters. Enoch said whatever tips had led to the search was ``bad information.'' ``If they think they're going to find that InfoCom is associated with terrorism, they're wrong. It's not,'' he said. Elashi said InfoCom's customers were not solely Arabic or Muslim. ``They are across the board, from Dallas to California to other places around the world,'' he said. Several American Islamic groups condemned the search as ``an anti-Muslim witchhunt promoted by the pro-Israel lobby in America,'' according to a statement from 10 organizations, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council. ``We are deeply concerned that there is a pattern of stereotyping that permeates all these types of investigations. There is a marginalization of the American-Muslim population,'' Mahdi Bray of the Los Angeles-based council said at a news conference outside the closed InfoCom office. The FBI denied the raid was any kind of witchhunt. ``We were executing a search warrant as part of a criminal investigation. It had nothing to do with anti-Islamic or anti-Palestinian or anti-Middle East issues or anything like that,'' said special agent Lori Bailey, spokeswoman for the Dallas FBI office. The search was conducted by the North Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multi-agency federal and local grouping which includes the FBI, Secret Service and the U.S. Customs Service. It also includes the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, an arm of the Treasury Department (news - web sites) empowered to freeze or seize the assets of individuals or organizations that have been designated by the government as terrorist. Email this story - View most popular | Printer-friendly format Earlier Stories FBI Denies Bias in Raid That Shut Qatar Web Site (September 6) Hunter Gray www.hunterbear.org From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Fri Sep 7 15:49:43 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: (en) US, Washington, IMF/WB Direct Action Information [EXCERPT] Message-ID: <001f01c137e7$020a7f60$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> ----- Original Message ----- From: Fitzhugh MacCrae To: Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 3:36 PM Subject: (en) US, Washington, IMF/WB Direct Action Information [EXCERPT] > ________________________________________________ > A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E > http://www.ainfos.ca/ > ________________________________________________ > > IMF/WB Direct Action Information > > > From: "Mobilization for Global Justice" > > Dear Friends, > > This email comes to you from the Mobilization for > Global Justice scenario > working group in Washington DC. We are would like > to begin building a > broader consensus about a mass direct action during > Global Justice Week. > Below you will find our thinking about goals, > intentions and possible > actions. Please discuss this with your groups and get > back to us at: > agcheckin@riseup.net as soon as possible with your > feedback and input. > > You will also find the following information in this > email: > Convergence Information, Direct Action Scenario, > Demands, Action Visions, > Proposed Action Calendar, Solidarity actions, Affinity > Groups, Spokes > Council, Legal Information, Housing, Contact Info > > For the most up to date info. please visit > www.globalizethis.org: > > DIRECT ACTION COMMUNITY CONVERGENCE > September 23rd - September 28th > Location TBA > The convergence will be a space for workshops > including nonviolent direct > action, legal/jail/court solidarity, anti-oppression, > affinity group > formation, legal observer training, blockade training, > street medic > training, communications for direct action, scouting, > media messaging and > more. Spokes councils will be held every night at the > convergence as well > as all day art and puppet building. > > MASS NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION INFORMATION FOR > SEPTEMBER 29 & 30 > > We are planning large-scale, well-organized, > high-visibility actions to > protest the IMF/World Bank meetings on Saturday and > Sunday, September 29-30. > We will take direct action to open the meetings, to > make our demands, and to > engage more of civil society in the growing discussion > about corporate power > versus justice, democracy and a sustainable future. > If we must, we will > challenge the walls that shut out people here and > around the world from > participating in the decisions that impact our lives > and communities. We > envision colorful and festive actions with street > theater as a major > element. We will make space for a variety of > non-violent action styles > reflecting our different groups and communities. We > will also act in a > spirit of mutual-aid, respect and accommodation with > all groups and > coalitions that are planning complimentary events and > actions independently > from the Mobilization for Global Justice. > > MOBILIZATION FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE VISIONS FOR ACTION > The Mobilization for Global Justice joins the masses > of people organizing > for global justice in welcoming you to Washington DC > this fall to protest > the IMF and the World Bank. We have agreed to a few > basic visions for > action in order to facilitate the coming together of a > broader, more diverse > movement. This understanding should allow people from > many backgrounds, > movements, and beliefs to work together and encourages > the movement-building > trust. These are not philosophical or political > requirements or judgments; > there are many ways to resist corporate globalization. > > VISIONS FOR ACTION > -The Mobilization for Global Justice is a nonviolent > organization. > -We will carry out this action in a manner that > reflects the world we want > to create, and act in the service of what we love. > -We envision a nonviolent world; we will use means > consistent with this > vision. > -We will act with respect for the local community and > in a way that > encourages all to join us. > -We will protect and care for each other in this > action. We will stand in > solidarity against police and state repression, even > with those whose > choices differ from ours, and work to ensure our > tactics do not result in > the endangerment of our sister and brother activists > or people not > participating in the demonstrations. > -We recognize that people of color, poor people, > LGBTs, people of limited > mobility and immigrant groups are at greater risk of > police harassment, > arrest and abuse. We respect that people may wish or > need to have safer > spaces to express themselves and we will act > accordingly. > > ACTION FRAMEWORK > > We will take action to be seen and heard anywhere the > delegates may be in > order to deliver our demands. In doing so we also > want to convey to all > who are willing to see, our vision for another world. > We intend to do so > through creative projects including banners, puppets, > theater, dance, spoken > word, through our courage and willingness to sacrifice > and through our > ability to act in unity embodying a new set of > political practices that > value direct democracy, creativity, collective action, > responsibility and > accountability to one another. > > In order to accomplish this we are proposing a > series of activities on the > days leading up to and following the two day meeting > on the 29th and 30th. > Within this framework we are encouraging different > organizations, clusters > or affinity groups to take responsibility for > particular actions that speak > to their goals, interests, issues or hearts. > > We seek to build and coordinate these actions through > an Action Spokes > Council that will meet in the days ahead. Up until > that time we ask for > groups to provide feedback, creative ideas, logistical > support etc through > the people who have contacted you about it. > > We want to acknowledge that many other activities are > already being planned > and this schedule does not encompass them all. Events > noted with ** are > available for affinity group and cluster participation > and organizing, and > are not fully planned. The other listed events are > being organized by other > groups who are asking for attendance and support. > > > For a complete calendar of actions and events please > visit: > http://www.globalizethis.org/s30/calendar.cfm > > TUESDAY 25TH > -Immigrant Rights March > > WEDNSDAY 26TH > -**Banner Actions** > -CITIGROUP Action > > THURSDAY 27TH > -**Actions to Keep the Fence Open** > - pm Women's Torch Light March > > FRIDAY 28TH > - am **Airport Leafleting / Actions** > - am Parking Lot Attendants Unite Action- HERE Local > 27 > - 10 am Rally and March for Clean Energy > - noon TACO BELL Action -Immokalee Farm Workers > - pm Rush hour - Stop Global Sweatshop Actions - UNITE > - **Evening March or Action** > > SATURDAY 29TH > -(3-4 am) **Wake Up Call at the Hotels** > - (8-9 am) **Open the Meetings!** Cancel the Debt! > Hear Our Demands! > Morning mass action to attend the meetings. > - (2 pm- at IMF) Solidarity Marches! Both the > International Action Center > and the Latin American Solidarity Groups are planning > marches to the White > House and then the IMF around mid-day. > - pm Interfaith Service and Candlelight March to the > IMF/WB > > SUNDAY 30TH > - **Another World is Possible** - feeder marches from > around DC to the > IMF-WB that will bring images, props, photos, banners > etc illustrating the > world we are trying to build and the demands we are > trying to advance. We > will engage in a positive, participatory direct action > in creating this > other world and then march as a unified group to the > Ellipse in order to > join the permitted march and rally. > -Mass March, Rally (and concert) - a number of > sponsoring groups including > the AFL-CIO are initiating a mass permitted event on > Sunday afternoon on the > Ellipse > > MONDAY 1ST > -**Jail Solidarity Actions** > > TUESDAY 2ND > -**Jail Solidarity and Vigil** > > WENSDAY 3RD > -**Jail Solidarity and Vigil** > > > JAIL SOLIDARITY & LEGAL SUPPORT > > We will encourage and facilitate jail and court > solidarity for the actions. > Through jail solidarity we can take power in a > situation designed to make us > powerless. We do this by making our decisions as a > group, by acting in > harmony with each other, and by committing ourselves > to safeguard each other > 's well-being. Every time there is a choice in the > legal process, activists > can refuse to cooperate, making things difficult for > the authorities. > Through solidarity tactics, we use group > non-cooperation to gain some > control, expedite the legal process and consequences, > prevent the > authorities from singling some people out for harsher > treatment, and help us > resist fines and probation. Solidarity tactics extend > the action to the > prison and legal system with the strength and > community of a group. We > encourage action participants to clear their calendars > in advance for > several days after the action, should it become > necessary to use a > fill-the-jails tactic to win demands. Those who want > or need to leave will > have that option open. We will have legal support for > those arrested > through arraignment: this includes legal and > solidarity briefings, a staffed > legal support office, and experienced lawyers who can > make jail visits. > > AFFINITY GROUPS, CLUSTERS & ACTION SPOKESCOUNCIL > > Everyone participating in the actions is asked to form > or join an affinity > group-a self-reliant action group of 5-20 people, > including people who do > not risk arrest and do support work before, during and > after arrest. > Affinity groups are the basic planning and > decision-making bodies for > actions. Form an affinity group with your friends, > people from your > community, workplace or organization. Two or more > affinity groups that have > something in common or want to do similar actions > should consider working > together as a "cluster" of affinity groups. Leading > up to the actions, > participants will coordinate through an Action > Spokescouncil, with > group-designated spokespeople responsible for carrying > their group's plans, > opinions and decisions to the spokescouncil and > reporting back to their > group. Affinity groups will discuss agenda items and > proposals before each > spokescouncil. Affinity groups are encouraged to > arrive on September 23, or > as soon thereafter as possible, in order to > participate in the spokescouncil > 's planning of the actions. If this is not possible, > affinity groups should > try to send at least one person early in the week. > All direct action > participants should be in town and trained by the > evening of September 27. > All participants are strongly urged to take part in > nonviolent direct action > preparation workshops, which will combine training > with specific strategy to > prepare for both the action and for jail/court > solidarity. Trainings will > be available in Washington during the week leading up > to the actions. > > DEMANDS > > We demand that the World Bank and International > Monetary Fund: > -Open all World Bank and IMF meetings to the media and > the public. > -Cancel all impoverished country debt to the World > Bank and IMF, using the > institutions' own resources. > -End all World Bank and IMF policies that hinder > people's access to food, > clean water, shelter, health care, education, and > right to organize. (Such > "structural adjustment" policies include user fees, > privatization, and > economic austerity programs.) > -Stop all World Bank support for socially and > environmentally destructive > projects such as oil, gas, and mining activities, and > all support for > projects such as dams that include forced relocation > of people. > -We furthermore demand that the United States > government, the largest > shareholder and most influential government in the > World Bank and IMF, adopt > the above demands, and work vigorously to compel the > World Bank and IMF to > implement them. > > DEMANDS BY OTHER GROUPS (as we know them) > No to Fast Track, No FTAA, No New Rounds of the WTO, > No To Plan Columbia, > Priority Treatment for Combating Aids, Amnesty Now for > All Immigrants, > > CONTACT INFO: > > Office: > Mobilization for Global Justice > C/O AFSC DC > 1328 Florida Ave. > Washington DC 20009 > (202) 265-7714 > info@globalizethis.org > > Working Groups: > ARTS & ACTION Angela Flynn 202-986-9455, > alf@survival.bigmailbox.com > Listserv: artsinactiondc-owner@yahoo.com > CONCERT: Contact Gaurav Madan > studentsforsocialchange@hotmail.com > EDUCATION: Monica Wilson 202-387-8030 > mwilson@essential.org > FUNDRASING: Paul Osher 202-332-5060 > paulosher@hotmail.com > MEDIA: Stacy Malkan smalkan@hotmail.com > MEDICAL: Jen Cohn, jennifer_cohn@hotmail.com, > 215-668-1646 > MESSAGING & MATERIALS: Daniel Holstein 202-270-8387 > dholstein@starpower.net > OUTREACH: Michele B michele1917@yahoo.com Listserv: > mgj-outreach-subscribe@yahoogroups.com > LOGISTICS (housing and food): Laura 301-864-6132 > laural88@yahoo.com > NUTS &BOLTS: Jen Carr 301-277-1581 jencarr3@cs.com > SCENARIO (Non-Permitted): agcheckin@riseup.net > SCENARIO (Permitted): Robert Weissman 202-387-8030 > rob@essential.org > TRAINING: Liz Butler 202-285-6758 liz@forestethics.org > WEB: Tom steelgame@yahoo.com > > ------------------------------------------ > > > > ******** > ****** The A-Infos News Service ****** > News about and of interest to anarchists > ****** > COMMANDS: lists@ainfos.ca > REPLIES: a-infos-d@ainfos.ca > HELP: a-infos-org@ainfos.ca > WWW: http://www.ainfos.ca/ > INFO: http://www.ainfos.ca/org > > -To receive a-infos in one language only mail lists@ainfos.ca the message: > unsubscribe a-infos > subscribe a-infos-X > where X = en, ca, de, fr, etc. (i.e. the language code) From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 7 19:00:18 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Interview with Luca Casarini, Spokesperson for the "Tute Bianche" Message-ID: <019001c13801$a2182a60$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Originally published in Spanish by the MRG de Reus, Catalunya, edited by SERPAL, Alternative Press Service, and in Italian by Il Manifesto ________________________________ Translated to English by irlandesa Interview with Luca Casarini, Spokesperson for the "Tute Bianche" Recent events in Genoa - where hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protested over the economic and social policies of leaders of those developed countries which make up the G-8 - demonstrated the growing potential of those social movements which have a risen in rejection of neoliberalism. The protest, violently repressed on orders from the government of Silvio Berlusconi, ended tragically with one death, that of Carlo Giuliani, and many injuries, as well as the aftereffects of detentions, threats and different kinds of torture inflicted on demonstrators by the "carabinieri." The events have also provoked serious reflection in the social arena where they are trying to create viable alternatives to the unjust, exclusionary and impoverishing "order" which the powerful are trying to impose. Forms of social organization, rejection of the use of violence (often a means of provocation which can facilitate repression of mass demonstrations and their subsequent criminalization), future perspectives of social movements...these are some of the subjects which make up the debate among active and occasional members of different groups. The debate is open, and it is good that it is so. Out of the richness of the discussions, and the contrast of the arguments, will emerge those consensuses which will allow progress to take place. As a contribution to these reflections, we are reproducing an interview with one of the spokespersons from the Social Forum of Genoa, Luca Casarini, so that everyone, in turn, can make their own contribution. The article was published by Il Manifesto (Italy - August 3, 2001). We are reproducing the version in Spanish which was circulated by the MRG de Reus, Catalunya. Editing by SERPAL, Alternative Pres Service. Interview with Luca Casarini, spokesperson for the TUTE BIANCHE, by Benedetto Vecchi, published in Il Manifesto, Italy - August 3, 2001 Original Italian version: www.ilmanifesto.it "When you see a carabinieri's armored car closing in on you, you either escape or you react in the same way as if a weapon were being pointed at you. We, in Genoa, on the Via Tolemaide, built barricades in order to protect our safety. For three hours we had to react to the police attacks, we and many others. Carlo died defending himself from the attacks by the carabinieri. At the same time, he was there along with thousands of men and women, in order to affirm that another world is possible." Luca Casarini, spokesperson for the network of social centers of the northeast, charismatic figure of the Tute Bianche, one of the "central promoters" of the Social Forum of Genoa (FSG), does not speak in half measures about the events in Genoa: "There is an enormous difference between someone who builds a barricade in order to defend himself, and someone who decides to militarily suppress a broad organized movement like this one, against economic globalization. The former is affirming his right to change a reality that produces poverty and exploitation. The latter is defending the G8, an illegitimate body that is trying to make decisions about the world, ignoring the hopes and desires for a better life held by those who inhabit it." Luca Casarini: What we bore witness to in Genoa was the end of political mediation between the movements and the institutions. I think about the month when the FSG dealt directly with the government: during that time the center-left opposition didn't say anything significant. Or I think about the implosion of a party like the DS... Il M: Speaking about death is sad, after what happened to Carlo. Yes, the institutional left died in Genoa. Try and imagine how embarrassing it was for the center-left, who prepared the meeting for the G8, and afterwards found itself face to face with the images of brutal beatings and of Carlo dead on the asphalt. They stammered and they grew silent. Even so, the preparation for the G8 summit was theirs. It infuriated us to read the statements by Luciano Violante, saying that the FSG should distance themselves from the violent ones in the red zone [...] We have tried to analyze the question of world government. We have talked about the imperial perspective of world government. It all means an erosion of national sovereignty. Not its end, but its erosion and its redirection towards a global, imperial system. In Genoa we have seen that perspective manifest itself in the form of war. How we should confront that form which the imperial perspective is adopting is a question for which we were not prepared. Il Manifesto: It appears to me that the Tute Bianche have also reached their end. LC: End? That's a bit strong to say it like that. Exhausted maybe, we have undoubtedly concluded a phase. The Tute Bianche were an experiment that sought to make the idea of conflict legitimate once again. Think about the FSG. There we were, the Catholics and us, Arci and Cobas, Rete Lilliput, Drop the Debt and the Fiom. A potent mix. We functioned as the central driving force, without that meaning that anyone was imposing their own priorities. As Tute Bianche we have traveled a long path, questioning ourselves about what we have accomplished. A positive experience, but one which seems inadequate to me now for confronting the imperial system we have facing us, in which politics are the continuation of war, and not the reverse, like Karl von Clausewitz wrote. Think about the Balkans, Palestine, Africa. A lot of people predicted that a delicate phase would be beginning this autumn for the social struggles [...] Many factors are leading me to the conclusion that the civil disobedience phase is played out. Now it's necessary to move on to social disobedience. It's necessary to verify the crisis of all the components of the FSG, which doesn't mean paralysis, but recognizing the limits of their methods of analysis, their perspectives and their political agenda. To go on creating social forums in all the cities is positive. Forming alliances is fundamental. Although I prefer to think not about alliances, but about a social process by which the movement turns into a magnetic pole for all kinds of figures and social realities which are different from us. Think about what happened in Genoa with the lawyers and volunteer doctors. The lawyers were obviously democratic, even though apart from the FSG. But after a lot of discussion, they decided to put on t-shirts that! said "Union of Democratic Lawyers" and to join in the demonstrations. These same lawyers talked with other lawyers in Genoa when the police attacks got worse, in order to write a very strong document about the government's behavior, which they directed to the Union delle Camere Penali. Or think about the experience of the nurses and doctors who came to the aid of the people who had been beaten, and who were ultimately themselves beaten up by the forces of order. That's two examples of the kinds of networks which are being built, attracted by the movement's issues. And they do so from the perspective of their own specific work, which they put at the movement's disposal. This doesn't mean that everything is going smoothly. We find ourselves facing a difficult, hard, reality, which has to be understood and analyzed once again. It's not about fascism, but a change in the form of the State, which confirms a profound transformation in the methods of producing wealth and subjectivity. And all of that on a global scale. I think about what happened on the streets of Genoa: it seemed more like a riot than a demonstration. This must be understood, analyzed. I'm not talking about the Black Bloc obviously, but about those who had to exercise resistance. The so-called Black Bloc is a phenomena which should not be criminalized. It's people who believe that, in order to fight capitalism, it's enough to destroy a shop window. That's what their "Smash Capitalism" is about. We think along different lines. We think about a social process of transformation, through which the "network of networks" becomes a magnetic pole which facilitates the creation of other social networks. Il M: I think that it makes sense to state that, after Genoa, nothing is like it was before. For you, what has changed? LC: I would propose that you go back to the events of Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st. Or, better, to the photograph in the Carta weekly, which you, Il Manifesto, also published. It was a photograph by Tano D'Amico which showed that already, in Via Tolemaide, long before Carlo was assassinated, the carabinieri had taken their pistols out of their holsters in order to take aim at us. That bears witness to a military perspective, which is the manner in which the government confronted the mobilizations against the G8. The carabinieri charged violently. We resisted, and I claim that resistance as a political act. Nonetheless, if we adopt the military perspective of confrontation, that would mean madness and political suicide. All the forces of order were in Genoa, the army, the secret service agencies of the eight most powerful countries in the world in economic and military terms. Our movement has no way of taking on that military power. They would destroy us in a matter of months. We must, therefore, find a third path, which would bear witness to the rejection of globalization, but also to symbolic gestures such as destroying a bank. IM: There are those who aver that Via Tolemaide was a trap you fell into... LC: Were we naive? Perhaps. But I see it differently. As Tute Bianche, we have signed a pact with the FSG, and we respect it. At the preparatory meeting for the "disobedience" event (Friday, the 20th), at no time did we conceal our intention to violate the red zone. We made it quite clear what instruments we'd be utilizing. We would not be carrying sticks or attack instruments. We would not even be dressing as white monkeys, a decision we reached after a lengthy discussion among ourselves in the Carlini Stadium. I believe it was a good decision because, when one is immersed in an intricate reality like this movement, the important element is not the claiming of a membership, but the "contamination" between different groups which, despite everyt hing, maintain a common objective. If we were naive in Genoa, then this was our naivete: we remained faithful to the pact, respecting those thought in a different way than we did but who wanted us to remain faithful to an objective. If, at the end of the day, it was a trap, it was set in order to strike at the movement. In the past there have been those who have written that the Tute Bianche played with traps. That our confrontations with the police were a joke. There were those who went to the extreme of saying that we agreed with the police. It's never been like that. For two, three years we have been dedicated to thinking long and hard about how to work conflict without it turning destructive. We decided to utilize new techniques: we announced publicly what we were trying to do, always warning that, if the police charged us, we would defend ourselves with shields and padded protective gear. That was our rule, because we felt that it was essential to create conflict and consensus about the objectives we had set. In Genoa we expected that things would be more or less the same as always. But they deceived us. We remember the FSG's meetings with Scajola and Ruggiero: they didn't respect any of the agreements we reached. The police used firearms, although they said they would not do so. Our right to demonstrate, which Ruggiero recognized as being inalienable, was crushed under the wheels of the police armored vehicles. IM: And now what? LC: For me it is essential to begin again, starting from what has been called the "Carlini laboratory." Intense experience. It has taught me a lot. For example, how to build a public space where the multitude isn't just a word, but a shared construction, a political construction of the "disobedients." Interview with Luca Casarini, spokesperson for the TUTE BIANCHE, by Benedetto Vecchi, published in Il Manifesto, Italy - August 3, 2001 Original Italian version: www.ilmanifesto.it (http://www.ilmanifesto.it) ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Sat Sep 8 07:40:40 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Examples of World Bank/IMF "Restructuring" Message-ID: <003501c1386b$dac9d100$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> PLEASE FORWARD Need info on how the World Bank, IMF, and IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) devastate countries with their "restructuring" policy? Click on the links below to read two very important articles. LABOR-ARGENTINA: JOBLESS GO HUNGRY UNDER GOV'T AUSTERITY PLAN DEVELOPMENT-HONDURAS: PAYING OFF DEBT ON RUINED PROJECTS Come to Washington DC for the 28th of September to expose these legalized Mafioso loan-sharking institutions to the world!! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1731 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010908/1b5d6651/attachment.txt From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Sep 8 09:24:08 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Australia halts refugee boat. Message-ID: <002f01c1387a$4e2b2320$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> BBC. 8 September 2001. Australia halts refugee boat. Australia's navy has intercepted a boat carrying more than 200 asylum seekers off its north-west coast. The migrants were taken off their boat on Friday night and put on the HMAS Manoora, the Australian troop ship already carrying more than 400 mainly Afghan asylum seekers involved in a diplomatic stand-off near Christmas Island. The Bali-registered boat was carrying 237 people, including 92 women. Prime Minister John Howard said he would introduce legislation to tighten Australia's migration laws. If approved, people would have reach the Australian mainland rather than outlying islands before they can apply for refugee status. Mr Howard said the new legislation would affect people reaching Christmas Island and Ashmore Island. He said the two places would be taken out of the Australian migration zone so that anyone arriving there would no longer be able to apply for refugee status. The Manoora is continuing to Papua New Guinea, where it is expected in the capital Port Moresby early next week. The original asylum seekers on board were put there after a Norwegian freighter which had picked them up was refused permission to land them at Christmas Island. Mr Howard instead brokered a deal whereby they will be taken from Papua New Guinea to New Zealand and Nauru, where their asylum claims will be assessed [and, presumably, media attention will be lessened]. Australia civil rights groups are still hoping to have his decision ruled illegal so the asylum seekers can be processed in Australia. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From bstoller at utopia2000.org Sat Sep 8 17:59:54 2001 From: bstoller at utopia2000.org (Barry Stoller) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Chavez starts land redistribution Message-ID: <3B9AB0EE.7BB88869@utopia2000.org> Reuters. 8 September 2001. Venezuela's Chavez Takes First Step to Land Reform. CARACAS, Venezuela -- In the first step toward a radical agrarian reform in Venezuela that might involve property confiscation, President Hugo Chavez presented poor farmers with deeds to thousands of acres of land on Saturday. At a ceremony in the oil-rich western state of Zulia, the leftist leader exhorted wealthy landowners to donate unused land to the state, or face heavy taxation and even confiscation or eviction under a forthcoming land law. "Today's act is a step toward the implementation of the Law of Lands and Rural Development by the revolution, so there can finally be justice in the distribution and use of land," said former paratrooper Chavez during the ceremony to award some 105,000 acres of property in the hands of the state-owned National Agrarian Institute. Chavez also announced he would create a new Agriculture Ministry to promote the rural economy. "I take this opportunity to call on all those who have a lot of land and are not using it to voluntarily put it at our disposal. And if they do not, we will have no alternative but to turn the screw on them," said Chavez, wearing his trademark military fatigues. "The land law will be very severe concerning the appropriate use of property," the populist leader said. The measure would regulate land use, he said, making sure that the best quality soils were used for producing crops and not pasture. Noting a lack of funding undermined previous attempts at agrarian reform in Venezuela dating back to the 1960s, Chavez said his government would provide loans and technical assistance to new farmers. As part of a "vast strategic plan" to develop the central axis of the country, Chavez announced plans to build a new city to the south of the giant Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela's western oil hub. The president has announced plans for several such new cities to resettle the poor from the precarious shantytowns that cling to hillside and river gorges in the capital Caracas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews From amandatatts at hotmail.com Sun Sep 9 07:59:32 2001 From: amandatatts at hotmail.com (Amanda Tattersall) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Australia halts refugee boat. Message-ID: >BBC. 8 September 2001. Australia halts refugee boat. Sorry I didn't update people on this issue. Just for background I live in Sydney Australia and in the last 2 years we have been witness to an increasinly racist agenda regarding immigration, refugees and asylum seekers. To give it some context we currently have a Liberal (very conservative government). Also, over the last 8 years we have seen the rise of a group called One Nation, lead by Pauline Hansen, who have produced a series of right wing national socialist policies. They believe in a white Australia (a previous policy of the Australian governments left and right from 1900 to 1972). The politics of race in Australia, clearly fuelled by heightened economic alienation and job insecurity has reached its peak this year. At a state level (in New South Wales) we have a "Labor" government labelling 'ethnic crime' a product of cultural tendencies towards violence. At a Federal Level we have mandatory detention of all asylum seekers who arrive without visas (translated - the poorest and most needy are detained). People can be kept in these concentration camps for up to 5 years, housed in remote areas of Australia (including the South Australian dessert in Womera). We are due to have a Federal Election late this year - and consequently the level of race politics being pushed by the Liberal Government shifted to the extreme. The Tampa which held 438 asylum seekers was preventing from landing in Australia, and the Government has increased its military presence of international waters. The Government, according to opinion polls has 77% support for its actions. The campaign is extremely difficult and I think strategically very similar to the Vietnam or anti-apartied campaigns of the 60s and 70s. There is extreme polarity in the community, fuelled by lies from our government. I was at a rally today which, although organised with short notice attracted a couple of thousand people. However the campaign will be extraordinarily difficult. Furthermore, given that our 'Labor' Federal Government is practically supporting the Howard (Liberal) Government agenda, the only counter-hegemonic, humanitarian response to this crisis is coming from community organisations. That voice is consequently hardly heard in our mainstream (monopoly controlled) media. Refugees and the protection of asylum seekers is a central issue within the anti-corporate lead globalisation campaign in Australia. Significantly as a campaign it belies the propaganda about globalisation, given that ‘globalisation’ allows wealth to pass over international borders, yet people suffering under this system cannot. The campaign is giving additional weight and direction to the movement in Australia. Given that it is rare for international meetings to ever be held here (thus limiting the opportunity for protest) this campaign not only is vital and necessary for immediate humanitarian reasons but also strategically provides clear direction the broader globalisation campaign. Amanda _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Sep 9 02:54:53 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Chavez starts land redistribution References: <3B9AB0EE.7BB88869@utopia2000.org> Message-ID: <004e01c1390d$1f1962c0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barry Stoller" > CARACAS, Venezuela -- In the first step toward a radical agrarian reform > in Venezuela that might involve property confiscation, President Hugo > Chavez presented poor farmers with deeds to thousands of acres of land > on Saturday. If this is true, Chavez has become our ally in this movement. This, to me, means we should hold him as such and refer to him accordingly. The Chavez experiment, no doubt, has become an inspirational experiment for many of the Bolivarist tradition. Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Sep 10 13:40:01 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] AFL-CIO "Comes Clean" Message-ID: <00db01c13a30$61e4a460$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> WA Union Delegates Call on AFL-CIO to "Come Clean" on International Activities http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=3D6231 Seattle, Wash. -- This past weekend delegates to the Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) voted in favor of pulling some labor skeletons out of the closet by passing a resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to "come clean" about its foreign relations activities and to make amends for the "excesses of the Cold War era." The language of the approved resolution applauds the "progressive new policies of the AFL-CIO in global affairs," but asserts that the labor federation's track record over the past quarter century continues to breed fear and suspicion among labor activists in other countries. To increase its credibility in the eyes of workers abroad, and in the United States, the resolution calls for action to be taken "to clear the air in affirmation of an AFL-CIO policy of genuine global labor solidarity." "This sends a message to progressive elements in the AFL-CIO that steps are being taking in solidarity with bottom-up, militant, working peoples' movements around the world," said Dick Burton, a delegate to the state labor convention from the Seattle Community Colleges Federation of Teachers. The resolution was sponsored by Pride at Work, a constituency group of the AFL-CIO that works toward full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers in their unions and workplaces, and which seeks to build mutual support between the LGBT community and organized labor. Pride at Work passed a similar resolution at its national convention in June of this year. The South Bay Labor Council, based in San Jose, Calif., also passed a similar resolution in November 2000. "The AFL-CIO has not even begun to come to terms with the atrocities done in its name around the world," said Sarah Luthens, a delegate to the convention and an activist with Pride at Work. "There is still a large degree of legitimate distrust between indigenous labor movements around the world and the AFL-CIO. And coming clean is a big part of rebuilding that trust." Citing sources tying AFL-CIO activities to C.I.A. intervention and the subsequent overthrow of a democratically elected government in Chile in 1973, as well as support for reactionary forces that backed the long-lived Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, the resolution claims that "the AFL-CIO engaged in similar activities in many countries on almost every continent." These activities, it continues, "served corporate interests and were largely funded by the U.S. government." The resolution also argues that the AFL-CIO's international activities during the Cold War generally supported corporate interests at the expense of workers, and resulted in the "persecution of working families and the torture, disappearance and death of many trade union activists and leaders." In order to advance new, progressive policies of the AFL-CIO, the resolution continues, it is imperative that the federation renounce past policies and practices and invite union members and researchers to review and discuss all AFL-CIO archives on international labor affairs. "If the AFL-CIO is really serious about taking a whole new direction in dealing with international labor issues, this is very important," said Lou Truskoff, a delegate from the American Postal Workers Union. "There is a lot of mistrust of the AFL-CIO around the world based on these past actions. I think it is in our basic interest to do this." The language of the approved resolution concludes by calling on the AFL-CIO to describe, country by country, all activities it may still be engaged in abroad with funds from the U.S. government, and to renounce any ties that could compromise the federation's credibility. Arguments against the resolution at the state labor convention revolved primarily around concerns that the information would be used to embarrass the AFL-CIO, or that it was "old news" and that the current AFL-CIO leadership was cut from a different cloth. Supporters reasoned that is was the right thing to do, and, in fact, quite necessary in order to forge or rebuild relationships with global labor partners. Roberta Wilson, a delegate from Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (CWA Local 37083), sees the resolution as a form of atonement. "The Catholic Church has done it regarding World War II and their failure to stand up to the Nazis. The United States has done it in terms of Japanese-American internment during World War II. South Africa is still running their Truth Commission. I don't think anything is gained by covering up misdeeds and much is lost -- the most important being trust." The passing of the resolution comes amidst the AFL-CIO's "Campaign for Global Fairness", which aims to build international labor solidarity, and as the federation is stepping up its rhetoric and lobbying in opposition to "fast track" treaty negotiating powers. President George W. Bush is seeking such powers in order to finalize negotiations on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Such authorization would give President Bush the ability to negotiate trade treaties without usual Congressional procedures or oversight, thereby limiting debate, eliminating the possibility for amendments, and preventing Congressional scrutiny of trade legislation. Supporters of the resolution to "come clean" on past foreign policy sins say many of the AFL-CIO's recent proclamations about "fair trade not free trade" fall on deaf ears among union activists in other countries because they remember an AFL-CIO that not so long ago was working hand-in-glove with the U.S. government and the C.I.A. to undermine progressive or militant trade unions in their countries. After several decades of watching the AFL-CIO support a foreign policy agenda that favored corporate interests over those of workers, and liberalized trade rules and structural economic "reforms" that often came at the expense of the middle classes and working poor, the jury is still out among many global labor activists as to the true nature of the AFL-CIO. The approved resolution will now be sent to the AFL-CIO Executive Board. Whether it will have any effect remains to be seen. Many delegates who voted in favor of the resolution say they see it as a good step in the right direction, but say a lot of education and organizing work inside the AFL-CIO lies ahead if the resolution is to move forward. "It's a beginning," said Truskoff of the Postal Workers Union. "I would hope that pretty soon some other labor councils will start dealing with this and adopt it. If it's just coming from the South Bay and Washington State, it could be easily dismissed." Burton, of the community college teachers union, says he hopes the resolution helps to rebuild some trust with labor activists in other countries. "I hope this sends a message to labor people around the world that there are labor council people and state delegate people who want to do the right thing." ***** ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Sep 10 13:49:49 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] New Brazilian Party? Message-ID: <00e701c13a31$c1464160$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> September 9, 2001 Brazil Is Getting a New Political Party: Its Base Is in State Prison By LARRY ROHTER ?O PAULO, Brazil - Having demonstrated its dominance of the prison system during a mass uprising, Brazil's most notorious criminal group is now looking to extend its influence by organizing a political party. Naturally, its platform calls for penal reform. The group, the First City Command, known by its initials in Portuguese, P.C.C., has already designated its first candidate for Congress in next year's national elections. He is Anselmo Neves Maia, a lawyer here who represents leaders of the organization. He says the group also plans to endorse candidates in other states who sympathize with the party platform. "Prisoners all over the country are mobilized behind this cause," he said, "and I am already getting calls from them asking me who their families should support and vote for." He added, "I am the candidate not just of the P.C.C., which has had the courage to rebel against the injustices practiced in the system, but of all the thousands of prisoners in Brazil's prisons." The new political organization is to be called the Party of the Incarcerated Community, whose initials would also be P.C.C. Its secretary general is J?lio C?sar Silv?rio, who is serving six years for robbery and was described by Mr. Maia as "dynamic and enlightened, an admirer of your Benjamin Franklin." But the director of prisons for the state of S?o Paulo, Nagashi Furukawa, has characterized the First City Command as a crime syndicate that controls the trafficking of drugs, alcohol, weapons and mobile telephones within the state prison system. The authorities say the group also runs a flourishing "escape industry" that has resulted in the flight of more than 1,000 prisoners since 1998 and further enriched the group's coffers. S?o Paulo, with more than 36 million of Brazil's 170 million people, is Brazil's most populous state. Nearly 100,000 people, or just under half of the national total, are being held in the state's jails and prisons. The national government does not operate prisons. In February the First City Command organized the largest prison rebellion in the nation's history. Using cell phones smuggled into their cells, the group's leaders ordered their followers in 29 prisons around the state to take control of cellblocks and hold thousands of hostages. The uprising was meant to stop the authorities' actions to weaken the gang. The two-day uprising left 19 people dead, most of them members of three rival groups competing with the First City Command for control of S?o Paulo's prisons. Since then, officials have tried to weaken the gang by moving its leaders to prisons outside S?o Paulo, but some other states have balked, arguing that the crime group could simply spread. During the rebellion the group described itself as a prisoners' union and hung banners calling for "peace, justice and freedom" from cell windows and roofs. In August it published a political manifesto condemning a political system that in Mr. Maia's words "offers the benefits of the law for the rich and its rigors for the poor." The local press has quickly christened Mr. Maia "the candidate of organized crime," but he says he does not mind the association with the First City Command, which he likens to "a club or a guild." He is so confident of victory in the October 2002 election, in fact, that he boasts that he has no plans to campaign or to spend money on posters, fliers or bumper stickers. "I figure that every prisoner has at least three people in his family who are voters," he said. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Sep 10 14:33:33 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Centre for Research on Globalisation Message-ID: <013801c13a37$dc9d6780$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: Centre for Research on Globalisation http://globalresearch.ca/tmp/ From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Sep 10 15:10:33 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] WORLD CONFERENCE TO COMBAT ACTIVISM PLANNED Message-ID: <01c001c13a3d$07d37840$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Organizing against activists!!! Date: 9/9/2001 2:33:36 PM Pacific Daylight Time From: lmnop@value.net (Greg McCombs) WORLD CONFERENCE TO COMBAT ACTIVISM PLANNED The Dutch police are organising an international conference about the methods used to combat activism at neoliberal summits. It will take place from 3 to 5 October 2001 in The Hague. The official program can be found on the website: http://www.burojansen.nl/documenten/DenHaagConferentie.htm (it's an activist website, as usual we are more public than the state...) The organisers claim that the goal of the conference is to prevent 'unnecessary damage' to both sides, but it's clear that they will be discussing a wide variety of methods of combatting resistance, actions and demonstrations. As the official program reads: "It will be a closed forum. Senior police officers from the capitals and other major cities of most European countries, North America, Australia and New Zealand are being invited to attend. There will be presentations on the events in Seattle, Melbourne, Prague and The Hague." Among the stated goals for the conference the official program reads: 1. To acquire greater insight into the phenomenon of "global civil society". 2. To share information and successful tactics for maintaining order during summit conferences. 3. To build up an international network of police experts. 4. To set up a permanent interchange of expertise and to intensify international cooperation in this area. The program continues: " The ultimate goal is to achieve a situation in which it remains possible to carry on holding summits without this leading to serious public order disturbances and riots, and in which at the same time the democratic right to demonstrate can be exercised as a legitimate means of influencing international political and financial decision-making.(...) ". By the way; as one can read in the official program, the organisers have invited someone to give a speech from the viewpoint of 'civil society'. We are in (good) contact with this person, and he is still in doubt as to whether he should collaborate or not. If he does, he will tell them loud and clear which atrocities police-forces have been committing and will not colaborate with them in any other way. Activist groups in the Netherlands are keeping a close watch on this conference, and discussing different options for dealing with it. At the moment various ideas for debate, awareness-raising and action are being developed. One of the things we have agreed on is that we would like to use this as an opportunity for activists to gather information about the means and methods that police (and other repressive forces and intelligence services) have been using against internationalist demonstrators/activists. We are therefore keen to receive information on this topic as well as related experiences concerning so-called anti- globalisation activities from 'Seattle' onwards. We are especially interested in analyses of the tactics employed by police and other state forces at different events and summits. We also welcome any comprehensive reviews of these and similar events containing details of numbers of arrests (and ultimate prosecutions) and wounded, 'illegal' police methods, actions, etc. We also plan to organise a modest debate for activists about various forms of repression, present and future. More information on this event will be distributed later. For the longer term, we would also like to discuss ways of establishing more structured form of information-sharing around this issue. You can contact us by email at: kh@xminy.nl If you want us to keep you informed, let us know. We will be posting new information on the website of the Dutch 'Copwatch'-group Buro Jansen en Janssen: http://www.burojansen.nl/ More background information is also to be found on the website of Statewatch: http://www.statewatch.org Greg McCombs 2338 Vicente #1 San Francisco, CA 94116 PLEASE NOTE ME NEW E-MAIL IS: LMNOP@VALUE.NET 415-753-3227 The Latin American Solidarity Conference website can be found at www.americas.org/LASC The following are instructions on using the Latin American Solidarity listserv: 1. If you need to unsubscribe at any time, send a blank email to: lasolidarity-unsubscribe@topica.com 2.To invite someone to join, tell them to send a blank message to: lasolidarity-subscribe@topica.com from the address that is being subscribed. (Doing it from another account won't work.) 3.To post a message to the list, send email to: lasolidarity@topica.com 4. Do not reply to the list-serve. If you need to reply to a message that comes over the list-serve, make sure that you reply to the sender. 5. All messages should be focused on Latin America Solidarity work. Please do not send news articles. 6. All messages should be national in focus. No local mobilizations or events, please. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Sep 10 15:13:51 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fast Track a Way to Dump Democracy Message-ID: <01d801c13a3d$7dbf7540$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Wednesday, August 29, 2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/ Fast Track a Way to Dump Democracy by Patti Goldman A little more than a year and a half ago, thousands marched in Seattle to demand that trade institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, respect the world environment and the creatures that inhabit it. Environmentalists joined unions, family farmers and religious leaders to complain that the WTO has put our laws to protect endangered species, forests, air quality and food safety at risk. Now Congress is threatening to bargain away our democracy in order to accelerate passage of new trade agreements. When Congress returns from its August recess, it may consider giving the president what is known as "fast-track" authority to negotiate trade agreements without ordinary congressional and public oversight. Fast-track authority allows the president to negotiate trade agreements in secret. The final agreements are submitted to Congress only when they are a done deal. Congressional hearings and debate are sharply limited and the entire package must be voted up or down within an inflexible and extremely short period of time. Fast-track authority is anti-democratic. It gives the president unaccountable power to decide the terms of trade agreements. As the WTO meeting made clear, trade agreements are not simply about tariffs any more. They establish rules that determine the viability of health and environmental protections. The WTO and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) give other countries the right to challenge our environmental laws as unfair trade barriers. Mexico and Malaysia have done so with our dolphin and sea turtle protections and Venezuela with our air pollution laws, to name a few examples. These challenges are resolved by trade officials who hear arguments and make decisions behind closed doors. In the face of threatened trade challenges, the United States has allowed pesticide residues on food that do not meet U.S. standards. Minnesota has waived its purchasing preference for recycled paper in the face of Canadian claims that it would disadvantage paper produced from logging native forests. NAFTA goes further and gives corporations the right to sue for monetary damages when laws harm their foreign investments. The first such challenge to a chemical ban resulted in repeal of the ban and payment of millions of dollars. More recently, Methanex Corp., a Canadian-based corporation, filed a NAFTA claim for $970 million for losses, including a decline in stock value, from California's phase-out of a toxic gasoline additive that has contaminated drinking water. These investor lawsuits can be tantamount to blackmail. A foreign corporation can insist on being paid a hefty sum to stop marketing a product that causes harm. Trade agreements make fundamental policy choices that create winners and losers. How much definitive scientific proof is required before a country can ban harmful chemicals, like asbestos? Can a country limit trade based on the harmful effects of logging, fishing or factory production? Can a local government sponsor eco-labeling or limit its own purchases to sustainably produced wood? Can the United States restrict imports of cheap Canadian timber produced with heavy government subsidies and by clear-cutting virgin forests right to the banks of salmon streams? In the United States, people have a voice when laws addressing these fundamental questions are debated and enacted. The people also should have a voice before these rights are traded away. Our democratic system thrives on checks and balances, as well as on public accountability. Fast-track authority sacrifices both. It truncates the congressional oversight provided through hearings and debate and eliminates the congressional power to amend. Trade agreements are a fait accompli by the time they are submitted to Congress. The public is kept in the dark about the terms of the agreement and cannot work through elected members of Congress to alter terms harmful to the public interest. While the WTO has earned a reputation as an institution unresponsive to public demands and input, we live in a democracy. Congress can control and shape the laws that govern U.S. consideration and approval of trade agreements. Congress should not jettison democratic lawmaking for the sake of rushing into new trade agreements. We are not against trade; in fact, trade is important to the region's economy. However, recent trade deals have been stacked against the environment, putting profits above people and the environment. Congress has a responsibility to insist that trade agreements safeguard our environmental laws. This power should not be traded away. Patti Goldman is a managing attorney at the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund . =A91999-2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer ************************************************** Margrete Strand Rangnes Field Director Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch 215 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Washington DC, 20003 USA mstrand@citizen.org & www.tradewatch.org Ph: + 202-454-5106, Fax: + 202-547 7392 ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From webmaster at globalcircle.net Mon Sep 10 22:57:37 2001 From: webmaster at globalcircle.net (Paul) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] 10 Sep 2001 GlobalCircle NetNews Message-ID: <200109102257370260.01463A30@mail.globalcircle.net> 10 Sept 2001 issue of my GlobalCircle NetNews is now online at http://globalcircle.net/1gnn0910sp.htm A sample of items this issue - each item with links to complete stories and websites is on our page at http://globalcircle.net/1gnn0910sp.htm If you're getting this by forwarding from someone else, you can subscribe at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GlobalCircleNetNews and get this summary no more than once a week. --paul, webmaster http://globalcircle.net networking for ecology, justice, and all our relations ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -- It's official - Six-hundred nazi infiltrators in Genoa - Story posted to Indymedia & story in Italian newspapers -- UN's World Conference Against Racism and Black Radical Congress Statement on the World Conference Against Racism -- Britain refuses to call slave trade a crime - from The Independent, U.K. -- Fidel Castro condemns the established world economic order that has widened the gap between the rich and poor - from IGC -- World Conference on Racism in Durban spotlights many insidious forms of racism, including anti-immigrant ctivity - Corpwatch article -- Mobilize for Global Justice September 30 2001 - from Globalize THIS -- AFL-CIO, 65 member unions with more than 13 million members - calls union members from across the US to come to Washington for a Global Justice Week -- from AFL-CIO -- FPIF Analysis on Globalization - from Foreign Policy in Focus -- "For over half a century we've believed that Big Dams would deliver the people of India from hunger and poverty. The opposite has happened" - from Arundhati Roy. India -- Philadelphia Law - The arrests in Philadelphia a year ago have resulted in next to nothing - Story in The Nation -- Major Study Reveals Deadly Link between DDT and Premature Births - from The Lancet -- Latest atrocities committed against Iraq, and independent background reports -- Robert Fisk report from Palestine - from The Independent, U.K. -- "Pipe Dreams: The World Bank's Failed Efforts to Restore Lives and Livelihoods of Dam-Affected People in Lesotho" - from International Rivers Network -- Peru: Mining Companies Invade Andean Cloud Forests - from Corpwatch -- 100,000 Protest IMF Austerity Measures in Argentina - from BBC -- Sweatshops, unions and Fortress Europe - from Workers Solidarity Movement All these and more with links to the stories at http://globalcircle.net/1gnn0910sp.htm GlobalCircle is not funded by or connected to any organization or agency, as we remain noncommercial and independent. And we're not peddling any books, tapes, or t-shirts. If you agree that alternative information like this needs wider distribution, please forward to anyone interested in these issues. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "There is a danger in separating, or even ignoring, issues that are fundamentally related... There is a tendency for campaigning groups to over-specialise, or to address the symptoms, rather than the underlying causes, of societal and environmental breakdown. This tendency, if left unaddressed, could scupper attempts to oppose and supplant the current system of economic globalisation." -- John Pilger, U.K. in Private Planet From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Sep 11 03:01:08 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:55 2006 Subject: [R-G] Gerry Adams to Visit Cuba Message-ID: <009f01c13aa0$4c5b1320$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> AFP. 10 September 2001. Cuba hails upcoming visit by Sinn Fein leader. HAVANA -- Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque on Monday welcomed a planned visit to Cuba by Northern Ireland republican leader Gerry Adams, saying it will help deepen relations between Cuban communists and Irish nationalists. The date of the visit by the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, has not been set. "We look forward with satisfaction to the visit by the Irish political leader, whose party maintains a relationship of respect with our party," Perez Roque said. "We expect the visit will help deepen relations between our parties and allow us to acquire better knowledge of processes that are under way in Northern Ireland," the foreign minister added. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Sep 11 03:01:59 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Resistance to Cultural Imperialism? Message-ID: <00ab01c13aa0$6ade0c80$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 10 September 2001. Greeks Protest Reality TV Show. ATHENS, Greece -- Hundreds of demonstrators protested the season opener of Greece's version of the Big Brother reality television show on Monday, saying it erodes respect for privacy. The protesters threw eggs and rocks at the studios of Greece's Antenna television station, which is broadcasting the show. Riot police prevented the protesters from entering the studios. There were no arrests or injuries. The demonstrators, which included anti-globalization activists, were protesting what they call the degradation of life and privacy in the name of profit. "The basic problem is that it basically violates the private life of people in the name of profit," said Kostas Sarris, a member of the Genoa 2001 initiative against globalization. "It puts a big eye into the lives of people." During Big Brother, 12 contestants will live for 112 days in a house filled with cameras and microphones following their every move. One by one, the television and Internet audience will vote them off the show. The last one to leave receives a cash prize of $130,000. Big Brother started on Dutch television in 1999, and its success spawned other reality shows around the world. The show borrows its name from George Orwell's classic novel "1984," in which society lives in constant terror and surveillance of a one-party state led by Big Brother. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Tue Sep 11 09:12:02 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: US Under Attack!! Message-ID: <008001c13ad4$1cac0d80$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> AMERICA'S CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST. "I think I'm of course opposed to terror, any rational person is, but I think that if we are serious about the question of terror, if we are serious about the question of violence, we have to recognize that it is a tactical and hence a moral matter. Incidentally, tactical issues are basically moral issues, they have to do with human consequences and if we are interested in, let's say, diminishing the level of violence in the world, its at least arguable, and perhaps even sometimes true, that a terroristic act does diminish the amount of violence in the world. Hence a person who is opposed to violence will not be opposed to that terroristic act." Noam Chomsky ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?bUrKvW.bVNWAS Or send an email To: destroyIMF-unsubscribe@topica.com This email was sent to: LAMZ@sympatico.ca T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ ------=extPart_000_0063_01C13AB1.D07C1620-- -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1662 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010911/60d87628/attachment.txt From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Tue Sep 11 09:15:50 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Attack on US Symbols of Capitalism and Oppression Message-ID: <008e01c13ad4$a4675e00$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> AMERICA'S CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST. "I think I'm of course opposed to terror, any rational person is, but I think that if we are serious about the question of terror, if we are serious about the question of violence, we have to recognize that it is a tactical and hence a moral matter. Incidentally, tactical issues are basically moral issues, they have to do with human consequences and if we are interested in, let's say, diminishing the level of violence in the world, its at least arguable, and perhaps even sometimes true, that a terroristic act does diminish the amount of violence in the world. Hence a person who is opposed to violence will not be opposed to that terroristic act." Noam Chomsky ------=extPart_000_0063_01C13AB1.D07C1620-- ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84tq1.a9asbR Or send an email To: stoptheWTO-unsubscribe@topica.com This email was sent to: LAMZ@sympatico.ca T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ ------=extPart_000_007D_01C13AB2.9535B840-- -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1744 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010911/11aba0bc/attachment.txt From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Tue Sep 11 09:18:46 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Attack on US Symbols of Capitalism and Oppression Message-ID: <00b901c13ad5$0d54f080$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> America's chickens have come home to roost. "I think I'm of course opposed to terror, any rational person is, but I think that if we are serious about the question of terror, if we are serious about the question of violence, we have to recognize that it is a tactical and hence a moral matter. Incidentally, tactical issues are basically moral issues, they have to do with human consequences and if we are interested in, let's say, diminishing the level of violence in the world, its at least arguable, and perhaps even sometimes true, that a terroristic act does diminish the amount of violence in the world. Hence a person who is opposed to violence will not be opposed to that terroristic act." Noam Chomsky ------=extPart_000_0063_01C13AB1.D07C1620-- ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84tq1.a9asbR Or send an email To: stoptheWTO-unsubscribe@topica.com This email was sent to: LAMZ@sympatico.ca T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ ------=extPart_000_007D_01C13AB2.9535B840-- -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2008 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010911/1d79ad02/attachment.txt From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Sep 11 10:14:31 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Attack on US Symbols of Capitalism and Oppression References: <00b901c13ad5$0d54f080$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> Message-ID: <003a01c13adc$d793fa60$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lysander Zimmerman" To: "Rad Green" Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 8:18 AM Subject: [R-G] Attack on US Symbols of Capitalism and Oppression America's chickens have come home to roost. "I think ... ------- We are going to have to take very special steps for awhile. A number of calls have already come in this morning. Some in tears; some delighted. All in shock. We need to keep our heads down for a couple of days. I've called my good friends who are *not so subtle* and not white- begged them to stay quiet and keep their heads down. There will be all sorts of human garbage crawling out of the sewer as a result of all this. There may easily be a sweep up. Keep your heads down. Macdonald From tobias at techno.ca Tue Sep 11 10:39:14 2001 From: tobias at techno.ca (Tobias) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Media & US Terrorist Attacks Message-ID: [ff'wd to IMC; also for all of you. tobias] Good morning IMCers, I know I haven't met many of you in person yet, but I am the (former, but currently acting) News Director at CiTR radio, and I just woke up to hear the news of the various terrorist attacks on the US (check your CNN if you haven't heard it yet). We up at CiTR are taking this very seriously, and we are going to strive and put the underground news on the air at CiTR. We would welcome any news the IMC has, so please feel free to pass anything on: CiTR on-air dj-line: 604-822-2487 news room line (w/voice mail): 604-822-5334 my cell phone: 604 839 1192 email me stuff: djtobias@hotmail.com Please feel free to pass this onto the other IMC's. tobias CiTR 101.9FM RADIO::::: streaming & info: http://www.citr.ca Vancouver, BC, Canada ------------------------------------ From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Sep 11 17:40:35 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Taliban Condemn Attacks in U.S Message-ID: <013901c13b1b$27e417a0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> It is my belief that our main current task in the imperialist countries is to avoid any allowance for American leaders to engage in racist BS- designed to justify a mass strike on a sovereign state- from any source. The level of fear and racist hatred spawned all over a relatively quiet city like Vancouver indicates a need to see that as our next fight. Know your enemy. It isn't the guy down the street. in the spirit of such- here is a follow up story. ---- SEPTEMBER 11, 14:20 EDT Taliban Condemn Attacks in U.S. By Kathy Gannon Associated Press Writer KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Afghanistan's hardline Taliban rulers condemned the devastating terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on Tuesday and rejected suggestions that Osama bin Laden could be behind them. ``We have tried out best in the past and we are willing in the future to assure the United States in any kind of way we can that Osama is not involved in these kinds of activities,'' the Taliban's foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil told reporters. Muttawakil said Tuesday's attacks were ``from a humanitarian point of view surely a loss and a very terrifying incident.'' Asked whether the Taliban condemned the attacks on the United States, he said: ``We have criticized and we are now again criticizing terrorism in all its forms.'' Bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire indicted in the United States on charges of masterminding the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, has lived here since 1996 under the protection of the ruling Taliban religious militia. Washington accuses him of running an international terrorist network. After Tuesday's attacks, a London-based Arab journalist said followers of bin Laden warned three weeks ago that they would carry out a ``huge and unprecedented attack'' on U.S. interests. Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said he received a warning from Islamic fundamentalists close to bin Laden, but did not take the threat seriously. ``They said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack but they did not specify,'' Atwan said in a telephone interview in London. ``We usually receive this kind of thing. At the time we did not take the warnings seriously as they had happened several times in the past and nothing happened. ``This time it seems his people were accurate and meant every word they said.'' Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden in 1996 and has since maintained contacts with his followers, said he believed the attack on the World Trade Center in New York was the work of ``an Islamic fundamentalist group'' close to bin Laden. But Abdul Hai Muttmain, the Taliban's spokesman in southern Kandahar, dismissed allegations that bin Laden could be behind the attacks in the United States. ``Such a big conspiracy, to have infiltrated in such a major way is impossible for Osama,'' Muttmain told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. He said bin Laden does not have the facilities to orchestrate such a major assault within the United States. The Taliban say bin Laden's communications have been taken away from him, but several sources close to him - including his family members in Saudi Arabia - say bin Laden has regular access to satellite telephones and other sophisticated communication equipment. Meanwhile, foreign aid workers and even Taliban commanders, who have spoken on condition of anonymity, say that the number of Arab nationals in Afghanistan has increased in recent months. ``They are in Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad. They have training centers in every province of Afghanistan,'' said one Taliban commander, who would not give his name. The Taliban, who espouse a harsh brand of Islamic law, have resisted U.S. demands to hand over bin Laden. After the attacks in East Africa three years ago, Washington retaliated with a blistering missile attack in August 1998, sending more than 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles into eastern Afghanistan apparently targeting training camps operated by bin Laden. The U.S. attacks killed about 20 followers of bin Laden's but bin Laden escaped unhurt. Since then he has been forced by the Taliban rulers to stop giving interviews and making statements. In Kabul foreign aid workers were keeping a low profile and security measures were heightened with most expatriates being advised to stay in their homes for fear of retaliatory attacks from the United States should evidence implicate bin Laden. But Muttawakil said there is no fear among the Taliban. ``Since there is no reason for an attack and we are not expecting any reprisal attack we are not taking any precautions,'' he said. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 12 03:18:24 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Cuba's Castro offers humanitarian aid Message-ID: <02a201c13b6b$e00be560$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> AFP. 11 September 2001. Cuba's Castro offers humanitarian aid for US, condemns attacks. HAVANA -- Cuban President Fidel Castro on Tuesday offered to provide medical and humanitarian aid to the United States, condemned the attacks in New York and Washington, and called for international efforts to end terrorism. He said Cuba -- which has been under a US trade embargo for four decades -- is ready to cooperate "with health institutions, or any other institution of a medical or humanitarian nature." "At this bitter hour, our people are in solidarity with the people of the United States and express their total willingness to cooperate," he said, reading a statement issued earlier in the day. He also reiterated what he said was Cuba's rejection of terrorism. "This event should serve to create an international (movement) against terrorism," the communist leader said during an inauguration ceremony at a teachers' training school in Havana. He said the international community should cooperate to "end world terrorism, create a world conscience against terrorism." But he stressed this could not be done by force. "There is no power in the world today, however big it may be, that can avoid acts of this nature. They are conducted by fanatics, people indifferent to death," said Castro. In the statement read by Castro, the Cuban government expressed "sincere condolences to the North American people." