Jim Craven (Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi) teaches economics in Vancouver. He is a veteran and long-time activist on behalf of anti-imperialism, which includes the ongoing imperial predations of the US and Canada against the First Nations. We (virtually) met on the former “Crashlist” hosted by Mark Jones, to whom Jim refers in this post pasted in below. [...]

Any time you hear the term bipartisan, check your six and check your wallet. It means the ruling class is united and on the move. Given the history of this term, I can’t imagine why it doesn’t send shudders down our collective spine. They call it bipartisanship; but it’s more like The Bipartisan Ship — the primary war vessel of the ultra-elite.

A commentary and link on elections, carbon trading, and civilizational collapse.

Here it is, 2 1/2 weeks from another election, and all those questions posed by the left have re-emerged.

Death rates, both overall and cancer-related, are considerably higher among workers engaged in manufacturing computers and component parts, when compared with the general population, according to a report in the journal Environmental Health.

[Those of us who consume this product whould be the very first to demand of these companies that they take immediate and drastic remedies — exercising the Precautionary Principle at every juncture.

There are a few enduring souls out there plodding through the bloody bog of the malaise-wracked Black Freedom Movement, and holding up the banner of the Black left and revolutionary Black nationalism. As the dad, and now grand-dad of African Americans, I have seen first-hand the ideological assault on young Black folks, from the intentional miseducation in public schools, to the massive cultural indoctrination into acquisitive darwinian individualism and compulsory image management. I have no doubt that this broadly successful trend to de-politicize new generations of Black folk is a combinaton of the market default of demand creation (unique to consumer societies like the US) and political will… the will of those who determined long ago to never allow another outbreak of self-detemination struggle like that which rocked US society a few decades ago. My own kids (in their 20s) grow impatient with the old heads who want to remind them of those struggles. The people who have been protecting this spark during this cold night, like the Black Radical Congress and Black Commentator, have themselves been repeatedly caught between the Scylla of ruling class hostility and Charybdis of an ailing movement, held hostage by opportunists and compradors. Glen Ford, the editor of Black Commentator, is one among the casualties of this period, and the crew from Black Commentator, like the Black Radical Congress, has found itself once again withering in the absence of plain material support. Those of us who feel like we have a stake in the future of the generations of young African Ameircans who are adrift on the seas of late capitalism (and we are all stakeholders, no matter our colors or nationalities) and know that the current conditions are neither static nor sustainable, need to encourage the beacons of critical thought, political engagement, and the determination to continue pursuing self-determination for the Black Nation. They are the lighthouse for our children and grandchildren, who will come to depend on them by and by. As the sun sets on Black Commentator, the essential voices from that effort are re-forming in The Black Agenda Report. Excerpts follow, but I want to appeal to those who can to support them.

The following excerpt and link will take you to a piece published at Truthdig. Comments here are welcome, but I would also note that Truthdig has a much wider audience. So, if the intent of commentary is to take a public discussion of issues into a braider arena, either double post comments, or make your comments at Truthdig.

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When I was 18, before student tracking in the public schools had been formalized, an informal tracking system was nevertheless in place: the university track, the craft track, the poultry worker track, and the prison track. I was somewhere between the last two. Both my parents were working in a defense contractor factory, and I was left adrift in the factory-worker ’burbs to be trained by television and alcohol. Raised on a curriculum of McCarthyism, I did the most logical thing I could think of to avoid both the factory and eventual incarceration with the ne’er-do-wells with whom I was keeping company. I joined the Army, and volunteered to fight communists in Vietnam.

I’m working on a a serialized book called “The Insurgent’s Handbook,” that will begin to run at FTW before too awful long. In the process of clarifying a few of the sub-themes there, I ran across this online book from the Canadian-based International Research and Development Centre (note cold weather spelling of “center”). It’s about urban agriculture, which any of us consider an essential dimension of any politics of resistance worth more than a bucket of steam.

Another introduction from some very interesting thinking available on the web. Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner is an anthropologists from the Univesity of Sussex, and a specialist in Chinese cultural anthropology as well as being engaged with the implications of genomics. This is a very provocative piece on the nature of ideas, especially how the “science of genomics” has succeeded in new expressions of ideas… just as mystifying as those from the past.

“At least 10 Florida-based journalists were paid by the US government to contribute to anti-Cuba propaganda broadcasts, the Miami Herald says.

“Three writers have been sacked by the Miami Herald newspaper group for an alleged conflict of interest.”

-BBC, September 8, 2006

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