by Louis Proyect

Over the last couple of months, I have become a big fan of “Househunters”,
a half-hour show that appears nightly on the House and Garden cable TV
network and that is as ritualized as Kabuki. It starts usually with the
introduction of a couple and their children who have outgrown their current
house or apartment. If they are renters, they make clear that their dream
is to own something. They see a house as an investment. Renters watching
this show cannot help but feel that they are losers.

It was in early August, in the wake of the most strictly scripted Democratic Party convention in US history, that presidential candidate and Senator John Kerry began broadcasting his claim to the US electorate that he would “cut troop numbers in Iraq.” This claim, of course, is as preposterous as the same claim made by the Republicans before they oversaw the invasion of Mesopotamia.

Support Sue and Abdullah Webster — punished for refusing to kill in Iraq

“My husband feels humble that so many people are supporting him. All he wants is understanding that he is not a coward, but a man of principle”.

“We women are behind these campaigns and we don’t get the recognition. As women we are protective of everyone we love. We can’t stay silenced, we have to speak and to do what we can.”

-Sue Webster

I hope those who can will support this important initiative by MacDonald Stainsby in Canada. -SG

A traveler to Canada will often remark immediately that this country is such a wonderful place. Even if they are able to get into something resembling the backwoods– that is, away from the concrete world they are shown in cities to the overly contrived parks such as Banff, Whistler, Mont Tremblant or even Kluane in the Yukon– they still see little of what this country wants to keep hidden.

At the Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference in Sydney, Australia last month, I met with people from 21 different countries around the world. There is general agreement among this overwhelmingly socialist gathering that (1) American imperialism in its present form is the most destructive determinative system in the world today, (2) that the US could not retain its current con trol over that system without the threat or exercise of globally projected military power, (3) that the US is undergoing a military crisis in Iraq that has temporarily undermined its capacity to intervene militarily in other regions, at least if that intervention requires the deploymen t of signficant ground forces, and (4) that the further integration, coordination, and expansion of an international struggle against these bases by activists in the “host-nations” to further undercut US power over the rest of the world makes strategic sense.

A Russian historian debunks the US narrative of World War II… former Soviet officials may not be the only ones who are discomfited by the opening of the archves.

The analysis we have made above suggests that the American state achieved a degree of dominance over the capitalist core after 1945 without any historical precedent. It used this dominance to construct a core-wide political system that was unipolar in structure and could be described as a kind of community of protectorates under U.S. primacy. This political system survived the revival of economic strength in Western Europe (centered on Germany) and in Japan.

By Peter Gowan

This article situates the Bush administration’s new strategy in the historical context of the international capitalist order established by the United States at the end of the 1940s and argues that this order, though extraordinarily successful for some decades, is now in crisis. The unique capitalist international community that the United States established under its primacy revived international capitalism while preventing geopolitical rivalries between the main capitalist centers. The leading sectors of U.S. business have become dependent on the preservation of the unipolar primacy order for its own economic security and expansion while the American domestic political economy has failed to revive as an industrial economy meeting the rules of international economics, exhibiting growing problems with current account deficits and rising levels of debt. To manage the resulting tensions between the orientation of American transnational sectors and problems in the domestic American political economy, the United States has developed an international monetary and financial regime that is destabilizing and dependent upon the preservation of American political primacy over the capitalist world. But the Soviet collapse has destabilized the primacy system, while the dominant sections of American capitalism are committed to rebuilding it. The Bush administration is seeking to rebuild U.S. primacy, using U.S. military dominance. But this carries very high risks.

Mahmood Mamandi

I was in New York City on 9/11. In the weeks that followed, newspapers reported that the Koran had become one of the biggest-selling books in American bookshops. Astonishingly, Americans seemed to think that reading the Koran might give them a clue to the motivation of those who carried out the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center. Recently, I have wondered whether the people of Falluja have taken to reading the Bible to understand the motivation for American bombings. I doubt it.