A couple of nice quotes by and about Chomsky

Nice quote from Chomsky on the Epic Tragedy of Zionist Israel:

In 1947, when the Truman administration was considering its stance towards the Palestine mandate that Britain was abandoning, the State Departments senior intelligence official, William Eddy, warned that partition 'would only intensify support for Zionist expansion and would represent an endorsement of a theocratic sovereign state characteristic of the Dark Ages.'

For those familiar with the Jewish community in Palestine and its ideological roots, the first prediction might have seemed reasonable enough, but the second an outlandish prospect for the secular socialist idealistic society that had taken root. Both evocative memoir and sober analysis, Ofra Yeshua-Lyths [whose book Chomsky is here reviewing] penetrating study reveals that Eddys grim prediction is not the fantasy it might once have seemed. She reviews the painful course by which the chains of religious orthodoxy from which the early Zionists sought to escape have become hanging cords, as Israeli Jews accept life in a homemade trap constructed from the dedication to expansionism and religious-nationalist domination that shatters aspirations for democracy and enlightenment. These might yet become more than mocking words, she suggests, but not without a willingness to face honestly the internal contradiction in the concept of a democratic Jewish state. [July 2007.]

That's about as good a one or two paragraph summary of the tragic trajectory of Zionism/Israel as could be found anywhere. One of the things I admire about Chomsky is not just his incredible depth of knowledge or his sound moral/philosophic foundation, it's the quality of his judgement and his insight. The best bar none.

Now onto another quote. John Brady Kiesling attracted deserved praise for being one of the very, very few people in the vast Anglo-American (including Australian) defence and government establishments who had the courage to resign in protest against the criminal Iraq war. The fact is, of course, that the 'Nuremberg Defence' ('I was only following orders') is the same defence everyone would use and very, very few people will ever give up their jobs or careers for 'principle'.

Kiesling writes:

Most Greek bookstores carry Greek translations of all the latest books by Noam Chomsky, an American intellectual gifted at connecting all the dots of U.S. behavior into a tidy picture. In 2001 I assured Mr. Tegopoulos, the publisher of Athens’ most popular leftist newspaper, that his favorite American philosopher was clinically insane.” Chomsky, I said, had deduced a vast, invisible mechanism of systematic U.S. oppression and exploitation, one that was not true to human nature and could not have operated over decades without becoming visible to its employees. I reassured Tegopoulos that the U.S. foreign policy apparatus could not conspire its way effectively out of a paper bag.

I feel more charitably disposed toward Chomsky now. The Iraq War proved that the United States does have a small group of extremely intelligent, disciplined, highly competitive individuals competent enough to mobilize the U.S. bureaucracy around a single mission such as regime change in Iraq. Chomsky’s favorite conspirators, the former Troskyites turned neoconservatives, might even have read Chomsky in their youth. Certainly they made the same mistake he did. They confused mastery over the U.S. bureaucratic system with U.S. power to triumph over the real world.

Kiesling might feel more charitably disposed, and we can charitably assume these are honest opinions, but they are a most absurd characterization of Chomsky's outlook. If these are the considered views of someone who resigned the Empire in protest, what would be really frightening would be the views of people inside the Empire - the deluded and the committed, capable of any folly. One recalls the dismal words of the Swedish diplomat as quoted by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly: "Know, my son, with what little wisdom the world is governed."

PS. Some other insightful review comments:

The foremost strength of the book is how it critiques not simply the religious establishment but how that establishment and its values have crept into the consciousness of the political-Zionist so-called "Liberal Left". These days, in an era where radicalized criticism of Islamic "religious fundamentalism" has become a mainstream intellectual trend, it is enlightening to meet an author and a work that exposes the political reality to the effect religious fundamentalism was introduced to the Middle East by political Zionism and that the State of Israel is a primary fundamentalist religious actor in the Middle East equations. - Uri Davis

This is a daring book, written in a country where the consensus is oppressive because the political correctness here requires not only proper language but also a proper defense of an improper, oppressive religion by a population which is the most non-religious one on earth. This is shameless hypocrisy. Behind it stands a secular religion, and secular religion is politically a most dangerous 20th-century disease. - Joseph Agassi

Israel Shahak was among the first, I assume, to critique the role of Orthodox Judaism in the disaster, but it now looks like a torrent of commentary is breaking around the subject.

Nice quote from Chomsky on the Epic Tragedy of Zionist Israel:

In 1947, when the Truman administration was considering its stance towards the Palestine mandate that Britain was abandoning, the State Departments senior intelligence official, William Eddy, warned that partition 'would only intensify support for Zionist expansion and would represent an endorsement of a theocratic sovereign state characteristic of the Dark Ages.'

For those familiar with the Jewish community in Palestine and its ideological roots, the first prediction might have seemed reasonable enough, but the second an outlandish prospect for the secular socialist idealistic society that had taken root. Both evocative memoir and sober analysis, Ofra Yeshua-Lyths [whose book Chomsky is here reviewing] penetrating study reveals that Eddys grim prediction is not the fantasy it might once have seemed. She reviews the painful course by which the chains of religious orthodoxy from which the early Zionists sought to escape have become hanging cords, as Israeli Jews accept life in a homemade trap constructed from the dedication to expansionism and religious-nationalist domination that shatters aspirations for democracy and enlightenment. These might yet become more than mocking words, she suggests, but not without a willingness to face honestly the internal contradiction in the concept of a democratic Jewish state. [July 2007.]

That's about as good a one or two paragraph summary of the tragic trajectory of Zionism/Israel as could be found anywhere. One of the things I admire about Chomsky is not just his incredible depth of knowledge or his sound moral/philosophic foundation, it's the quality of his judgement and his insight. The best bar none.

Now onto another quote. John Brady Kiesling attracted deserved praise for being one of the very, very few people in the vast Anglo-American (including Australian) defence and government establishments who had the courage to resign in protest against the criminal Iraq war. The fact is, of course, that the 'Nuremberg Defence' ('I was only following orders') is the same defence everyone would use and very, very few people will ever give up their jobs or careers for 'principle'.

Kiesling writes:

Most Greek bookstores carry Greek translations of all the latest books by Noam Chomsky, an American intellectual gifted at connecting all the dots of U.S. behavior into a tidy picture. In 2001 I assured Mr. Tegopoulos, the publisher of Athens’ most popular leftist newspaper, that his favorite American philosopher was clinically insane.” Chomsky, I said, had deduced a vast, invisible mechanism of systematic U.S. oppression and exploitation, one that was not true to human nature and could not have operated over decades without becoming visible to its employees. I reassured Tegopoulos that the U.S. foreign policy apparatus could not conspire its way effectively out of a paper bag.

I feel more charitably disposed toward Chomsky now. The Iraq War proved that the United States does have a small group of extremely intelligent, disciplined, highly competitive individuals competent enough to mobilize the U.S. bureaucracy around a single mission such as regime change in Iraq. Chomsky’s favorite conspirators, the former Troskyites turned neoconservatives, might even have read Chomsky in their youth. Certainly they made the same mistake he did. They confused mastery over the U.S. bureaucratic system with U.S. power to triumph over the real world.

Kiesling might feel more charitably disposed, and we can charitably assume these are honest opinions, but they are a most absurd characterization of Chomsky's outlook. If these are the considered views of someone who resigned the Empire in protest, what would be really frightening would be the views of people inside the Empire - the deluded and the committed, capable of any folly. One recalls the dismal words of the Swedish diplomat as quoted by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly: "Know, my son, with what little wisdom the world is governed."

PS. Some other insightful review comments:

The foremost strength of the book is how it critiques not simply the religious establishment but how that establishment and its values have crept into the consciousness of the political-Zionist so-called "Liberal Left". These days, in an era where radicalized criticism of Islamic "religious fundamentalism" has become a mainstream intellectual trend, it is enlightening to meet an author and a work that exposes the political reality to the effect religious fundamentalism was introduced to the Middle East by political Zionism and that the State of Israel is a primary fundamentalist religious actor in the Middle East equations. - Uri Davis

This is a daring book, written in a country where the consensus is oppressive because the political correctness here requires not only proper language but also a proper defense of an improper, oppressive religion by a population which is the most non-religious one on earth. This is shameless hypocrisy. Behind it stands a secular religion, and secular religion is politically a most dangerous 20th-century disease. - Joseph Agassi

Israel Shahak was among the first, I assume, to critique the role of Orthodox Judaism in the disaster, but it now looks like a torrent of commentary is breaking around the subject.

A couple of nice quotes by and about Chomsky

Middle-East indicators and warnings point to war against Iran

The Vineyard of the Saker: Middle-East indicators and warnings point to war: The Saker joins more commentators than I could mention in predicting war against Iran. The preparations for war are so broad and deep it almost has an air of inevitability to it. As in a number of his articles, the Saker provides an interesting and original-looking analysis of the situation.

The future cannot be predicted so no one can say for certain. However war is certainly possible, and not unlikely. War, if it does come, would likely be disastrous (and criminal), perhaps catastrophically so. Moreover, the whole world is aware of this situation and of this danger.

In these circumstances what I find most appalling is the near-complete silence of the world's leaders, especially its Western leaders, including virtually the entire government, diplomatic, educational and media establishments.

Say it loud and say it now, as John Pilger virtually on his own has done: The US is the Third Reich of our time, bent on aggression against one country after another. It must not be appeased; it must be contained and deterred. War against Iran must not happen.

God Damn America and all its 'friends' and 'allies' if it and they, in near complete passivity and silence, let this war happen.

If the US attacked Iran, it would be a watershed moment for the 21st Century, even more so than the aggression against Iraq. And we're taking names: of those who protest, and those who don't.

The Vineyard of the Saker: Middle-East indicators and warnings point to war: The Saker joins more commentators than I could mention in predicting war against Iran. The preparations for war are so broad and deep it almost has an air of inevitability to it. As in a number of his articles, the Saker provides an interesting and original-looking analysis of the situation.

The future cannot be predicted so no one can say for certain. However war is certainly possible, and not unlikely. War, if it does come, would likely be disastrous (and criminal), perhaps catastrophically so. Moreover, the whole world is aware of this situation and of this danger.

In these circumstances what I find most appalling is the near-complete silence of the world's leaders, especially its Western leaders, including virtually the entire government, diplomatic, educational and media establishments.

Say it loud and say it now, as John Pilger virtually on his own has done: The US is the Third Reich of our time, bent on aggression against one country after another. It must not be appeased; it must be contained and deterred. War against Iran must not happen.

God Damn America and all its 'friends' and 'allies' if it and they, in near complete passivity and silence, let this war happen.

If the US attacked Iran, it would be a watershed moment for the 21st Century, even more so than the aggression against Iraq. And we're taking names: of those who protest, and those who don't.

Middle-East indicators and warnings point to war against Iran

Kevin Carson attacks 'vulgar libertarians' again

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: Review: The Mind of the Market, by Michael Shermer The elements Kevin Carson describes as "vulgar" in "right-libertarianism" seem to me the essense of that doctrine.

Its a noble effort to "reform it from within" and I wish Carson all success in that endeavour but I would simply abandon "right-libertarianism" in favour of geo-libertarianism, left-libertarianism, libertarian socialism and elements of classical liberalism.

In my view "right-libertarianism" is a purely reactionary doctrine - classical liberalism sans single tax. You have to fight it tooth and nail and send it back to where it came from. It's particularly insidious because it induces well-intentioned people who might otherwise be radicals to veer from the left and ally with the right. Try and convince me that's not the whole point of it.

I agree the dogma of the 'free market' and the 'invisible hand' is vastly overstated as well. Yes, the 'invisible hand' is a correct and valuable insight, but in general people should be banned from (ab)using this phrase. The popular understanding is now such that to critique the system you do indeed have to dissociate yourself from the 'free market'.

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: Review: The Mind of the Market, by Michael Shermer The elements Kevin Carson describes as "vulgar" in "right-libertarianism" seem to me the essense of that doctrine.

Its a noble effort to "reform it from within" and I wish Carson all success in that endeavour but I would simply abandon "right-libertarianism" in favour of geo-libertarianism, left-libertarianism, libertarian socialism and elements of classical liberalism.

In my view "right-libertarianism" is a purely reactionary doctrine - classical liberalism sans single tax. You have to fight it tooth and nail and send it back to where it came from. It's particularly insidious because it induces well-intentioned people who might otherwise be radicals to veer from the left and ally with the right. Try and convince me that's not the whole point of it.

I agree the dogma of the 'free market' and the 'invisible hand' is vastly overstated as well. Yes, the 'invisible hand' is a correct and valuable insight, but in general people should be banned from (ab)using this phrase. The popular understanding is now such that to critique the system you do indeed have to dissociate yourself from the 'free market'.

Kevin Carson attacks 'vulgar libertarians' again

Thousand Year Reich

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen: "He went on to say that the US has 'has been at Israel's side for all of 60 years, it will be for the next 60 years, 100 years and 1,000 years."