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar Wed Sep 12 07:08:29 2001 From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Gorojovsky) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] (Port) Water as tourist highlight in 21st. Century Message-ID: On same issue of water resources. ------- Forwarded message follows ------- [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] JORNAL DO COMMERCIO AM (AM), ESPECIAL, 11/9/2001 Artigo ?gua - Atra??o tur?stica do s?culo XXI Gaitano Antonaccio ?gua ? um l?quido incolor composto de oxig?nio e hidrog?nio, representado pela tradicional f?rmula qu?mica do H2O e totalmente inodoro. Fundamental para a sobreviv?ncia dos seres vivos, a ?gua na forma??o do planeta Terra ocupa tr?s quartas partes do globo, e na composi??o dessa grande massa aqu?tica, mais de 70% ? de ?gua salgada. A ?gua pot?vel ou seja, aquela utilizada para o consumo humano, vem sendo motivo de grande preocupa??o para a humanidade, porque a sua exist?ncia est? amea?ada, levando estudiosos, cientistas e pesquisadores a profundos estudos sobre o assunto. Segundo previs?es da Organiza??o das Na??es Unidas (ONU), a partir do ano 2054, a Terra coexistir? com uma popula??o de 9 bilh?es de habitantes e os cientistas afirmam que, quando esse n?mero for atingido, estaremos alcan?ando o perigoso ponto de equil?brio, ou seja, o volume de ?gua pot?vel ser? suficiente para atender apenas ?s necessidades m?nimas da humanidade. Da? a import?ncia de se conscientizar a todos os seres humanos no sentido de evitar o desperd?cio da ?gua. A ONU ou qualquer outra organiza??o existente no planeta, pelo menos ? que me consta, jamais informou at? a presente data, a popula??o dos irracionais, isto ?, os animais que consomem ?gua tanto quanto os seres humanos. Quantos s?o esses seres habitando resid?ncias, zool?gicos, museus, bosques e as florestas que ainda restam no mundo? Seria poss?vel avaliar o consumo total de ?gua pot?vel somando-se racionais e irracionais? O Brasil desponta como um cen?rio gigantesco de reservas de ?gua doce com a Amaz?nia, e tem sido tema de in?meras confer?ncias e questionamentos por parte das pot?ncias internacionais, que se aproximam de todas as formas at? sob disfarce do mais espetacular congresso internacional sobre ecologia e biodiversidade, dando-nos a impress?o de uma preocupa??o que em verdade, esconde o verdadeiro sentido dessa alian?a. A cada dia que passa, por causa dessa amea?a de esgotamento de reservas da natureza e fundamentais ? vida dos seres vivos da Terra, a Amaz?nia se apresenta como a maior atra??o mundial, para ser visitada, explorada, invadida, devastada e conquistada. Em verdade, a Amaz?nia do s?culo XXI, al?m de sua marca universal de beleza, que atrai turistas de todas as partes, passa a ser agora, uma regi?o fundamental para a sobreviv?ncia da humanidade, um centro especial de estudos e pesquisas para qualquer cientista e um tesouro inesgot?vel para a cobi?a internacional. Enquanto essa caminhada em dire??o ? Amaz?nia avan?a e as autoridades brasileiras assistem muito mais do que agem, somos todos mais contemplativos do que participativos, fazendo-se necess?rio mudan?as radicais em nossos comportamentos. J? foram anunciadas algumas provid?ncias importantes para evitar-se o desperd?cio, mas n?o concordo que essa seja uma forma louv?vel para se conscientizar o ser humano. ? necess?rio um esfor?o muito maior, onde cada unidade escolar dos munic?pios brasileiros, comece a LECIONAR sobre desperd?cio de ?gua, luz, telefone e os alunos passem a ter no??o de que est?o destruindo n?o apenas a natureza, mas as suas pr?prias vidas no futuro. Conscientiz?-los de que o desperd?cio destruir? o que seria deles no futuro. Hoje, o desmatamento, o aquecimento da Terra, a redu??o das ?reas aqu?ticas, o crescimento urbano, aliados ao desperd?cio e ? falta de conscientiza??o da humanidade, s?o fatores de destrui??o natural da natureza, sem necessidade dos crimes ecol?gicos, sempre marcando presen?a no processo predat?rio. No Amazonas, maior reserva de ?gua doce do mundo, o l?quido vem sendo t?o valorizado, que o pre?o do fornecimento j? se equipara ao pre?o da energia el?trica, sendo mais caro que o servi?o telef?nico, e o pior de tudo, a sua concess?o est? em poder de empresas estrangeiras, causando apreens?o nos amazonenses, porque em futuro pr?ximo, ?gua pot?vel ser? atra??o para turistas e objeto de seguran?a nacional. ********************************************** Para enviar mensagens para toda lista, escreva para: listageografia@yahoogroups.com (as respostas de mensagens tambem sao encaminhadas para todos os membros da lista). Para informa?oes "administrativas"-sair, mudar de endere?o, etc: pazera@zaz.com.br Arquivo automatico de mensagens da lista (ordem cronologica): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/listageografia/messages Seu uso do Yahoo! Grupos ? sujeito ?s regras descritas em: http://br.yahoo.com/info/utos.html ------- End of forwarded message ------- N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky gorojovsky@arnet.com.ar From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar Wed Sep 12 07:08:31 2001 From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Gorojovsky) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] My last one on "who did it", just for the record In-Reply-To: <02a201c13b6b$e00be560$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: On a posting to rad-green, Macdonald quotes Fidel as saying: > "There is no power in the world today, however big it may be, that can > avoid acts of this nature. They are conducted by fanatics, people > indifferent to death," said Castro Though I still believe that such a move could not be done without some degree of cooperation from the intelligence community (either the American or the Israelis), if the great man has reports pointing to this direction, I will trust him once again. N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky gorojovsky@arnet.com.ar From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar Wed Sep 12 07:08:28 2001 From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Gorojovsky) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] (Port) On international dimension of water resources Message-ID: For those interested, I am forwarding an interesting note by a Brazilian geographer. Please keep in mind that Brazil is one of the best endowed countries when it comes to water resources ------- Forwarded message follows ------- [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] A DIMENS?O INTERNACIONAL DOS RECURSOS H?DRICOS Prof. Dr. Wagner Costa Ribeiro Ge?grafo, professor do Departamento de Geografia, autor de Rela??es Internacionais: cen?rios para o s?culo XXI, entre outros. Apesar da falta d'?gua em algumas ?reas do Brasil, como a Grande S?o Paulo, a regi?o metropolitana de Recife e a regi?o semi-?rida no Nordeste brasileiro, entre outras, dispomos de um dos maiores estoques de ?gua doce do planeta. Essa situa??o pode despertar novos neg?cios para o pa?s nesse in?cio de s?culo. Segundo estimativas da ONU, cerca de 30% da popula??o mundial est? vivendo em ?reas de stress h?drico. O que isso significa? Que est?o utilizando mais de 20% da ?gua dispon?vel em seus pa?ses. Para evitar o agravamento da situa??o, ? preciso diminuir o consumo de ?gua tanto em atividades produtivas quanto em atividades domiciliares. Por?m, muitas vezes isto ? dif?cil. Falta de ?gua ou consumo de ?gua inadequado s?o fontes de problemas de sa?de. Dados da Organiza??o Mundial de Sa?de indicam que ? do total de leitos hospitalares em todo o mundo est?o alojando pacientes de doen?as relacionadas com a ?gua. Eles concentram-se em pa?ses pobres, que n?o t?m uma boa rede de distribui??o de ?gua nem tratam seus esgotos. Al?m disso, atualmente cerca de 1 bilh?o de pessoas n?o disp?em de ?gua pot?vel e 40% da popula??o mundial j? enfrenta algum tipo de racionamento de ?gua. O mais grave, por?m, ? que s?o associadas ? falta de ?gua cerca de 10 milh?es de mortes ao ano em todo o mundo. S?o pessoas que morrem pela simples aus?ncia de ?gua para realizar sua higiene e preparar alimento. Infelizmente este cen?rio deve agravar-se, caso n?o sejam tomadas medidas em car?ter de urg?ncia. Estudos das Na??es Unidas projetam para 2025 que o consumo de ?gua deve crescer cerca de 40%, levando 2/3 da popula??o mundial ? condi??o de viver em stress h?drico. Observando-se a distribui??o geogr?fica dessa popula??o, nota-se que parte dela estar? numa faixa que se estende do norte da ?frica at? a ?ndia, passando pelo Oriente M?dio. A popula??o que vive nessa por??o da Terra j? sofre com a falta de ?gua doce, o que n?o consistiria nenhuma novidade. O fato novo ? que se projeta para 2025 que a popula??o dos Estados Unidos e de v?rios pa?ses europeus, como a Fran?a e a Alemanha, estar? classificada como vivendo em stress h?drico de m?dio para alto, devendo consumir entre 20 e 40 % de seus recursos. Para conseguir a ?gua que vai faltar, os especialistas apontam duas perspectivas: a guerra ou o com?rcio de ?gua. No primeiro caso, a situa??o verificada no Oriente M?dio demonstra que essa possibilidade j? n?o ? uma teoria. Israel recusa-se a devolver ? S?ria uma ?rea de mananciais conquistada com muitas batalhas na d?cada de 1960, o que tem dificultado a assinatura de um acordo de paz entre os pa?ses. Quanto ao com?rcio internacional de ?gua, ainda h? muito o que avan?ar. N?o disp?e-se de um foro capaz de regular esse tema. A Organiza??o Mundial do Com?rcio n?o prev? este tipo de com?rcio. O Programa das Na??es Unidas para o Meio Ambiente realiza estudos que projetam quadros sombrios, mas tamb?m n?o avan?a na proposi??o de alternativas. O que se pode vislumbrar como sa?da? ? preciso consultar o mapa da disponibilidade de recursos h?dricos para come?ar a esbo??-la. Pa?ses tropicais ao Sul do Equador, portanto sujeitos ?s chuvas fortes como bem sabemos os que habitam (em) S?o Paulo, n?o devem apresentar stress h?drico em 2025, o que definiria um primeiro grupo de pa?ses. Um segundo pode ser organizado considerando-se os que disp?em de reservas h?dricas congeladas, como os pa?ses n?rdicos, a R?ssia, e o Canad?. Entretanto, o uso dessa ?gua pode comprometer a din?mica clim?tica do planeta, como indicam estudos de especialistas em altera??es do clima. Olhando-se com mais cuidado ainda para o mapa, nota- se que, segundo as proje??es para 2025, o Brasil aparece como um consumidor de menos de 10% das reservas. Ora, se considerarmos que nosso pa?s disp?e de cerca de 12% da descarga de ?gua doce do mundo n?o ? imposs?vel imaginar que a diferen?a entre o consumo e o excedente h?drico possa vir a ser exportada. A ?gua passaria a ser transportada por navios, engarrafada ou n?o, para outros pa?ses. Por?m, imagino que ao nosso pa?s caberia uma posi??o ainda mais destacada. Por sermos um dos maiores provedores de ?gua doce no mundo, dever?amos estar convidando lideran?as de pa?ses detentores deste recurso fundamental ? exist?ncia da vida para discutir como regulamentar o com?rcio internacional de ?gua. Porque uma coisa ? certa: se os pa?ses que t?m recursos h?dricos em abund?ncia n?o se organizarem para comercializ?-los para o resto do mundo, o "resto" do mundo o far?, seja participando da privatiza??o do servi?o de abastecimento de ?gua, em curso em v?rios pa?ses, seja por meio de uma Conven??o Internacional sobre os Recursos H?dricos, algo que tem sido discutido nos ?ltimos anos. Resta saber se vamos preservar nossos mananciais para evitar a degrada??o desta que ser? uma das mais raras mercadorias no s?culo XXI: a ?gua doce. ********************************************** Para enviar mensagens para toda lista, escreva para: listageografia@yahoogroups.com (as respostas de mensagens tambem sao encaminhadas para todos os membros da lista). Para informa?oes "administrativas"-sair, mudar de endere?o, etc: pazera@zaz.com.br Arquivo automatico de mensagens da lista (ordem cronologica): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/listageografia/messages Seu uso do Yahoo! Grupos ? sujeito ?s regras descritas em: http://br.yahoo.com/info/utos.html ------- End of forwarded message ------- N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky gorojovsky@arnet.com.ar From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Wed Sep 12 10:44:41 2001 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Website Additions & Statement Message-ID: <000301c13baa$39eb8520$54a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Our large website www.hunterbear.org has a number of new additions and expansions -- which are found in the upper portion of our Index [Directory.] Our site is well visited -- by a wide range of people: Native and non-Native. This -- posted yesterday, September 11th -- is our published website comment: _____________________________________________________________________ I have a few things to say briefly and bluntly on this awful day of September 11, 2001. And I strongly think genuinely thoughtful people will agree with me. This tragedy of today, almost beyond any human comprehension, is simply one more in a sanguinary progression of hideous events around the world shaped by the people-strangling chess game of major powers and their clients in the context of greedy, profiteering economic systems and power drives. We've been bombing Iraq for more than a decade. [I opposed that war as I have opposed every single United States war and military excursion since Korea -- including our recent adventures in southeast Europe.] We've bombed Libya. We've contributed substantially to the tragedies of Lebanon. We have certainly looked away again and again and again from much of the utter tragedy visited upon Palestinian civilians. And a great number of Americans indeed have been completely oblivious -- or outrightly opposed -- to the compelling and eminently just need by the Palestinian people for Land -- their Land. [Native American people can definitely understand the need for Land -- our Land.] The United States is certainly not alone in its sins of omission and commission. There are other very culpable nations and related dimensional forces. Given all of this and much more, who should be really be surprised that these rivers of bloody injustice have played into the hands of fanatics? I hope there is enough good sense in Washington, and in the country as a whole, to refrain from the kind of sanguinary outburst abroad that can only make things infinitely worse. If ever there was a time to fight sensibly to make peace processes work -- very importantly, peace with full justice -- it is now. The hour is late -- tragically late -- but it is never too late. There is now a tremendous danger of a witch-hunt within the United States: against our own civil liberties -- and against people of Middle Eastern background. In 1996, a hysterical Congress passed the Anti-Terrorist Act -- which has -- in the context of virtually no domestic terrorism -- set up a widespread network of FBI-managed Federal/state/local "task forces" and related endeavours. All of these have conducted an increasingly wide-ranging war against our American civil rights and civil liberties. This Website has had considerable material on this increasingly uninhibited witch-hunting operation -- and we shall have much more indeed. It is critical, in these difficult days ahead, that we fight -- sensibly and effectively and with every ethical resource at our command -- to protect our civil liberties and our civil rights from anyone and any force which would create and foster paranoid fear and hysteria and utilize those irrational winds to bring this country -- in however veiled and subtle a fashion -- closer and closer to a police state. Finally, at this point, the ethnic nationalities in the United States that are most vulnerable to every kind of scapegoat attack are the peoples of Middle Eastern background. It is critically incumbent upon all of us -- whoever we are -- that we practice to the hilt that time-honoured principle, "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All'' and work with commitment, determination, and the most intense vigour to effectively protect the human rights of those people of Middle Eastern background -- and the rights of all others. Hunter Gray [ September 11, 2001] Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Wed Sep 12 13:19:00 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] A Global Atmosphere of Terror Message-ID: <001e01c13bbf$c76100a0$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> I am writing this for those who might have misunderstood the email that I sent around yesterday morning. Shortly after I learned of the attack on the US World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I sent out an email with the header "America's chickens have come home to roost" accompanied by a single quote by Noam Chomsky in which he addresses the tactical/moral issues surrounding a terroristic act. I must stress the fact that the intention and meaning of the post was in no way a justification for the killing of innocent civilians. It is impossible to imagine the horror that they experienced in the final moments of their lives. Likewise it is difficult to imagine the terrific grief that their families are experiencing. As someone who embraces humanist and anti-authoritarian values, I see the killing of such a vast number of unarmed civilians as an anti-human act---an act that I recognize as a tactic repeatedly turned to by the corporate military state. However, it would be an act of bad faith on anyone's part to ignore the atmosphere of utter terror that US economic policy is breeding in every country on this planet. Upon an examination of this neo-colonial campaign for global domination, one inescapably concludes that such retaliation was predestined. As the majority of social activists already know, heinous crimes against humanity have been repeatedly perpetrated in the name of US economic interest. Since the genocide of Native Americans carried out centuries ago, nothing has changed. The world continues to witness the American-led upsurge of corporate fascism. Every year, an estimated six million people die as a direct result of IMF "restructuring". Countless more senselessly die of famine, disease, and murder in countries directly sanctioned by the US. Inseparable from this humanitarian crisis is the environmental destruction that accompanies the imposition of the "free-market" economy on unwilling populations. As we have seen in the case of Yugoslavia, countries that refuse this new-world disorder are bombed into submission. Several thousand innocent people were massacred and then dismissed as "collateral damage" during those 78 days of unimaginable terror. Serbians saw the destruction of their vital infrastructure, schools, hospitals and factories, while the vast majority of North Americans remained indolent, ignorant and apathetic. Kosovo was carpet bombed by raining clusters of explosives and depleted uranium shells. The campaign of terror still continues in Serbia and Kosovo as NATO and KFOR troops allow the KLA and other Albanian Mafioso groups to ruthlessly attack innocent Serbians---an obvious effort to mimic Hitler's attempt at creating a Greater Albania. Another villainous American crusade is being waged on the people of Iraq. Since the end of the Gulf War, over two and a half million Iraqis have died of malnutrition, cancer, and other diseases caused by the combined effects of inhumane sanctions and depleted uranium exposure. US bombing attacks, accomplishing nothing more than widespread terror and death, have continued almost daily. Meanwhile Saddam Hussein and his oil-baron elite---a regime created and initially supported by the US--- still hold their despotic rule. Furthermore, Latin America has remained a consistent target of American imperialism for decades. From the incontrovertibly US-orchestrated coup d'?tat of November 1973 in Chile; to the covert workings of US-trained death squads in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador during the seventies and eighties; to the ongoing state of terror created by the so-called "war on drugs" in Colombia; the US continues with its military-economic invasion at the cost of countless lives and vital ecosystems. The allotted 7.6 billion dollar budget of Plan Colombia is being used to train and equip the Colombian military, private mercenary groups, and US-based outsourcing firms to assault the peasant supported guerilla uprisings. The people of the agricultural regions are exposed to some of the most toxic man-made chemicals as the Colombian countryside is subjected to extensive defoliation. These people are experiencing a systematic attack on their means of survival since the distinction between coca crops and agricultural fields is disregarded. Meanwhile, the US-sanctioned terror continues to plague Palestinians as Israel assiduously evicts and kills civilians. Cowardly nighttime helicopter raids, targeted assassinations, massacres in refugee camps, the demolition of houses, and the torture of prisoners are carried out by the Israeli forces with impunity as the US continues its economic and military support. As it is crucial to acknowledge the American assault on the world's freedom, it is thus important to see this as a concerted crusade by the world's capitalist-industrialist elite. The US is a business-run society and its foreign and domestic policy is structured around the acquisition of excessive wealth for its ruling class. The same can be said for the group of eight industrialized nations who alone dominate the world's resources. It is for this reason that the atmosphere of complete terror is being globalized. Not only are the world's poorest feeling the effects of the insane capitalist crusade, but the acceleration of our living planet's demise is fast developing into a global crisis. Alternative energy technologies are essentially ignored; corporate deforestation activity is practically unregulated; and overpopulation, as a direct result of third-world poverty, is never concretely acted upon. However, what separates the United States from even its ally capitalist states, is the absolute contempt for the future of humanity and the earth. While most of the world is attempting to create an agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions --- although, not eliminate them, as that would harm their profit systems --- the US will not even consider this as an option. We saw this with the Bush administration's shunning of the Kyoto agreement talks, and also with its policy for increased oil production. I recently read an article in the Toronto Star ('Trickle down' policies don't help the nations poor -- Monday, Sept. 10) by Jerry Rose, which accurately describes the American corporate system's fascist policy. In it, the human rights and social justice activist, writes: "In Canada, our future depends upon our ability to stand up to the 'evil empire' south of our border. What else can you call a country that refuses to reduce emissions that cause global warming, refuses to ratify agreements curtailing the spread of biological weapons, refuses to ratify an agreement to curb sales of small arms to nations in civil crisis, won't agree to the elimination of land mines that are killing and maiming thousands of civilians and is ruled by an administration that admits any agreement that may limit US corporate goals is unacceptable?" The only thing that I would add to this statement is that the future of the entire planet depends on our ability to stand up to 'evil' America and its allies. Hence, it is evident that the United States of America --- the most barbaric and destructive nation, and consequently the richest and most powerful nation --- has amassed a plethora of desperate enemies who are willing to retaliate with any means at their disposal. Countless people, in every country on this planet, are being pushed to the brink of insanity and beyond by the American-led neo-colonialist crusade. Yesterday's attack on American capitalism was inevitable. The stage has been set for years now and it was only a matter of time before the terror abroad returned to face its creator at home. Therefore, it must be concluded that the blood of those innocent American civilians is on the hands of their own government's terror system. For now, all I will say is that the future is uncertain. The only thing that seems inevitable, is the increase in international state repression. It is no doubt going to become increasingly difficult for us to oppose the forces of corporate globalization. The "experts" in the corporate media are already discussing the strengthening of the international Security State. Nevertheless, we must continue to struggle. Moreover, we must increase our movement's strength, because the alternative to struggle is slavery and death. In solidarity with all of those engaged against authoritarian rule, -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 9053 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010912/d9e680f1/attachment.txt From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 12 17:24:57 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Website Additions & Statement References: <000301c13baa$39eb8520$54a90e3f@ibm22761429477> Message-ID: <03ae01c13be2$22e894c0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> I have a million different emotions regarding all of this, but: > We've been bombing Iraq for more than a decade. [I opposed that war as I > have opposed every single United States war and military excursion since > Korea -- including our recent adventures in southeast Europe.] We've bombed > Libya. We've contributed substantially to the tragedies of Lebanon. We > have certainly looked away again and again and again from much of the utter > tragedy visited upon Palestinian civilians. And a great number of Americans > indeed have been completely oblivious -- or outrightly opposed -- to the > compelling and eminently just need by the Palestinian people for Land -- > their Land. Is of course to try and do part of what must be done. Forget the "line"or "position"or anything else! This is the wor coming home. This is a glimpse of what has happened to many peoples around the world- over and over in silence- because we never fought back. Our world is one that is preceisely this desperate. It is already this wrong. In public there were thousands and thousands upon thousands of tears falling. In private, in country after country, the oldest dustiest bottle of wine was pulled out, cleaned off and the cork popped. All done from a genuine contempt of Amertican Imperialism. For many, the sight ofAmerica taking such a hit looks like simple poetic justice. The project that is now "America" has been begging people for some form of desperate response to somehow- possibly- equate with the absolute terror of the rest of the planet. Dear fellow North Americans! Yesterday, some 20 000 people were senselessly slaughtered. Why? Because we have been unable to hear their cries of pain for so long. The war came home yesterday. Will we leave it only to these who have nothing in the way of a compass beyond a righteous denunciation of American Imperialism? Or will we see this for what it is: Made in the USA. I'll admit to having more to say, but I'm waiting this one out. My love to you all. Hold strong and let us hold together. Things changed overnight. Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 12 18:04:24 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Now comes the real danger Message-ID: <03f901c13be7$a6372300$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> The Globe and Mail September 12, 2001 The morning after: Now comes the real danger Will we overreact to yesterday's terrorist attacks and destroy democracy? asks security specialist Thomas Homer?Dixon Some events shatter the order of things-the routines and regularities of our lives that we rely upon for our sense of safety and our sense, most importantly, of who we are and where we are going. Some events change our perceptions forever. The world never looks the same again afterward. Suddenly, the reliable landmarks of life seem strange and distorted-recognizable, yet simultaneously weirdly unrecognizable. It will take us a long time to unpack the full meaning of yesterday's events, to develop a coherent understanding of what they mean for global society, for our nations, and for each of us as individuals. Yet three things are clear right now: first, the problem of international terrorism isn't going to go away, in fact it's almost certain to get worse; second, although a decisive, forceful response is necessary, force isn't enough by itself-we must also act to address the roots of this madness; and, third, the worst thing we can do is overreact. Overreaction is exactly what the perpetrators want, and overreaction poses a grave threat to our democratic institutions. The problem is going to get worse because of three trends, two technological and one social. New technologies are shifting power downward from large institutions and governments to small groups and individuals. Sometimes this is a good thing, as when the Internet empowers citizens to better participate in democratic processes. But sometimes it's a bad thing, because some groups are malign, and because one technology that's diffusing downward is an extraordinary capacity to destroy. Because of progress in materials engineering, miniaturization of electronics, explosives and the like, weapons are becoming cheaper, lighter, more rugged, more accurate, easier to use, and more powerful. Meanwhile new communication technologies-from satellite phones to the Internet- allow terrorists and criminal syndicates to marshal their resources and co?ordinate their actions around the planet. As these trends continue, it's easier for smaller and smaller numbers of people to hurt larger and larger numbers. Despite all the utopian hype, the new gadgets entering our lives are distinctly double-edged swords: We've unleashed technological forces that we don't remotely understand and almost certainly can't control. Another trend is the growing complexity and interdependence of our technological systems, which makes it more likely that damage to one system component will ramify outward to other components. We've seen such knock?on effects in the globe's tightly wired financial system, when a crisis in a distant economy spreads like wildfire to others; we've even seen it in mundane infrastructure systems like electricity grids. Terrorists can exploit this greater interdependence to magnify their disruptive power (that's a key reason they went after the World Trade Center-at one blow, they may have killed a significant portion of the most skilled financial experts in the United States). The first rule of modern terrorism, as one astute analyst notes, should be to "find the critical but nonredundant parts of the system and sabotage them according to your purposes." The third trend is social: the rapidly widening gulf between the planet's richest and poorest groups, and between individuals and societies that thrive in the face of our world's dramatic new challenges and those that fail and succumb. While the lives of people in even the world's most impoverished corners have generally improved in recent decades, their progress has been snail?like compared to the stunning enrichment of the wealthiest. Despite the miracles of modern communication and transportation, never in human history have the differences of wealth and opportunity among us been so great. These differences breed envy and frustration and, ultimately, anger. Thanks to the spread of TV, today's disadvantaged know better than ever before what they are missing. And thanks to the spread of cheap, portable, and powerful technologies of violence, they also have a greater capacity than ever before to harm the targets of their anger. If this is the future, how should we respond? The natural reaction is to strike back-fast, furiously arid hard. Send in the cruise missiles and bombers; smash the bastards into the ground! But who, exactly? Even if the perpetrators of yesterday's horror were state?backed (and it's not clear they were), their links to specific governments will be evanescent threads, almost impossible to identify, easy to deny. Groups that do these things can now be so small, so dispersed and so mobile that dealing with them is like trying to put your finger on quicksilver-crushing one cluster simply causes it to break into a thousand pieces and reform elsewhere. We can't afford to look weak at this critical moment. Some military response is essential. But a fast, unconsidered reaction will make us look weak, not strong. Our response has to be precise and carefully calibrated. This requires very good military intelligence, and one has to wonder if such intelligence is available, because the events yesterday were, more than anything else, a monumental intelligence failure-a failure, at least symbolically, on the scale of the failures that led to Pearl Harbor. The very worst thing we can do is lash out at whoever seems to be nearby and plausibly connected with the horror. Because the "enemy" in this case is so diffuse and indeterminate, it would be easy to turn against groups and people within our societies - against anybody who looks different, who expresses opinions that vary from the norm, or who has been associated, at one time or another, with suspect people or causes. We must guard against this impulse. It's exactly what the terrorists want. They believe their appalling attacks will provoke us to reveal the true bigotry and violence of our societies that lurk behind the facade of democracy and tolerance. Make no mistake. The unfolding terrorist threat in coming years will pose a profound test of our democratic institutions. Can we maintain the freedom of association that we've enjoyed in the past? The freedom of movement? The vigorous diversity of opinion? Will people who look a bit strange or different be singled out for random searches and interrogations? Can we resist the natural tendency to become more intolerant, suspicious, bitter, and militarized? Most importantly, can we remember that the problem will never go away if we don't address the underlying disparities that help motivate such violence? Some events shatter the order of things. The triumphalism that has permeated Western society in the last decade-the widely accepted conceit that Western capitalism, democracy, and science have brought us to the end of history-rings somewhat hollow now. History marches forward still, and a startling new chapter opened yesterday. Thomas Homer?Dixon, director of the Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict at the University of Toronto, is the author of The Ingenuity Gap. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 12 18:27:16 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: [L-I] My last one on "who did it", just for the record References: Message-ID: <043c01c13bea$d79f1e40$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> I think Fidel, as a statesmen and a former target of the attempt to smear him with the assasination of JFK is simply being a smart President and making it very clear what is going on. I cannot think of a simple reason or help to the "cause" for this for us here. However, Fidel may be wrong- because I must confess as I sat there yesterday and obsorbed all of this: I too thought of Mossad as the best theory I was offered. The reason, was partly because they have a lot to gain from beinbg able to really send in the fucking tanks (Sharon made me want throw rocks through the TV yesterday, as did all the hypocritical bastards. They do this all the time and expect the rest of the world to stop because it isn't Third World anymore?...) once and for all. An expulsion claimed as the final solution seemed likely. There still hasn't been a single commercial on any channel. The other part of this theory is that the US government needs a blame. They cannot go w/o a blame victim. The US could never admit it was- if they discovered it was the Mossad, they would have to label someone else. That knowledge might have made the Mossad do something: knowing they could never be publically made to account. The third plane, into the Pentagon, hit about an hour after two planes had devastated New York. I simply am having severe trouble wrapping my head around the fact that this plane- a commerical airliner like the ones already crashed into the WTC- could somehow fly over the capitol of the United States of America, aim for the Pentagon with no one alerted. I am not surprised it still hit: I'm stunned it wasn't even attempted to be intercepted. Air Traffic Controllers would all know that NY was on fire at that time, and do nothing about this blip- unreponsively as it headed towards the symbols of American politics themselves? I don't believe that, at least I am having trouble. It could be anything, I don't claim to know and am not speculating further. At most, this is absolutely going to split the ranks of the new revolutionary generation. There are going to be a lot of people who simply say "fuck you, resistance is wrong..." and proceed to think in terms of the same kinds of actions w/o civilian casualties. I've already heard one person, quite rational, who said: "Fuck them, the americans kill thousands every day..." That belief lives in many many hearts right now, where the mounths are simply too smart to say anything about it publically. The patriotic bonfire is terrifying as well. Deep breath time, comrades. These are completely unchartered waters. Don't let anyone ever tell you that politics is boring. Hugs and love and condolonces to all- we must stand at least as strong in drawing the lessons that the US Empire is responsible for those that did this- as the US Empire stands in resolve to strike back. Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gorojovsky" To: ; ; Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 6:08 AM Subject: [L-I] My last one on "who did it", just for the record On a posting to rad-green, Macdonald quotes Fidel as saying: > "There is no power in the world today, however big it may be, that can > avoid acts of this nature. They are conducted by fanatics, people > indifferent to death," said Castro Though I still believe that such a move could not be done without some degree of cooperation from the intelligence community (either the American or the Israelis), if the great man has reports pointing to this direction, I will trust him once again. N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky gorojovsky@arnet.com.ar _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list Leninist-International@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Wed Sep 12 18:26:25 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Reuters article seems to say IMF meetings WILL be canceled for n References: <0.900009741.2113557854-738719082-1000337688@topica.com> Message-ID: <001a01c13bea$bb5e73c0$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> We need this mobilization more than ever now! Even if they cancel the meetings, we have to forge ahead with our struggle against capitalism. Capitalism creates this violence and it WILL GET WORSE as long as the class system exists. We need to become stronger now. We must become more persistent and stress the fact that we are opposed to the systems which breed violence worldwide---like the IMF and World Bank that kill millions of people each year. We cannot fall prey to bourgeois sentimentalism and nationalism. We must add the innocent Americans (not the generals and traders) to our list of reasons to fight the upsurge of corporate fascism. We must be brave, strong, rational and uncompromising in our resolve to oppose the death market system. For NEVER giving up on revolution, Lysander ----- Original Message ----- From: heather To: Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 7:40 PM Subject: Fw: [v-nv-mobilize] Reuters article seems to say meetings WILL be canceled for n > > > > > > > World Bank, IMF annual meetings in Washington expected to be > > postponed > > September 12, 2001: 1:04 p.m. ET > > WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Staff of the International Monetary Fund and > > World Bank were resigned Wednesday that their upcoming annual > > meetings would be called off, saying an announcement is expected on > > the matter within days. > > > > "The meetings are going to be called off," an IMF source told > > Reuters, adding that the lender is awaiting word from the U.S. > > Treasury -- the official host of the Washington summit -- before > > making an official announcement. > > > > The source said an announcement was, "at least two days away." > > > > D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey Tuesday urged the international > > lenders to call off their meetings in the aftermath of terrorist > > attacks that caused both towers of New York's famed World Trade > > Center to collapse. > > > > The attackers also crashed a hijacked plane into the Pentagon, > > costing many lives and putting local police and emergency workers in > > crisis mode. > > > > With tens of thousands of protesters expected at the meetings, slated > > to take place at the end of September, sources at the World Bank said > > the lenders had no desire to put Washington through any more trouble > > so soon after Tuesday's horrific events. Early estimates of the loss > > of life at the Pentagon range from 100 to 800 people. > > > > "They will leave it for a couple of days before making an > > announcement," one World Bank staffer told Reuters. > > > > Among the problems local police face is how to manage crowd control > > in the face of an expected massive protest in Washington. Police had > > said they would rely heavily on officers drafted from New York and > > elsewhere to help control the event. > > > > But given the massive operations in downtown Manhattan, it now seems > > impossible for New York to spare its own much-needed police to help > > Washington tackle anti-globalization protesters. > > > > Protests at global financial summits have grown increasingly violent > > recently, with one protester killed in clashes with police at a mid- > > July summit in Genoa. > > > > IMF spokesman Bill Murray and World Bank spokeswoman Caroline Anstey > > both said no decision had been made but that the meetings will be > > discussed in coming days. > > > > As the host country of the meetings, the United States advises the > > World Bank and IMF about security details of the meetings in > > Washington. Police were bracing for as many as 100,000 protesters to > > take part in violent demonstrations against the policies of both > > institutions. > > > > One of the main protest organizers, Mobilization for Global Justice, > > is mulling its options, including whether to curtail or down-size > > some of the protests. > > > > The annual meetings bring together finance ministers and central bank > > governors from around the world to discuss the global economic > > situation. The event, currently scheduled for Sept. 29 and 30, > > already had been shortened to two days because of the threat of > > violent protests. > > > > In the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941, > > three hijacked planes slammed into the Pentagon and New York's World > > Trade Center Tuesday. Two of the planes demolished the New York > > landmark's two 110-story towers that have symbolized U.S. financial > > might. Later in the day a third and smaller WTC tower that had been > > burning also collapsed. > > > > Officials fear the number of victims could climb into the thousands > > at the trade center, where 40,000 people worked. > &*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*& > > www.teknopunx.co.uk for NVDA news and Links > www.driftart.co.uk for beautiful craftwork > > "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my > contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the > spinal cord would fully suffice." -Albert Einstein > > "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws!" --Tacitus (A.D. > 55-130) > pd-unity is an unmoderated discussion list for discussing diversity of > activist tactics To subscribe to this group, send an email to: > pd-unity-subscribe@yahoogroups.com > > ==^================================================================ > EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84vOj.a9hyBy > Or send an email To: friendlyanarchistsleague-unsubscribe@topica.com > This email was sent to: lamz@sympatico.ca > > T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! > http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register > ==^================================================================ > From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Sep 12 20:09:30 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Quote. Message-ID: <046401c13bf9$20362780$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> "It makes you realise, as an American, what's going on in the rest of the world as well." -American business man, on a business trip to Russia, interviewed in Moscow caf? by CBC news. