America Vera-Zavala

Yesterday, the French left broke with the Chirac government and voted NO on the neoliberal EU constitution. The neoliberal establishment is trying everything to paint this as backward and xenophobic, conflating the left’s reasons for opposition to the EU with those of the racist right. This campaign to contain the French left failed utterly, and the French vote was resoundingly NON! This commentary by America Vera-Zavala gives a very brief, but good account of the background. This vote was a victory for our side, and may be an indication that the European left is finally stirring against the rightward trend that has been so ably assisted with the European version of Clinton Democrats. -SG

“To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.”

Ruth Hubbard

By Gernot Bodner

If we try to gauge some general elements of situations in the 20th century when a revolutionary change could happen, we usually find a crisis of hegemony and of the state of the old ruling elites, an organised political vanguard and a vanguard political project that is accepted by the people as a path to liberation from an unbearable situation.

By Henry C K Liu

After oil prices peaked above US$58 a barrel in early April, and stayed around their current $50 range, the White House announced that it wanted oil to go back down to $25 a barrel. There is a common misconception in life that if only things could go back to the ways they were in the good old days, life would be good again like in the good old days. Unfortunately, good old days never return as good old days because what makes the old days good is often just bad memory. The problem with market capitalism is that while markets can go up and markets can go down, they never end up in the same spot. The term “business cycle” is a misnomer because the end of the cycle is a very different place from the beginning of a cycle. A more accurate term would be “business spiral”, either up or down or simply sideways.

Official Response to Announcement of $1 million Bounty and the Listing
of ASSATA SHAKUR on Domestic Terrorist Watch List

On May 2nd the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New Jersey
Troopers publicly announced a $1 million bounty for the capture of
Assata Shakur.

Terry Eagleton

Celebrity trials, like those of OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson, are
sometimes loosely called postmodern, meaning that they are media
spectaculars thronged with characters who are only doubtfully real. But
they are also postmodern in a more interesting sense. Courtrooms, like
novels, blur the distinction between fact and fiction.

By Chris Cook

A very strong case has been made by William Engdahl (the author of A Century of War - Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order) that the three principal goals of US foreign policy in the last 100 years have been energy security, energy security and energy security.

A Pakistani attack in June 1993 against Mohammed Farah Aidid’s Somali National Alliance (SNA) in Mogadishu met that well-prepared defense, and the SNA delivered them a decisive tactical defeat that pivoted on a very well-prepared anti-armor ambush – which the Day paper refers to, demagogically, as a “massacre.” The SNA’s next major ambush would be against the Americans in Bakara.

By DICK J. REAVIS

In the Newsweek-Koran-in-the-toilet scandal of the past week, press commentators and pundits have overlooked what they must regard as an inconsequential detail: the ethics of showing a draft of one’s story to a source.

By Mike Davis

The road from Mecca follows the Southern Pacific tracks past Bombay Beach to Niland, then turns due south through a green maze of marshes and irrigated fields. The bad future of Southern California rises, with little melodrama, in the middle distance between the skeleton of last year’s cotton crop and the aerial bombing range in the Chocolate Mountains. From a mile away, the slate-gray structures resemble warehouses or perhaps a factory. An unassuming road sign announces “Calipatria State Prison.” This is the outer rim of Los Angeles’s ecology of fear…