At the rate the loathsome ideology of Zionism is collapsing amongst both Jews and non-Jews alike, I wouldnt be surprised if it lasted no more than 12 years, forget about 1,000.

Given the US strategic interest in Gulf oil, it couldnt stay by Israel's side for a day beyond depletion, estimated to be no more than 40 or 50 years hence. That would give Israel around 100 years of existence, after which it would vanish from the map like the little crusader state it is.

NB. If Ehud Barak had accepted Arafat's generous offer at Camp David in 2000 - an Israeli state behind the 1967 Green Line and recognition of a Palestinian state in the remainder - Israel could last indefinitely. But the expansionism and militarism inherent in Zionist ideology prevented and prevents this offer from being accepted, leaving a most uncertain future for the Jewish state.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen: "He went on to say that the US has 'has been at Israel's side for all of 60 years, it will be for the next 60 years, 100 years and 1,000 years."

At the rate the loathsome ideology of Zionism is collapsing amongst both Jews and non-Jews alike, I wouldnt be surprised if it lasted no more than 12 years, forget about 1,000.

Given the US strategic interest in Gulf oil, it couldnt stay by Israel's side for a day beyond depletion, estimated to be no more than 40 or 50 years hence. That would give Israel around 100 years of existence, after which it would vanish from the map like the little crusader state it is.

NB. If Ehud Barak had accepted Arafat's generous offer at Camp David in 2000 - an Israeli state behind the 1967 Green Line and recognition of a Palestinian state in the remainder - Israel could last indefinitely. But the expansionism and militarism inherent in Zionist ideology prevented and prevents this offer from being accepted, leaving a most uncertain future for the Jewish state.

Thousand Year Reich

No Sitefeed

Welcome to the official website of Ilan Pappe. Dr Pappe doesnt have a sitefeed. Neither does Dr. Finkelstein, Dr Hudson or Dr Gaffney. Or even John Pilger.

This suggest the good doctors dont have or use a feed reader either. Once you start subscribing to sitefeeds with a feedreader like Google Reader there's no going back. Talk about killer app. And you wouldn't start or have a blog or website which didnt offer a feed, that's for sure.

NB. The great Dr Richard Stallman does have a sitefeed, but doesnt have comments. Also, as I'm a loyal subscriber, I have found that Dr. Stallman tends to blog what are commonplaces in the radical blogosphere. It might be better if he had a focussed blog on the basic concepts of freedom and free software, but then again, what would I know?

Dr Chomsky doesn't even have his own website. But he's an old-fashioned guy. What's the big deal with the "Internet" when you've got a university library and know how to use it? I hear Dr Chomsky say. And Dr Chomsky has got a secret weapon at his disposal that not even today's Internet can match: the online Lexis-Nexis database. Have to traipse down to the University library in person to load up on that particular WMD.

Instead Dr Chomsky allows his Internet presence to be subsumed under ZNet, who recently had their abortion of a website completely redesigned to make it even more of a mess than it already is. And no, it doesnt seem to include a sitefeed. Well I couldnt find one after a bit of looking. Couldnt find the Chomsky blog either. Instead his content seems to be spread over at least half a dozen different areas.

Its so bad I've noticed that I've effectively stopped reading the Znet space. Which means I've probably been missing a lot of good stuff, not only Chomsky but other good writers they have carried over there.

No, I've found Chomsky's blog on Znet! Shows what you can do if you try hard enough. But still cant find the sitefeed. Hard to believe they dont have one.... Even worse, you have to register (or even pay) to read some if not all of the blog posts. That makes the site literally unreadable such as you do not visit again. A model that died sometime ago.

The other Chomsky site, chomsky.info, has the right idea, and have obviously been trying to make up for the longstanding deficiencies of Znet. Simple, clean homepage - except that the "what's new" or blogsite section is cleverly disguised under "News and Reports". Why do that? Reverse chronological order (of posting). A sitefeed. But it has weaknesses - not everything he writes or says is included (I guess that would be a massive task). No comments. No presence from Chomsky himself. Not everything is fed through the blogsite.

Antiwar.com is perhaps the best example of good webdesign among the antiwar and radical websites. But no comments, as well of course as the harmful impact of right-libertarian philosophy everywhere on the site. And too much reliance on the corporate press.

Commondreams.org is very good. Includes comments, which have been of exceptional quality lately. But not radical enough. Includes a sitefeed, but there are too many articles to take for a sitefeed to be much use. One wants to be more selective (which is why every writer should have their own website where all their articles are posted in addition to being posted elsewhere.)

Counterpunch.org is good. Its biggest fault is the huge waste of screenspace at the top of the homepage. Look at antiwar.com by contrast to see how it can be better used. No comments. No sitefeed, but again one would not want to subscribe to it all, only to selected authors.

Welcome to the official website of Ilan Pappe. Dr Pappe doesnt have a sitefeed. Neither does Dr. Finkelstein, Dr Hudson or Dr Gaffney. Or even John Pilger.

This suggest the good doctors dont have or use a feed reader either. Once you start subscribing to sitefeeds with a feedreader like Google Reader there's no going back. Talk about killer app. And you wouldn't start or have a blog or website which didnt offer a feed, that's for sure.

NB. The great Dr Richard Stallman does have a sitefeed, but doesnt have comments. Also, as I'm a loyal subscriber, I have found that Dr. Stallman tends to blog what are commonplaces in the radical blogosphere. It might be better if he had a focussed blog on the basic concepts of freedom and free software, but then again, what would I know?

Dr Chomsky doesn't even have his own website. But he's an old-fashioned guy. What's the big deal with the "Internet" when you've got a university library and know how to use it? I hear Dr Chomsky say. And Dr Chomsky has got a secret weapon at his disposal that not even today's Internet can match: the online Lexis-Nexis database. Have to traipse down to the University library in person to load up on that particular WMD.

Instead Dr Chomsky allows his Internet presence to be subsumed under ZNet, who recently had their abortion of a website completely redesigned to make it even more of a mess than it already is. And no, it doesnt seem to include a sitefeed. Well I couldnt find one after a bit of looking. Couldnt find the Chomsky blog either. Instead his content seems to be spread over at least half a dozen different areas.

Its so bad I've noticed that I've effectively stopped reading the Znet space. Which means I've probably been missing a lot of good stuff, not only Chomsky but other good writers they have carried over there.

No, I've found Chomsky's blog on Znet! Shows what you can do if you try hard enough. But still cant find the sitefeed. Hard to believe they dont have one.... Even worse, you have to register (or even pay) to read some if not all of the blog posts. That makes the site literally unreadable such as you do not visit again. A model that died sometime ago.

The other Chomsky site, chomsky.info, has the right idea, and have obviously been trying to make up for the longstanding deficiencies of Znet. Simple, clean homepage - except that the "what's new" or blogsite section is cleverly disguised under "News and Reports". Why do that? Reverse chronological order (of posting). A sitefeed. But it has weaknesses - not everything he writes or says is included (I guess that would be a massive task). No comments. No presence from Chomsky himself. Not everything is fed through the blogsite.

Antiwar.com is perhaps the best example of good webdesign among the antiwar and radical websites. But no comments, as well of course as the harmful impact of right-libertarian philosophy everywhere on the site. And too much reliance on the corporate press.

Commondreams.org is very good. Includes comments, which have been of exceptional quality lately. But not radical enough. Includes a sitefeed, but there are too many articles to take for a sitefeed to be much use. One wants to be more selective (which is why every writer should have their own website where all their articles are posted in addition to being posted elsewhere.)

Counterpunch.org is good. Its biggest fault is the huge waste of screenspace at the top of the homepage. Look at antiwar.com by contrast to see how it can be better used. No comments. No sitefeed, but again one would not want to subscribe to it all, only to selected authors.

No Sitefeed

Arthur Silber finally comes out

Arthur Silber, the right-libertarian who, I believe, knew and worked personally with Ayn Rand, has finally admitted he has become an anarchist. A leftist-anarchist no less.

Well, join the crowd. Actually, it has been obvious for some time that Silber was drifting into anarchism. I even began to suspect he was secretly reading Chomsky.

In my case, it was Chomsky that stimulated the interest in anarchism, and I would guess, countless others as well. In fact one of Chomsky's many great contributions had been the popularisation of anarchism as a political philosophy. As far back as 1971 (if not earlier), with his essay Notes on Anarchism, Chomsky has been revealing his debt to anarchist philosophy, or libertarian socialism as he calls it. And it has been a strange, sometimes comical spectacle to observe the endless string of witless critics who attack Chomsky for being "totalitarian", "bolshevik", "stalinist", "maoist" etc. Don't these fools know there is a difference between anarchism and bolshevism? Obviously not, meaning they never read any Chomsky either.

It's a shame, however, that Chomsky was not able to do the same job of elevation and popularisation of another neglected, important philosophy: that of Henry George and his 'Georgist' movement. This, I humbly submit, is worthy of the honour.

By coincidence, the brain dead corporate media columnist Paul Sheahan writes a useless, misleading and uninformative article on the Obama/Wright controversy at the same time as Silber's vastly superior piece appears in my sitefeed. In such a way the internet has exposed the flank of the corporate media.

The rubbishy propaganda produced by corporate hacks like Sheahan, Gerard Henderson, Andrew Bolt etc is presumably the best that money can buy, but is easily outclassed by dozens, if not hundreds of articles in the blogosphere every day. As soon as people learn to construct their own 'newspaper' using sitefeed software like google reader, I cant see these people earning their keep.

Justice seeks Vengeance against the evil of corporate media, and is bounding like a huge, slavering hound toward the exposed flank of a previously invincible foe. Revenge, when it comes, will be swift and deadly.

Or, as they say, go read the whole thing, including the links.

Arthur Silber, the right-libertarian who, I believe, knew and worked personally with Ayn Rand, has finally admitted he has become an anarchist. A leftist-anarchist no less.

Well, join the crowd. Actually, it has been obvious for some time that Silber was drifting into anarchism. I even began to suspect he was secretly reading Chomsky.

In my case, it was Chomsky that stimulated the interest in anarchism, and I would guess, countless others as well. In fact one of Chomsky's many great contributions had been the popularisation of anarchism as a political philosophy. As far back as 1971 (if not earlier), with his essay Notes on Anarchism, Chomsky has been revealing his debt to anarchist philosophy, or libertarian socialism as he calls it. And it has been a strange, sometimes comical spectacle to observe the endless string of witless critics who attack Chomsky for being "totalitarian", "bolshevik", "stalinist", "maoist" etc. Don't these fools know there is a difference between anarchism and bolshevism? Obviously not, meaning they never read any Chomsky either.

It's a shame, however, that Chomsky was not able to do the same job of elevation and popularisation of another neglected, important philosophy: that of Henry George and his 'Georgist' movement. This, I humbly submit, is worthy of the honour.

By coincidence, the brain dead corporate media columnist Paul Sheahan writes a useless, misleading and uninformative article on the Obama/Wright controversy at the same time as Silber's vastly superior piece appears in my sitefeed. In such a way the internet has exposed the flank of the corporate media.

The rubbishy propaganda produced by corporate hacks like Sheahan, Gerard Henderson, Andrew Bolt etc is presumably the best that money can buy, but is easily outclassed by dozens, if not hundreds of articles in the blogosphere every day. As soon as people learn to construct their own 'newspaper' using sitefeed software like google reader, I cant see these people earning their keep.

Justice seeks Vengeance against the evil of corporate media, and is bounding like a huge, slavering hound toward the exposed flank of a previously invincible foe. Revenge, when it comes, will be swift and deadly.

Or, as they say, go read the whole thing, including the links.

Arthur Silber finally comes out

What the [US] Public Really Wants on Iraq

What the Public Really Wants on Iraq: Ruy Teixeira examines polling data to determine what the US public thinks about the war on its fifth anniversay:

The public made up its mind on Iraq quite a while ago, and the surge has had no effect whatsoever on the public’s basic verdict on the war. They believe that the war has been a huge mistake and that we should move expeditiously to remove U.S. troops from Iraq and end the conflict.... The Iraq war, in the public’s view, has been a mistake, with the costs of the war far exceeding its benefits.

Two comments:

1. The questions are phrased strictly in terms of cost/benefit to the United States. The US public is not asked, for example, if it thinks the war was 'legitimate self-defence' or a 'war of aggression.' If it thinks the war is illegal and criminal, the public is not asked if those responsible for it should be prosecuted. It is not asked whether the war benefits Iraqis, or has destroyed them (for example, killing over one million people). This perhaps reflects who is conducting the polls and for what purpose. Chomsky has remarked that the US public is extensively polled so that the rulers do know what they think. Public opinion is then a problem which needs to be managed with public relations and propaganda.