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From sherrynstan at igc.org Thu Sep 13 04:59:11 2001 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan@igc.org) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Reuters article seems to say IMF meetings WILL be canceled for n Message-ID: This sounds good on paper, but there are other, tactical, considerations here. A tactical retreat is not turning away from the revolution. If large sectors of the mobilization opt not to go to DC, a response that marginalizes us with small numbers or creates divisions in this mass movement must be evaluated for its real effect. Passion does not a revolution make. We must stay connected with our mass base. I'm not arguing for cancellation. I'm arguing for collectivity and tactical good sense. >>rad-green@lists.econ.utah.edu wrote: > We need this mobilization more than ever now! Even if they cancel the meetings, we have to forge ahead with our struggle against capitalism. Capitalism creates this violence and it WILL GET WORSE as long as the class system exists. We need to become stronger now. We must become more persistent and stress the fact that we are opposed to the systems which breed violence worldwide---like the IMF and World Bank that kill millions of people each year. We cannot fall prey to bourgeois sentimentalism and nationalism. We must add the innocent Americans (not the generals and traders) to our list of reasons to fight the upsurge of corporate fascism. We must be brave, strong, rational and uncompromising in our resolve to oppose the death market system. For NEVER giving up on revolution, Lysander ----- Original Message ----- From: heather To: Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 7:40 PM Subject: Fw: [v-nv-mobilize] Reuters article seems to say meetings WILL be canceled for n > > > > > > > World Bank, IMF annual meetings in Washington expected to be > > postponed > > September 12, 2001: 1:04 p.m. ET > > WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Staff of the International Monetary Fund and > > World Bank were resigned Wednesday that their upcoming annual > > meetings would be called off, saying an announcement is expected on > > the matter within days. > > > > "The meetings are going to be called off," an IMF source told > > Reuters, adding that the lender is awaiting word from the U.S. > > Treasury -- the official host of the Washington summit -- before > > making an official announcement. > > > > The source said an announcement was, "at least two days away." > > > > D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey Tuesday urged the international > > lenders to call off their meetings in the aftermath of terrorist > > attacks that caused both towers of New York's famed World Trade > > Center to collapse. > > > > The attackers also crashed a hijacked plane into the Pentagon, > > costing many lives and putting local police and emergency workers in > > crisis mode. > > > > With tens of thousands of protesters expected at the meetings, slated > > to take place at the end of September, sources at the World Bank said > > the lenders had no desire to put Washington through any more trouble > > so soon after Tuesday's horrific events. Early estimates of the loss > > of life at the Pentagon range from 100 to 800 people. > > > > "They will leave it for a couple of days before making an > > announcement," one World Bank staffer told Reuters. > > > > Among the problems local police face is how to manage crowd control > > in the face of an expected massive protest in Washington. Police had > > said they would rely heavily on officers drafted from New York and > > elsewhere to help control the event. > > > > But given the massive operations in downtown Manhattan, it now seems > > impossible for New York to spare its own much-needed police to help > > Washington tackle anti-globalization protesters. > > > > Protests at global financial summits have grown increasingly violent > > recently, with one protester killed in clashes with police at a mid- > > July summit in Genoa. > > > > IMF spokesman Bill Murray and World Bank spokeswoman Caroline Anstey > > both said no decision had been made but that the meetings will be > > discussed in coming days. > > > > As the host country of the meetings, the United States advises the > > World Bank and IMF about security details of the meetings in > > Washington. Police were bracing for as many as 100,000 protesters to > > take part in violent demonstrations against the policies of both > > institutions. > > > > One of the main protest organizers, Mobilization for Global Justice, > > is mulling its options, including whether to curtail or down-size > > some of the protests. > > > > The annual meetings bring together finance ministers and central bank > > governors from around the world to discuss the global economic > > situation. The event, currently scheduled for Sept. 29 and 30, > > already had been shortened to two days because of the threat of > > violent protests. > > > > In the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941, > > three hijacked planes slammed into the Pentagon and New York's World > > Trade Center Tuesday. Two of the planes demolished the New York > > landmark's two 110-story towers that have symbolized U.S. financial > > might. Later in the day a third and smaller WTC tower that had been > > burning also collapsed. > > > > Officials fear the number of victims could climb into the thousands > > at the trade center, where 40,000 people worked. > &*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*& > > www.teknopunx.co.uk for NVDA news and Links > www.driftart.co.uk for beautiful craftwork > > "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my > contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the > spinal cord would fully suffice." -Albert Einstein > > "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws!" --Tacitus (A.D. > 55-130) > pd-unity is an unmoderated discussion list for discussing diversity of > activist tactics To subscribe to this group, send an email to: > pd-unity-subscribe@yahoogroups.com > > ==^================================================================ > EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84vOj.a9hyBy > Or send an email To: friendlyanarchistsleague-unsubscribe@topica.com > This email was sent to: lamz@sympatico.ca > > T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! > http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register > ==^================================================================ > _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Thu Sep 13 08:29:28 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: What is the WB saying here? Message-ID: <000b01c13c60$7ff56480$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> This sounds scary...a threat from the World Bank perhaps??!! ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 12:04 AM Subject: What is the WB saying here? > The following is from a September 22 press release: > > http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/NEWS/DEVNEWS.NSF/46773469c477da9285256716000f7 22 > > 1/216802a22542635485256ac500510faa?OpenDocument > AACK! That`s long. Just go to www.worldbank.org and click on press releases > > > "The big international organizations, most of which are effectively run from > America, had already been spooked by the activities of the anti-globalization > protesters. Suddenly, the latter's' proposal to assemble a flotilla to sail > on Qatar to lobby the November meeting of the WT O looks almost irrelevant. > At the end of the month, some of the usual suspects among the activists may > find pressing engagements elsewhere that prevent them from attending the IMF > and World Bank annual meetings in Washington. " > > > The term "usual suspects" was used in the movie Casablanca when activists > were rounded up who obviously had nothing to do with the crime that had been > committed. > > "... activists may find pressing engagements elsewhere that prevent them from > attending the ... meetings" > Is this some kind of hint? Does this sound fishy to anyone else? > > Let`s all hope the American Constitution will defend us through this. That > is what Bush is sworn to defend. > > me > > ==^================================================================ > EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84tq1.a9asbR > Or send an email To: stoptheWTO-unsubscribe@topica.com > This email was sent to: LAMZ@sympatico.ca > > T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! > http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register > ==^================================================================ > From kimberly.linden at studentmail.newcastle.edu.au Wed Sep 12 21:39:33 2001 From: kimberly.linden at studentmail.newcastle.edu.au (KIMBERLY MARIE LINDEN) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] s11 2001: who did it? Message-ID: <103f1c10488c.10488c103f1c@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au> Hi, I don't know if I got the right email address here but I just wanna say that I really believe it is very suspect as to the lack of intellegence the US seems to have engaged in re: the hijacking of the planes. I thought I heard (??) on some CNN babble here on Australian TV that the CIA/FBI were warned about this two days before it happened, but ignored the warning? Has anyone else heard this? Regardless, there is something suss about this. KL From Pokohil at bigpond.com Thu Sep 13 06:11:47 2001 From: Pokohil at bigpond.com (Paul Collins) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] A Global Atmosphere of Terror References: <001e01c13bbf$c76100a0$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> Message-ID: <019b01c13c4d$44511f40$fa1e36cb@default> Dear Lysander, Thank you for your lucid and reasonably accurate portrayal of possibly the most intrusive and predatory State terrorist organisation on earth, i.e., the USA. No doubt there are some very good people who live in that country, and it would be unfair to damn them just because they were born in America, and suffer under the repressive and fascist regime perpetuated by the ruling class and their military partners in crime. Please keep up your email discourse, it flows like music to my tired eyes. Perhaps you might consider drafting a letter of demand (a "petition" is in my view undesirable) to the US government which we could all 'sign', but then knowing the pernicious nature of the US establishment, they would probably get FBI agents to collect dossiers on us for daring to stand up to them; to which my only response is to say "silence is death." Regards, Paul Collins ----- Original Message ----- From: Lysander Zimmerman To: mob4glob@dojo.tao.ca ; IMC Hamilton ; IMC Ontario Stories Cc: no_to_nato@flora.org ; Rad Green Sent: Thursday, 13 September 2001 5:19 Subject: [R-G] A Global Atmosphere of Terror I am writing this for those who might have misunderstood the email that I sent around yesterday morning. Shortly after I learned of the attack on the US World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I sent out an email with the header "America's chickens have come home to roost" accompanied by a single quote by Noam Chomsky in which he addresses the tactical/moral issues surrounding a terroristic act. I must stress the fact that the intention and meaning of the post was in no way a justification for the killing of innocent civilians. It is impossible to imagine the horror that they experienced in the final moments of their lives. Likewise it is difficult to imagine the terrific grief that their families are experiencing. As someone who embraces humanist and anti-authoritarian values, I see the killing of such a vast number of unarmed civilians as an anti-human act---an act that I recognize as a tactic repeatedly turned to by the corporate military state. However, it would be an act of bad faith on anyone's part to ignore the atmosphere of utter terror that US economic policy is breeding in every country on this planet. Upon an examination of this neo-colonial campaign for global domination, one inescapably concludes that such retaliation was predestined. As the majority of social activists already know, heinous crimes against humanity have been repeatedly perpetrated in the name of US economic interest. Since the genocide of Native Americans carried out centuries ago, nothing has changed. The world continues to witness the American-led upsurge of corporate fascism. Every year, an estimated six million people die as a direct result of IMF "restructuring". Countless more senselessly die of famine, disease, and murder in countries directly sanctioned by the US. Inseparable from this humanitarian crisis is the environmental destruction that accompanies the imposition of the "free-market" economy on unwilling populations. As we have seen in the case of Yugoslavia, countries that refuse this new-world disorder are bombed into submission. Several thousand innocent people were massacred and then dismissed as "collateral damage" during those 78 days of unimaginable terror. Serbians saw the destruction of their vital infrastructure, schools, hospitals and factories, while the vast majority of North Americans remained indolent, ignorant and apathetic. Kosovo was carpet bombed by raining clusters of explosives and depleted uranium shells. The campaign of terror still continues in Serbia and Kosovo as NATO and KFOR troops allow the KLA and other Albanian Mafioso groups to ruthlessly attack innocent Serbians---an obvious effort to mimic Hitler's attempt at creating a Greater Albania. Another villainous American crusade is being waged on the people of Iraq. Since the end of the Gulf War, over two and a half million Iraqis have died of malnutrition, cancer, and other diseases caused by the combined effects of inhumane sanctions and depleted uranium exposure. US bombing attacks, accomplishing nothing more than widespread terror and death, have continued almost daily. Meanwhile Saddam Hussein and his oil-baron elite---a regime created and initially supported by the US--- still hold their despotic rule. Furthermore, Latin America has remained a consistent target of American imperialism for decades. From the incontrovertibly US-orchestrated coup d'?tat of November 1973 in Chile; to the covert workings of US-trained death squads in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador during the seventies and eighties; to the ongoing state of terror created by the so-called "war on drugs" in Colombia; the US continues with its military-economic invasion at the cost of countless lives and vital ecosystems. The allotted 7.6 billion dollar budget of Plan Colombia is being used to train and equip the Colombian military, private mercenary groups, and US-based outsourcing firms to assault the peasant supported guerilla uprisings. The people of the agricultural regions are exposed to some of the most toxic man-made chemicals as the Colombian countryside is subjected to extensive defoliation. These people are experiencing a systematic attack on their means of survival since the distinction between coca crops and agricultural fields is disregarded. Meanwhile, the US-sanctioned terror continues to plague Palestinians as Israel assiduously evicts and kills civilians. Cowardly nighttime helicopter raids, targeted assassinations, massacres in refugee camps, the demolition of houses, and the torture of prisoners are carried out by the Israeli forces with impunity as the US continues its economic and military support. As it is crucial to acknowledge the American assault on the world's freedom, it is thus important to see this as a concerted crusade by the world's capitalist-industrialist elite. The US is a business-run society and its foreign and domestic policy is structured around the acquisition of excessive wealth for its ruling class. The same can be said for the group of eight industrialized nations who alone dominate the world's resources. It is for this reason that the atmosphere of complete terror is being globalized. Not only are the world's poorest feeling the effects of the insane capitalist crusade, but the acceleration of our living planet's demise is fast developing into a global crisis. Alternative energy technologies are essentially ignored; corporate deforestation activity is practically unregulated; and overpopulation, as a direct result of third-world poverty, is never concretely acted upon. However, what separates the United States from even its ally capitalist states, is the absolute contempt for the future of humanity and the earth. While most of the world is attempting to create an agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions --- although, not eliminate them, as that would harm their profit systems --- the US will not even consider this as an option. We saw this with the Bush administration's shunning of the Kyoto agreement talks, and also with its policy for increased oil production. I recently read an article in the Toronto Star ('Trickle down' policies don't help the nations poor -- Monday, Sept. 10) by Jerry Rose, which accurately describes the American corporate system's fascist policy. In it, the human rights and social justice activist, writes: "In Canada, our future depends upon our ability to stand up to the 'evil empire' south of our border. What else can you call a country that refuses to reduce emissions that cause global warming, refuses to ratify agreements curtailing the spread of biological weapons, refuses to ratify an agreement to curb sales of small arms to nations in civil crisis, won't agree to the elimination of land mines that are killing and maiming thousands of civilians and is ruled by an administration that admits any agreement that may limit US corporate goals is unacceptable?" The only thing that I would add to this statement is that the future of the entire planet depends on our ability to stand up to 'evil' America and its allies. Hence, it is evident that the United States of America --- the most barbaric and destructive nation, and consequently the richest and most powerful nation --- has amassed a plethora of desperate enemies who are willing to retaliate with any means at their disposal. Countless people, in every country on this planet, are being pushed to the brink of insanity and beyond by the American-led neo-colonialist crusade. Yesterday's attack on American capitalism was inevitable. The stage has been set for years now and it was only a matter of time before the terror abroad returned to face its creator at home. Therefore, it must be concluded that the blood of those innocent American civilians is on the hands of their own government's terror system. For now, all I will say is that the future is uncertain. The only thing that seems inevitable, is the increase in international state repression. It is no doubt going to become increasingly difficult for us to oppose the forces of corporate globalization. The "experts" in the corporate media are already discussing the strengthening of the international Security State. Nevertheless, we must continue to struggle. Moreover, we must increase our movement's strength, because the alternative to struggle is slavery and death. In solidarity with all of those engaged against authoritarian rule, -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 11953 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010913/699c50ab/attachment.txt From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Thu Sep 13 10:52:19 2001 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:56 2006 Subject: [R-G] Speaking the Unspeakable.htm Message-ID: Speaking the UnspeakableSo is it... "The chickens have come home to roost." Malcom X, November 22, 1963 (alternately) "Gentlemen, the Reichstag is on fire." A. Hitler, February 27 1933 ---------- ======================================= As All Praise Emperor's Attire, Russian Navy Chief Quietly Demurs [Posted 13 September 2001] ======================================= As one considers the terrible events of Sept. 11 and observes U.S. media reaction, so pervasive and consistently military that it appears choreographed, doubts increase. The following is from pravda.ru, a Russian language Website (politically centrist, nationalist). In some places the English translation is confusing, so we added alternate phrasing in brackets. - Jared Israel [Start report from Russia] ?Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday.? This was said by the commander-in-chief of the Russian Navy, Anatoli Kornukov. ?We had such facts too?, - said the general straightforwardly. Kornukov did not specify what happened in Russia and when and to what extent it resembled the events in the US. He did not advise what was the end of air terrorists? attempts either. But the fact the general said that means a lot. As it turns out the way the terrorists acted in America is not unique. The notification and control system for the air transport in Russia does not allow uncontrolled flights and leads to immediate reaction of the anti-missile defense, Kornukov said. ?As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up,? - said the general. [End report from Russia.] *** Further Reading: 1) While Washington points to Osama bin Laden as "suspect # 1" in yesterday's horrific violence, the truth is not being told to the American people: 'Washington Created Osama bin Laden' by Jared Israel can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/sudan.html#w 2) If one looks carefully, one can find in the Western media evidence that bin Laden has been involved - on the U.S.-backed side - in Kosovo, Bosnia and now Macedonia. 3) Bin Laden was propelled into power as part of the U.S. drive to create an Islamist terrorist movement to crush the former Soviet Union. See, the truly amazing account from the 'Washington Post,' 'Washington's Backing of Afghan Terrorists: Deliberate Policy.' at http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/anatomy.htm www.emperors-clothes.com or www.tenc.net [Emperor's Clothes] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4455 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010913/6fbee82a/attachment.txt From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Sep 13 14:46:16 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Crowd in Ill. Protests at Mosque... Message-ID: <074901c13c95$233edac0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 13 September 2001. Crowd in Ill. Protests at Mosque; Bus With Muslim Children Stoned. Combined reports. BRIDGEVIEW, Ill. (US) and BRISBANE (Australia) -- Backlash hit several communities as federal officials said there was mounting evidence that radical Muslims planned and carried out the terror attacks in New York and Washington. Police turned back 300 marchers -- some waving American flags and shouting "USA! USA!" -- as they tried to march on a mosque in this southwest Chicago suburb late Wednesday. Three demonstrators were arrested, said Bridgeview Police Chief Charles Chigas. There were no injuries and demonstrators were kept blocks from the closed Muslim worship place. "I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have," said 19-year-old Colin Zaremba who marched with the group from Oak Lawn. In Chicago, a Molotov cocktail was tossed Wednesday at an Arab-American community center. No injuries were reported. In the suburb of Palos Heights, a man was charged with a felony hate crime for allegedly attacking a gas station attendant he believed was Arab with the blunt end of a machete, Police Sgt. Dave Delaney said. The attendant, who is Moroccan, did not seek treatment, Delaney said. "The terrorists who committed these horrible acts would like nothing better than to see us tear at the fiber of our democracy and to trample on the rights of other Americans," Gov. George Ryan said. In Huntington, N.Y., a 75-year-old man who was drunk tried to run over a Pakistani woman in the parking lot of a shopping mall, police said. The man, Adam Lang, then followed the woman into a store and threatened to kill her for "destroying my country." A man in a ski mask in Gary, Ind., fired a high-powered assault rifle at a gas station where Hassan Awdah, a U.S. citizen born in Yemen, was working Wednesday, the Post Tribune reported. Police were investigating it as a hate crime. "I lived in the Middle East for most of my life and have never seen anything like this," Awdah said. Tamara Alfson, an American working at the Kuwait Embassy in Washington, D.C., spent Wednesday counseling frightened Kuwaiti students attending schools across the United States. "Some of them have already been harassed. People have been quite awful to them," said Alfson, an academic adviser to roughly 150 students. Abu Nahidian, director of the Manassas Mosque in Virginia, said his congregation has been the target of insults and hate messages left on the office answering machine. "We have some recordings in our tapes that say, 'We hate you so-and-so Muslims and we hope you die,'" Nahidian said. A mosque in Lynnwood, Wash., was vandalized, and no one showed up for afternoon prayers at the Islamic Center of Spokane. In Dearborn, Mich., Issam Koussan told The Detroit News he bought large U.S. flags to fly in front of his home and outside his supermarket after men pulled into his parking lot and yelled threats and racial slurs at his customers. "I just feel I needed to show my loyalty to this country," Koussan said. Meanwhile in Australia, a school bus carrying Muslim children was stoned and vandals tried to set fire to a Lebanese church in apparent acts of retaliation for terrorist attacks in the United States, officials said Thursday. Queensland state Islamic Council chairman Sultan Deen said stones and bottles damaged the side of the bus Wednesday in the northeastern city of Brisbane. Nobody was injured. "The children are quite shaken up," Deen said. Deen said public outrage over the attacks had also led to abusive phone calls to mosques. "It is very disturbing. They are saying things like, 'You will be held responsible' and 'We'll get you,'" Deen said. In Sydney overnight, vandals attempted to set fire to the St. Mary's Antiochian Orthodox church -- which has a Lebanese congregation -- and racist slurs and swastikas were scrawled on the walls of another Lebanese church, said police inspector Norm Russell. Meanwhile, pro-Islamic slogans were daubed on a building in Melbourne's central business district overnight, police said. _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list Leninist-International@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From sipila at kominf.pp.fi Thu Sep 13 14:44:13 2001 From: sipila at kominf.pp.fi (sipila@kominf.pp.fi) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] s11 2001: who did it? In-Reply-To: <103f1c10488c.10488c103f1c@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au> Message-ID: on 13.9.2001 06:39, KIMBERLY MARIE LINDEN at kimberly.linden@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au wrote: > Hi, > I don't know if I got the right email address here but I just wanna say > that I really believe it is very suspect as to the lack of intellegence > the US seems to have engaged in re: the hijacking of the planes. I > thought I heard (??) on some CNN babble here on Australian TV that the > CIA/FBI were warned about this two days before it happened, but ignored > the warning? Has anyone else heard this? Regardless, there is something > suss about this. > KL Well, nobody can never prove anything, but haven?t CIA and FBI always been professional troublemakers and warmongers in the world..? That kind of ignoring is quite possible. Heikki > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: kominform@lists.EUnet.fi subscribe mails to: kominf@kominf.pp.fi Geopolitical news: anti-imperialism@yahoogroups.com subscribe: anti-imperialism-subscribe@yahoogroups.com __________________________________________________ From khanival at btopenworld.com Thu Sep 13 14:50:15 2001 From: khanival at btopenworld.com (Mo Khan) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] s11 2001: who did it? References: <103f1c10488c.10488c103f1c@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au> Message-ID: <000e01c13c95$b0c86000$0200a8c0@Iqbal> Here's something interesting... The USS Cole bombing against the backdrop of Israeli "Black Propaganda" Operations -- by Michael Gillespie Many in the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States are inclined to suppose that Israel may be responsible for the terror-bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemen port city of Aden on October 13. Although few Americans would suspect Israel, a trusted U.S. ally, of such a dastardly act, they may well be wrong while better informed and more experienced Arab and Muslim observers may be correct. The Israeli intelligence agencies have a long history of carrying out what have been called "black propaganda" operations. Such covert actions are designed to create suspicion and inflame animosity between Israel's perceived enemies in the Middle East and Americans. While Israel's deadly surprise attack on the USS Liberty on June 6, 1967, is now widely viewed as having been carried out for the purpose of keeping the USS Liberty's electronic monitoring capabilities from uncovering and reporting to Washington on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)'s military preparations in advance of the attack on the Golan Heights, which would have allowed the Johnson administration to apply diplomatic pressure to forestall the IDF's aggression against Syria, there are many other clear examples of Israeli intelligence agencies engaging in "black propaganda" for the purpose of damaging the public image of Arabs and Arab states and organizations and fomenting trouble between Arabs and Arab states and organizations and the U.S. government. Lets look at just three examples. The hi-jacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro by "Palestinian terrorists" was later reliably reported by former IDF arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe in his 1992 book, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network, to have been ordered and funded by Mossad. Ben-Menashe revealed that Israeli intelligence organizations regularly engaged in "black operations," espionage activity designed to portray Palestinians and others in the worst possible light. "An example," wrote Ben-Menashe, "is the case of the 'Palestinian' attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli 'black' propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were." According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli spymasters arranged the attack through "Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas . . . gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met. As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel, it was the best kind of anti- Palestinian propaganda." It should be noted that in April 1996, Abbas returned to Gaza and in a show of support for Yasser Arafat apologized for the hi-jacking and the killing of the American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer without mentioning him by name, saying, "The hi-jacking was a mistake, and there were no orders to kill civilians." Abbas made no mention of Mossad involvement in the hi-jacking according to the April 23, 1996 Associated Press report. The attack by over 150 U.S. warplanes on Libya, on April 14, 1986, which caused great destruction and over 40 civilian deaths including that of Col. Qaddafi's adopted daughter, was carried out only after Mossad field agents entered Libya in February of 1986 and placed a "Trojan" radio transmitter there to broadcast false signals, according to former Mossad field officer Victor Ostrovsky writing in The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda in 1994. The spurious signals duped American intelligence officials monitoring the broadcasts causing them to believe the Libyan government was sponsoring terrorism in Europe and was responsible for the deadly April 5, 1986, terror-bombing of the La Belle discotheque in Berlin which took the lives of two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. Reports that Spanish and French intelligence agencies were not fooled by the Israeli "Trojan" transmitter broadcasts lend credence to suggestions that American intelligence officials may have been unable to resist political pressure for retaliation or perhaps exercised judgment that was influenced by Israeli sympathies. If, as it appears, Libya was not responsible for the bombing of the Berlin night spot and the loss of three lives, the question of who was remains unanswered, as does another obvious question: Was it the Mossad? Ostrovsky also revealed Israeli espionage that occurred on American soil, in Washington, DC. in 1979. In his scathing 1990 expose, By Way of Deception: A Devastating Insiders Portrait of the Mossad. Ostrovsky reported that Mossad gents bugged the home of a Middle Eastern diplomat during the administration of Jimmy Carter in order to embarrass the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, after Young sought to establish informal talks with PLO representatives. When Young met with the unofficial United Nations PLO representative Zehdi Labib Terzi "accidentally" in the home of a friendly diplomat, Kuwaiti Ambassador Abdalla Yaccoub Bishara, listening devices planted surreptitiously and without Terzi's knowledge by Mossad field officers recorded every word of the diplomats conversation. The incident soon became front-page news in the Zionists' most prominent U.S. propaganda organ, The New York Times, and President Carter caved in to public pressure and asked for Young's resignation. Thus, that early effort to establish relations between the U.S. government and the PLO became a footnote in history when, on September 23, 1979, Young resigned from his position. Young, an African American, has never since served in the upper levels of government. Quite apparently, the Mossad and other Israeli intelligence organizations have long enjoyed the ability to operate more or less freely in the United States and around the world. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attempted to rein in Israel's intelligence organizations activities in the USA with an investigation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the early 1990s. The ADL, which is nothing less than the Mossad's right arm in the U.S.A. disguised as a civil rights monitoring organization, was forced to curtail its operations for a period of time during the 1990s following the limited success of the investigation, which the FBI, bowing to political pressures, passed on to the Office of the San Francisco District Attorney. Press accounts of the FBI/SFDA investigation were limited relative to the obvious importance of the story, and some major American news organizations simply ignored the ADL spy scandal altogether. The remarkable effectiveness of Israel's current propaganda campaign against Palestinians makes it abundantly clear that Israel's intelligence assets in mainstream broadcast news organizations, most of which are subsidiaries of Zionist-owned or managed entertainment industry conglomerates, are able to exert consistent and heavy influence on, if not absolute control over, the public discussion here in the USA and abroad about almost all matters related to Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. Sadly, it is all too true, as Charlie Reese, a lonely voice of reasoned outrage at the Orlando Sentinel, recently wrote: "Palestinians won't get their freedom until Americans get theirs." Let us all hope that the president-elect of the United States, George W. Bush, has not forgotten that renegade Mossad officers cooked up a crack-pot plan to assassinate a former U.S. president--his own father--in 1991 at the Madrid peace conference after the senior Bush was courageous enough to try to pressure the government of Israel to end the establishment of illegal settlements on Palestinian lands by withholding approval of $10 billion dollars worth of loan guarantees for Israel. It is widely reported that the Bush family places a premium on loyalty. Perhaps the new president will have noted that Israel has been anything but a loyal ally of the United States of America and will be able to make some appropriate and long overdue adjustments in U.S. Middle East foreign policy, regardless of what domestic political pressures may demand in the way of a public facade. Freelance Investigative Journalist and Commentator Michael Gillespie writes about Politics and Media for Media Monitors Network (MMN). His work also appears frequently in the popular Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Source: by courtesy & ? 