From Joaquin Bustelo

Spent the weekend in Chicago, at the Immigrant Rights Strategy Convention.
Met a wonderful fighter there, a young Mexican woman by the name of Elvira
Arellano. The immigration Gestapo wants to deport her. She’s a convicted
criminal, used a social security number that wasn’t hers, no less. Her son,
he can stay. He was born here, and is thus a citizen, at least until the
Republicans can figure out how to correct the 14th Amendment.

By Audrey Mantey

Hezbollah’s leader, Nasrallah, gave a victory speech Monday in which he offered to pay a year’s rent for a house plus a furniture budget to all displaced Lebanese refugees. The following day, just one day after the cease-fire, Lebanese refugees began returning home. As the NYT reported on Tuesday, “hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying damage.

[image from Jay Maylone]
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

I have reached another of those points where I could light a small city with the steam coming outta my ears and this time it’s about the recurring inability of the complicit whiteboy media — including its Librul fringes and most of its token female writers — to Get A Clue on the relationship between war, propaganda, and pornography. The whole topic popped up again with the release of ‘Hadji Girl’ (see earlier thread) and thus the revival of awareness, for about 15 seconds, of “trophy videos” and photos taken by soldiers “in country” and avidly shared and gloated over by wannabes and keyboard warriors at home.

The parallel with pornography is so obvious that even the MSM can’t quite ignore it… but oh, the contortions they have to go through to demonstrate to their own satisfaction that the two phenomena are completely different, even while they use “war porn” as a handy catch phrase to describe, er . . . war porn. Metaphorically, of course! For example . . .

It must be an election year…

August 10, 2006 was my mom’s 81st birthday. I hadn’t seen her in over two years, so last month I booked a flight from my home in Raleigh, North Carolina to Little Rock, Arkansas.

By Toni Greatrex, M.D.

Projective identification is a clinical enactment and part of the common currency of the
psychoanalytic process that occurs especially around the difficult nodal points at the deepest
levels of our psychic organization that seem resistant to change. Neurophysiological studies
of pre-symbolic, unconscious emotional systems offer a biological explanation for the
clinical experience of resistance to change.

By Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke

The United States and France have produced a United Nations resolution of sorts aimed at ending the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, but the negotiations between US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton and France’s Jean-Marc de La Sabliere nearly ended in disaster.

Kenneth Worthy

An extensive, ongoing privatization of the public sphere has been carried out in the West for the past half millenium. Law, technology, rhetoric, and worldview have come together to mediate between people and nature and the production of their life, bringing resources into the capitalist market. The separation of commoners from the commons that traditional peoples and their ancestors intensively managed, as well as the patenting and control of plant germplasm developed over millennia by farmers, are two of the countless ways that privatization has made the market a primary force in peoples’ lives and alienated them from direct control over their own production. This paper looks at the history of enclosures, generalizing and contextualizing the role of biotechnology today in this historic process.

I am putting in this piece by David Harvey as another key bit of analysis, talking about one specific aspect of commodification, what he describes thus: “To presume that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to presume that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity. Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relaitons, that a price ccan be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide — an ethic — for all human action… Pornography is broadly protect5ed as free speech under US law… [t]he commodificaton of sexuality, culture, history, heritage; of nature as spectacle or as a rest cure, the extracton of monopoly rents…” And this is what Harvey’s enclosed essay discusses. Monopoly rents and the commodificaton of culture. Sound arcane? Not if you’ve been keeping up. (-:

One of my mentors, the late Mark Jones, as a dyed-in-the-wool, hard-nosed communist, was also keenly interested in the question of biospheric destruction and gender. We had our disagreements on the latter, but he never fell into the postmodern quagmire of “sex-radical” liberalism. It was him who set me thinking about a rapproachment between the aspects of the left, be they from traditions of class struggle, gender struggle, or enviro struggle. The most frequent accusation hurled at him by the orthodox and social democratic left was that he was a “catastrophist.” In fact, he was simply unflinching in stating the obvious, imo, which can alienate a lot of people, denial being the force that it is from all quarters it sometimes seems. His exigeses of Marx were without parallel, afaic, and he emphasized the method, not the doctrine. He pointed out repreatedly that we could not look to Marx for how to make our own revoluton or build socialism. But if we wanted to understand capitalism, at its molecular level, Marx remains irreplaceable. This piece is a fine example of that, and shows the cancerous character of capital accumulation at that molecular level, which seems important to revisit now, as our discussions have advanced. I hope people are as engaged by his lively writing as I always was, and appreciative of this sorely missed intellect.