2. The public's view is not reflected in the political system. The Democrats have taken advantage of the public's views to win Congressional seats and perhaps the Whitehouse later this year, but have taken no action to end the war, ie they have not defunded the war or impeached the people responsible.

What the Public Really Wants on Iraq: Ruy Teixeira examines polling data to determine what the US public thinks about the war on its fifth anniversay:

The public made up its mind on Iraq quite a while ago, and the surge has had no effect whatsoever on the public’s basic verdict on the war. They believe that the war has been a huge mistake and that we should move expeditiously to remove U.S. troops from Iraq and end the conflict.... The Iraq war, in the public’s view, has been a mistake, with the costs of the war far exceeding its benefits.

Two comments:

1. The questions are phrased strictly in terms of cost/benefit to the United States. The US public is not asked, for example, if it thinks the war was 'legitimate self-defence' or a 'war of aggression.' If it thinks the war is illegal and criminal, the public is not asked if those responsible for it should be prosecuted. It is not asked whether the war benefits Iraqis, or has destroyed them (for example, killing over one million people). This perhaps reflects who is conducting the polls and for what purpose. Chomsky has remarked that the US public is extensively polled so that the rulers do know what they think. Public opinion is then a problem which needs to be managed with public relations and propaganda.

2. The public's view is not reflected in the political system. The Democrats have taken advantage of the public's views to win Congressional seats and perhaps the Whitehouse later this year, but have taken no action to end the war, ie they have not defunded the war or impeached the people responsible.

What the [US] Public Really Wants on Iraq

Protests and Protest Singers

Interesting article by protest singer David Rovics on the sad state of the antiwar/protest movement and the need for music and culture to be brought front and centre:

Excerpts:

Talk to anyone who lived through the 60’s -- who remembers any but the most eloquent of the speeches by the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Mario Savio? But millions remember the songs. Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin were the soundtrack to the struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in this country to this day and you will find somewhere in the pages an unaccredited reference to a line in a Bob Dylan song....

Knowing the essential power of music, the very industry that sells us music mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to kill music. For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best to teach us all that music is something to have in the background to comfort you as you try to get through another mind-numbing day of meaningless labor in some office building or department store. It’s something to help you seduce someone perhaps, or to help you get over a breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, action, or feelings of compassion for humanity (other than for your girlfriend or boyfriend)....

Radical culture needs to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not sidelined as people are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing station ID's. Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song is worth a hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a three-minute ballad is easily equal to any book.

Interesting article by protest singer David Rovics on the sad state of the antiwar/protest movement and the need for music and culture to be brought front and centre:

Excerpts:

Talk to anyone who lived through the 60’s -- who remembers any but the most eloquent of the speeches by the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Mario Savio? But millions remember the songs. Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin were the soundtrack to the struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in this country to this day and you will find somewhere in the pages an unaccredited reference to a line in a Bob Dylan song....

Knowing the essential power of music, the very industry that sells us music mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to kill music. For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best to teach us all that music is something to have in the background to comfort you as you try to get through another mind-numbing day of meaningless labor in some office building or department store. It’s something to help you seduce someone perhaps, or to help you get over a breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, action, or feelings of compassion for humanity (other than for your girlfriend or boyfriend)....

Radical culture needs to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not sidelined as people are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing station ID's. Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song is worth a hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a three-minute ballad is easily equal to any book.

Protests and Protest Singers

MidEast Proconsul Fallon Out

Centcom Commander Admiral William Fallon has "resigned", after less than a year in the job.

Fallon was responsible for the rather remarkable comments last year that

an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch”.

Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, “You know what choices I have. I’m a professional.” Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, “There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box.”

One would think that such statements would greatly anger Bush and especially Cheney and it's a wonder he lasted as long as he did. After all, he doesn't really have the option of crossing the Rubicon, does he?

A recent interview with Esquire magazine seems to have sealed his fate, or, according to another version, was a pre-emptive strike by Fallon: get in another shot at the 'crazies' before he is inevitably fired.

The Esquire article also helps to make clear what a powerful position, a true Proconcul, the Centcom Commander is. Not only is he running two major wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) he is also conducting diplomacy at the highest level, with the heads of State and Government of strategically crucial countries like Pakistan and Egypt. This annoyed the Whitehouse, but if they install a sycophant or cripple the Commander's powers it can only lead to increased risk of bad policy.

Naturally this will lead to a renewed bout of speculation as to whether Bush/Cheney plan to attack Iran before the year is out, eg here, here, here and here.

As John Pilger pointed out prior to the Iraq invasion, the US is the Third Reich of our time: a superpower bent on Imperialism and military aggression against one country after another, which we to our lasting disgrace are not only appeasing but assisting. The world regards the US (quite correctly) as the greatest threat to world peace.

The only effective barriers to further aggression have been financial bankruptcy and military defeat. According to Seymour Hersh, had the war against Iraq been a success as planned, the US would already have gone 'left and right', ie Syria then Iran.

In other words, one million Iraqi people had to pay with their lives to save Syria and Iran from aggression, while the rest of the world merely looked on, or in some cases such as Australia's Howard Government, actually participated in the crime.

However there are two other sources of inhibition to US aggression which need to be mobilised: the US domestic population; and the global population. Our responsibility as world citizens is to oppose the barbarism of military aggression and its attendant warcrimes, crimes against humanity, atrocities, tortures, genocides etc - and to force our governments, specifically the new Australian Federal Labor Rudd Government, to also join in a policy of opposition and containment, instead of appeasement and participation.

Centcom Commander Admiral William Fallon has "resigned", after less than a year in the job.

Fallon was responsible for the rather remarkable comments last year that

an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch”.

Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, “You know what choices I have. I’m a professional.” Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, “There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box.”

One would think that such statements would greatly anger Bush and especially Cheney and it's a wonder he lasted as long as he did. After all, he doesn't really have the option of crossing the Rubicon, does he?

A recent interview with Esquire magazine seems to have sealed his fate, or, according to another version, was a pre-emptive strike by Fallon: get in another shot at the 'crazies' before he is inevitably fired.

The Esquire article also helps to make clear what a powerful position, a true Proconcul, the Centcom Commander is. Not only is he running two major wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) he is also conducting diplomacy at the highest level, with the heads of State and Government of strategically crucial countries like Pakistan and Egypt. This annoyed the Whitehouse, but if they install a sycophant or cripple the Commander's powers it can only lead to increased risk of bad policy.

Naturally this will lead to a renewed bout of speculation as to whether Bush/Cheney plan to attack Iran before the year is out, eg here, here, here and here.

As John Pilger pointed out prior to the Iraq invasion, the US is the Third Reich of our time: a superpower bent on Imperialism and military aggression against one country after another, which we to our lasting disgrace are not only appeasing but assisting. The world regards the US (quite correctly) as the greatest threat to world peace.

The only effective barriers to further aggression have been financial bankruptcy and military defeat. According to Seymour Hersh, had the war against Iraq been a success as planned, the US would already have gone 'left and right', ie Syria then Iran.

In other words, one million Iraqi people had to pay with their lives to save Syria and Iran from aggression, while the rest of the world merely looked on, or in some cases such as Australia's Howard Government, actually participated in the crime.

However there are two other sources of inhibition to US aggression which need to be mobilised: the US domestic population; and the global population. Our responsibility as world citizens is to oppose the barbarism of military aggression and its attendant warcrimes, crimes against humanity, atrocities, tortures, genocides etc - and to force our governments, specifically the new Australian Federal Labor Rudd Government, to also join in a policy of opposition and containment, instead of appeasement and participation.

MidEast Proconsul Fallon Out

Henry George Eulogizes Karl Marx March 1883

SCI:

I am unable to accept the invitation of our committee to address the meeting at Cooper Institute, but I desire to express my deep respect for a man whose life was devoted to efforts for the improvement of social conditions.

I never had the good fortune to meet Karl Marx, nor have I been able to read his works, which are untranslated into English. I am consequently incompetent to speak with precision of his views. As I understand them, there are several important points on which I differ from them. But no difference of opinion can lessen the esteem which I feel for the man who so steadfastly, so patiently, and so self-sacrificingly labored for the freedom of the oppressed and the elevation of the downtrodden.

In the life and in the teachings of Karl Marx there were the recognition of two profound truths, for which his memory deserves to be held in special honor.

He was the founder of the International - the first attempt to unite in a "holy alliance of the people" the workingmen of all countries; he taught the solidarity of labor, the brotherhood of man, and wherever his influence has reached it has tended to destroy those prejudices of nation and race which have been in all ages the most efficient means by which tyranny has been established and maintained. For this I honor Karl Marx.

This seems fair enough.

And I honor Karl Marx because he saw and taught that the road to social regeneration lies not through destruction and anarchy, but through the promulgation of ideas and the education of the people. He realized that the enslavement of the masses is everywhere due to their ignorance, and realizing this, he set himself to work to master and to point out the social economic laws without the recognition of which all effort for social improvement is but a blind and fruitless struggle.

Now this of course is the very view of George himself, and perhaps of anarchist thinkers also, moreso than Marx. Marx was interested in revolution, in which a vanguard would play a more prominent role.

Karl Marx has gone, but the work he has done remains; whatever may have been in it of that error inseparable from all human endeavor will in turn be eliminated, but the good will perpetuate itself.

And how freaking long is that going to take? One of the problems with Marxian economics is that the crucial labour theory of value and theory of surplus value is formally incorrect. We need logically correct theory at this fundamental level, and my suggestion has been that the value theories of henry george can contribute to this.

And his memory will be cherished as one who saw and struggled for that reign of justice in which armies shall be disbanded and poverty shall be unknown and government shall become co-operation, that golden age of peace and plenty, the possibility of which is beginning even now to be recognized among the masses all over the civilized world.

Well, we've had a nightmare century-and-a-quarter of warfare, imperialism, colonialism, tyranny, genocide, warcrimes, crimes against humanity worse than anyone at that time cold have conceived and it just continues on and on unabated in front of our eyes, albeit at a slower pace than the peak horror of WW11. And we still directly face nuclear holocaust or environmental devastation.

But hope springs eternal....


Dave Reed observes that the influence of Henry George on the UK Labour party was rather more, and the influence of Marx rather less, than many might assume:

In the UK the influence of Marx was not paramount in the formation of the Labour Party, as CJ Bartlett attests in a typical college textbook 'A History of Postwar Britain' (1977) p15 "The party had always been a heterogenous body ,drawing inspiration from Morris, Dickens, Ruskin, and Carlyle as well as Marx, and later from the Webbs, Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge, not to mention the general influence of non conformity, the Bible, American contributions from Henry George and Jack London" . Oxford's Prof Iain McLean is more specific in his "Land tax : options for reform" 2004 [which is available direct from the Net and via the Labour Land Campaign website]. He states p10 "Henry George had far more influence on the British and American left than Karl Marx." For this reason the Labour Land Campaign often sees itself, not so much as trying to point the Labour Party in new directions, as trying to get it back to its origins.

How much the Labour Party was committed to land tax can be seen from Labour Land Campaign's "Labour and Land" a summary of old Labour Party manifestos (for internal use by the Labour Land Campaign but now on the Net).It is surprising how long land tax appeared as Labour policy alongside a reluctance to use redistributive income tax. For those wishing to check the originals they are available on the Net as Archive of UK Labour Party Election Manifestos.)

It is a similar story of course with the Australian Labor Party.

SCI:

I am unable to accept the invitation of our committee to address the meeting at Cooper Institute, but I desire to express my deep respect for a man whose life was devoted to efforts for the improvement of social conditions.

I never had the good fortune to meet Karl Marx, nor have I been able to read his works, which are untranslated into English. I am consequently incompetent to speak with precision of his views. As I understand them, there are several important points on which I differ from them. But no difference of opinion can lessen the esteem which I feel for the man who so steadfastly, so patiently, and so self-sacrificingly labored for the freedom of the oppressed and the elevation of the downtrodden.

In the life and in the teachings of Karl Marx there were the recognition of two profound truths, for which his memory deserves to be held in special honor.

He was the founder of the International - the first attempt to unite in a "holy alliance of the people" the workingmen of all countries; he taught the solidarity of labor, the brotherhood of man, and wherever his influence has reached it has tended to destroy those prejudices of nation and race which have been in all ages the most efficient means by which tyranny has been established and maintained. For this I honor Karl Marx.

This seems fair enough.

And I honor Karl Marx because he saw and taught that the road to social regeneration lies not through destruction and anarchy, but through the promulgation of ideas and the education of the people. He realized that the enslavement of the masses is everywhere due to their ignorance, and realizing this, he set himself to work to master and to point out the social economic laws without the recognition of which all effort for social improvement is but a blind and fruitless struggle.

Now this of course is the very view of George himself, and perhaps of anarchist thinkers also, moreso than Marx. Marx was interested in revolution, in which a vanguard would play a more prominent role.