2000 Michael Gillespie Copyright ? 2000 Media Monitors Network. All rights reserved. ----- Original Message ----- From: "KIMBERLY MARIE LINDEN" To: Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 4:39 AM Subject: [R-G] s11 2001: who did it? > Hi, > I don't know if I got the right email address here but I just wanna say > that I really believe it is very suspect as to the lack of intellegence > the US seems to have engaged in re: the hijacking of the planes. I > thought I heard (??) on some CNN babble here on Australian TV that the > CIA/FBI were warned about this two days before it happened, but ignored > the warning? Has anyone else heard this? Regardless, there is something > suss about this. > KL > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From dstainsby at telus.net Thu Sep 13 18:31:23 2001 From: dstainsby at telus.net (Donna Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Forwarded from Stuart Lawrence Message-ID: <02c801c13cb6$47dc0300$182134d1@donna> ----- Original Message ----- > The following is an account from a Hunter student and paramedic. > Christopher Day > > Hello all-- Thank you very much for the many *many* notes of support and > condolence. Things are very difficult here in New York City, and I'm just > trying to keep on top of things. I thought I would share a bit about what > happened to me on September 11th, 2001--to answer questions, and let you > know a little bit more about the events here... > > I woke up Tuesday morning to the radio, and heard that a building had been > struck by an airplane. I honestly thought it was a historical piece about > the B-52 bomber that hit the Empire State Building back in the 1940's... > Once I knew the real deal, that two planes had struck, I put my uniform on > and headed off to my station. We were on "recall," and were required to be > in duty. As I drove to work, I got diverted into the Battery Tunnel, and > found myself about 4 blocks south of World Trade Center. I parked my car, > and walked up to the front staging area to find my lieutenant. Once I found > him, he set me up with a helmet and some medical gear. He set off to help > coordinate triage, and I went to make contact with another unit. > > From where I was standing, it was about half a block to WTC 1 (North > Tower). I could see flames and smoke billowing out fo the building, and > debris was landing all around me. There were body parts scattered on the > ground, and it was pretty clear how bad things were... > > Moments later, I heard an enormous roar and felt the ground shaking. I > looked up to the tower, and saw what looked like an umbrella being opened > up--like a starburst at the fireworks. I was directly underneath it, and I > could see girders shooting out from the building. I immediately began to > run southwest, towards a building that had some sort of opening. I already > felt rocks landing on my back and helmet, and there were girders falling > right near me. I made it perhaps thirty feet before being knocked off my > feet. I went about ten feet through the air, and landed rolling on a set of > steps. My helmet was gone, my phone, my stethoscope... > > This was the scariest moment of my life. The air was black with ash and > debris, and I literally couldn't see a thing. People were screaming, and > some were clearly seriously injured. We couldn't breathe, and our mouths > eyes and noses watered and burned... I stayed crouching on the ground, > covering my head, and breathed through my shirt. A few minutes later, the > smoke began to clear and I was able to make out a few other figures. We > held on to each other, and were able to make it to a restaurant where we > started gathering water for eye flushes. Ambulances and fire trucks were > overturned, walkways were collapsed, and people were running and screaming. > > After a half-hour of giving out water, I started to help out with moving > other people to the waterfront where we were loading them onto boats and > ferries. But soon we had to clear out from there also because the second > tower was coming down. I was holding a 3-year-old girl at the time, and we > lost sight of her mother. We all ran as hard as we could, while we tried to > carry as many people as couldn't make it. There were many injuries, and > many more people with smoke inhalation or blindness. > > Eventually, we regrouped on a pier farther southeast, and got more people > loaded up to bring them to New Jersey. I helped here for a while, and ended > up taking one of the last boats to NJ to help with triage and treatment > there, by order of my supervisor. > > An hour or two later, I was redeployed to Manhattan, but I was then taken > to the hospital to be treated for injuries. Luckily, I got off well. I have > a sprained ankle, twisted knee, miscellaneous burns and abrasions, and had > to have glass and gravel removed from my arms and back. > > That night I stayed in the hospital on semi-active duty, and this morning ( > Wednesday ) I worked a 911 shift uptown and then went down to Ground Zero > to assist with rescue efforts. > > Overall, I feel very lucky. Many of us thought there would be > chemical/biological agents in the explosion, but thus far we are in the > clear. I have made it out in one piece, but the same cannot be said for > many others. > > Especially sad and difficult to me is the loss of two members of my own > team. They were killed in collapse of WTC 2 (South Tower), along with > hundreds of other rescuers. > > Tonight, I want to thank all of you for your calls and emails. I feel > honored to have been in your thoughts and prayers, and am unspeakably > grateful for each and every friendship that has revealed itself. But more > importantly, I ask that you keep the in your thoughts the lives and > sacrifices of the many rescue workers. I have lost friends, and I can > honestly say that they were some of the most caring, deeply committed, and > selfless people I have ever met. > > Finally, I want to urge all of us to remember the complexities of the world > we live in. This is a tragic act, one that has destroyed or forever altered > the lives of countless people. It is also an act that occurs in particular > context, one in which the United States is guilty of this exact same kind > of crime, only on a greater and more gruesome scale. Let us take from this > the inspiration to create a world free from imperialism in all its > manifestations, one that moves us from the civil war that is capitalism to > a higher form of society... > > With love and rage, james creedon > > > Louis Proyect > Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org > > ======= > PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message From noamish at home.com Thu Sep 13 19:09:41 2001 From: noamish at home.com (Noam A) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Villification and counter-villification Message-ID: Since Tuesday morning, we have all been paying close attention both to the establishment's actions and propaganda, and to the response of the activist community from around the world. The rhetoric of the establishment has taken on a now totally predictable, echo-chamber-like unanimity. So has that of the left, and more so. This, of course, would not strike most of us as a bad thing; solidarity is never more evident than in agreement, especially when that agreement is not constructed by the forces of imperialism. However, there is a critical argument to be made that in our rush to a clear, morally confident and active stance of unity, we are establishing - or rather, reinforcing - a very destructive habit of argument - the near exclusive reliance on comparative counter-villification. Argument-wise, this method is both incomplete and unsound. Tactically, it is likely to be as effective in its goal of creating a sense of proportion among working class Americans as the tactic of direct combat with the state is effective in crushing it. The reports, analyses and arguments made by the establishment are partial, out of context, and totally misleading. The left's arguments do not escape these sins, but commit them on a far smaller scale. Too often, we imply self-evident knowledge of a moral truth when in fact deep, contentious ethical arguments exist - about what "murder" is, for example. Some of us are even willing to dismiss the act of ethical argument itself as a bourgeoius excersize, implicitly if not explicitly. But I think that these are minor problems with our approach to argument. The biggest problem is that of competing moral condemnation. What inspired me to write this was a satire on Zmag.org of a speech Bush could give to save the world, right now, if one of us took control of his brain (the scenario wasn't as elaborate, but my elaboration does not injure the orignal spirit of the satire). Over and over again, the focus was on comparison, on scope, with over-simplistic shoe-on-the-other-foot excersizes, and above all, the desire for a massive admission of guilt, guilt, and more guilt. One almost thinks that if the U.S. were to suddently offer to change its whole political and economic system so that it would emulate Cuba, but not admit how wrong it was in the past, the writer would reject the offer. This article is not that extreme an example of this trend in radical writing and speech. Few of the arguments are pragmatic, let alone what they need to be, and that is whole-systemic-analytic. They are overwhelmingly moral arguments, using the same object-isolating, instrumentalist logic that the right uses. The only lasting effect of all of them, whether intended or not, is to convey that "X is good, Y is bad." And just like the right, when the "good" party does something that human beings naturally find morally repgunant, we step back, and stoically label it a logical systemic reaction. When the "bad" does something repugnant, we act as if they are metaphysically autonomous, holding perfect empirical knowledge and normative wisdom, and apply stern, object-isolational condemnation. This is a flawed and I think fundementally disingenuous form of argument. Just because the right does the exact same thing only on much deeper and volumionous scale does not make it right for us to do it. And it certainly doesn't give us a tactical chance in this new emotionally charged, flag-waving environment. Arguments that address moral repugnancy, by their very nature, affect us in a primarily emotional way. Therefore, while we win on points in terms of scale of villainy of the other side, we get crushed by the geographic and media-encouraged displacement and skewed focus. Most people, when confronted with both arguments, will retreat to the easier, more "secure" answer, acknowledging breifly that both sides are "evil in their own way" but forgetting that acknowledgement 30 minutes of CNN later. We need to be more holistic about both our analysis and our emotionally-felt morals. Instead of saying "x is an outrage, but y is a bigger outrage, [so x is cancelled out]" we have to say "x is part of the outrage, y is part of the outrage, and the world system IS the outrage." This involves certain sacrifices from what has been the left's overriding approach in activism. We cannot think of a goal to liberate women, or liberate workers, or liberate the 3rd world, or even liberate the oppressed, as an isolated thing. Our goal is to change the world. We feel sympathy for the oppressed, and it may be (and usually is, for hardcore activists) this sympathy that leads us to want to understand change the system, but we must always make it clear that it is the SYSTEM that is oppressing people, that PEOPLE like George W Bush (especially) do not make perfectly autonomous decisions, but are part of a system, that personalistically villifying a leader or a state or even a corporation is innaccurate, unfair, inflammatory both for and - mostly - against the cause, and ineffective against the same tactic from a side that has a far greater capacity to use it more effectively. Systemic arguments are not naturally easy to make to people, especially in the west. Detachment and patience with regard to emotions and morality is very difficult for all of us, and all those we wish to join us. But the systemic analysis approach has a profound advantage. It bypasses the head-on battle of arguments that we have never won and will lose horribly in the next few months. The systemic approach cannot be competed with by the media in any way that they can use in sound-bite culture, and even in longer forms, they will be forced to adopt systemic world views, or to combat the idea of there being systemic issues at all - something I don't believe will wash. I am quite new to activism, though not to political observation, but I am guessing that for some of you, I have revived fully-explored and happily buried debates. But I fear that at the moment, this movement is at risk of counter-villifying its way into irrelevency. Then, all that will be left will be a world of villains - or rather, a totally villanous world. Noam A From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 13 15:31:33 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] What Sort of People Did This? G&M Message-ID: <200109132131.f8DLVXp07476@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Globe & Mail September 13, 2001 What Sort of People Did This? by Erna Paris In a culture that ignores the past, Tuesday's devastating attacks on the military and financial nerve centers of Western power are portrayed as having emerged out of a void. Today, the finger seems to point to Saddam Hussein, or to someone called Osama bin Laden. Saddam is familiar, but just who is Osama bin Laden? In photos, he is rather handsome. We are told that he is a fanatic and that he is protected by another group of fanatics called the Taliban who live in Afghanistan and wear turbans. But there is a thread that connects us to Mr. bin Laden and to other haters of the West. Here are two strands. Picture the world in 1955, a decade after the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust (the attempted genocide that will, as the years pass, increasingly color Western perceptions of the 20th century). The ancient territories of the Middle East have recently undergone a fatal change: The State of Israel is just seven years old, but its arrival has effectively displaced most of the Arabs who had lived for centuries on that tiny sliver of land. The Palestinian refugee camps are already in place. And they are breeding a generation of angry children nourished on stories of family loss and exile. In Europe and North America, the postwar West is ascendant. The special relationship between Israel and the United States is already firm, largely because the former is perceived by the latter as a geographical and ideological bulwark in the emerging Cold War struggle. In Western Europe, especially Germany, what matters are the pleasures of a booming economy. Then in April, 1955, a key event occurs: A conference whose echo will be heard across many decades is held in Bandung, Indonesia. Delegates from 29 African and Asian countries (representing half the world's population) come to discuss racism, nationalism, and the struggle against colonialism. Britain has been separating from its colonies relatively peacefully, but France's eight-year war to hold onto Indochina (Vietnam) has just ended. Its war to maintain control over Algeria is still ahead. The meeting concludes with a statement about economic and cultural co-operation, human rights, and anti-imperialist self-determination, but the single common theme among the Arab delegations is hatred of Israel. The Iraqi representative calls Zionism "one of the blackest, most somber chapters in human history." An Arab-sponsored resolution against Israel is one of the few that everyone can agree on. Israel, the conference concludes, is a base for imperialism and a threat to world peace. Bandung gave birth to the idea of the Third World and concentrated efforts to achieve stability that continue to this day (they were visible in the buildup to the recent Durban conference). At the same time, Bandung was the first comprehensive, international opposition to Israel, Zionism, and eventually to the entire West -- an ideology that would soon mobilize elements of the radical right as well as the Marxist left in terrorist movements that paralyzed parts of Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Otto Ernst Remer, an ex-Nazi who lived in Cairo after the war, clearly expressed the developing anti-Zionist/anti-Western thinking in an 1980s interview: "There is a problem concerning who holds the real power in the United States," he said. "Without a doubt, the Zionists control Wall Street, and as a result, the Middle East foments war." Since he voiced these words, the equation has been repeated: Zionism + Wall Street + U.S. military power = the enemy. Though we don't yet have all the evidence that this is what drove Tuesday's suicidal attackers to murder thousands of innocent people, the likelihood is high. In a global world united by instant technologies -- a world that ought to be increasingly rational -- how is it that a culture of terror and martyrdom continues into the 21st century? The easy response is to dismiss those who choose to die as fanatics. But a deeper answer may emerge from the unfinished business first articulated at Bandung. North Americans tend to think little about colonialism, but its aftermath has not yet been resolved. Another answer is despair. In 1987, I traveled to the West Bank to research my book (The Garden and the Gun)about the shifting ideologies of Israel. In the dusty Balata refugee camp, I encountered young Palestinians who were enraged or numbed by the thwarted circumstances of their lives. I remember their rousing, well-rehearsed chorus of "Death to Israel." And I shall never forget the boy of 18 who said, "Our daily life is what you see here. We have no hope. . . . Maybe death is that way out." Nor shall I forget the soft-spoken professor at An Najah University near Nablus who said, "I believe that if the Palestinians continue to live as deprived as they are now, the younger, more radical generation will initiate a new round of terrible violence." A few months after I left Israel, the first intifada began. Now that violence has evolved into suicide bombings -- martyrdom in the war against the hated West. Such martyrs struck again this week. Who is Osama bin Laden -- this man who can (we presume) command young people to die for his cause? And when the West retaliates against him or against others, will anything really change? If we paid more attention to the currents of the past that shape the present, would we have been less surprised than Tuesday revealed us to be? Erna Paris's latest book, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, won the Pearson Non-Fiction Prize, the inaugural Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the Jewish Book Award for History. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 13 15:32:38 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] A Letter to our American Friends - Toronto Star Message-ID: <200109132132.f8DLWdp08626@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Toronto Star September 13, 2001 A Letter to our American Friends by Haroon Siddiqui Dear Neighbors: In your darkest hour of shock, grief and outrage, we walk with you in your collective mourning. As your politicians and media empty their arsenal of adjectives to convey Tuesday's catastrophe - Terror Rocks America; Terrorist Armageddon; Pearl Harbor II - our former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy offers you eloquence in his simple summation of the tragedy: The world has changed but not our collective responses. He suggests, as only best friends can, that you resist the temptation to hit back, hard, at someone, anyone, anywhere. Or build bigger walls, higher fences, hire more guards. It is important for your long-term security, and, by extension, ours, that your "response be right," he said. So far, it has been, unlike Bill Clinton's flawed response to the 1998 terrorist attacks on American embassies in East Africa. American credibility took a heavy hit when the cruise missiles he dispatched killed innocents at a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan but missed Osama bin Laden and his operations in Afghanistan. Despite all the media-baiting, your current administration has been steadfast in counseling patience until it determines who the dead culprits were and who is behind them. As much as some hawks would have it, Tuesday's terrorist attacks were not the start of the Clash of Civilizations. "It's not one civilization or one people attacking another, but a bunch of extremists killing innocent civilians," Axworthy noted. The United States needs to dig out "the root causes and the sources of this extreme anti-American antagonism," he said - a point also made separately by Sandy Berger, former National Security Adviser. To do so, America must engage with, not isolate itself from, the world, as it has done lately, abrogating international treaties and walking away from its obligations. This week's wickedly audacious attacks, annihilating thousands, represent the dark underbelly of globalization. Its tools - high technology, high-speed information and easy travel - shrink geography but also empower a handful to hit nation-states by targeting their most vulnerable spots: easily accessible public spaces and the civilians therein. Short of creating a garrison state that would shut down our open democratic societies, Axworthy said, the only sensible response is international co-operation, not isolationism. President George Bush and the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright opined that America was targeted because it is the brightest beacon of freedom and the best hope for humanity. Perhaps. Or, maybe because it no longer pays enough attention to those ideals and is indifferent to the suffering of too many peoples, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to the Middle East, if not contributing directly or indirectly to their troubles, thus driving the ordinary folk there to seethe in silence against America and the crazed ones into fanatical acts. "If you let problems fester and hope they go away ... and withdraw yourself, you pay a price for it," Axworthy said. That's why "as neighbors, we have to reach out in a political way to say, `we're in this with you. It's not the United States against the world. Let's work together. We'll bring other countries, we will work with countries in the Middle East ... We can help in identification and intelligence as to the causes; work on technical security matters; and help organize some major international initiative to look at the broad issue.'" On the domestic front, Americans are being told not to rush to judgment about who may be responsible. "We pray that Arabs are not behind it," said an Arab American, echoing a broad sentiment in that beleaguered community. Said another: "I hope that the culprits were not Muslims." Those are the voices of fear: minorities dreading a public backlash. Not all Arabs are Muslims. Not all the nearly 7 million American Muslims are Arabs. But in the public mind, they are. Both groups experienced harassment and hate during the Gulf War; in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, before it was linked to Timothy McVeigh; and are beginning to in the last 48 hours. Given this week's far greater civilian slaughter, they fear even worse, recalling the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the more recent movie Siege showing a large number of innocent Arab Americans being rounded up following an Arab terrorist attack. It is instructive that such anxiety exists among law-abiding citizens in this age of heightened awareness of individual civil liberties and fading memories of mob rule. It may indeed turn out that the terrorists were all Arabs, or Muslims, or both. So what? They were no more representatives of all Arabs or Muslims than Baruch Goldstein was of all Jews or Irish Republican Army members were of all Catholics. It is revealed that some of the suspects were not foreigners but U.S. residents. That, too, means nothing by way of collective guilt; McVeigh did not make all Christian Americans suspects. So, dear Americans: Hit the terrorists hard. Be merciless in going after them. But spare the innocents, both abroad and at home. Which is what, to your great credit, you and your President have done so far. Haroon Siddiqui is The Star's editorial page editor emeritus. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 13 16:38:43 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] no subject Message-ID: <200109132238.f8DMchp09212@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 13 16:39:17 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Inevitable ring to the unimaginable - John Pilger Message-ID: <200109132239.f8DMdHp09612@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> http://www.theherald.co.uk/home_frame.html Inevitable ring to the unimaginable By John Pilger If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can really be surprised? Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word appeared in the mainstream media in Britain. An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust in London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf War. This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west. At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and Britain. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA. The terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now "America's most wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American money and backing. In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not for US backing. Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth. This fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at best minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, put it this way: "Western foreign policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence." That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the world is managed. One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind. Alas, it is no comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have died so terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that it could bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself, or rather its own innocent people? The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they represent the victims of the West's intervention in their homelands. "America, which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims." As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the loss of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and television networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present coverage to the half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no. There are deeper roots to the atrocities in the US, which made them almost inevitable. It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia. Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power while the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown as never before. An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth. In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to its trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks, and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status). Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that journalists dare not speak or write. The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the Wilson government received almost no press coverage. Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from which US bombers patrol the Middle East. In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the complicity of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto with assassination lists, then ticking off names as people were killed. "Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia correspondent. British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food, villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a million people forcibly dispossessed. In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by what Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism. In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of around 50,000 people. As official documents now reveal, this was the model for the terror in Chile that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of Nicaragua. All of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece. Now imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently operate with impunity from bases in 50 countries. "Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim. Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt. In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed up as "peacekeeping"), and which have little or no basis in international law: a record matched by no other British government for half a century. What has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If you travel among the impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that it has everything to do with it. People are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism. But how patient the oppressed have been. It is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups, willing to blow themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and only after Israel and the US had rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state, and justice for a people scarred by imperialism. Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home. John Pilger is an award-winning, campaigning journalist. September 13, 2001 From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 13 17:23:03 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] They can't see why they are hated - The Guardian (UK) Message-ID: <200109132323.f8DNN4p16719@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Guardian September 13, 2001 They can't see why they are hated Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad By Seumas Milne Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible. Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy. As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages. If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response. It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming. It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth. But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world. All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday. Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 13 17:30:51 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Video - U.S. Covert Operations and Interventions Since World War II Message-ID: <200109132330.f8DNUpp22849@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Hello Friends, My name is Frank Dorrel. I live in Culver City, California and I consider myself to be a peace activist. I am a Veteran for Peace. I work with the Save the Iraqi Children Coalition, and with many of the other peace organizations here in Los Angeles. I put together video compilations on U.S. foreign policy. My best video is called "WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, CIA Covert Operations and U.S. Interventions Since World War II - What You Didn't Learn in School and Don't Hear on the Mainstream Media". It is available for a $5 donation, plus postage. I am willing to mail it to you before recieving payment. It is a 2-hour compilation featuring 10 segments which I have edited. They are as follows: 1. Martin Luther King Jr., Civil rights leader who was killed after he spoke out against the U.S. war in Vietnam. 2. John Stockwell, Former CIA Chief of Station in Angola, working for then CIA Director, George Bush Sr. 3. Bill Moyer's "The Secret Government" Played on PBS-1987. Excellent! 4."Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair", On Nicaragua. Narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery. Produced by the Empowerment Project. 5."School of Assassins" with Father Roy Bourgeois on the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Narrated by Susan Sarandon. 6."Genocide by Sanctions" Shows the effects of the sanctions in Iraq, with Ramsey Clark talking to Iraqi doctors. Made by Gloria La Riva. 7."The Panama Deception" Won the academy award for best documentary. Narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery, made by The Empowerment Project. 8.Ramsey Clark, Former Attorney General, talking on U.S. militarism. 9.Amy Goodman,Journalist & host of Democracy Now on WBAI FM Radio NY. 10. S. Brian Willson, Vietnam Veteran who wages Unconditional Peace. This video is an excellent educational tool that reveals the true nature of U.S. foreign policy. It has been seen in college classrooms, at churches and at various political groups. It is very convincing! People such as Howard Zinn, Brian Willson, Blase Bonpane, Ed Asner, Amy Goodman, Michael Parenti, Oliver Stone, Father Roy Bourgeois, Ramsey Clark, Casey Kasem and many others have seen this video and find it very worthwhile and informative. If you are interested in getting a copy of this video, email me your mailing address and I will mail you the tape. I do ask for a $6 donation, which includes postage. I will send you the video before I recieve the payment. I do this in good faith and as a way to protect you. The donations do help me to keep this project going. I also have 2-hour video on the effects of the sanctions against Iraq called "Genocide by Sanctions". It features that documentary, plus Ramsey Clark (former Attorney General of the U.S.), the Rev. James Lawson (who taught non-violence with Martin Luther King Jr.), and Denis Halliday. Halliday worked for 34 years in the United Nations, and ran the Oil for Food Program in Iraq for one year before resigning his position, calling the sanctions a genocide, and putting the blame directly on the United States and England. Hans von Sponeck is also on this video. He followed Denis Halliday as the Director of the Oil For Food Program in Iraq and he also reigned his position, calling it Genocide against the Iraqi people. Also seen on this video is American Scott Ritter, former member of the UNSCOM, the weapon inspection team in Iraq, who says Iraq is now and has been disarmed. UNICEF says that 5,000 children die every month in Iraq due to the U.S.-led sanctions. They are dying from diarrhea and dysentary due to lack of clean drinking water, medicine and food. The sanctions do not allow Iraq to rebuild it's water systems that were destroyed during the bombing ten years ago. Over 1.5 million Iraqi's have died in the last ten years due to the sanctions and the continued bombings, which are still happening every week in Iraq. I also have a 2-hour video compilation on the CIA's involvement with international drug dealers. This is a very interesting video, showing how the CIA has been complicit with and has profited from the illegal drug trade. It features such people as Michael Ruppert(cop versus CIA)Cele Castillo (former Drug Enforcement Agent) Peter Dale Scott, John Stockwell and many others who have been involved in one way or another in this CIA-drug business. My goal is to provide this information to as many people as possible. This is difficult because the mainstream media is owned by the multi-national corporations and the military-industrial-complex. They do not want to the truth to be known by the masses. This information is not what we learned in school. It is not what we see on TV, hear on the radio, read in the newspapers or experience in our own lives. The people on these videos are telling a truth that all Americans need to hear, if we are ever going to put a stop to U.S. imperialism. We have been lied by experts in propaganda and misinformation. We live in a state of mass denial, of mass hypnosis. If you really care about having Peace in the world, if you care about Justice and Freedom for all of the people who share the Earth with us, I believe the first step is to educate yourself to the true nature of U.S. foreign policy and then begin to share this information with other people. That is what these tapes are about. And to those of you whose primary concern is the environment, you should be aware that United States militarism is one of the main contributing factors in polluting the Earth. In Peace, Truth, Justice and Hope For All of the People on Earth! Frank Dorrel 310-838-8131 3967 Shedd Terrace Culver City, Calif. 90232 fdorrel@hotmail.com ALSO IN THE WORKS "ADDICTED TO WAR, WHY THE U.S. CAN'T KICK MILITARISM" by Joel Andreas I am also reprinting this brilliant 64 page illustrated expose, first published in 1993, which is now out of print. This is the best book I have ever seen on this subject! It is endorsed by Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Blase Bonpane, S. Brian Willson, Ed Asner, George Carlin, Casey Kasem and many others. "Addicted to War" takes on the most powerful and destructive military in the world. Hard-hitting, carefully documented, and heavily illustrated, it reveals why the United States has been involved in more wars in recent years than any other country. Read it to find out who benefits from these military adventures, who pays, who dies. This book is easy to read and understand. It has 161 footnotes. It also has great quotes from some of the military, government & business leaders who have been in control of our American system. Our tax dollars have been used to exploit the people of the Third World, while many of the problems here at home have not be taken care of. At this point I can send you a xerox copy of "Addicted to War" for $8, or you can send me an email letting me know that you would like to get a new copy ($10), as soon as it is reprinted, sometime in September. Joel Andreas will be updating this book, as it was written in 1993. Sincerely, Frank Dorrel 3967 Shedd Terrace Culver City, Calif. 90232 310-838-8131 From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 13 17:23:07 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] They can't see why they are hated - The Guardian (UK) Message-ID: <200109132323.f8DNN7p16787@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Guardian September 13, 2001 They can't see why they are hated Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad By Seumas Milne Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible. Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy. As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages. If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response. It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming. It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth. But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world. All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday. Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed. From Nemonemini at aol.com Thu Sep 13 20:50:41 2001 From: Nemonemini at aol.com (Nemonemini@aol.