Karl Marx has gone, but the work he has done remains; whatever may have been in it of that error inseparable from all human endeavor will in turn be eliminated, but the good will perpetuate itself.

And how freaking long is that going to take? One of the problems with Marxian economics is that the crucial labour theory of value and theory of surplus value is formally incorrect. We need logically correct theory at this fundamental level, and my suggestion has been that the value theories of henry george can contribute to this.

And his memory will be cherished as one who saw and struggled for that reign of justice in which armies shall be disbanded and poverty shall be unknown and government shall become co-operation, that golden age of peace and plenty, the possibility of which is beginning even now to be recognized among the masses all over the civilized world.

Well, we've had a nightmare century-and-a-quarter of warfare, imperialism, colonialism, tyranny, genocide, warcrimes, crimes against humanity worse than anyone at that time cold have conceived and it just continues on and on unabated in front of our eyes, albeit at a slower pace than the peak horror of WW11. And we still directly face nuclear holocaust or environmental devastation.

But hope springs eternal....


Dave Reed observes that the influence of Henry George on the UK Labour party was rather more, and the influence of Marx rather less, than many might assume:

In the UK the influence of Marx was not paramount in the formation of the Labour Party, as CJ Bartlett attests in a typical college textbook 'A History of Postwar Britain' (1977) p15 "The party had always been a heterogenous body ,drawing inspiration from Morris, Dickens, Ruskin, and Carlyle as well as Marx, and later from the Webbs, Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge, not to mention the general influence of non conformity, the Bible, American contributions from Henry George and Jack London" . Oxford's Prof Iain McLean is more specific in his "Land tax : options for reform" 2004 [which is available direct from the Net and via the Labour Land Campaign website]. He states p10 "Henry George had far more influence on the British and American left than Karl Marx." For this reason the Labour Land Campaign often sees itself, not so much as trying to point the Labour Party in new directions, as trying to get it back to its origins.

How much the Labour Party was committed to land tax can be seen from Labour Land Campaign's "Labour and Land" a summary of old Labour Party manifestos (for internal use by the Labour Land Campaign but now on the Net).It is surprising how long land tax appeared as Labour policy alongside a reluctance to use redistributive income tax. For those wishing to check the originals they are available on the Net as Archive of UK Labour Party Election Manifestos.)

It is a similar story of course with the Australian Labor Party.

Henry George Eulogizes Karl Marx March 1883

The Insanity of the 'War on Drugs'

Prohibition seems to be very much an American thing, perhaps it might be included as part of the 'Washington Consensus', and will also collapse with the American Empire. James Bovard has an article on one of the latest and worst extremes of this nonsense:

Thailand’s war on drugs — vigorously approved by the Bush administration — has received far less attention in the United States than it deserves.

When [former Thai Prime Minister] Thaksin launched his anti-drug campaign in 2003, he declared that “in this war, drug dealers must die.” Interior Minister Wan Muhamad Nor Matha promised that drug dealers “will be put behind bars or even vanish without a trace. Who cares? They are destroying our country.”

Throughout Thailand, local officials set up black boxes or mailboxes and encouraged people to accuse anyone suspected of involvement with narcotics — no evidence required. Many people used the anonymous system to accuse business competitors or personal enemies... “Most of [the victims] got killed on the way back from the police office. People found their name on a blacklist, went to the police, then ended up dead.”

Drugs were planted on the bodies of many victims after they were murdered. Amnesty International complained, “Authorities are not permitting pathologists to perform autopsies and bullets are reportedly being removed from the corpses.” ...

Governors were permitted to keep 35 percent of all the drug assets they confiscated, and police detectives were entitled to skim 15 percent of the loot.... Many Thai drug gangs operate under the protection of politicians and the military and appeared to easily survive the Thaksin purge....

According to the U.S. State Department, 307 people were killed worldwide in international terrorist attacks in 2003. The Bush administration endorsed and helped finance an anti-drug crackdown that killed more than seven times as many people in a single country as were killed by all the international terrorists in the world that year.

Go read the whole thing.

Prohibition seems to be very much an American thing, perhaps it might be included as part of the 'Washington Consensus', and will also collapse with the American Empire. James Bovard has an article on one of the latest and worst extremes of this nonsense:

Thailand’s war on drugs — vigorously approved by the Bush administration — has received far less attention in the United States than it deserves.

When [former Thai Prime Minister] Thaksin launched his anti-drug campaign in 2003, he declared that “in this war, drug dealers must die.” Interior Minister Wan Muhamad Nor Matha promised that drug dealers “will be put behind bars or even vanish without a trace. Who cares? They are destroying our country.”

Throughout Thailand, local officials set up black boxes or mailboxes and encouraged people to accuse anyone suspected of involvement with narcotics — no evidence required. Many people used the anonymous system to accuse business competitors or personal enemies... “Most of [the victims] got killed on the way back from the police office. People found their name on a blacklist, went to the police, then ended up dead.”

Drugs were planted on the bodies of many victims after they were murdered. Amnesty International complained, “Authorities are not permitting pathologists to perform autopsies and bullets are reportedly being removed from the corpses.” ...

Governors were permitted to keep 35 percent of all the drug assets they confiscated, and police detectives were entitled to skim 15 percent of the loot.... Many Thai drug gangs operate under the protection of politicians and the military and appeared to easily survive the Thaksin purge....

According to the U.S. State Department, 307 people were killed worldwide in international terrorist attacks in 2003. The Bush administration endorsed and helped finance an anti-drug crackdown that killed more than seven times as many people in a single country as were killed by all the international terrorists in the world that year.

Go read the whole thing.

The Insanity of the 'War on Drugs'

New PM a dud on climate change

The former Howard government's position on climate change was incredibly backward: it refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol and effectively denied that there was even a problem for ten long years. At least Rudd has ratified and talks of the need to tackle the issue. In reality, however, he is not that far removed from Howard or even the Bush administration.

Rudd will not even set a target, much less take the necessary steps to achieve the target.

WITH less than 24 hours to deadline, the crucial UN climate talks in Bali were deadlocked last night between the US and Europe - with Australia being drawn into the centre of the conflict.

The European Union demanded to know where Australia stood in the attempt by America to remove crucial wording in the draft Bali road map which calls for developed countries to make deep cuts to their greenhouse gas emissions.

Shortly before leaving Bali, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, signalled Australia would back moves by the US to remove the controversial wording from the draft. The Americans have refused to accept the phraseology, which refers to scientific advice that the developed world would need to cut its emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020 to avoid the most severe effects of climate change.

The EU's Environment Minister, Stavros Dimas, said last night that the wording was "indispensable" to the Bali road map.

"The Prime Minister lost an opportunity in his speech to commit to this range of 25 to 40 per cent," he told reporters, adding, "They still have time."

But in a thinly veiled criticism of Mr Rudd, he said that if Australia refused to back the European stand on the draft road map, the Prime Minister's signing of the Kyoto Protocol "will not have the substance we hoped for".

A spokeswoman for the main environmental groups at the conference, Jennifer Morgan, told reporters: "There is a wrecking crew here in Bali led by the Bush Administration and its minions. Those minions continue to be the governments of Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia and others, with unfortunately Australia shadowing that group of minions."

During the long election campaign just concluded with Rudd Labor's sweeping victory, Rudd tried to make a virtue of his conservatism, and how he was much like a younger Howard. It is no such virtue at all, and on issues such as climage change and International Law, I am sure we will see this again and again, unfortunately.

Al Gore stated plainly at Bali that "my own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress."

The United States is a rogue state that must be contained and must not be appeased. Rudd's (partial) alignment of Australia with the US position is a disservice to both the people of Australia and the world community.

The former Howard government's position on climate change was incredibly backward: it refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol and effectively denied that there was even a problem for ten long years. At least Rudd has ratified and talks of the need to tackle the issue. In reality, however, he is not that far removed from Howard or even the Bush administration.

Rudd will not even set a target, much less take the necessary steps to achieve the target.

WITH less than 24 hours to deadline, the crucial UN climate talks in Bali were deadlocked last night between the US and Europe - with Australia being drawn into the centre of the conflict.

The European Union demanded to know where Australia stood in the attempt by America to remove crucial wording in the draft Bali road map which calls for developed countries to make deep cuts to their greenhouse gas emissions.

Shortly before leaving Bali, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, signalled Australia would back moves by the US to remove the controversial wording from the draft. The Americans have refused to accept the phraseology, which refers to scientific advice that the developed world would need to cut its emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020 to avoid the most severe effects of climate change.

The EU's Environment Minister, Stavros Dimas, said last night that the wording was "indispensable" to the Bali road map.

"The Prime Minister lost an opportunity in his speech to commit to this range of 25 to 40 per cent," he told reporters, adding, "They still have time."

But in a thinly veiled criticism of Mr Rudd, he said that if Australia refused to back the European stand on the draft road map, the Prime Minister's signing of the Kyoto Protocol "will not have the substance we hoped for".

A spokeswoman for the main environmental groups at the conference, Jennifer Morgan, told reporters: "There is a wrecking crew here in Bali led by the Bush Administration and its minions. Those minions continue to be the governments of Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia and others, with unfortunately Australia shadowing that group of minions."

During the long election campaign just concluded with Rudd Labor's sweeping victory, Rudd tried to make a virtue of his conservatism, and how he was much like a younger Howard. It is no such virtue at all, and on issues such as climage change and International Law, I am sure we will see this again and again, unfortunately.

Al Gore stated plainly at Bali that "my own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress."

The United States is a rogue state that must be contained and must not be appeased. Rudd's (partial) alignment of Australia with the US position is a disservice to both the people of Australia and the world community.

New PM a dud on climate change

Global Warming and Climate Change: Fundamentals

Its anthropogenic (caused by human activity). Global temperature rises need to be kept to a maximum of 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels or else risk runaway warming and serious consequences. Emissions need to be reduced by between 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and between 60-90% by the year 2050.

The UNEP report said irreversible damage to the world's climate will be likely unless greenhouse gas emissions drop to below 50% of their 1990 levels before 2050. To reach this level, the richer countries must cut emissions by 60% to 80% by 2050 and developing countries must also make significant reductions.

Its anthropogenic (caused by human activity). Global temperature rises need to be kept to a maximum of 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels or else risk runaway warming and serious consequences. Emissions need to be reduced by between 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and between 60-90% by the year 2050.

The UNEP report said irreversible damage to the world's climate will be likely unless greenhouse gas emissions drop to below 50% of their 1990 levels before 2050. To reach this level, the richer countries must cut emissions by 60% to 80% by 2050 and developing countries must also make significant reductions.

Global Warming and Climate Change: Fundamentals

Howard Gone at Last

A nation of 20 million people and this was our leader? A blinkered, reactionary, unenlightened man. A scarcely reconstructed racist, colonialist, imperialist, militarist, monarchist, sycophant, bigot and bosses' man through and through.

A true man of the 50s who altogether escaped what could be called the 'Second Enlightenment'. Howard and his type learnt nothing from the Sixties. Hence issues like those mentioned above were incomprehensible to him and simply derided as 'political correctness' or a 'black armband' view of history.

He could not bring himself to make an apology to people whose children had been forcibly taken from them by Government policy. What is this other than rank racism combined with blinkered incomprehension? This impossibly foolish man could not understand that the Vietnam war was either a crime or a disaster (or of course both) - not even long after the event. One would think such folly and ignorance would disqualify him from public life, but on the contrary, he ascended the highest office to repeat the folly in Iraq.

His political success and career could be put down to two things: luck and persistence. He was, by his own admission, in the right time and place to become Fraser's treasurer, and thus in line to become leader. Following Fraser's defeat both the country and the Liberal party were (understandably) not very impressed and he thus spent a difficult decade in opposition and internal infighting. This however gave him invaluable experience and showed or developed his other key virtue: persistence. With another stroke of luck he managed to regain the Liberal leadership and then the Prime Ministership.

Narrowly winning again in 1998, his most infamous victory was the cynically crafted Tampa election of 2001. Another victory in 2004 over a weak rival makes up his much lauded decade-long rule. But it was nothing other than a decade of reactionary conservatism.

I'm not much impressed with his famed 'economic management'. He simply ruled in a decade of boom times. And the land bust and global financial crisis might actually make life difficult for the Rudd government. All the more notable, therefore, that Costello has thrown in the towel. Evidently Peter 'no ticker' Costello doesn't believe his own warnings about a 'financial tsunami' and the political opportunities that that might present the Liberal opposition in a relatively short period of time.

Jeff Kennett harshly condemns Costello: "Costello says he has withdrawn in the interests of renewal within the party. For goodness sake, he is only 50 years of age.... Well, one news conference today has destroyed that dream. This one announcement says more about the character of the man than his 11 years as Treasurer of this country."

Howard could be given credit for only two things: his gun law reform (a modest achievement); and his support for East Timorese independence. It was a confused story, but when the opportunity arose, Howard somehow was able to back independence. Perhaps he was just reacting against Keating and Labor?