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Speaking the Unspeakable.htm Message-ID: <42.1a45e4ca.28d2ca81@aol.com> This is a post from Phil-Lit today, in case you are interested. Summarizing this work is not so easy in a short post, but is an extended kind of investigative-OpEd analysis, about whose facts I could not vouch. I am also a bit hard pressed for time, but here are a few snippets. This work is Dollars for Terror, NY 2000, Richare Labeviere, republished from French edition, 1999, author: Swiss television journalist, from what appears to be a jaundiced somewhat left-middle perspective (don't know that, post Cold War). The book opens, " A spectre haunts the world, the spectre of religious fanaticism", and the author prefaces with "What happened since the bloody bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998? Frankly not much....But fundamentally the State Department is not exerting any real pressure on the Taleban to 'catch' the Saudi billionaire who is happily whiling away his days in Afghanistan. More pro-Islamist than ever the CIA still plays down the misdeeds of its former agent [such statements may, of course, already be dated since the Cole incident]. The book thus documents the menace created by the CIA in its policy to recruit, arm and support the most extreme Islamist fundamentalists in the war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Foreign policy has always been ambiguous here since the thirties and the perennial 'deal' with Saudi Arabia based on issues of oil. The question, among many, arises, how did these former guerilla fighters, especially Bin Laden, later infiltrating the terrorist organizations of the Middle East manage to so easily avoid capture? ?Bin Laden, although repudiated by Saudi Arabia has maintained indirect relations and funding throughout, and managed the creation of an immense financial empire from the Sudan to Switzerland and amidst desperate calls for the discovery of his wherabouts. There is a clear differentiation of Sunnis and Shiites here, and the case of Iran is downplayed in these operations, Iran being let off the hook to some degree ( We forget J. Carter's initial support for the removal of the Shah, etc..., and the period before the Embassy seizure) The book documents the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and its sources in the thirties, and the clear distinction of Islamism from Islam and the former from Arab nationalism. The author describes the variants longstanding of the 'divide and conquer' strategy of the British Empire in which now the Islamism of fundamentalists is pitted against the progressive nationalism of the various Arab states, this promoted by covert initiatives and tailored to the new 'Great Game', the Eurasian field with its geopolitical and economic sweepstakes. Thus, the author notes as to a previous episode in this game, p. 50, " By actuating the "Islamist lever" once more, the United States thus generates a new zone of political instability that renders their presence, then their arbitration, necessary in Eurasia. This will open the new "Silk Road", the object of so much covetousness. Lacking an active national middle class, the countries along this new axis of development have little chance, in the short or the long term, of asserting themselves as emergent 'partners', future exporters of products with high added value. In short there is no immediate danger of making them into competitors. In summary, Islamism is soluble in capitalism; Islamism is an antidote to nationalist temptations. And finally, Islamism is a rampart to the ever-present threat of a return to socialism. In short, Islamism is an essential ally of the neo-liberal revival. " The book contains a large number of similar diverse analyses, adding up to a portrait entirely different from naive news accounts, to say the least. He also cites, Benjmin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld with its similar analysis of fundamentalism and the economic globalization process as antagonists to democracy. In general then we have an ambiguous portrait requiring the impossible fact checking update of the subtle collusions of the parties parties in a manner not easy to investigate, and, at least, a caution to the soundbite news versions demanding retaliation and vengeance, none of it likely to really define let alone address the problem. John Landon http://eonix.8m.com nemonemini@aol.com -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4481 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010913/b58e1354/attachment.txt From debsian at pacbell.net Fri Sep 14 11:25:56 2001 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: FINANCIERS WARNED OF IMMINENT ATTACK ON WTC!! Message-ID: <004001c13d42$52aeae40$2a20aace@oemcomputer> Counterpunch lack of fact checking can be maddening. I'll tell an amusing example from a few yrs. ago in a second. On the first item below. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/09/14/MN92245.DTL On this, "CNN's videotape of Palestinians, " saw that from Marcio A.V. Carvalho, on the Israeli Indymedia website yesterday morning. Not more than about a dozen more posts down was this, http://worldtribune.com/wta/Archive-2001/me_palestinians_09_13.html The NYT on the 12th had this http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/13/international/middleeast/13PALE.html?ex=10 01455886&ei=1&en=67b786c0ae3df047 (URL did not wrap, cut and paste into browser) where Arafat admitted that Hamas militants in Nablus were exultent. This from a list not known for being a pro-Israeli! http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg07982.html Now the amusing story about factchecking at Counterpunch. A freelancer, from the defunct NYC publication, The Eye, had a piece in Counterpunch that quoted extensively, Bill White, the notorious far right, Buchananite loon with the www.libertariansocialism.com and overthrow domains. Bill White, I wouldn't believe if he said the sky is blue. Sent a few e-mails to Jeff St. Clair, who later that morning said that Alex and he had decided to retract that story and never use the services of that freelancer again. But, my skepticism of Cockburn had been pricked in the early 80's when in The Nation he disputed the figures of the # of deaths in the Ukranian famine of the early 30's from Robert Conquest, and gave an absurdly low # of "premature deaths in the GULAG in the low hundreds of thousands, not the 2 million that is now the consensus figure. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/message/1436 (Stalinist nutters from PLP on Conquest, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/message/825 http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/revisionists/ ) Pages and pages of letters followed in a subsequent issue. Recently, Cockburn has cast doubt on global warming. Is friendly with http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9911/1327.html Gun Owners of America leader, Larry Pratt. Pratt, as this antifa piece relates was up to his ears in links to Guatemalan death squads and attended the meeting in Estes Park, Colorado in '92 addressed by Louis Beam, formerly of the KKK, on a strategy for the then emergent militias, called, "leaderless resistance." And, on Lysander's previous e-mail, have some skepticism about Emperors New Clothes, both Jared Israel and Michel Chossudovsky. Jared, still denies the 7,000 killed in Srbenica, and disputes that 200,000 were killed in Bosnia. On his website you might still be able to find the hour soundwave file of him debated David Rohde who has written extensively about Srbenica, on the Australian Bradcasting Corp. Chossudovsky, as well, has repeatedly appeared on stages with figures like Srjda Trifkovic, a former publicist for Radovan Karazdic, the Bosnian Serb leader, who had much operational responsibilty, in terms of signing off on massacres of Muslims in Bosnia by Mladic and the paramilitaries of the allies of Milosevic party, the SPS, that were under the control of the far right, neo-fascist, V. Seselj of the serbian Radical Party. Back to Jared> The International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic (see their website, "Free Slobo!"), despite a number of e-mails that have been sent to them and allies of theirs like the Tangents website in Europe, still has signatures of support from the French fascists in the Third Positionist party, the PCN. http://www.icdsm.org/activities.htm http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/leninist-international/2001-July/000220 .html "Red-Browns, " and other "National Bolshevik creeps, as well as other more generically right wing forces have supported the Milosevic'es and Karazdic'es. http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/muttamericabelgrade.htm http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/gopbelgrade.htm Michael Pugliese ----- Original Message ----- From: Lysander Zimmerman To: TO Anti-Racist Action ; Stop the WTO ; Rad Green ; mob4glob@dojo.tao.ca ; no_to_nato@flora.org ; Mac Quebec Group ; London Action Family ; Anarchist Information ; Hamilton Action for Social Change ; Friendly Anarchists League ; bus10@yahoogroups.com ; anti-capitalism@yahoogroups.com ; Destroy the IMF Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 8:29 AM Subject: FINANCIERS WARNED OF IMMINENT ATTACK ON WTC!! PLEASE FORWARD TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE The news will never report this!! From: www.indymedia.org and: www.counterpunch.org FINANCIERS WARNED! Congress left in the dark about WTC foreknowledge (english) by relayed from counterpunch 4:06am Fri Sep 14 '01 lots of stuff, MOSTLY THAT FINANCIERS WERE WARNED! and Congress left in the dark. Internal memo to Goldman Sachs distributed on SEPTEMBER 10 2001 warning emminent terrorism. Wonder why all the big CEOs they have been reporting were conveniently "out of the office" in the WTC that day? Talk about private and corrupt power, and Congresspeople are saying this. By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch.org 9-14-1 * Most revealing reaction Benyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli prime minister, on being asked what the attack means for relations between the US and Israel: "It's very good." * Least credible analysis New York Times columnist William Safire, claiming there was a terrorist mole in the White House, relaying to the kamikaze pilots the whereabouts of the President and the special coordinates of Air Force One. Safire's political mission in that particular column was to explain why the President fled down a SAC bunker in Nebraska. * Least credible news footage CNN's videotape of Palestinians supposedly dancing in the streets of a West Bank town. CounterPuncher Marcio A.V. Carvalho at the state university of Campinas in Brazil tells us that he and his colleagues had compared this tape with one from 1991 showing Palestinian cheering, and found them to be identical. [a claim--though Canadian news footage shows mourning Arabs; U.S. media shows happy, celebrating Arabs. You put the pieces together on who is the enemy: THE U.S CORPORATE MEDIA!] From sherrynstan at igc.org Fri Sep 14 14:11:24 2001 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan@igc.org) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: FINANCIERS WARNED OF IMMINENT ATTACK ON WTC!! Message-ID: Dear me. Seems some fact checking needs to be done by Michael. Simply refuting the refutations, very credible in fact, of the Srbrinica "massacre", the long discredited but still popular figures of Robert Conquest, et al, by using ad hominem attacks, or declaring figures "widely accepted" in no way answers the actual arguments. The problem with Conquests outrageous numbers and the Srbrenica "massacre" is that the so-called evidence has been shown to be rumors, innuendos, and outright fabrications. From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Fri Sep 14 09:29:46 2001 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] FINANCIERS WARNED OF IMMINENT ATTACK ON WTC!! Message-ID: <00c201c13d32$16de2180$c73c8d18@bubr1.on.home.com> PLEASE FORWARD TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE The news will never report this!! From: www.indymedia.org and: www.counterpunch.org FINANCIERS WARNED! Congress left in the dark about WTC foreknowledge (english) by relayed from counterpunch 4:06am Fri Sep 14 '01 lots of stuff, MOSTLY THAT FINANCIERS WERE WARNED! and Congress left in the dark. Internal memo to Goldman Sachs distributed on SEPTEMBER 10 2001 warning emminent terrorism. Wonder why all the big CEOs they have been reporting were conveniently "out of the office" in the WTC that day? Talk about private and corrupt power, and Congresspeople are saying this. By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch.org 9-14-1 * Most revealing reaction Benyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli prime minister, on being asked what the attack means for relations between the US and Israel: "It's very good." * Least credible analysis New York Times columnist William Safire, claiming there was a terrorist mole in the White House, relaying to the kamikaze pilots the whereabouts of the President and the special coordinates of Air Force One. Safire's political mission in that particular column was to explain why the President fled down a SAC bunker in Nebraska. * Least credible news footage CNN's videotape of Palestinians supposedly dancing in the streets of a West Bank town. CounterPuncher Marcio A.V. Carvalho at the state university of Campinas in Brazil tells us that he and his colleagues had compared this tape with one from 1991 showing Palestinian cheering, and found them to be identical. [a claim--though Canadian news footage shows mourning Arabs; U.S. media shows happy, celebrating Arabs. You put the pieces together on who is the enemy: THE U.S CORPORATE MEDIA!] America's Greens Rally to Flag, Run for Cover Hot to present themselves as staunch flag-waggers, some of America's premier environmental organizations have disgracefully ditched their principles. The Sierra Club, America's oldest green group has abruptly turned off its campaign against the anti-environmental program of the Bush administration. CounterPunch has secured an internal memo in which the club's high command explains to its staff why it suspending its campaigns. "In response to the attacks on America," the memo goes, "we are shifting our communications strategy for the immediate future. We have taken all of our ads off of the air; halted our phone banks; removed any material from the web that people could perceive as anti-Bush, and we are taking other steps to prevent the Sierra Club from being perceived as controversial during this crisis. For now we are going to stop aggressively pushing our agenda and will cease bashing President Bush " The memo then instructs club staffers on how to respond to the press: "If you are asked about what this terrorism does to the Sierra Club's agenda, please respond simply by saying that right now the public needs to focus on comforting each other and strengthening our national security to deal with the crisis at hand." Imagine if this craven posture spreads across the public interest movement. We could expect First Amendment defenders to say that they were abandoning efforts to protect the Bill of Rights. We could expect groups defending immigrants to say that henceforth the INS should be given free rein. Fortunately First Amendment defenders and defenders of immigrants have stronger spines and principles than the supposed defenders of the environment at the Sierra Club. Are we now to expect the Club to endorse drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve as necessary "for national security"? Even groups that we here at CounterPunch have admired are now in pellmell cowardly retreat. The Berkeley-based International Rivers Network, which has been the main bulwark against the Three Gorges dam in China, now announces that it is suspending its planned nationwide protest against Morgan Stanley, one of the dam's principle financiers. Morgan Stanley had 50 floors of offices in the World Trade Center. IRN has also announced that "out of respect for the victims of this disaster, with understanding of the strategic difficulties in conveying to a shocked media and public our messages regarding the World Bank and IMF, with concern for the integrity of security systems in Washington DC, and for the safety of all, we will refrain from participating in activities surrounding the planned World Bank / IMF this month. We are also sharing our concerns with the leading organizations responsible for planning and coordinating these activities." The Ruckus Society, the direct action training group involved in many demonstrations at the World Trade Organization has simultaneously announced that it is canceling its training camp, to be held in Middleburgh, Virginia, scheduled as preparation for the next World Bank meeting. This camp was to be cosponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, Jobs with Justice and Global Exchange. All these organizations have now backed out, saying that now is not the time for such activity. The Rainforest Action Network, based in San Francisco, has called for the cancellation of the protest and said that in the event it goes forward it will not participate. Let's get this straight. If all resisters to the Bush political program were to follow this shameful exhibition by these green groups, we would see peace groups declining to protest against nuclear attacks on Iraq and armed invasion of Afghanistan. We would see civil rights sitting on their hands as racial and religious profiling is used to persecute people of Middle Eastern descent. Defenders of Palestinian rights would say that for the time being they wouldn't protest the use of US Apache helicopters against civilians in West Bank towns and villages. What nonsense! Principles are never more important than when it is inconvenient or dangerous to stand up for them. Big Oil's Kamikaze Rep. Don Young, the wild man from Alaska, was one of the few members of congress who didn't completely buy into the notion of Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade complex and the Pentagon. There's some possibility, Young told the Alaska Daily News, that the attacks are linked to the protests against the World Trade Organization, another of which is scheduled for later this month in Washington D.C. "If you watched what happened (at past protests) in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there's some expertise in that field," Young said. "I'm not sure they're that dedicated but ecoterrorists --which are really based in Seattle -- there's a strong possibility that could be one of the groups." Young doesn't believe any of this. But he smells weakness in the environmental movement and, like the old fur-trapper that he is, he is poised to exploit it. Young is not beneath using the carnage of the World Trade Center as a launching ground for his own agenda: oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, logging in the Tongass rainforest, passing laws against environmental protest and construction of new missile bases in the Alaska tundra and on the Aleutian Islands. Chemical War in Manhattan As the environmentalists are putting themselves into a state of suspended animation, the citizens of Manhattan and the thousands of volunteer rescue workers mulling through the rubble at the World Trade Center complex may well be in the whirlwind of a toxic event, which has received little media attention and almost no precautionary aid from FEMA or other federal agencies coordinating. Early reports from the Environmental Protection Agency described the destruction of the World Trade complex "an environmental catastrophe": the air of Manhattan clotted with asbestos, dioxin and other poisons. Yet, rescue workers found themselves without little more than surgical masks between their lungs and the poisons emanating from the smoldering ruins. For years, the Pentagon and other terror pundits had been warning of the vulnerability of American cities to attack by biological and chemical weapons, the so-called asymmetrical warfare. These apocalyptic scenarios held that terrorist groups would unleash anthrax or sarin gas attacks in subways, water supplies or mega-office buildings, such as the World Trade Towers. Well, it turns out that the attackers didn't need to pack any chemicals, the buildings themselves proved to be quite toxic enough. The attackers used American planes as missiles and the buildings as chemical weapons. Built during the height of the asbestos boom, the guts of the World Trade Center may have been one of the world's largest repositories of the carcinogenic fiber, used as insulation in the giant towers. Underneath the rubble, thousands of tires continue to burn, sending plumes of pitch black smoke down the canyons of Manhattan. This smoke is contaminated with dioxins and assorted other poisons of the petrochemical age. Early Warnings Reports keep coming in to us of advanced warnings that an attack of some sort was eminent. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was booked to fly from the Bay Area to New York City on the morning of September 11. But Brown says that late Monday evening, a full 8 hours prior to the attack, he received a call from a person Brown described as his "airport security man" telling him that he should be extra cautious about air travel on September 11. In addition to what we have previously reported about heightened security at the World Trade Center itself in the weeks leading to the attack and at the Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway, New Jersey, CounterPunch has also learned that an internal memo was sent around Goldman Sachs in Tokyo on September 10 advising all employees of a possible terrorist attack. It recommended all employees to avoid any American government buildings. That said, according to Rep. David Bonior, the Michigan Democrat, the Congress was the last to know. Even after two planes had struck the World Trade Center towers and another had smashed into the Pentagon, Bonior says congressional officials were not warned by the CIA or any other intelligence arm of the federal government that the 30,000 workers in the Capitol might be at risk of an attack. Bonoir has been one of the few members of Congress to openly question the value of bowing to the demands for more money made by CIA and other intelligence agencies. "If they can't even warn members of Congress about an ongoing attack, you really have to wonder what good they are," Bonior said. CP http://www.counterpunch.org/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 13359 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/attachments/20010914/6ce93c95/attachment.txt From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 14 15:55:17 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Globe and Mail alters truth Message-ID: <0a5501c13d67$f12a6da0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> PLEASE FORWARD Globe and Mail alters truth On Friday, September 14th, The Globe and Mail printed parts of a letter written and e-mailed to interested parties by film maker Michael Moore the night after the morning of the recent terrorist attack in New York. In the spirit of the famous observation that "The first casualty of war is truth", the paper's editors gutted Moore's political observations, added a few pieces of text and placed it under the headline "Safety/Me and my airport". In a small effort to offset this, I reprint the letter below. The portions printed by the Globe start about 1/5 of the way into the letter and end about 1/2 way through; the section is bounded here by a line of "===". The Globe's additions are enclosed within [ ]. removed text is marked by X's; e.g. Xremoved textX. If I might paraphrase, the remaining, unprinted, text suggests that what happened, while abhorent, should, perhaps, not be unexpected and offers reasons for this view. I believe I have cut and pasted from the original email correctly, but I am human and apologize for any errors. I have found a web site for this: http://www.michaelmoore.com/2001_0912.html. K. Panton From: "Michael Moore" To: Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 3:10 AM Subject: [Mike's Message] Death, Downtown Death, Downtown Dear friends, I was supposed to fly today on the 4:30 PM American Airlines flight from LAX to JFK. But tonight I find myself stuck in L.A. with an incredible range of emotions over what has happened on the island where I work and live in New York City. My wife and I spent the first hours of the day -- after being awakened by phone calls from our parents at 6:40am PT -- trying to contact our daughter at school in New York and our friend JoAnn who works near the World Trade Center. I called JoAnn at her office. As someone picked up, the first tower imploded, and the person answering the phone screamed and ran out, leaving me no clue as to whether or not she or JoAnn would live. It was a sick, horrible, frightening day. On December 27, 1985 I found myself caught in the middle of a terrorist incident at the Vienna airport -- which left 30 people dead, both there and at the Rome airport. (The machine-gunning of passengers in each city was timed to occur at the same moment.) I do not feel like discussing that event tonight because it still brings up too much despair and confusion as to how and why I got to live. a fluke, a mistake, a few feet on the tarmac, and I am still here, there but for the grace of. Safe. Secure. ============================START OF PRINTED EXCERPT=================== ... XI'mX [I am] an American, living in America. I like my illusions. I walk through a metal detector, I put my carry-ons through an x-ray machine, and I know all will be well. [Won't it?] Here's a short list of my experiences lately with airport security: * At the Newark Airport, the plane is late at boarding everyone. The counter can't find my seat. So I am told to just "go ahead and get on" -- without a ticket! * At Detroit Metro Airport, I don't want to put the lunch I just bought at the deli through the x-ray machine so, as I pass through the metal detector, I hand the sack to the guard through the space between the detector and the x-ray machine. I tell him "It's just a sandwich." He believes me and doesn't bother to check. The sack has gone through neither security device. * At LaGuardia in New York, I check a piece of luggage, but decide to catch a later plane. The first plane leaves without me, but with my bag -- no one knowing what is in it [or who it belongs to]. * Back in Detroit, I Xtake my timeX ['m slow] getting off the commuter plane. By the time I have come down its stairs, the bus that takes the passengers to the terminal has left -- without me. I am alone on the tarmac, free to wander wherever I want. So I do. Eventually, I flag down a pick-up truck and an airplane mechanic gives me a ride the rest of the way to the terminal. * I have brought knives X,X [and] razors; and once, my traveling companion brought a hammer and chisel. No one stopped us. Of course, I have gotten away with all of this because the airlines consider my safety SO important, they pay rent-a-cops $5.75 an hour to make sure the bad guys don't get on my plane. That is what my life is worth -- less than the cost of an oil change. Too harsh, you say? Well, chew on this: a first-year pilot on American Eagle (the commuter arm of American Airlines) Xreceives around $15,000 a year in annual payX [is paid about 15,000 a year]. That's right -- $15,000 for the person who has your life in his hands. Until recently, Continental Express paid a little over $13,000 a year. There was one guy, an American Eagle pilot, who had four kids so he went down to the welfare office and applied for food stamps -- and he was eligible! Someone on welfare is flying my plane? Is this for real? Yes, it is. So spare me the talk about all the precautions the airlines and the FAA is taking. They, like all businesses, are concerned about one thing -- the bottom line and the profit margin. Four teams of X3-5X [three to five] people were all able to penetrate airport security on the same morning at 3 different airports and pull off this heinous act? My only response is -- Xthat's allX [is that all]? =========================== END OF PRINTED EXCERPT =============== Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the "terrorist threat" and today's scariest dude on planet earth -- Osama bin Laden. Hey, who knows, maybe he did it. But, something just doesn't add up. Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path? Or am I being asked to believe that there were four religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today? Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause -- but FOUR? Ok, maybe you can -- I don't know. What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin Laden guy except this one fact -- WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA! Don't take my word for it -- I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that laid it all out. When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us. We abhor terrorism -- unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing. We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers! We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit. We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause. Yet, our recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted by a guy from the desert but rather by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys who hated the federal government. >From the first minutes of today's events, I never heard that possibility suggested. Why is that? Maybe it's because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient in getting Americans whipped into a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It's much easier to get us to hate when the object of our hatred doesn't look like us. Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the military; one Senator on CNN even said he didn't want to hear any more talk about more money for education or health care -- we should have only one priority: our self-defense. Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes? In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race -- you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all. The Senators and Congressmen tonight broke out in a spontaneous version of "God Bless America." They're not a bad group of singers! Yes, God, please do bless us. Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush! Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity. Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it's appropriate let's examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in. It doesn't have to be like this. Yours, Michael Moore mmflint@aol.com ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 14 15:56:16 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Israel accused of opportunism Message-ID: <0a6101c13d68$146c0080$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters; AP. 14 Septemeber 2001. Various stories, combined and edited. TEHRAN, JERUSALEM, GAZA and CAIRO -- Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi accused Israel of exploiting the terror attacks in the United States to try to further complicate the volatile situation in the region, state television reported on Friday. "Even as all Muslim countries have condemned this incident, Israel is unfortunately after provocative measures," it reported Kharrazi as saying in a telephone conversation with his Austrian counterpart Benita Ferrero-Waldner on Thursday. "The situation in the region is very complicated and difficult. Israel's actions could leave a negative impact in Muslim countries," he said, urging the world community to contain Israel. "This incident is worrisome for everyone. All Muslims condemn the attacks," Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani said during Friday prayers in Tehran. "But the attacks are becoming an excuse for Israel to make martyrs of the Palestinians and target Islam," he added. "The world should mobilize to prevent these attacks. If we are to fight terrorism, we will have to remove the conditions which breed it," the ayatollah said. "Israel is the foremost terrorist state which fosters terrorism." Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon instructed Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on Friday to cancel plans to hold truce talks with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on Sunday, a senior Israeli political source said. "Sharon told Peres not to meet Arafat on Sunday because the timing of the talks would hurt Israel," the source said, apparently referring to Tuesday's terror attacks in the United States and Sharon's biting comments the next day about Arafat. "He (Arafat) is like (Osama) bin Laden, bin Laden also has a coalition of terror...But the difference is that Arafat still has a choice, he can still make a switch," government spokesman Raanan Gissin quoted Sharon as telling Secretary of State Colin Powell by telephone on Wednesday. While world attention focused on events in the United States, fresh violence erupted in the Gaza Strip. In Gaza's Nusairat refugee camp, more than 2,000 supporters of the militant Hamas group took part in an anti-Israel rally. Holding aloft pictures of Mohammed Ihbeishi, the first Arab-Israeli suicide bomber, they called on Arafat to spurn talks with Israel and warned of further attacks. A Gaza cleric, Abu Abdullah, told thousands of Muslim worshippers attending prayers that the United States was responsible for causing the "severe frustration" that led attackers to strike in New York and Washington. "America supports the injustice and spreads it among the weak people that leads to such malice," he said. A senior official of the Islamist militant group Hamas, echoing calls by Taliban clerics in Afghanistan, urged Muslims on Friday to unite against any U.S. retaliation for the terror attacks in New York and Washington. "I join the cause for Muslims to be united in order to deter the United States from launching war against Muslims in Afghanistan," the Hamas official, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, said in response to the calls by clerics in Kabul. "It is impossible for Muslims to stand handcuffed and blindfolded while other Muslims, their brothers, are being attacked. The Muslim world should stand up against the American threats which are fed by the Jews," Rantissi told Reuters. Taliban clerics used Friday prayers to urge Muslims around the world to unite against the United States if it attacked Afghanistan, and threatened revenge "by other means" in the event of such attacks. In Beirut a man giving his name as Hussein said Israel had killed thousands of Arabs and Muslims over the years "but we haven't seen the United States move at any point...to stop Israel." Now the United States wants Muslims to join it in fighting Muslim Afghanistan "for the sake of one terrorist who does not speak in the name of Arabs or Muslims," he said. In Iraq, the preacher at Imam Al-Azam Mosque in Baghdad criticized those people who sympathized with the U.S. victims. "Have you heard about the hypocrites and the dissemblers who are shedding tears over the tyrants whose hands are stained with the blood of our people, women and children?" the preacher said during his sermon, which was broadcast live on Iraqi television. 20-year-old engineering student, Ahmed Adel said: "The attacks in the United states are the right thing to do. If anyone had asked me to do this myself, I would have done it, and I support whoever did this." Adel added that since "Arabs can't wage a war against Israel or the United States because they are powerful countries, we are forced to this. Suicide operations are the right thing to do." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 14 16:11:42 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Dear North America Message-ID: <0a6901c13d6a$3ce8c500$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> I watched in stunned silence yesterday as all of this occurred. All the other political debates seems so distant. They seem so irrelevant. Of course, it needs to be said that not only am I personally repulsed by all this, not only do I not support this I know no one who does, nor would such an act be even entertained as a notion in the minds of those I work with, love and respect for their principled opposition to Imperialism and the blood drenched, viciousness of our current society. Nothing of this act resonates with what I love about humanity, what it is I find so irreplaceable in surrounding myself with the warmth and the laughter of human beings. That, in the final analysis is what motivates the good people- and I hope to count myself among these- to resist the butchers who run the world today. However, another thing happens to the mind. When I look at the images of the tortured burnt out villages of the Vietnamese people, the victims of the Al-Amiriya Shelter in Iraq or the cluster bombs dropped on Belgrade, I feel a strong, deep and passionate hate. An utter contempt for the very evil our own leaders do- across both sides of the 49th parallel- and do it in our names. This is not politics as such, this is humanity. My total love for people is why such a vicious burning guttural hate swells up in me. I know all of you who love the people of the whole planet know that desperate hate feeling. So, it is that part of me that hates as a reaction to what happens to the entire world that pauses for a brief section- less than 2% perhaps- of what I am and thought- no one ever need go through this, but by God we have been begging for this for centuries. On some level, it is only something like this which can wake North Americans to a permanent crisis, built up by our "leaders". Imperialism is the mother and the midwife simultaneously on this. We are also to blame- for as our governments rain death on the heads of our friends we have not stopped them. I want to try to bring this into some sense by way of personal observation. Last night, I had the chace to go to the Colleges' "welcome back" barbecue- cheap beer and free veggie burgers provided by the student union. I had tried to avoid people for three days. The whole thing had me angry at the edge of my toes- because of the rankest racism I was hearing. I, like everyone else there, was talking about nothing else. The thing was, my fears and my hopes were coming to light. I watched a young woman, a pacifist- be followed around by an angry lunatic who wanted everyone in his earshot to hear him denounce her as trying to justify what happened. What she had done was explain the IMF/WB and their role in the 3rd world. The fanaticism has begun. Also, there were a large number of people who said they thought America deserved it- and that this was something that should have happened sooner. So the lessons have been learned as well. Many people admire the dedication and military brilliance pulled off here. A startling comment which makes me wonder if it because these images look like a movie or if they genuinely thought it was done well. Something strange happened. When I got there- anything I said on the matter was preceded by a long disclaimer- distancing myself from such tactics. The more beer I had, the more I pointed to the obvious: why should we stop because it happens to the US? What about the people they kill every damn day? Then I would suggest that at least this will bring the racist scum bags in our neighbourhoods out, so we know who they are. I really tested it by saying that perhaps a people who leech of the rest of the world - settle for imperialist structures with something as simple as a Nike shoe as the payoff- perhaps these people (including us) don't deserve to live in peace, or at least that they have had a totally free ride for far too long. The more blunt the statement, the more respect it got. Friends, these 10 000 people appear to have been the price I could never call- a price paid to wake up North America to just how vicious reality is. This is reality. This is what our fair leaders produce the way they run the world. I am not prepared to die for Chase Manhattan- I am prepared to die fighting it. A simple reality: what this is- let there be no shirking from it- will not decrease at all until we do our God-damned historic mission and over throw the bastards in the Pentagon and not just fly planes of civilians into them. Lay the blame at three levels: One, callous and misdirected human disregard for fellow humans. What motivated them was the largest culprit: Death to Imperialism. The final push, the third reason? The callousness with which we have ignored the rest of the worlds' pleas for centuries. Dear North America: I, like you, have been crying. I am typing while the tears dry on my cheeks. I am typing so as to make sure the lesson of all this horror, this carnage- that it is not lost. For years we have been the few who sat on top of the rest of the world. We have allowed- by our inactions in learning the true terror that our rulers perpetuate on the rest of the world. Those terrors are not false, they are not superfluous- and they are not to be looked at lightly. They are to be understood as similar- except they aren't even shocking for the victims any longer. The world order imposed by the Bastards in Washington- and the people they truly serve- are the real architects of this tragedy. Do not look to the man who speaks with an accent in your local corner store. Do not look, as David Letterman says, to the Cab driver. Do not look to any of these people. They are the victims of these atrocities. This whole god-damned mess is spawned by the fact we put up with "leaders" who kill 50 000 a day in hunger. A people who have done this crime a dozen times this very year in Iraq. Listen, and listen carefully: Now you know. Now you know the pain of Imperialism. Now you get it. Malcolm X was right. This is the Imperialist Chicken coming right home to roost. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From debsian at pacbell.net Fri Sep 14 16:41:22 2001 From: debsian at pacbell.net (michael pugliese) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Conquest, Srbenica, GULAG ghoulishness Message-ID: <140901257.56478@webbox.com> Stan Goff, has a fine book on Haiti that looks to be as good as the Bob Shochachis volume on the same, but, won't sell as many copies giving he isn't a novelist that gets published in Harpers. I may not agree with Stan on the below but, praise is due. First, GULAG controversies. I've read alot of the relevent literature, both from Soviet and anti-Soviet historians, from the Russian marxist, Roy Medvedev, the authors of, "June 22, 1941, " that later wrote, "Utopia in Power, "Nekrich and someone else whose name escapes me, the ever so long piece on the PLP website of Grover Furr in New Jersey, the latest volumes in the yale Univ. Press series, "Annals of Communism, " which except for the Richard Pipes volume of letters from Lenin are solid. The figures of Solzhenitsyn of 66 million dead prematurely are way overblown, and demographers have long discounted them. The J. Arch Getty numbers which concur with the #'ers that Norman Davies, a collaborator of E.H. Carr in the later volumes of his history of the the fSU, that were published in New Left Review in the early 90's both are based on the archives of the NKVD and CPSU that were beginning to be opened during Gorby. I have someone else that has greater expertise than me you can debate offlist if you like, an anti-Stalinist marxist from Brazil, Alexandre fenelon, from the lbo-talk list. I'll send you his e-mail address offlist later. As for Conquest, well his latest book, "reflections on a ravaged century, " has a blurb from christopher hitchens. (Final banishing of the hitch from the left, shouts heard from the progressives...) On the Ukranian Famine, look at that URL from the canadian ukranian website, 'Famine and Genocide Deniers." Side comment on J. Arch Getty that compiled the appendix in the Yale volume of docs on the GULAG. His first book, on the purges, published by Cambridge Univ. Press in the mid-80's if memory serves, was controversial within the Soviet Studies field because he postulated that the purges from '36-'38, were not a top-down, calculated, totalitarian plan from good 'ol Uncle Joe but a process that acquired its own insane set of dynamics. (Compare to the GPCR in the PRC) For Getty to have backtracked from what the historians called revisionism. (Different than Bernsteinian or Kautskyite revisionism!) is significant. Go to H-Russia for lotsa more to and fro on all this. Srbenica, now. Out of the 7,000 dead there is now about 4,000 conclusively identified from DNA and bodily remains in a morgue there. Watch for that evidence to be submitted to the Hague in October when Slobodan gets formally indicted for genocide in Bosnia. If you wanna debate, I've read all that stuff from Jared but, have you read anything that disputes his tendentious accts.??? Final comment, the case for the left and the horrors that capitalism inflicts on us, have to be based on the unvarnished truth. Fellow travelling and/or Stalinist myths have to junked. From bstoller at utopia2000.org Fri Sep 14 17:04:33 2001 From: bstoller at utopia2000.org (Barry Stoller) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] IMF, WB delay meet; some groups cancel Message-ID: <3BA28CB1.7F849267@utopia2000.org> AP. 14 September 2001. IMF, World Bank Delay Annual Meetings. WASHINGTON -- The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are postponing their annual meetings later this month because of security concerns following the terrorist attacks against the United States, officials said Friday. A formal announcement was expected Monday, said officials familiar with the discussions at the two institutions. The meetings were set for Sept. 29-30. It is not certain when or if they will be rescheduled, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The fund and the bank have an agreement in principle that a postponement is warranted, but the executive boards have to take action," said one official. Day-to-day operating policy for the agencies is set by separate 24-member executive boards. "Because of the tragedy, everybody is focused on how we can help the police forces to make sure they are deployed to the best benefits of national security," World Bank spokeswoman Caroline Anstey said. "We don't want to draw police away from other business." After Tuesday's attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Police Chief Charles Ramsey of the District of Columbia urged the IMF and World Bank to cancel the meetings. City police had counting on colleagues from other jurisdictions, including New York City, to help them deal with what they said could be as many as 100,000 protesters at the meetings. The AFL-CIO and Friends of the Earth announced on Friday that they were pulling out of the planned demonstrations. "For our part, the AFL-CIO will not, in any event, continue our planning to lead a peaceful mass protest at the meeting, nor will we participate in any such demonstration," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement. Friends of the Earth President Brent Blackwelder said, "We have chosen to demonstrate our commitment to peace and justice by not demonstrating." Organizers at Mobilization for Global Justice, one of the umbrella groups for the protests, said they planned to meet Saturday to determine whether to go ahead with the demonstrations. An announcement was expected Monday. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 14 18:49:18 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] test please ignore. Message-ID: <0b2e01c13d80$408d6100$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 14 15:51:36 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Why we are hated Message-ID: <200109142151.f8ELpap13699@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> "We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism." - Robert Bowman, who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is presently [1998] bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL. Originally printed in The National Catholic Reporter, Oct. 2, 1998. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 14 15:52:49 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Articles giving background on Bin Laden Message-ID: <200109142152.f8ELqop15037@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 14 15:54:01 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] When the Puritan Citadel Cracked - John MacArthur Message-ID: <200109142154.f8ELs2p16313@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Globe & Mail September 14, 2001 When the Puritan Citadel Cracked by John MacArthur Until a few years ago, my family owned a Holiday Inn in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., where we frequently hosted commercial and other visitors to the nearby Sikorsky helicopter test-flight centre. As good Americans with rooms to rent, we didn't discriminate among paying customers. So I could only wince when the hotel manager mentioned, just before the outbreak of the Persian Gulf war, that among our distinguished guests in the mid-1980s had been a group of Iraqi air force pilots. This salient memory returned when I read that several of the suspects in the World Trade Center attack were educated at flight schools in the Sunshine State. If no one at Huffman Aviation or Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University thought to check out their backgrounds before enrolling them, it's hardly surprising. For more than 50 years in America, a country still besotted and deluded by the Cold War, anybody with sufficient cash, brains and the proper anti-Communist credentials has been welcomed with open arms in the name of the greater good and of American-style virtue. Our national guest list of ungrateful thugs and terrorists is long. We might as well begin with the government's suspected "Mr. Big," Osama bin Laden, the Saudi rich kid who joined the Islamic jihad against the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Whether paymaster or supplier of heavy construction equipment, Mr. bin Laden's cause and America's was the same for 10 years, until the Russians finally withdrew in 1989. Mr. bin Laden's personal financial contribution to the holy war against godless communism, drawn from an inheritance valued at $80-million (U.S.) in 1968, is unknown. But thanks to journalist Mary Anne Weaver, we do know that the CIA gave the various Afghan resistance movements -- including direct training and logistical support -- more than $3-billion. You'll forgive me if I don't believe the spy agency's denials that it worked with or schooled Mr. bin Laden: According to Ms. Weaver's New Yorker article last year, the Saudi construction heir enjoyed impeccable establishment connections during the Afghan rebellion, including close ties with Pakistan's military ruler, Zia ul-Haq, whose government transferred CIA-supplied weapons to the rebels. Ironically, according to Ms. Weaver, it's the gulf war (our allegedly democratic jihad against the new Hitler, Saddam Hussein) that seems to have turned Mr. bin Laden once and for all against the U.S. and our allies, the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Mr. bin Laden's disillusionment with his former U.S. teammates was extreme, but perhaps his confusion is understandable. Mr. Hussein had developed into a U.S. "asset" thanks to his invasion of Islamically pure Iran in 1980. When the Iranians began to win, it was the U.S. that rescued the Iraqi dictator with logistical and intelligence support. Here again, it was the mad competition of the Cold War that largely dictated U.S. policy. True, the Carter and Reagan administrations were angry about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini's seizure of the U.S. embassy hostages, but America didn't definitively ally itself with Iraq until after the Soviets tilted toward Iran -- a reluctant client but grateful for any help against Iraq. Mr. Hussein, too, was confused by American realpolitik,since his former friends in the Reagan and Bush administrations had turned violently against him after diligently aiding him in his war against Iran. When he grabbed Kuwait, he did it with the assurance, he thought, of U.S. neutrality. Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Hussein are not the only former U.S. assets to betray us when politics and ambition changed their moods. Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, was welcomed by Washington as a suitable replacement for Omar Torrijos once Mr. Torrijos became too friendly with Fidel Castro. Eventually, General Noriega began to imagine that he really ran Panama, and spit in the face of the Bush administration; another good U.S.-trained anti-Communist had gone to seed and was duly crushed by the American military. Further back, we find Ho Chi Minh, the liberator of Vietnam from French and Japanese rule, rebuffed by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations when he asked for support to free his country. An admirer of Thomas Jefferson, he was rewarded for his help against the Japanese in the Second World War with the back of the American hand; our Soviet-obsessed foreign policy elite was horrified by his Communist rhetoric. Ho Chi Minh remembered the slight and inflicted greater damage against this country than any former U.S. ally. In the Balkans, we're witnessing another "blowback." U.S.-dominated NATO launched a bombing campaign against "the last Communist," Slobodan Milosevic, on behalf of the oppressed Muslims of Kosovo. Now our "friends" in the Kosovo Liberation Army have nearly destabilized Macedonia. Like Saddam Hussein in the fall of 1990, they're disinclined to take seriously the U.S. requests for restraint. Why do we play this hypocritical game that comes back to burn us? Part of the explanation lies in the corrupted thinking of a generation of U.S. policy intellectuals. Some of this was crystalized in Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous essay, Dictatorships and Double Standards,published in 1979, when Jimmy Carter had supposedly gone soft on communism and Third World radicalism, especially in Nicaragua and Iran. Ms. Kirkpatrick wrote approvingly of "autocracy" as compared with Marxism: "[Unlike Communists,] traditional autocrats . . . do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations." Thus could America justify its overthrow of Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh and its long support of the brutal Shah; thus could we support the organized terrorism of the anti-Sandinista contras. The fanatical mullahs of Iran know history better than we do, and have not forgotten our misdeeds. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan just doesn't believe that we mean what we say. But another explanation for this self-defeating arrogance stems from the old Puritan belief in American "exceptionalism." This special place in the New World, defined by John Winthrop, was to be a "model of Christian charity" that would demonstrate Christ's spirit on Earth and lead its adherents to heaven. The Massachusetts Bay colony would be separate from the decadent Old World, yet be the exemplar for those left behind. But the "the City Upon The Hill" was not just a shining example to the world. It is also supposed to be an impregnable citadel of Christian morality, once protected by God and now by the atomic bomb. Thousands of innocent people died on Tuesday in part because of a naive belief in that moral impregnability. >From where I write, near the intersection of Houston Street and Broadway, I can see and smell the smoke still pouring from the disaster site. Our Puritan citadel isn't destroyed, but it's badly cracked. I hope our false belief in our own essential goodness has cracked as well. John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper's Magazine. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 14 15:55:10 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] War Isn't A Game After All - Naomi Klein Message-ID: <200109142155.f8ELtAp17548@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Globe & Mail September 14, 2001 War Isn't A Game After All by Naomi Klein Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies. They are incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their motivations senseless. They are "madmen," their states are "rogue." Now is not the time for understanding -- just better intelligence. These are the rules of the war game. But war is not a game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is lost sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. Perhaps Sept. 11, 2001, will mark the end of the shameful era of the video-game war. Watching the coverage this week was a stark contrast to the last time I sat glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space Invader battlefield of the Persian Gulf war had almost nothing in common with the destruction of Manhatten. Back then, we saw only sterile bomb's-eye views of concrete targets -- there, and then gone. Who was in those abstract polygons? We never found out. Since the gulf war, U.S. foreign policy has been based on a single brutal fiction: that the U.S. military can intervene in conflicts around the world -- in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan -- without suffering any U.S. casualties. This is a country that believed in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe war. The safe-war logic is, of course, based on the technological ability to wage a war exclusively from the air. But it also relies on the deep conviction that no one would dare mess with the U.S. -- the one remaining superpower -- on its own soil. This conviction allowed Americans to remain blithely unaffected by -- even uninterested in -- international conflicts in which they are key protagonists. Americans don't get daily coverage on CNN of the ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to human-interest stories on the devastating effects of economic sanctions on that country's children. After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (mistaken for a chemical weapons facility), there weren't too many follow-up reports about what the loss of vaccine manufacturing did to disease prevention in the region. And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Yugoslavia -- markets, hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station -- NBC didn't do "streeter" interviews with survivors about how shocked they were by the indiscriminate destruction. The United States is expert in the art of sanitizing and dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. No wonder Tuesday's attacks seemed to many Americans to have come less from another country than another planet. The events were reported not so much by journalists as by the new breed of brand-name celebrity anchors who have made countless cameos in Time Warner movies about apocalyptic terrorist attacks on the United States -- now, incongruously reporting the real thing. The United States is a country that believed itself not just at peace but war-proof, a self-perception that would come as quite a surprise to most Iraqis, Palestinians and Colombians. Like an amnesiac, the U.S. has awakened in the middle of a war, only to find out it has been going on for years. Did the United States deserve to be attacked? Of course not. But there's a different question that must be asked: Did U.S. foreign policy create the conditions in which such twisted logic could flourish, a war not so much on U.S. imperialism but on perceived U.S. imperviousness? The era of the video-game war in which the U.S. is at the controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted revenge-seekers make no other demand than that U.S. citizens share their pain. A blinking message is up on our collective video-game console: game over. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 14 15:56:38 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] One way to beat the bombers - Rick Salutin Message-ID: <200109142156.f8ELucp19399@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> The Globe and Mail September 14, 2001 One way to beat the bombers By Rick Salutin As I began to waken on Wednesday, the events of Tuesday started to seem more dream than reality, the kind you stir slowly from, and with vast relief as you realize what you thought had been real was not. If only. What marked Tuesday's attacks was not "sophistication," a word I've heard enough since then. Certainly not in the sense of technological sophistication: They used plastic knives! Nor logistics, cost or co-ordination. It was all relatively simple and stripped down. That's what's scariest. Once it's been shown to be doable, it becomes redoable, with relative ease. Except for one item, harder to duplicate and on which it all depends: the willingness of those involved to kill themselves. This is what marks these attacks as 21st century rather than 20th. The great motivator of political action in the 20th century was ideology: socialism, fascism, national liberation. In its name, people were ready to murder massively and, in a better version, to die for their cause, their fellow humans and the future. But willingness to die for a cause is not the same as a deliberate choice to kill oneself for it. Political ideologies are secular and thisworldly; their horizon of hope lies in this world, where their followers want to build something better; all of which will be lost to them if they die, though not to others who may benefit. The world-view that motivated Tuesday's events is different. Its horizon is otherworldly. It sees this world in the frame of another world, the supernatural and an afterlife. It is, in other words, religious; not just religious but fundamentalist and simplistic. Robert Fisk, the British journalist, says it pits theology against technology, the only force that has shown an ability to equalize. This is religious, as opposed to political terrorism; and the difference is the choice not just to die if necessary but to willfully commit suicide. It sees its cause not in social change but in a cosmic "titanic struggle between good and evil," according to experts quoted by The Globe's Marcus Gee. In an eerie parallel, President George W. Bush said this week that America was in a fight between good and evil. There are days when it seems that George Bush and Osama bin Laden deserve each other. Bizarrely, the rise of fundamentalist religion as a political factor in many parts of the world owes something to American policy. The U.S. chose to nurture Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan in the 1980s, to undermine Soviet control there; in the course of which it worked with, armed and trained -- Osama bin Laden! In a similar way, Israel chose to encourage fundamentalism among Palestinians to undermine secular left-wing forces. I point this out for two reasons. As a wise reader wrote to me recently, "There is a fundamental principal of Vedic philosophy (Hinduism) that asks one to examine, when confronted with adversity, what one 'owns' in it." And if the West had some role in creating this force, perhaps it can do something to uncreate it. It won't be easy. It truly feels -- pardon this cultural reference -- like a genie you can't stuff back in the bottle. You can't hunt it down because no country is its home; its home is despair, delusion and faith in values such as cosmic war and an afterlife. You can't "make them pay"; they're already dead. You can't threaten their families and communities; that's what started the cycle. But if you can't destroy it, you can try to defuse it. By that, I mean deprive it of the soil it lives in. Take a precursor: Japan's kamikaze pilots during the Second World War. They were dependent on the emperor's blessing, their nation's applause, its mythology etc. Remove that and it would have been hard to find candidates. Today's soil is the despair and sense of injustice in places such as the Mideast. Communities have been created that laud these gestures, as one sees at Palestinian funerals. "Terrorism experts say the approval of the community is an important reason why terrorists do what they do," wrote Marcus Gee. You defuse this by eliminating the worst cases of wretchedness that sustain it. An obvious example, since Palestine has been a tinderbox of religious terror, and the Israeli occupation has been the tinderbox of the tinderbox, would be to end the occupation and hand those lands back to Palestinians. It would be hard, because of the settlers, but it would eliminate the tinderbox. A similar case would involve ending sanctions against Iraq that have led, the UN says, to the death of a million children. The fanatics themselves wouldn't vanish. And fanaticism itself may be a human perennial. But there would be massive relief among huge numbers who yearn mainly to live decent, unharassed lives. The despair, mania and hate that sustain the fanatics would largely be withdrawn. Would this mean "giving in to terrorism"? No, it would be a strategy to cut off its oxygen. It would also be the right thing to do, but think of that as merely collateral damage. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 14 15:58:15 2001 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad@sfu.ca) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Folks out there have a "distaste of western civilization and cultural values" - Ed Herman Message-ID: <200109142158.f8ELwFp21403@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Folks out there have a "distaste of western civilization and cultural values" Edward S. Herman One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible. Editorializing on the recent attacks ("The National Defense," Sept. 12), the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and consequent "resurgent of ethnic hatreds," but that the United States and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian "reform"; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized. The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious fanaticism...the anger among those left behind by globalization," and the "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values" among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark. Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating "nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses," as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators. During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States. The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims. Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation). The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas-- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy. All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions--perhaps even billions--of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are prepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire. From Borba100 at aol.com Fri Sep 14 19:43:52 2001 From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100@aol.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Conquest, Srbenica, GULAG ghoulishness Message-ID: <8a.c8fe99a.28d40c58@aol.com> Dear people, In a message dated 9/14/01 6:43:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, debsian@pacbell.net writes: << Out of the 7,000 dead there is now about 4,000 conclusively identified from DNA and bodily remains in a morgue there. Watch for that evidence to be submitted to the Hague in October when Slobodan gets formally indicted for genocide in Bosnia. If you wanna debate, I've read all that stuff from Jared >> Oh my, it isn't not nice to print such lies. "All that stuff from Jared" points out - and this has been admitted by Srebrenica 'expert' David Rohde from the NY Times including when I debated him on Australian public radio - that as of last year only about 70 bodies had been identified. NOT 4000! That is, the ICTY people CLAIM (note the word) to have identified these bodies - after 6 years. NOT 4000. Maybe by now they claim some more; I recall it's gone up a bit. Somewhere around 130; I'd have to check. So the supposed 4000 (the numbers vary) are unidentified, even according to their PR. However many there really are, they're people who were found in graves, in a wide area. So the question remains: who are they? As I pointed out, since the ICTY is backed by the most powerful apparatus in world history, including unlimited technical personnel, their failure to identify all but a handful in 6 years suggests that they do not want to publicly identify the others, i.e., that these may be among the many Serbs and Yugoslav loyalist Muslims killed by the mass murderer Oric who ran the Islamist army in Srebrenica. Here is a little account of Oric's work-style: "Nasir Oric's war trophies don't line the wall of his comfortable apartment. They're on videocassette tape: burned Serb houses and headless Serb men, bodies crumpled in a pathetic heap. '"We had to use cold weapons that night,' Oric explains as scenes of dead men sliced by knives roll over his 21-inch Sony...Reclining on an overstuffed couch, clothed head to toe in camouflage fatigues, a U.S. Army patch proudly displayed over his heart?the Muslim commander is the toughest guy in this town [of Srebrenica], which the U.N. Security Council has declared a protected 'safe area.'" (Emphasis added, Washington Post, 16/02/94) Significance of cold weapons: they were the way Oric's predecessors, the pro-Nazi Islamists who supported the Ustashe fascist state during world war II, killed. Much more ghastly than the German Nazi's, who called them "our Nazis." Hence there was purpose in Oric's horror: he was telling the antifascists: we're back. This is not a minor point. As for those terrible Serbs, they were allied with the Muslim leader Abdic, who had defeated the Islamist-fascist head of "Bosnia," Alijah Izetbegovic, in elections in 1990. Interestingly, one of the three main 'surviving witnesses' trotted out (with ludicrously contradictory testimony) to prove the massacre took place, was Oric's nephew. Those who would like to read some of the only factual material in existence on Srebrenica, can find a listing of articles at http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/refutat.htm Jared Israel From dstainsby at telus.net Fri Sep 14 20:07:33 2001 From: dstainsby at telus.net (Donna Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] sid's repeats Message-ID: <045801c13d8b$32efa840$182134d1@donna> Hi Sid -- Something wrong with your system? All your messages are arriving twice -- sometimes each repeated immediately after, sometimes a batch gets repeated. I really notice it because I look for your postings. Thanks for them. Donna From Borba100 at aol.com Fri Sep 14 20:08:36 2001 From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100@aol.com) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] A bit More on Srebrenica Message-ID: <7e.1ad159f2.28d41224@aol.com> URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/fulltext.htm www.tenc.net [Emperor's Clothes] David Rohde, Srebrenica and the New Justice by Jared Israel (24-7-00) [Note: An Internet exchange involving Srebrenica media star David Rohde culminated in his taking our argument to the 'New York Times.' Rohde achieved 'NY Times' status by loudly broadcasting Clinton-Albright-et al's smear campaign against the Bosnian Serbs. Will we get to reply to Rohde in the 'Times?' I don't know, but we're going to try. In the meantime, here are some thoughts on Rohde's 'NY Times' article which, frankly, I found shocking. I suppose I shouldn't be shocked anymore. I'm too old. - Jared Israel] David Rohde's latest article is entitled "The Battle of Srebrenica Is Now Over the Truth," and one wonders, "Is he trying to be funny?" In the article, Rhode substitutes the manipulation of prejudicial language for facts and analysis (that is, for journalism). In so doing he defines himself: he is not a journalist at all; he is an advertising man. True, he writes ad copy for the richest client in the world, the American Establishment, but it is advertising copy nonetheless and the outfit he works for is nonetheless only the most influential advertising agency in the world, the 'NY Times.' In the article, Rhode has two goals: First, to leave readers with the impression that the Srebrenica massacre story has been proven true beyond reasonable doubt and, second, to discredit those of us who have used the Internet to ferret out and disseminate information about Srebrenica, information which has raised a whole mess of doubts concerning the Srebrenica charges, from which Mr. Rohde has constructed a lucrative career. These Internet Critics include Emperor's Clothes, perhaps especially Emperor's Clothes, for a couple of us just had an unpleasant exchange with David Rhode. Unpleasant for Mr. Rhode that is; he doesn't like losing. And why should he? He is paid to win. A bit later we have reprinted an excerpt from Rohde's article. In it he takes on his critics in his customary manner; that is, he smears us. APPEAL TO PREJUDICE Rhode writes that the Srebrenica Critics are "some American and European leftists." In fact we include people from all over the political spectrum. It is not political ideology that unites us but a distaste for lies. But if the leftist label is inaccurate it is nonetheless handy; for it allows readers to dismiss the Critics as ideological zealots who need not be taken seriously. Appeal to prejudice # 1: Rhode asserts that our views "radiate out from Belgrade." This is pretty silly stuff. Does Rohde view Belgrade as the hub of some political Empire, dispensing billions of dollars and employing an army of agents to subvert other countries? Has he confused Belgrade with Washington? The articles that launched the Internet critique of Srebrenica didn't come from Yugoslavia at all, they came from George Pumphrey (an American political analyst in Berlin) and Abe de Vries (a journalist in the Netherlands) and Diana Johnstone (an American political analyst in Paris.) Appeal to prejudice # 2: Rohde misrepresents our arguments, saying we support "Serb nationalist claims that Western governments and journalists exaggerated Serb war crimes." Aside from the pointless "Serb nationalist" bait - who cares whether they are nationalists or dentists as long as they are in fact being falsely accused by Mr. Rohde and his friends - aside from this silly bait, we do not say that Mr. Rohde's claims are exaggerated. We say they are lies. We say that NATO has produced no evidence that Serbian forces massacred anyone at Srebrenica. We say that a person (or a people) should be viewed as innocent until proven guilty, that this business of positing a crime and then spending five years failing to produce any evidence that it occurred is nightmare Justice. Meanwhile, we have done a little looking ourselves and discovered that there is real proof that Islamist terrorists (the 'Bosnian Muslim Army') used the UN safe haven in Srebrenica to launch raids on nearby villages, mutilating and killing several thousand Serbs and moderate Muslims. Here is the confession of the commander of that 'Muslim Army,' one Nasir Oric: "[On the video tape I saw] burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing. [Commander] Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork. 'We ambushed them,' he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on the screen. "The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: 'We launched those guys to the moon,' he boasted. When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: 'We killed 114 Serbs there.' Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises." (Toronto Star, 7/16/95) Note that Oric's ' troops' slaughtered villagers, that is civilians, not soldiers. In this they are rooted in a venerable tradition. During War II, the Nazi Islamists in the same area killed Serbian, 'Gypsy' and Jewish civilians by means of mutilation, using so-called "cold weapons" - knives, hammers, axes. They liked to be photographed displaying 'trophies' acquired in this manner, that is, holding the severed heads of their victims. Here again is Commander Oric: "Nasir Oric's war trophies don't line the wall of his comfortable apartment. They're on videocassette tape: burned Serb houses and headless Serb men, bodies crumpled in a pathetic heap. '"We had to use cold weapons that night,' Oric explains as scenes of dead men sliced by knives roll over his 21-inch Sony...Reclining on an overstuffed couch, clothed head to toe in camouflage fatigues, U.S. Army patch proudly displayed over his heart?commander Oric is the toughest guy in this town the Muslim [of Srebrenica], which the U.N. Security Council has declared a protected 'safe area.'" ('Washington Post,' 16/02/94) Note, first of all, that the above articles were written during the period (1993-1995) that Srebrenica was a so-called UN safe haven, when the Islamist 'Army' was supposedly disarmed and at the mercy of the bad Serbs. Second, note that the Bush and Clinton administrations strongly supported (and still support) the Islamist regime in Sarajevo. (The Western press calls the Sarajevo regime 'Muslim' but in fact it was and that Commander Oric's killers were an official part of the Muslim regime's army. Is that why Oric wore a US army patch? Note that the Post expresses no horror over Oric's unbelievable crimes. Is that because the victims were Serbs? PROOF BY DEFINITION Getting back to Rohde, he also attempts to dismiss the Critics by calling us "revisionists." This is a big word which shows Rohde has been studying. Here's the dictionary definition: re?vi?sion?ist - re?vi?sion?ist (r?-v?zh?e-n?st?) noun 1. One who advocates the revision of an accepted, usually long-standing view, theory, or doctrine, especially a revision of historical events and movements Despite their control of the Western media, despite their control of NATO's armed forces, despite hiring an army of forensic experts and a full stable of War Crimes Tribunal employees - despite all this, the US elite has yet to provide a shred of evidence that the Bosnian Serbs committed war crimes at Srebrenica. But Mr. Rohde finesses this problem: he names us revisionists. Since a revisionist is one who revises the "accepted" view of "historical events," by so defining us Mr. Rohde 'proves' the Srebrenica charges are true. Neat, huh? Having thus flailed his opponents with a variety of labels ("leftist", "Belgrade", "nationalists" and of course "revisionists") Mr. Rohde concludes with the following coup de gr?ce: "In the case of Srebrenica," says Rhode, "the slow pace of efforts to recover and count bodies has created an opening for denials of what occurred five years ago." Indeed. One might think that the failure to produce evidence that a crime has occurred should lead one to question the validity of the criminal charge; but that is old fashioned . In the New World Order system of Justice, NATO need only charge an individual or group with criminal guilt for guilt to be assured and the nonexistence of the crime in question in no way mitigates the guilt of the accused, especially if said crime is heinous. Thus fictional murder is a good deal worse than fictional theft and fictional Genocide is the worst crime of all, putting one in the category, 'similar to Hitler.' A lack of evidence of guilt, or the presence of evidence of innocence, in no way constitutes legal remedy for a criminal charge; it is simply an annoyance since it encourages in some people (such as writers at Emperor's Clothes) a psychological aberration: the denial of guilt. Here's the excerpt from Rohde, followed by further comments. A link to the entire article is provided at the end. "In that uncertain atmosphere, the bodies have become part of a broader propaganda battle, being waged across the former Yugoslavia, Europe and the United States. Aided by the Internet, a revisionist interpretation of the war has begun to radiate out from Belgrade; some American and European leftists, who a year ago took exception to NATO's bombing of Kosovo, are now backing Serb nationalist claims that Western governments and journalists exaggerated Serb war crimes not only in Kosovo but in Bosnia as well. "In the case of Srebrenica, the slow pace of efforts to recover and count bodies has created an opening for denials of what occurred five years ago. After Bosnian Muslims turned their heavy weapons over to United Nations peacekeepers in exchange for having Srebrenica declared a protected "safe area" in 1993, Dutch peacekeepers and United Nations commanders did little to protect the town when Bosnian Serb forces attacked in 1995." ('NY Times, Week in Review' July 9, 2000) A LOADED DECK Aside from the attacks on us revisionists, Rohde's article is structured so that the casual reader will leave with a comfortable reaffirmation of Serbian guilt. He begins: "For two years, thousands of bodies packed in white plastic bags have been awaiting burial in central Bosnia." This sensationalist sentence sets the tone. In the next paragraph he informs us that "rats were allowed to feast on the bodies" (note, they didn't just knaw on the cadavrs, horrible enough; they feasted). Another paragraph refers to "7000 Muslim soldiers" who were definitely massacred. It is only later that we learn a) the very existence of a massacre is challenged by "revisionists" and b) "to date, 1,866 bodies [not thousands] have been recovered from mass graves, according to tribunal investigators." And Rohde never mentions that: "After five years we have found 160 mass graves, but we have no idea who the people are." ("Mail on Sunday," June 18, 2000). Five years of digging. Five years of Rohde slandering the Serbs. No idea who the bodies are. They could be massacred Muslims. They could be massacred Serbs. They could be dead Serbain soldiers, or dead terrorists, or just plain dead people, just poor dead souls, people who died, as we all die, sooner or later. There you have it, folks. Five years later. No evidence. So what? *** The full text of Rohde's article can be read at www.nytimes.com/library/review/070900srebrenica-review.html For most informative exchanges between Prof. Drasko Jovanovic, David Rohde, Jared Israel and Max Sinclair, See 'Mr. Rohde, Srebrenica, and a little historical reality' or go to www.emperors-clothes.com/letters/mrrohde.htm Click here to be added to Emperor's Clothes Email list - Get One Article/Day If you find emperors-clothes.com useful, we can use your help... All our (many) expenses are covered by individual donations. A donation of any amount will help with our work. To use our secure server, please click here or go to http://www.emperors-clothes.com/howyour.htm. Or you can mail a check to Emperor's Clothes, P.O. Box 610-321, Newton, MA 02461-0321. Or call 617 916-1705 and contribute by credit card. Thanks very much. www.tenc.net [Emperor's Clothes] From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 14 20:25:03 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Chavez Urges U.S. Not to Start War Message-ID: <017701c13d8d$a09b4d20$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 14 September 2001. Chavez Urges U.S. Not to Start War CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chavez urged the United States on Friday not to start the "first war of the 21st century" in responding to terrorist attacks. Chavez, who often challenges the United States on foreign policy, took exception to the pledge by President Bush to lead the world to victory over terrorism in the millennium's first war. "Today's newspaper headlines are announcing the first war of the 21st century. Let's hope, by God, not," Chavez said in a speech in the western state of Merida. "Let's ask that any measures taken not provoke a war between brother peoples." Last year, despite objections by Washington, Chavez became the first world leader to visit Iraqi President Saddam Hussein since the 1991 Gulf War. He also has a close relationship with Cuban President Fidel Castro, providing the communist island with a third of its oil in exchange for goods and services. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 14 20:33:28 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] sid's repeats References: <045801c13d8b$32efa840$182134d1@donna> Message-ID: <019101c13d8e$cd885980$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> Sid is on two lists with you. He is on the local project-x list and the Rad Green. For those on both, it will be annoying. For the rest, now you get some great stuff. Me and at least Carrol all have to deal with getting them 3 times. Sid also posts to the Socialist Register list. So no complaining!! Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "Donna Stainsby" To: "Rad Green" Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 7:07 PM Subject: [R-G] sid's repeats From debsian at pacbell.net Fri Sep 14 20:46:03 2001 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] ockburn and St. Clair retract the CNN faked footage story,..sort-off Message-ID: <006401c13d90$9223f6e0$2b01aace@oemcomputer> http://www.counterpunch.org/aftershocks.html Where there was this was, "Least credible news footage, " in between, "Least credible analysis, " and, " America's Greens Rally to Flag, Run for Cover." is now empty. HTML wiped clean, no retraction. Egg on face? BTW, yrs. ago Alex Cockburn asked to be on the editorial advisory board of Against the Current, from Solidarity. Mike Rubin from Soli told me that the board was divided and in the end the consensus was not to add him. Too much baggage from his cranky past. Michael Pugliese >From the Lysander Zimmerman cut and paste... Least credible news footage CNN's videotape of Palestinians supposedly dancing in the streets of a West Bank town. CounterPuncher Marcio A.V. Carvalho at the state university of Campinas in Brazil tells us that he and his colleagues had compared this tape with one from 1991 showing Palestinian cheering, and found them to be identical. [a claim--though Canadian news footage shows mourning Arabs; U.S. media shows happy, celebrating Arabs. You put the pieces together on who is the enemy: THE U.S CORPORATE MEDIA!] From bstoller at utopia2000.org Fri Sep 14 21:16:35 2001 From: bstoller at utopia2000.org (Barry Stoller) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Dear North America Message-ID: <3BA2C7B3.1E7224CF@utopia2000.org> What an encouraging -- and courageous -- post. I wish my experiences were as optimistic. When I mention the racist-baiting throughout the US, the invariable response is: 'considering, it could be worse. What do you expect?' Of course, that rationale applies all too well to the attacks in question! Pointing THAT out, however, has not earned as much 'understanding' -- at least from my hometown. From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Sep 14 21:59:43 2001 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:57 2006 Subject: [R-G] Bush declared a state of National Emergency Message-ID: <030501c13d9a$da58dfc0$5b075318@vc.shawcable.net> (forwarded) So, in case folks don't know (cause this seems to be getting buried) - Bush declared a state of National Emergency in the US about 2 or 3 hours ago.... here is a short piece that i found online about what that means sortof.... i think it suspends civil liberties should the government choose to enact it in that way..... its interesting anyhow that he should choose to declare a state of emergency 3 days later.... I have also attached here (below) the actual statement of order declaring this state of emergency.... A STATE OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY Since the advent of changes which took place during the Reagan regime, America has been a presidential directive away from a civil security state of emergency which, if ever enacted, could create a constitutional crisis equal in severity to the American Civil War. A national state of emergency can be declared by a concurrent resolution of both houses of Congress or by the President in the case of natural disasters, nuclear war, a massive mobilization in anticipation of an enemy attack on U.S. territory, or domestic civil unrest. A disturbing shift in policy occurred during the Reagan years which could have profound consequences with respect to civil liberties. Whereas civil defense planning in the past had focused on disaster relief, the national security focus of the Reagan administration meant implementing new ways to expand police powers in times of nuclear war, domestic unrest, or civil disorder. Bending under pressure brought by the Reagan Administration, Congress gave the president and his executive agencies sweeping emergency powers. ******************************************* President Bush declares national emergency - - - - - - - - - - - - The Associated Press Sept. 14, 2001 | Text of President Bush's message to Congress on Friday declaring a national emergency. Pursuant to section 201 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1621), I hereby report that I have exercised my authority to declare a national emergency by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States. A copy of my proclamation is attached. Further, I have authorized, pursuant to section 12302 of title 10, United States Code, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Transportation with respect to the Coast Guard, when it is not operating as a service within the Department of the Navy, to order to active duty units and individual members not assigned to units of the Ready Reserve to perform such missions the Secretary of Defense may determine necessary. The deployment of United States forces to conduct operational missions in connection with the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks necessitates this action. A copy of my Executive Order implementing this action is attached. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From g.maclennan at qut.edu.au Sat Sep 15 02:28:56 2001 From: g.maclennan at qut.edu.au (Gary MacLennan) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:58 2006 Subject: [R-G] Canada & Australiaand the WTC bombings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20010915180835.00baaaa0@pop.qut.edu.au> The reaction to the bombings in Australia has made me wonder what the responses have been in Canada. I have always been puzzled that there has not been more contact between Canada and Australia as in many ways our histories are parallel - both white settler colonies within the British Empire. Canada is of course closer to the USA, though our Prime Minister has been anxiously trying to get Australia included in a Free Trade agreement with the USA. However it must be said that the US has shown remarkable little interest in Howard's overtures. I suppose it is a case of a dog not needing to praise its fleas. So we are not a major player in the world's stakes. We are it is true a loyal sycophant of the USA but a far away one. Still it cannot be doubted that the popular imagination is with the USA and that includes Bush. In the polls here John Howard's popularity has soared and he would win an election if these figures are accurate. Not that the alternative is all that inviting. The leader of the opposition Labor Party Kim Beazley is a leading pro-American. Thus he has indeed written that the biggest problem in Australia is that the public does not perceive how much Australia needs America to continue to commit itself to the region. So we look to be in for a protracted period of kissing up to the Americans and of a subsequent increased marginalisation for the Left. I will post more on this and the connection to the CHOGM protests. regards Gary From tony at tao.ca Sat Sep 15 05:19:03 2001 From: tony at tao.ca (Tony Tracy) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:58 2006 Subject: [R-G] On Terror & State Terror (fwd) Message-ID: The enclosed is a contribution to the discussion on the events of Tuesday Sept. 11th by my friend & comrade Garth Mullins here in Vancouver, BC. Garth is a leading activist in the anti-globalization movement locally, and is presently a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. Comradely greetings, Tony Tracy Vancouver, BC ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 09:31:00 -0700 From: Garth Mullins Subject: On Terror & State Terror On Terror and State Terror by Garth Mullins The savage murder of thousands, or tens of thousands in New York and Washington DC is abhorrent. When the WTC towers collapsed, a good friend and activist in Vancouver's pro-choice community was only two blocks away, in a building in which the windows imploded. She was treated for smoke inhalation, released and is now volunteering as part of the relief effort. Myself and others were extremely worried about her until she called. This was a horrendous crime against humanity. The victims are not the architects of American imperialism and genocide, but rather regular working people. The growing backliash and reaction from western states and police apparatus is sure to further victimize the world's oppressed peoples. Tuesday saw the chickens of the new world order coming home to roost on a nation that has come to dominate the world through political, economic, and military force. The holy trinity of Dow-Jones, Happy Meals and Cruise Missiles. This act of terror will surely be used by western states as a pretext for further repression at home and abroad. Jean Chretien was quick to follow the lead of Bush, Blair and other leaders in taking a firm stand against terrorism, or more accurately, against selected incidents of terror. Apparently the long tradition of state terror inflicted by the US (and a lesser extent Canada) is exempt from such passionate indictments - Clinton's bombing of Sudan, Iraq, and Kosovo; Poppa Bush's war against Iraq, the US's continued military and political support for the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, all involved large civilian casualties, or "acceptable collateral damage." With almost one million Iraqis dead since the Gulf War, it is clear that western leaders are selective in their condemnation of terror and violence - even accepting collateral damage as they seek retribution. The Coming Backlash At the time of posting, there is little evidence of who is responsible for the attacks, however Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa'ida organization are the US authorities' prime suspects. Reuters reported that "frightened Afghans braced Thursday for possible U.S. retaliation... Arab residents fled the capital [Kabul} or began digging trenches on the outskirts of the city." Diplomats and UN international staff have left the country in anticipation of American retaliation. Bin Laden said he had nothing to do with the attacks, describing them as "punishment from Allah.'' Immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building, media and politicians blamed "Arab terrorists." Two days and a significant racist backlash later it was revealed that a home grown white fascist was responsible. Within hours of Tuesday's attacks, pundits and politicians were again scapegoating Arab extremists, well before any evidence had come to light. Canadian and US security and intelligence agencies have been so busy spying on the anti-globalization movement that they were taken almost completely unawares. Ultra-conservative, xenophobic elements in Washington (and Ottawa) are sure to be rubbing their hands together with glee. This atrocity gives the state and police agencies all the excuses they need to severely ratchet up the level of surveillance on immigrants and refugees and various political communities. Canada's having been labeled a "haven" for terrorists will mean a tightening of immigration rules and asylum criteria. Middle eastern communities within Canada and the US are already feeling the racist backlash from jingoistic citizens, and hearing the knock of CSIS at the door. In a chilling echo of the Gulf War, a racist backlash against Arab communities is underway. In Chicago, a Molotov cocktail was hurled at an Arab-American community center, and a crowd of 300 waved flags and marched on a mosque. An AP report quotes Colin Zaremba, one of the marchers as saying"I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have." A mosque in Lynnwood, WA, was vandalized. In Australia, racists hurled stones and invectives at a school bus carrying Muslim children and an arson attempt was made on Lebanese church. Terrorism - Born in the USA The US and the west have strategic and material interests in the Middle East, and Isreal is compelled to act as the American watchdog in the region. The current political landscape of the middle east reflects its status as a cold war arena of conflict between superpowers. Historically, the US and the USSR played a 35 year long game of cold war chess, with Israel, the PLO, Afghanistan and many other states and organizations as the pawns. The US saw an opportunity to get one up on the commies after they invaded Afghanistan. The struggle against the soviet invasion was framed in terms of an Islamic Jihad against communist atheism. Tens of thousands of radical Muslims from various parts of the middle east would join the Mujahideen. The largest covert operation in the history of the CIA supplied masses of arms and specialists to the Mujahaideen and its Jihad via the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). The latter two organizations would eventually form the Taliban, which has taken power in Afghanistan. The Taliban protects Osama bin Laden, who was a key fighter against Afghani communism and recipient of CIA resources. The Mujahaideen's CIA sponsored bases are now the "terrorist training camps" of bin Laden. The US and CIA are now experiencing Jihad Blowback. Iraq and Iran made the short list of suspects shortly after the attacks. Both countries have been at one time or the other the recipient of US support and meddling. Saddam Hussein received training and support from the CIA and US when he was seen as a strategic ally against Iran. More chess. The uncritical and unqualified political and military support of the US for Israel's annexation of Palestine and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip has made enemies of the Palestinian people and many other Arab nations. This is what I mean by chickens coming home to roost. The US has used excessive military force, economic coercion, and political manipulation to pursue its interests around the world, and deny many of its peoples their self-determination. By way of explanation, rather than justification, terrorism is the subjugated lashing out, is the last resort, the desperate, cruel cry of the oppressed. It is evidence of the truism that absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Further state repression will likely lead to further acts of terrorism, or put another way, violence begets violence. Implications for the Movement The events of September 11, 2001 have many implications for the anti-globalization movement. Many of the movements constituents and member-communities will be under the microscope of the state. The movement as a whole is likely to experience an increase in infiltration and monitoring by CSIS, the RCMP, etc. Movement events will attract even more police attention. Many in the Arab and Iranian communities have already been approached by CSIS, as well as at least one member of the anit-globalizaiton movement. Tuesday's events will further politically polarize the public, impacting the population of our soft supporters and future activists. The attacks will likely mean the cancellation of the IMF/WB meeting in Washington, DC at the end of the month as well as the G8 summit scheduled for next year in Alberta. This may mean the end of high profile international summits where a number of world leaders gather together to work out trade agreements and the like. Leaders will be reticent to gather in one place and present potential terrorists with a target. Buzz Hargrove and Ken Georgetti have announced that labour is pulling out of anti-WTO demonstrations to be held across the world on November 9. This is a mistake. Our movement should show our sadness at this loss of life, but we should not go into hiding. We should be clearly showing that peaceful protest is the best way to make political change, and is an alternative to the terror and violence seen in the US. This demonstration is an opportunity to put forward an analysis that promotes internationalism, and not jingoism and a knee-jerk retaliatory military response. Tuesday's events impact the anti-globalizaiton movement is a strong vehicle on international solidarity between the world's peoples and as such has a positive, highly visible role to play in the aftermath of these attacks. Further, it now more than ever important that institutions like the WTO be exposed for the social and economic damage they do the world, the distance the increase between have and have not nations, and classes. Globaliztion is not stopping, and neither should we. The diversity of the anti-globalization movement is united by a general world-view that is completely opposed to the mass violence seen this week. While the western states thirst for war and revenge, we can be a voice of peace and humanity. According to Thursday's Guardian "NATO is now drawing up an emergency plan for a massive attack on Afghanistan if proof emerges that Osama bin Laden, the wanted Saudi-born terrorist sheltered by Afghanistan, was responsible for the attacks." Our movement will not have the luxury to remain neutral if the US and NATO (of which Canada is a member) decide to retaliate, declare war and invade Afghanistan. We may have to move very quickly to engage in an anti-war struggle. Market Jitters An interesting side note to all of this is the impact this is having on the US, and thus world economies. The New York Stock Exchange, along with many other forms of trading, will not resume until Monday. This is not a respectful period of mourning, or because of security issues or the chaos in Manhattan. It is because market analysts fear a serious crash. One economist made the understatement of the year; "my hopes are dashed for a recovery in the fourth quarter." A bad spike in an already slumping American economy could hasten a global recession on the scale of that of the early '90s. So huge sectors of the economy are frozen, Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan is burning the midnight oil, and doing what the Federal Reserve does best, bailing out capitalism's periodic crisis, Greenspan is quietly adding billions into the banking system to ensure the stability of inflation and presumably the American dollar(!) This just underscores the fragility and volitillity of capitalism. The events of September 11, 2001 have severely altered the global political landscape. Activists in the anti-globalization movement have to begin to assess this situation, to analyze the politics of terror and state terror, to determine how constituents of the movement are affected as well as how the movement as a whole is affected, and how we should respond to Tuesday's events and intervene against the reaction and backlash that is surely coming. Garth Mullins, Vancouver. ------- The Guardian September 13, 2001 They can't see why they are hated Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad By Seumas Milne Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible. Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy. As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages. If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response. It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming. It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth. But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world. All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday. Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed. ------ Who Is Ousmane Bin Laden? by Michel Chossudovsky Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montr=E9al Posted 12 September 2001 The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html _________________________________________________________________ A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that "Ousmane bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects". CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan ``multiple attacks with little or no warning.'' Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks "an act of war" and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them". Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at "state sponsorship," implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, "I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution." Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of "punitive actions" directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: "When we reasonably determine our attackers' bases and camps, we must pulverize them -- minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage" -- and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror's national hosts". The following text outlines the history of Ousmane Bin Laden and the links of the Islamic "Jihad" to the formulation of US foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath. _________________________________________________________________ Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an "international terrorist" for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Ousmane bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders". 1 In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.2: With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.3 The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade: In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,...[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, ... as well as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.4 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam: Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow.5 Pakistan's Intelligence Apparatus Pakistan's ISI was used as a "go-between". The CIA covert support to the "jihad" operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, --i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be "successful", Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the "jihad", which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union. In the words of CIA's Milton Beardman "We didn't train Arabs". Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the "Afghan Arabs" had been imparted "with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA" 6 CIA's Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Ousmane bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help". 7 Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA. With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of US military aid, the Pakistani ISI had developed into a "parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government". 8 The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000. 9 Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq: 'Relations between the CIA and the ISI [Pakistan's military intelligence] had grown increasingly warm following [General] Zia's ouster of Bhutto and the advent of the military regime,'... During most of the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Zia [ul Haq] sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984.... `the CIA was more cautious than the Pakistanis.' Both Pakistan and the United States took the line of deception on Afghanistan with a public posture of negotiating a settlement while privately agreeing that military escalation was the best course.10 The Golden Crescent Drug Triangle The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. 11 In this regard, Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979... to 1.2 million by 1985 -- a much steeper rise than in any other nation":12 CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests ... U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies `because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.' In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. `Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,'... `I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout.... There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.'13 In the Wake of the Cold War In the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the World's opium representing multibillion dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between 100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the Worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion.14 With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics-- reached a record high of 4600 metric tons.15 Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus essentially "served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia." 16. Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington's strategic interests in the former Soviet Union. Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government, they also "handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions..." 17 And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that "half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI" 18 In fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through Pakistan's ISI. 19 In other words, backed by Pakistan's military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia. No doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes on the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban including the blatant derogation of women's rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices and the enforcement of "the Sharia laws of punishment".20 The War in Chechnya With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers. In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI in Chechnya "goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war". 22 Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin. The two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan's ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army: [In 1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.23 Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, according to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) "Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo... through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia" 24 Basayev's organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia's oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials (See Mafia linked to Albania's collapsed pyramids, 25 Alongside the extensive laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities have been funneled towards the recruitment of mercenaries and the purchase of weapons. During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander "Al Khattab" who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev's return to Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC, Khattab's posting to Chechnya had been "arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya".26 Concluding Remarks Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Ousmane bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI's "most wanted list" as the World's foremost terrorist. While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America's war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI --operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has --since the Soviet-Afghan war-- supported international terrorism through its covert operations. In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad --featured by the Bush Adminstration as "a threat to America"-- is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. _________________________________________________________________ Endnotes 1. Hugh Davies, International: `Informers' point the finger at bin Laden; Washington on alert for suicide bombers, The Daily Telegraph, London, 24 August 1998. 2. See Fred Halliday, "The Un-great game: the Country that lost the Cold War, Afghanistan, New Republic, 25 March 1996): 3. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999. 4. Steve Coll, Washington Post, July 19, 1992. 5. Dilip Hiro, Fallout from the Afghan Jihad, Inter Press Services, 21 November 1995. 6. Weekend Sunday (NPR); Eric Weiner, Ted Clark; 16 August 1998. 7. Ibid. 8. Dipankar Banerjee; Possible Connection of ISI With Drug Industry, India Abroad, 2 December 1994. 9. Ibid 10. See Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford university Press, New York, 1995. See also the review of Cordovez and Harrison in International Press Services, 22 August 1995. 11. Alfred McCoy, Drug fallout: the CIA's Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade. The Progressive; 1 August 1997. 12. Ibid 13. Ibid. 14. Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a changing World, Technical document no 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations Publication, Vienna 1999, p 49-51, And Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000. 15. Report of the International Narcotics Control Board, op cit, p 49-51, see also Richard Lapper, op. cit. 16. International Press Services, 22 August 1995. 17. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November- December, 1999, p. 22. 18. Quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 3 September 1998) 19. Tim McGirk, Kabul learns to live with its bearded conquerors, The Independent, London, 6 November1996. 20. See K. Subrahmanyam, Pakistan is Pursuing Asian Goals, India Abroad, 3 November 1995. 21. Levon Sevunts, Who's calling the shots?: Chechen conflict finds Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 23 The Gazette, Montreal, 26 October 1999.. 22. Ibid 23. Ibid. 24. See Vitaly Romanov and Viktor Yadukha, Chechen Front Moves To Kosovo Segodnia, Moscow, 23 Feb 2000. 25. The European, 13 February 1997, See also Itar-Tass, 4-5 January 2000. 26. BBC, 29 September 1999). _________________________________________________________________ The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html *******see unsubscribe instructions below ---------------------------------------------------------------------------= -------- Mobilization for Global Justice Vancouver - working to expose and oppose th= e FTAA. http://mobglobvan.tao.ca --------- mobglob-discuss is a non-moderated list: to unsubscribe from mobglob-discuss, send an e-mail message, with a blank s= ubject line, to with the following text in the bo= dy: unsubscribe ---------------------------------------------------------------------------= -------- From sherrynstan at igc.org Sat Sep 15 07:24:20 2001 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan@igc.org) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:58 2006 Subject: [R-G] Re: Conquest, Srbenica, GULAG ghoulishness Message-ID: I very much appreciate the praise for my bookm though I stand confused about what it might have to do with this issue. The point I was making is that Conquest is not credible. His numbers don't conform to reality, and they were ratcheted up over the years to conform with the demonization of the Soviet Union, the purpose of which has always been to show that Communists are the same as Nazis. As one of the former, I have a few resentments about that. But also as someone who would call himself a Marxist, a feminist, and even nowadays something of a deep ecologist, it's important to point out that these are interpretive methodologies and not doctrines, and I am not the caricature that these terms might conjure up in the minds of the indoctrinated masses of the US, et al. I have not come to conclude what I conclude because I am a communist. I have come to be a communist, because of what I have concluded based on my experience and the evidence I have been presented with. I am neither a Stalinist, nor an anti-Stalinist. These are pretty meaningless terms to me, because no one has adequately defined the terms, and it seems to be convenient more than anything else to slander the Soviet Union and cut off debates. Last I checked, and I don't have the academic credentials of many on this list, there seems to have been a term applicable to using a label against the debater to avoid confronting the substance of an argument... ad hominem or something like that. Stalinist myth-making? I would be more dissuaded from whatever errors I may make by someone specifically pointing out the errors in my assertions than by this kind of denunciation, and the deployment of prestigious names from the academy. I am not prepared to accept arguments simply because they originate from Yale or Cambridge. I have read the "Holocaust Deniers" piece, and it is unconvincing for reasons too numerous to place in this post. The point I want to reinforce is that these kinds of distortions are part and parcel of official policy, the kinds of policy I was a part of for many years. Official versions of anything only correspond to the truth incidentally, because that is not their purpose. Their purpose is to gain consent, or at least acquiescence, for policy. Have I read counter-accounts to the "revisionism" I stand accused of embracing? You bet. Every day, for about the last four decades, in the manifold organs of ruling class propaganda. It's interesting how, since I have begun to look elsewhere for information and analysis, how caution" has been mobilized on my behalf to protect me from all this danger. Fellow traveling? Well, I am a fellow, and I am traveling. Regards, Stan From bstoller at utopia2000.org Sat Sep 15 11:03:08 2001 From: bstoller at utopia2000.org (Barry Stoller) Date: Sat Aug 5 04:30:58 2006 Subject: [R-G] 3rd world to US: feel our pain Message-ID: <3BA38938.BAE0FE61@utopia2000.org> AP; Reuters. 15 September 2001. Sudanese Still Bitter Towards U.S.;Saddam Hussein Warns U.S., West; Cubans Express Sorrow to U.S. People, Criticize Gov. Combined reports. KHARTOUM, BAGHDAD and HAVANA -- When President Bush talks about punishing those responsible for this week's terrorist attacks, some Sudanese say they can't help but remember with bitterness the cruise missiles the United States sent in retaliation for the 1998 embassy bombings. On Aug. 20, 1998, much of the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum was reduced to rubble by the missiles, which were fired to avenge terrorist bombings at U.S embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 13 days earlier that killed 231 people, 12 of them Americans. "They bombed this factory because they got their facts wrong. It was not right," said Amir Mohammed Nuor, one of the security guards on duty the night El Shifa was bombed. "At that time I hated America -- the government, not American people." No one died in the attack on the factory -- three of the five night guards were injured -- but the blast shocked the Sudanese and planted seeds of hatred toward the United States. Then-President Clinton alleged that El Shifa was making precursors for chemical weapons, claims that were never substantiated. It was also alleged that the factory was connected to Osama bin Laden, who has been indicted by a U.S. federal court for masterminding the embassy bombings. This also was never substantiated. To the Sudanese, the bombing of El Shifa was an unwarranted act of aggression based on misinformation. The factory simply made pharmaceutical products for people and animals, they say. "They are looking for a scapegoat, they are looking for a weak target," said Abdulrahman Ahmadsoun, news editor of a pro-government newspaper, Alwan. "They can send cruise missiles here, and we cannot stop it." Meanwhile, grief-stricken Americans should not wage a "new Crusade" against Muslims, but rather learn from the pain that Iraqis and Palestinians have been suffering at the hands of the United States and Israel, Saddam Hussein said on Saturday. "Just as your beautiful skyscrapers were destroyed and caused your grief, beautiful buildings and precious homes crumbled over their owners in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq because of American weapons used by the Zionists," Saddam said in an open letter addressed to the American people, citizens of the West and their governments. The Iraqi leader warned of a "new crusade" by the United States and its supporters against "an Islamic country." He was apparently referring to Afghanistan, ruled by the radical