David Williamson:

There are many reasons to wish Johnnie bon voyage, the most pressing being the thought of another eighteen months of television footage of his morning walks.

It’s time to say no to those daggy shorts, the horrible knees, the resolute stride towards a neo con past where Anglo man still rules the world, and the total lack of wit or spontaneity in his travelling badinage. Joy number two will be picturing the tears and foot stamping of the well paid hosts of Howard acolytes littering our press.

Any journalist who can turn a man his own party dubbed a “lying rodent”, into the Saint who saved Australia, has, like their idol, a superb grasp of slippery rhetoric which has hopefully earned them enough money to retire. These same scribes have falsely divided Australia into “Howard hating elites”, and “ordinary Australians,” without ever asking the question as to why many with the remnants of a conscience, including “ordinary Australians”, find it hard to stomach him.

The shameless exploitation of fear and hysteria over four hundred genuine and dehydrating refugees on Tampa might be a start. The ludicrous and hugely expensive “Pacific solution” might be another. The moral sleaze of the Saddam kickbacks, the lies of children overboard, the blatant and immoral pork barrelling of Coalition electorates, the attempt to deliver a cowed and cheap workforce to employers without a mandate, the constant and unrelenting grovelling to George Bush, the deathbed conversion to climate change and reconciliation lite - the list could go on.... Many would like a return to simple decency, and Rudd patently has more of it than Howard.

David Williamson again:

The Coalition over its years of rule has progressively abandoned any moral dimension in its quest to retain power. We saw racist dog whistling on every possible occasion, brutal treatment of genuine refugees, studied blindness over the Saddam bribes, shameless pork barrelling in Coalition electorates, obsequious deference to George Bush, and in what proved to be one ideological bridge too far, Howard indulging his lifelong hatred of unions by blatantly tipping the power balance towards employers, then calling it, in true Orwellian fashion, Work Choices....

Many commentators saw the election as a race between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Mark Latham called it the Seinfeld election, a poll about nothing. Rudd as a younger version of Howard. That's a very superficial assessment, one I think is wrong. As one commentator said last week, the same thing was said about the 2000 US presidential election between Bush and Al Gore. The world could have well been a very different and better place today if the conservative US Supreme Court hadn't halted the recount that had Gore on track to win....

Morality does count, in life and in politics. I think part of the Rudd vote was due to the fact that Howard, in his selfish and single-minded quest to retain power, had pushed the sleaze boundaries further than Australians wanted to go.

Rudd will be different. If he can tilt our culture's tone to one in which fear, greed, indifference, cynicism and prejudice are a little less prevalent in our national life, then many of us will feel a little prouder to be Australians than we have in the past 11½ years.

Antony Lowenstein condemns Howard and includes some commenters with the harshest views.

Louise Newman doesn't mince words: ‘What I’m describing here is State-sponsored torture and child abuse.’

Keating, predictably, has some harsh words:

Think about [Howard's] tacit endorsement of Hanson's racism during his first government, his WASP-divined jihad against refugees — those wretched individuals who had enough faith in us to try to reach us in old tubs, while his wicked detention policy was presided over by that other psalm singer, Philip Ruddock. This is the John Howard the press gallery in Canberra went out of its way to sell to the public during 1995. The new-made person on immigration, not the old suburban, picket-fence racist of the 1980s, no, the enlightened unifier who now accepted Australia's ethnic diversity; the opposition leader who was going to maintain Keating Labor's social policies on industrial relations, on superannuation at 15%, on reconciliation, on native title, and on the unique labour market programs for the unemployed.

These solemn commitments by Howard, which helped him win the 1996 election, bit the dust under that breathtaking blanket of hypocrisy he labelled "non-core promises". Even on Medicare, contrary to his commitment, he forced each of us into private health or carry the consequences.

[Howard] turned out to be the most divisive prime minister in Australia's history. Not simply a conservative maintaining the status quo, but a militant reactionary bent on turning the clock back against social inclusion, co-operation in the workplace, the alignment of our foreign policies towards Asia, providing a truthful and honourable basis for our reconciliation, accepting the notion that all prime ministers since Menzies had — Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and me — that our ethnic diversity had made us better and stronger and that the nation's leitmotif was tolerance....

He also trod on the reasonable constitutional progression to an Australian republic, even when the proposal I championed had everything about it that the Liberal Party could accept: a president appointed by both houses of parliament (meaning by both major parties), while leaving the reserve powers with the new head of state.

The price of Howard conniving in its defeat will probably mean we will ultimately end up with an elected head of state, completely changing the representative nature of power, of the prime ministership and of the cabinet.

Keating may well be correct in this view but he must share some of the blame. The Republic issue was pushed too soon and politicised, leading to failure instead of consensus.

Bob Hawke mauls Howard: "I will now demolish those arguments, not with opinions but with facts.... As to TV advertisements and the trade unions: what an insult to voters' intelligence is Howard's "union thug" scam.... In some ways the greatest Howard myth, is his claim about foreign relations and security. Again, look at the facts: joining with his pal, George Bush, in Iraq (described by Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of the US-led forces there, as "a catastrophic failure"). It is the unanimous view of the Australian, US and UK intelligence agencies that the war in Iraq has increased the threat of a terrorist attack in our country. Thank you, Prime Minister."

Surely over the years the Labor opposition could have used some more direct criticism of the Government in the Hawkie style.

Robert Manne condemns Howard's backward, reactionary and futile war against 'political correctness', multiculturalism and reconciliation: "Compared to the harm it has done to Australia, however, [Howard's achievements] will seem relatively trivial."

Manne is also vigourous on other issues:

[The] Howard Government imprisoned these refugees for indefinite periods in appalling desert camps.... Iraq was the worst foreign policy blunder of any Australian government....

Unprecedented international co-operation is the only chance humanity now has for avoiding real disaster. Just as Western governments of the 1930s are now judged over their response to the Nazi threat, so will today's be judged by whether they have risen to the challenge of global warming. Of all Western governments, Bush's America and Howard's Australia — both of which believe that climate change can be combated by voluntary national emissions targets and yet-to-be-discovered technological miracles — will be seen by history as the most blind, reckless and delinquent.

In July 2005, the Howard Government took control of the Senate. Getting what it most desired provided the foundation for impending defeat. The Government now introduced to an unsuspecting public, radical "WorkChoices" legislation. Even the name was offensive.

Howard's whole career has been dominated by his union-busting ideology ("flexible labour markets") so it is a fitting irony that this issue played such a major role in doing him in.

Alan Ramsay points out that Howard's legacy is to destroy the Liberal party. As a reactionary conservative, Howard spent years diminishing the presence of the Liberal 'wets' or 'small-l liberals' - in other words, the people with values, understandings, and principles that might be worth supporting. What's left is an unappealing collection of religious fundamentalists, neo-con extremists, neo-liberal economic fundamentalists, Hansonite racists and nearly every other kind of unaccceptable right-wing political formation.

A nation of 20 million people and this was our leader? A blinkered, reactionary, unenlightened man. A scarcely reconstructed racist, colonialist, imperialist, militarist, monarchist, sycophant, bigot and bosses' man through and through.

A true man of the 50s who altogether escaped what could be called the 'Second Enlightenment'. Howard and his type learnt nothing from the Sixties. Hence issues like those mentioned above were incomprehensible to him and simply derided as 'political correctness' or a 'black armband' view of history.

He could not bring himself to make an apology to people whose children had been forcibly taken from them by Government policy. What is this other than rank racism combined with blinkered incomprehension? This impossibly foolish man could not understand that the Vietnam war was either a crime or a disaster (or of course both) - not even long after the event. One would think such folly and ignorance would disqualify him from public life, but on the contrary, he ascended the highest office to repeat the folly in Iraq.

His political success and career could be put down to two things: luck and persistence. He was, by his own admission, in the right time and place to become Fraser's treasurer, and thus in line to become leader. Following Fraser's defeat both the country and the Liberal party were (understandably) not very impressed and he thus spent a difficult decade in opposition and internal infighting. This however gave him invaluable experience and showed or developed his other key virtue: persistence. With another stroke of luck he managed to regain the Liberal leadership and then the Prime Ministership.

Narrowly winning again in 1998, his most infamous victory was the cynically crafted Tampa election of 2001. Another victory in 2004 over a weak rival makes up his much lauded decade-long rule. But it was nothing other than a decade of reactionary conservatism.

I'm not much impressed with his famed 'economic management'. He simply ruled in a decade of boom times. And the land bust and global financial crisis might actually make life difficult for the Rudd government. All the more notable, therefore, that Costello has thrown in the towel. Evidently Peter 'no ticker' Costello doesn't believe his own warnings about a 'financial tsunami' and the political opportunities that that might present the Liberal opposition in a relatively short period of time.

Jeff Kennett harshly condemns Costello: "Costello says he has withdrawn in the interests of renewal within the party. For goodness sake, he is only 50 years of age.... Well, one news conference today has destroyed that dream. This one announcement says more about the character of the man than his 11 years as Treasurer of this country."

Howard could be given credit for only two things: his gun law reform (a modest achievement); and his support for East Timorese independence. It was a confused story, but when the opportunity arose, Howard somehow was able to back independence. Perhaps he was just reacting against Keating and Labor?

David Williamson:

There are many reasons to wish Johnnie bon voyage, the most pressing being the thought of another eighteen months of television footage of his morning walks.

It’s time to say no to those daggy shorts, the horrible knees, the resolute stride towards a neo con past where Anglo man still rules the world, and the total lack of wit or spontaneity in his travelling badinage. Joy number two will be picturing the tears and foot stamping of the well paid hosts of Howard acolytes littering our press.

Any journalist who can turn a man his own party dubbed a “lying rodent”, into the Saint who saved Australia, has, like their idol, a superb grasp of slippery rhetoric which has hopefully earned them enough money to retire. These same scribes have falsely divided Australia into “Howard hating elites”, and “ordinary Australians,” without ever asking the question as to why many with the remnants of a conscience, including “ordinary Australians”, find it hard to stomach him.

The shameless exploitation of fear and hysteria over four hundred genuine and dehydrating refugees on Tampa might be a start. The ludicrous and hugely expensive “Pacific solution” might be another. The moral sleaze of the Saddam kickbacks, the lies of children overboard, the blatant and immoral pork barrelling of Coalition electorates, the attempt to deliver a cowed and cheap workforce to employers without a mandate, the constant and unrelenting grovelling to George Bush, the deathbed conversion to climate change and reconciliation lite - the list could go on.... Many would like a return to simple decency, and Rudd patently has more of it than Howard.

David Williamson again:

The Coalition over its years of rule has progressively abandoned any moral dimension in its quest to retain power. We saw racist dog whistling on every possible occasion, brutal treatment of genuine refugees, studied blindness over the Saddam bribes, shameless pork barrelling in Coalition electorates, obsequious deference to George Bush, and in what proved to be one ideological bridge too far, Howard indulging his lifelong hatred of unions by blatantly tipping the power balance towards employers, then calling it, in true Orwellian fashion, Work Choices....

Many commentators saw the election as a race between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Mark Latham called it the Seinfeld election, a poll about nothing. Rudd as a younger version of Howard. That's a very superficial assessment, one I think is wrong. As one commentator said last week, the same thing was said about the 2000 US presidential election between Bush and Al Gore. The world could have well been a very different and better place today if the conservative US Supreme Court hadn't halted the recount that had Gore on track to win....

Morality does count, in life and in politics. I think part of the Rudd vote was due to the fact that Howard, in his selfish and single-minded quest to retain power, had pushed the sleaze boundaries further than Australians wanted to go.

Rudd will be different. If he can tilt our culture's tone to one in which fear, greed, indifference, cynicism and prejudice are a little less prevalent in our national life, then many of us will feel a little prouder to be Australians than we have in the past 11½ years.

Antony Lowenstein condemns Howard and includes some commenters with the harshest views.

Louise Newman doesn't mince words: ‘What I’m describing here is State-sponsored torture and child abuse.’

Keating, predictably, has some harsh words:

Think about [Howard's] tacit endorsement of Hanson's racism during his first government, his WASP-divined jihad against refugees — those wretched individuals who had enough faith in us to try to reach us in old tubs, while his wicked detention policy was presided over by that other psalm singer, Philip Ruddock. This is the John Howard the press gallery in Canberra went out of its way to sell to the public during 1995. The new-made person on immigration, not the old suburban, picket-fence racist of the 1980s, no, the enlightened unifier who now accepted Australia's ethnic diversity; the opposition leader who was going to maintain Keating Labor's social policies on industrial relations, on superannuation at 15%, on reconciliation, on native title, and on the unique labour market programs for the unemployed.

These solemn commitments by Howard, which helped him win the 1996 election, bit the dust under that breathtaking blanket of hypocrisy he labelled "non-core promises". Even on Medicare, contrary to his commitment, he forced each of us into private health or carry the consequences.

[Howard] turned out to be the most divisive prime minister in Australia's history. Not simply a conservative maintaining the status quo, but a militant reactionary bent on turning the clock back against social inclusion, co-operation in the workplace, the alignment of our foreign policies towards Asia, providing a truthful and honourable basis for our reconciliation, accepting the notion that all prime ministers since Menzies had — Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and me — that our ethnic diversity had made us better and stronger and that the nation's leitmotif was tolerance....

He also trod on the reasonable constitutional progression to an Australian republic, even when the proposal I championed had everything about it that the Liberal Party could accept: a president appointed by both houses of parliament (meaning by both major parties), while leaving the reserve powers with the new head of state.

The price of Howard conniving in its defeat will probably mean we will ultimately end up with an elected head of state, completely changing the representative nature of power, of the prime ministership and of the cabinet.

Keating may well be correct in this view but he must share some of the blame. The Republic issue was pushed too soon and politicised, leading to failure instead of consensus.

Bob Hawke mauls Howard: "I will now demolish those arguments, not with opinions but with facts.... As to TV advertisements and the trade unions: what an insult to voters' intelligence is Howard's "union thug" scam.... In some ways the greatest Howard myth, is his claim about foreign relations and security. Again, look at the facts: joining with his pal, George Bush, in Iraq (described by Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of the US-led forces there, as "a catastrophic failure"). It is the unanimous view of the Australian, US and UK intelligence agencies that the war in Iraq has increased the threat of a terrorist attack in our country. Thank you, Prime Minister."

Surely over the years the Labor opposition could have used some more direct criticism of the Government in the Hawkie style.

Robert Manne condemns Howard's backward, reactionary and futile war against 'political correctness', multiculturalism and reconciliation: "Compared to the harm it has done to Australia, however, [Howard's achievements] will seem relatively trivial."

Manne is also vigourous on other issues:

[The] Howard Government imprisoned these refugees for indefinite periods in appalling desert camps.... Iraq was the worst foreign policy blunder of any Australian government....

Unprecedented international co-operation is the only chance humanity now has for avoiding real disaster. Just as Western governments of the 1930s are now judged over their response to the Nazi threat, so will today's be judged by whether they have risen to the challenge of global warming. Of all Western governments, Bush's America and Howard's Australia — both of which believe that climate change can be combated by voluntary national emissions targets and yet-to-be-discovered technological miracles — will be seen by history as the most blind, reckless and delinquent.

In July 2005, the Howard Government took control of the Senate. Getting what it most desired provided the foundation for impending defeat. The Government now introduced to an unsuspecting public, radical "WorkChoices" legislation. Even the name was offensive.

Howard's whole career has been dominated by his union-busting ideology ("flexible labour markets") so it is a fitting irony that this issue played such a major role in doing him in.

Alan Ramsay points out that Howard's legacy is to destroy the Liberal party. As a reactionary conservative, Howard spent years diminishing the presence of the Liberal 'wets' or 'small-l liberals' - in other words, the people with values, understandings, and principles that might be worth supporting. What's left is an unappealing collection of religious fundamentalists, neo-con extremists, neo-liberal economic fundamentalists, Hansonite racists and nearly every other kind of unaccceptable right-wing political formation.

Howard Gone at Last

Debnam breaks ranks on Kyoto - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Debnam breaks ranks on Kyoto - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "Former New South Wales Liberal leader Peter Debnam has broken ranks with the Federal Coalition, saying the Kyoto protocol should have been ratified long ago. The New South Wales Opposition energy spokesman has told an energy conference clean coal is an oxymoron and nuclear power is not a realistic option for Australia. The Federal Coalition has refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change and insists nuclear energy must be considered. Mr Debnam says Australia has to grab clean sustainable energy strategies. 'In Australia we've been distracted by vested interests and by everything else imaginable, including the prolonged Kyoto debate,' he said. 'I wish we had ratified Kyoto long ago and then we could have led the world with bold initiatives in clean energy.' Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd says Mr Debnam's comments show that the Coalition is out of touch on climate change. 'We have people like Peter Debnam say ratification of protocol of the Kyoto protocol's the right way to go,' he said. '[But] Mr Howard, Mr Costello, Mr Turnbull [are] out there in denial land.'"

Debnam breaks ranks on Kyoto - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "Former New South Wales Liberal leader Peter Debnam has broken ranks with the Federal Coalition, saying the Kyoto protocol should have been ratified long ago. The New South Wales Opposition energy spokesman has told an energy conference clean coal is an oxymoron and nuclear power is not a realistic option for Australia. The Federal Coalition has refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change and insists nuclear energy must be considered. Mr Debnam says Australia has to grab clean sustainable energy strategies. 'In Australia we've been distracted by vested interests and by everything else imaginable, including the prolonged Kyoto debate,' he said. 'I wish we had ratified Kyoto long ago and then we could have led the world with bold initiatives in clean energy.' Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd says Mr Debnam's comments show that the Coalition is out of touch on climate change. 'We have people like Peter Debnam say ratification of protocol of the Kyoto protocol's the right way to go,' he said. '[But] Mr Howard, Mr Costello, Mr Turnbull [are] out there in denial land.'"

Debnam breaks ranks on Kyoto - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Global Financial Tsunami

Howard responds to expected interest rate rise: "Yesterday [PM Howard] seized on the economic fallout in the United States from the subprime mortgage market meltdown as another reason people should not vote for Labor. He singled out the resignations of the Citigroup chairman, Charles Prince, and Merrill Lynch chief executive, Stan O'Neal, after their banks reported heavy losses. 'This has ramifications around the world,' Mr Howard said. 'We have a strong economy but events around the world and some domestic events are presenting new challenges.'"

Earlier Treasurer Peter Costello remarked that a "huge tsunami" could engulf world financial markets, because of the US subprime mortgage meltdown and a possible floating of the Chinese currency.

These statements dont seem to have made much impression. Perhaps with the previous lies about children overboard, Iraq war, no GST and so on and so forth nobody believes or pays attention anymore to what the Government says. But for once Costello and Howard could be right. Its more than a 'subprime' crisis, its a classic land boom-and-bust, and a big one, the biggest ever. At the same time the US dollar appears to be on a terminal slide. The 'tsunami' might just become a reality.

Howard responds to expected interest rate rise: "Yesterday [PM Howard] seized on the economic fallout in the United States from the subprime mortgage market meltdown as another reason people should not vote for Labor. He singled out the resignations of the Citigroup chairman, Charles Prince, and Merrill Lynch chief executive, Stan O'Neal, after their banks reported heavy losses. 'This has ramifications around the world,' Mr Howard said. 'We have a strong economy but events around the world and some domestic events are presenting new challenges.'"

Earlier Treasurer Peter Costello remarked that a "huge tsunami" could engulf world financial markets, because of the US subprime mortgage meltdown and a possible floating of the Chinese currency.

These statements dont seem to have made much impression. Perhaps with the previous lies about children overboard, Iraq war, no GST and so on and so forth nobody believes or pays attention anymore to what the Government says. But for once Costello and Howard could be right. Its more than a 'subprime' crisis, its a classic land boom-and-bust, and a big one, the biggest ever. At the same time the US dollar appears to be on a terminal slide. The 'tsunami' might just become a reality.

Global Financial Tsunami

Blogger Awards: Andy Stephenson

I dont usually pay much attention to these things, but Deltoid makes a case that a vote should be made this time. First, some background. William Rivers Pitt delivers a eulogy for Stephenson:

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

- Words inscribed on the gravestone of Brandon Lee

It was late July 2004, and it was a hot day for Seattle. The park was filled with activists, organizers and regular folks, there to hear a battery of speakers who had come together for this stop on the Rolling Thunder Democracy Tour. I spent a couple of hours that day in a crowded tent with election reform activist Andy Stephenson, running a teach-in on electronic touch-screen voting machines, corporate control of the vote, and what could be done about it.

I threw in my two cents here and there, but this was Andy’s show. He had thrown his entire life into the fight for election reform, he had crisscrossed the country a dozen times, he had raided the offices of public officials with camcorder in hand to ask questions and demand answers, he had run for the office of Secretary of State in Washington on a platform of reforming the way we run elections in this country, and on that hot July day in Seattle, he was despondent.

As we sweltered in the tent, Andy ticked off all the problems we were sure to face in the coming November presidential election. There was no independent vetting of these voting machines, he explained, so there was no way to tell if the hardware and software within was counting things properly. There were no paper ballots involved, so recounts were a thing of the past. Votes tallied on these machines wound be transferred via unsecured modem to central processing computers – which were basically PCs with Windows software – that had no security and could be easily tampered with. The companies distributing these machines and counting the votes were run by men who gave money to, and in some instances actively worked for, the Bush for President campaign.

I watched the crowd slump lower and lower into their seats as Andy rattled off the grim news. Meek hands were raised here and there. “What can we do about it?” people asked. Not much more than I’ve done, I could feel Andy thinking, and what I’ve done hasn’t fixed this damned situation one bit. He squared his shoulders and replied, “Get in touch with your Secretary of State and explain the situation. Write letters to the editor. Let people know this is happening. Do what you can.”

Flash forward to a cold day in January 2005. I walked the route of the Bush inauguration in Washington DC, counting the protesters and the Bush supporters who were squaring off in shouting matches on every corner. It wasn’t Boston cold, but it was cold enough, the chill in the air enhanced by the overwhelming police and military presence. I made my way down to the main protest gathering point, and there in the crowd was a familiar face.

Andy Stephenson stood off to the side, red hair sliding out from under a black wool cap, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pea coat, ruddy face downcast as he watched the parade go by. We looked at each other a moment, no words available to capture the bottomless depths we felt yawning before us, and then turned to watch the show. When Bush went by in his rolling cannonball of an armored limousine, Andy and I and everyone gathered on that corner turned our backs.

Later that night we sat together with a large crew of activists in a bar that had come to be our gathering point for post-action decompression in DC. I looked over at one point and saw Andy weeping silently, shoulders shaking as all of the frustration and anger poured out of him. Everything he had warned us about in July had happened – in Ohio, in Florida, in New Mexico – and on that night he felt like an utter failure.

Several of us gathered around him to console him. I took his hand and said, “You know, Andy, it could be worse.” He looked up at me and asked, “How on Earth could it be worse?” I looked at him with straight-faced solemnity and said, “You could be straight.” He smiled that utterly incomparable Andy Stephenson smile and laughed until he was fit to split.

That was the last time I saw him.

Andy Stephenson passed away Thursday night from complications due to pancreatic cancer. A series of strokes caused by the cancer in his bloodstream and a post-operative infection carried him to his rest. At his side were his family and Ted, his partner of nineteen years. All across the country, thousands and thousands of people who had rallied to help him heard the news, and bent their heads, and wept. He was 43 years old.

The story of Andy Stephenson’s life and death carries with it all the brightness, and all the unspeakable darkness, that exists today in modern American politics. Here was a man of rare passion, an activist who poured his life into a cause, who continued fighting for this cause even after stricken with his disease, who encompassed the death of his sister and kept working, who never stopped believing that one person could make a difference.

Still, there is that darkness. It has been said that you can best know a person by knowing his enemies. In Andy’s case, his enemies rank among the foulest, most despicable sub-humans ever to draw breath. A small cadre of graveyard rats..

Now at this point I feel I have to break off Pitt's otherwise eloquent eulogy. Ordinarily, in a eulogy some restrained and dignified language is used to respect the occasion and memorialize the departed.

Pitt's peroration:

Andy will be remembered by his friends and family in Seattle this coming weekend. We will gather, we will sing his songs and tell his stories. We will remember the life of a man who gave of himself far more than he received, who was a patriot in the best sense of the word, whose smile could outshine the stars. We will rededicate ourselves to the causes he espoused, and we will prevail with his spirit as the wind at our backs.

Andy believed he had failed that night in January. If I could have one more chance to speak with him, I would tell him how wrong he was that night. You won, Andy. You were the best of us.

This is well said. One of the solutions to the problems of humanity is democracy. Not the only thing, but important nonetheless. And if we are to have democracy, then integrity in the voting systems and the counting is of course essential. Stephenson and others were fighting the good fight, and have not failed, but like Viking Heroes, go to Valhalla because they fought, not because they won.

A Sadly No commenter provides some useful information into pancreatic cancer, which took Stephenson away:

My father hates the pancreas, as every good surgeon does. It is a nasty little organ, full of awful things and prone to falling apart horribly under stress. It is necessary to be profoundly delicate with it under normal circumstances.

Pancreatic resection is among the worst surgical nightmares remaining in this modern world, where most surgeries can be done with little bitty cameras and servos in a gas-inflated cavity. Doing a pancreatic resection requires that the stomach be sliced open from stem to stern, the entire bowel - that is, everything below the stomach - be pulled out, and then you can finally do what you need to to the pancreas.

That is, cut off a tiny little piece of it, very delicately and sloooowly.

The whole time, this requires a superhuman effort from all involved. Nurses keeping intestines in place outside of the body, monitoring heartbeat and breathing and keeping them niiiice and stable during the most traumatic experience a normal human body will ever endure. It is a long surgery, so there is a substantial amount of commitment from people who could as well just leave the room a lot of the time - anesthesiologists, scrubs.

Pancreatic resection has a morbidity rate, depending on the skill of the operating techs and the equipment available, of as little as 70%. That is, within six months, you get one of those suckers done and chances are very good you will be dead - and for good reason. You’ve had a team of tired, agitated professionals slinging around a shit-filled tube in your torn-open gut for hours on end, trying to get at the most bilious little asshole of a gland in your body and poke it and cauterize it. There are so many things that can go wrong, something not going wrong is almost cause for alarm.

It says a lot, then, that there are near to no cases where pancreatic resection is refused.

Pancreatic cancer is a death sentence, a horrific death sentence; it’s a spreading, consuming horror in one of the nerve-blood-and-flesh-richest area of the body you don’t use to screw. If you survive six months without the surgery, you’ll wish you hadn’t. It is so bad that dying horribly of massive sepsis is a step up.

Everyone knows that cancer treatment has its best chance of success if diagnosed and treated early, pancreatic cancer especially so.

Stephenson had no medical insurance, like millions of Americans. So friends of his launched an Internet campaign to raise the funds ($50,000) necessary for surgery, using tools such as blogs and Paypal.

Elizabeth Ferrari - central to the fundraising effort - is quoted by Sadly No to explain the difficulties they had with this process:

What followed was a coordinated effort to block Andy [Stephenson]’s medical care or his benefit from the medical care we could secure for him. In specific, the Bush right had its agents make small donations so they could then call Paypal with allegations of fraud that froze Andy’s account. They also called Paypal, misrepresenting themselves as the hospital to “verify” that this effort was a scam.

And it got more vicious from there. Due to the frozen funds and the confusion it caused us all, Andy’s surgery date was cancelled by Johns Hopkins. It was with great difficulty that we were able to persuade the doctor to be put Andy back into the surgical rotation. That cost him two weeks while he suffered from the most aggressive, invasive form of cancer.

[…]

After Andy was admitted to the hospital, the rumors turned into threats. A bounty was offered by the Bush right for anyone who could sneak into his hospital room. It was said he was getting a face lift. A telegram was sent just to see if it could be successfully delivered. The harassment was nonstop. And we tried to shield Andy from it, with less success than we would have liked.

[…]

Andy left the hospital and spent two weeks recovering at a friend’s house, learning how to eat again, learning how to move, weaning himself from the morphine that he’d needed post surgery. During this time, one of his supporters in Baltimore had her car vandalized – a message was sent. Shortly after he left to return to Seattle, his second East Coast hostess was stalked to her home and watched as someone tried to open her front door. His supporters everywhere were systematically intimidated and all the while, they tried to keep it from Andy.

Andy then went back home to Seattle, looking forward to a medical course of chemotherapy and radiation. Once he arrived, he found that an anonymous tipster had managed to get his Medicaid shut down. It took us two weeks to get him back in the system. Andy had anaplastic pancreatic cancer and was again forced to wait weeks for follow up care.

By this time, Andy’s stalkers had set up a website. It purported to be concerned that the funds for his surgery were raised fraudulently. Thankfully by this time, Andy spent very time on line. But it wore on his core advocates who were repeatedly attacked, defamed and baited.

[…]

As late as week before Andy died, we couldn’t keep the poisonous campaign from him. He felt well enough to log into to his email and found a multipage denunciation, supposedly being filed with his state’s attorney general. He called me, not so much in a panic. Panic was no longer a speed Andy had. He called me in despair, because he could no longer fight the barrage of hatred being leveled at him. I don’t remember what I said to him but I hope it helped for a moment.

The attack from the Bush right never paused, not even through the agony of Andy’s last days. Not at all. Even the fact of his death is being disputed. Two days after his passing, his advocates are still being harassed, still receiving anonymous hate calls, “It was a scam.” The friend planning his service was visited by two men impersonating sheriffs on the morning after Andy passed. They were there to ask about fraud, they said.

Andy’s physical death has not stopped the attack, has not slowed the hatred, has not stemmed the steady stream of intimidation.

John Le Carre famously said ahead of the Iraq invasion that "the United States has gone mad." Yes it has, and not in a funny way, in a terrible and frightening way. Not to mention Karl Rove and neo-confederacy, American political discourse in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Free Republic and the like is appalling. Not just the lies, the bad policy and arguably criminal activity of modern government - the utter immorality, the deranged, hateful rhetoric, the total disregard for truth, justice, compassion and human decency of these enablers, propagandists and cheerleaders is what is shocking. These people are cyber-stormtroopers. And they show dangerous signs now of donning the brownshirt and hitting the streets, causing real hurt to those who dare to oppose.

One of the brownshirt blogs, DUmmie FUnnie, is in the running for 'Funniest Blog' category. ha ha. Go now to Weblog Awards and vote for Sadly No to prevent the brownshirt victory.

I dont usually pay much attention to these things, but Deltoid makes a case that a vote should be made this time. First, some background. William Rivers Pitt delivers a eulogy for Stephenson:

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

- Words inscribed on the gravestone of Brandon Lee

It was late July 2004, and it was a hot day for Seattle. The park was filled with activists, organizers and regular folks, there to hear a battery of speakers who had come together for this stop on the Rolling Thunder Democracy Tour. I spent a couple of hours that day in a crowded tent with election reform activist Andy Stephenson, running a teach-in on electronic touch-screen voting machines, corporate control of the vote, and what could be done about it.

I threw in my two cents here and there, but this was Andy’s show. He had thrown his entire life into the fight for election reform, he had crisscrossed the country a dozen times, he had raided the offices of public officials with camcorder in hand to ask questions and demand answers, he had run for the office of Secretary of State in Washington on a platform of reforming the way we run elections in this country, and on that hot July day in Seattle, he was despondent.

As we sweltered in the tent, Andy ticked off all the problems we were sure to face in the coming November presidential election. There was no independent vetting of these voting machines, he explained, so there was no way to tell if the hardware and software within was counting things properly. There were no paper ballots involved, so recounts were a thing of the past. Votes tallied on these machines wound be transferred via unsecured modem to central processing computers – which were basically PCs with Windows software – that had no security and could be easily tampered with. The companies distributing these machines and counting the votes were run by men who gave money to, and in some instances actively worked for, the Bush for President campaign.

I watched the crowd slump lower and lower into their seats as Andy rattled off the grim news. Meek hands were raised here and there. “What can we do about it?” people asked. Not much more than I’ve done, I could feel Andy thinking, and what I’ve done hasn’t fixed this damned situation one bit. He squared his shoulders and replied, “Get in touch with your Secretary of State and explain the situation. Write letters to the editor. Let people know this is happening. Do what you can.”

Flash forward to a cold day in January 2005. I walked the route of the Bush inauguration in Washington DC, counting the protesters and the Bush supporters who were squaring off in shouting matches on every corner. It wasn’t Boston cold, but it was cold enough, the chill in the air enhanced by the overwhelming police and military presence. I made my way down to the main protest gathering point, and there in the crowd was a familiar face.

Andy Stephenson stood off to the side, red hair sliding out from under a black wool cap, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pea coat, ruddy face downcast as he watched the parade go by. We looked at each other a moment, no words available to capture the bottomless depths we felt yawning before us, and then turned to watch the show. When Bush went by in his rolling cannonball of an armored limousine, Andy and I and everyone gathered on that corner turned our backs.

Later that night we sat together with a large crew of activists in a bar that had come to be our gathering point for post-action decompression in DC. I looked over at one point and saw Andy weeping silently, shoulders shaking as all of the frustration and anger poured out of him. Everything he had warned us about in July had happened – in Ohio, in Florida, in New Mexico – and on that night he felt like an utter failure.

Several of us gathered around him to console him. I took his hand and said, “You know, Andy, it could be worse.” He looked up at me and asked, “How on Earth could it be worse?” I looked at him with straight-faced solemnity and said, “You could be straight.” He smiled that utterly incomparable Andy Stephenson smile and laughed until he was fit to split.

That was the last time I saw him.

Andy Stephenson passed away Thursday night from complications due to pancreatic cancer. A series of strokes caused by the cancer in his bloodstream and a post-operative infection carried him to his rest. At his side were his family and Ted, his partner of nineteen years. All across the country, thousands and thousands of people who had rallied to help him heard the news, and bent their heads, and wept. He was 43 years old.

The story of Andy Stephenson’s life and death carries with it all the brightness, and all the unspeakable darkness, that exists today in modern American politics. Here was a man of rare passion, an activist who poured his life into a cause, who continued fighting for this cause even after stricken with his disease, who encompassed the death of his sister and kept working, who never stopped believing that one person could make a difference.

Still, there is that darkness. It has been said that you can best know a person by knowing his enemies. In Andy’s case, his enemies rank among the foulest, most despicable sub-humans ever to draw breath. A small cadre of graveyard rats..

Now at this point I feel I have to break off Pitt's otherwise eloquent eulogy. Ordinarily, in a eulogy some restrained and dignified language is used to respect the occasion and memorialize the departed.

Pitt's peroration:

Andy will be remembered by his friends and family in Seattle this coming weekend. We will gather, we will sing his songs and tell his stories. We will remember the life of a man who gave of himself far more than he received, who was a patriot in the best sense of the word, whose smile could outshine the stars. We will rededicate ourselves to the causes he espoused, and we will prevail with his spirit as the wind at our backs.

Andy believed he had failed that night in January. If I could have one more chance to speak with him, I would tell him how wrong he was that night. You won, Andy. You were the best of us.

This is well said. One of the solutions to the problems of humanity is democracy. Not the only thing, but important nonetheless. And if we are to have democracy, then integrity in the voting systems and the counting is of course essential. Stephenson and others were fighting the good fight, and have not failed, but like Viking Heroes, go to Valhalla because they fought, not because they won.

A Sadly No commenter provides some useful information into pancreatic cancer, which took Stephenson away:

My father hates the pancreas, as every good surgeon does. It is a nasty little organ, full of awful things and prone to falling apart horribly under stress. It is necessary to be profoundly delicate with it under normal circumstances.

Pancreatic resection is among the worst surgical nightmares remaining in this modern world, where most surgeries can be done with little bitty cameras and servos in a gas-inflated cavity. Doing a pancreatic resection requires that the stomach be sliced open from stem to stern, the entire bowel - that is, everything below the stomach - be pulled out, and then you can finally do what you need to to the pancreas.

That is, cut off a tiny little piece of it, very delicately and sloooowly.

The whole time, this requires a superhuman effort from all involved. Nurses keeping intestines in place outside of the body, monitoring heartbeat and breathing and keeping them niiiice and stable during the most traumatic experience a normal human body will ever endure. It is a long surgery, so there is a substantial amount of commitment from people who could as well just leave the room a lot of the time - anesthesiologists, scrubs.

Pancreatic resection has a morbidity rate, depending on the skill of the operating techs and the equipment available, of as little as 70%. That is, within six months, you get one of those suckers done and chances are very good you will be dead - and for good reason. You’ve had a team of tired, agitated professionals slinging around a shit-filled tube in your torn-open gut for hours on end, trying to get at the most bilious little asshole of a gland in your body and poke it and cauterize it. There are so many things that can go wrong, something not going wrong is almost cause for alarm.

It says a lot, then, that there are near to no cases where pancreatic resection is refused.

Pancreatic cancer is a death sentence, a horrific death sentence; it’s a spreading, consuming horror in one of the nerve-blood-and-flesh-richest area of the body you don’t use to screw. If you survive six months without the surgery, you’ll wish you hadn’t. It is so bad that dying horribly of massive sepsis is a step up.

Everyone knows that cancer treatment has its best chance of success if diagnosed and treated early, pancreatic cancer especially so.

Stephenson had no medical insurance, like millions of Americans. So friends of his launched an Internet campaign to raise the funds ($50,000) necessary for surgery, using tools such as blogs and Paypal.

Elizabeth Ferrari - central to the fundraising effort - is quoted by Sadly No to explain the difficulties they had with this process:

What followed was a coordinated effort to block Andy [Stephenson]’s medical care or his benefit from the medical care we could secure for him. In specific, the Bush right had its agents make small donations so they could then call Paypal with allegations of fraud that froze Andy’s account. They also called Paypal, misrepresenting themselves as the hospital to “verify” that this effort was a scam.

And it got more vicious from there. Due to the frozen funds and the confusion it caused us all, Andy’s surgery date was cancelled by Johns Hopkins. It was with great difficulty that we were able to persuade the doctor to be put Andy back into the surgical rotation. That cost him two weeks while he suffered from the most aggressive, invasive form of cancer.

[…]

After Andy was admitted to the hospital, the rumors turned into threats. A bounty was offered by the Bush right for anyone who could sneak into his hospital room. It was said he was getting a face lift. A telegram was sent just to see if it could be successfully delivered. The harassment was nonstop. And we tried to shield Andy from it, with less success than we would have liked.

[…]

Andy left the hospital and spent two weeks recovering at a friend’s house, learning how to eat again, learning how to move, weaning himself from the morphine that he’d needed post surgery. During this time, one of his supporters in Baltimore had her car vandalized – a message was sent. Shortly after he left to return to Seattle, his second East Coast hostess was stalked to her home and watched as someone tried to open her front door. His supporters everywhere were systematically intimidated and all the while, they tried to keep it from Andy.

Andy then went back home to Seattle, looking forward to a medical course of chemotherapy and radiation. Once he arrived, he found that an anonymous tipster had managed to get his Medicaid shut down. It took us two weeks to get him back in the system. Andy had anaplastic pancreatic cancer and was again forced to wait weeks for follow up care.

By this time, Andy’s stalkers had set up a website. It purported to be concerned that the funds for his surgery were raised fraudulently. Thankfully by this time, Andy spent very time on line. But it wore on his core advocates who were repeatedly attacked, defamed and baited.

[…]

As late as week before Andy died, we couldn’t keep the poisonous campaign from him. He felt well enough to log into to his email and found a multipage denunciation, supposedly being filed with his state’s attorney general. He called me, not so much in a panic. Panic was no longer a speed Andy had. He called me in despair, because he could no longer fight the barrage of hatred being leveled at him. I don’t remember what I said to him but I hope it helped for a moment.

The attack from the Bush right never paused, not even through the agony of Andy’s last days. Not at all. Even the fact of his death is being disputed. Two days after his passing, his advocates are still being harassed, still receiving anonymous hate calls, “It was a scam.” The friend planning his service was visited by two men impersonating sheriffs on the morning after Andy passed. They were there to ask about fraud, they said.

Andy’s physical death has not stopped the attack, has not slowed the hatred, has not stemmed the steady stream of intimidation.

John Le Carre famously said ahead of the Iraq invasion that "the United States has gone mad." Yes it has, and not in a funny way, in a terrible and frightening way. Not to mention Karl Rove and neo-confederacy, American political discourse in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Free Republic and the like is appalling. Not just the lies, the bad policy and arguably criminal activity of modern government - the utter immorality, the deranged, hateful rhetoric, the total disregard for truth, justice, compassion and human decency of these enablers, propagandists and cheerleaders is what is shocking. These people are cyber-stormtroopers. And they show dangerous signs now of donning the brownshirt and hitting the streets, causing real hurt to those who dare to oppose.

One of the brownshirt blogs, DUmmie FUnnie, is in the running for 'Funniest Blog' category. ha ha. Go now to Weblog Awards and vote for Sadly No to prevent the brownshirt victory.

Blogger Awards: Andy Stephenson

First Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan or Iraq by the enemy

Explosive device may have come from Iran: Nelson

The improvised explosive device that killed an Australian soldier and injured another in Afghanistan yesterday may have come into the country from Iran, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson says.

But he admitted the Australian Defence Force had no proof about the source of the device, which was detonated in a roadside bombing in Oruzgan Province in Afghanistan.

The dead Australian soldier was a driver in a convoy. It was the first time an Australian has been killed in direct enemy attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Dr Nelson said there were 700 Australian troops in Oruzgan Province and another 300 soldiers in other parts of the country.

By his own admission there is no proof or evidence of Iranian involvement. The bomb may have been made anywhere, in Pakistan or perhaps in Afghanistan itself. Why is Nelson pointing the finger at Iran?

Is he trying to prepare the public for war with Iran, a war which must not happen. Australia, instead of enabling or participating in such a war, must join with humanity in doing everything possible to dissuade the US from such a catastrophe.

Howard and his government have been lucky in the Middle East. 5 years of devastating warfare and this is the first enemy killing of one of our own. Of course the contribution has been token and clever Howard seems to have taken care that the soldiers are kept out of harm's way.

The safest place for them would be back in Australia. What on earth are we doing on the other side of the world in an imperialist/colonialist war which is as disastrous as it is illegal and immoral? Did we learn nothing from the Gallipoli fiasco all those years ago? All troops should be brought home immediately.

The death comes as coalition forces in Afghanistan suffer their highest casualties since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001.

191 coalition soldiers have died so far this year, already matching last year's total. In 2005, 130 military personnel died, compared to 58 in 2004.

More than likely the White powers will have to pull out of Afghanistan just as they will have to pull out of Iraq.

Explosive device may have come from Iran: Nelson

The improvised explosive device that killed an Australian soldier and injured another in Afghanistan yesterday may have come into the country from Iran, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson says.

But he admitted the Australian Defence Force had no proof about the source of the device, which was detonated in a roadside bombing in Oruzgan Province in Afghanistan.

The dead Australian soldier was a driver in a convoy. It was the first time an Australian has been killed in direct enemy attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Dr Nelson said there were 700 Australian troops in Oruzgan Province and another 300 soldiers in other parts of the country.

By his own admission there is no proof or evidence of Iranian involvement. The bomb may have been made anywhere, in Pakistan or perhaps in Afghanistan itself. Why is Nelson pointing the finger at Iran?

Is he trying to prepare the public for war with Iran, a war which must not happen. Australia, instead of enabling or participating in such a war, must join with humanity in doing everything possible to dissuade the US from such a catastrophe.

Howard and his government have been lucky in the Middle East. 5 years of devastating warfare and this is the first enemy killing of one of our own. Of course the contribution has been token and clever Howard seems to have taken care that the soldiers are kept out of harm's way.

The safest place for them would be back in Australia. What on earth are we doing on the other side of the world in an imperialist/colonialist war which is as disastrous as it is illegal and immoral? Did we learn nothing from the Gallipoli fiasco all those years ago? All troops should be brought home immediately.

The death comes as coalition forces in Afghanistan suffer their highest casualties since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001.

191 coalition soldiers have died so far this year, already matching last year's total. In 2005, 130 military personnel died, compared to 58 in 2004.

More than likely the White powers will have to pull out of Afghanistan just as they will have to pull out of Iraq.

First Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan or Iraq by the enemy

All quiet on the leadership front as our troops die in faraway lands

Simon Jenkins has a little fun at the expense of the vile doctrine of 'liberal interventionism' or 'humanitarian war':

Amid the past week’s political sound and fury, one subject slid unnoticed under the platform. Britain is at war. Its soldiers are fighting and dying in two distant lands. Foreign policy, once the stuff of national debate, is consigned to cliché and platitude.

With casualties mounting in Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians dare not mention it, let alone disagree. The prime minister declared to his party conference in Bournemouth that “the message should go out to anyone facing persecution anywhere from Burma to Zimbabwe . . . we will not rest”. Britain will defend the oppressed anywhere in the world. Unfortunately Britain is doing nothing in Burma or Zimbabwe, while the message from Iraq and Afghanistan is that Britain chooses bad wars at America’s behest in which it gets beaten.

All the airbrushing in the world will not remove the greatest legacy that Tony Blair left his successors, that of “liberal interventionism”. Never articulated except in a confused speech in Chicago in 1999, it asserted Britain’s right to meddle in any country to which it took offence, under the rubric of “humanitarian just war”.

Nothing that Brown and his foreign secretary, David Miliband, said at their party conference indicated a change of direction. Nor did they say anything to which David Cameron and his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, could risk taking exception. Blair’s wars, unprovoked by any threat to Britain, passed uncontested at the conferences, though the polls say they are highly unpopular.

In Brown’s case, Iraq has heavily qualified his core support within the Labour party. He went to Washington on taking office and received firm instructions not to quit Basra. Last week, in choosing to stay at the airbase (while pretending to “withdraw” troops), he disagreed with his generals and obeyed the White House. Brown has to engineer a retreat from Iraq to the beat of an American drum.

In Afghanistan British policy has detached itself from reality. Brown wants to “defeat the Taliban” and eradicate the poppy crop. He cannot do either. Indeed his supposed ally in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, is negotiating with the Taliban and has a government stuffed with drug lords.

For his part Cameron has been trapped into avoiding the government’s most vulnerable flank, its subservience to Washington.

In spite of the disasters of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we can only expect that this will continue until imperialism, militarism and colonialism is completely rooted out of the UK. The UK and its armed forces may have to be dismantled for this to happen.

Simon Jenkins has a little fun at the expense of the vile doctrine of 'liberal interventionism' or 'humanitarian war':

Amid the past week’s political sound and fury, one subject slid unnoticed under the platform. Britain is at war. Its soldiers are fighting and dying in two distant lands. Foreign policy, once the stuff of national debate, is consigned to cliché and platitude.

With casualties mounting in Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians dare not mention it, let alone disagree. The prime minister declared to his party conference in Bournemouth that “the message should go out to anyone facing persecution anywhere from Burma to Zimbabwe . . . we will not rest”. Britain will defend the oppressed anywhere in the world. Unfortunately Britain is doing nothing in Burma or Zimbabwe, while the message from Iraq and Afghanistan is that Britain chooses bad wars at America’s behest in which it gets beaten.

All the airbrushing in the world will not remove the greatest legacy that Tony Blair left his successors, that of “liberal interventionism”. Never articulated except in a confused speech in Chicago in 1999, it asserted Britain’s right to meddle in any country to which it took offence, under the rubric of “humanitarian just war”.

Nothing that Brown and his foreign secretary, David Miliband, said at their party conference indicated a change of direction. Nor did they say anything to which David Cameron and his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, could risk taking exception. Blair’s wars, unprovoked by any threat to Britain, passed uncontested at the conferences, though the polls say they are highly unpopular.

In Brown’s case, Iraq has heavily qualified his core support within the Labour party. He went to Washington on taking office and received firm instructions not to quit Basra. Last week, in choosing to stay at the airbase (while pretending to “withdraw” troops), he disagreed with his generals and obeyed the White House. Brown has to engineer a retreat from Iraq to the beat of an American drum.

In Afghanistan British policy has detached itself from reality. Brown wants to “defeat the Taliban” and eradicate the poppy crop. He cannot do either. Indeed his supposed ally in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, is negotiating with the Taliban and has a government stuffed with drug lords.

For his part Cameron has been trapped into avoiding the government’s most vulnerable flank, its subservience to Washington.

In spite of the disasters of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we can only expect that this will continue until imperialism, militarism and colonialism is completely rooted out of the UK. The UK and its armed forces may have to be dismantled for this to happen.

All quiet on the leadership front as our troops die in faraway lands

Climate Change & Appeasement

A new WWF report illustrates the growing sense of crisis and urgency surrounding global warming, and contrasts with the fundamentally inadequate and insincere approach of the Howard Government.

There is now irrefutable scientific evidence that human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing an ongoing rise in global temperature and that this warming is having impacts on human society and the natural environment today. Of great concern is the fact that many impacts are emerging at the high end of past scientific projections. In other words, international scientific reports appear to have been underestimating the speed and seriousness with which impacts would be felt. As a result, scientists are increasingly concerned that we may be approaching a set of tipping points, thresholds where large-scale qualitative changes will occur and new processes will be triggered that further amplify global warming. The result of reaching these tipping points could be that climate change becomes unstoppable and irreversible.

A climate tipping point may occur with global warming of 2-3oC but if warming reaches 3-4oC then the thresholds for irreversible change will almost certainly be crossed.

A favourite idea of the warmongers and far right is that the war against Hitler is never over, every enemy is a 'new Hitler', and anyone who speaks against a new war is an 'appeaser'. Overlooking the fact that, as John Pilger has said, the US is the Third Reich of our time (a great power bent on military aggression that must not be appeased and must be stopped), Hitler is long dead and the great crisis of our time is not the threat of Nazi militarism but the threat of global warming.

Its not enough that Hitler got jailed for mounting a coup, that he published a long book revealing his whole repugnant philosophy, that he made any number of screaming anti-semite and anti-democratic speeches, that once in power he simply murdered opponents and established a dictatorship, that he marched into the Rheinland.....

What does it take for people to wake up?

With there being no real dispute in the scientific community for many years, the Howard government has simply sat on its hands for a full decade and watched this crisis relentlessly develop. Of course there are links between the Government and the polluting industries, and the whole idea of putting the common good or the environment ahead of profits and markets is ideologically foreign.

The steps taken now are essentially 'public relations' in response to bad polling results. The Howard Government can generate no conviction in what it does. If it in anyway grasped the seriousness of the problem, chimeras like nuclear energy or clean coal would be abandoned; a carbon tax immediately introduced; firm targets set; renewable energy mandated; and many other action, including of course, abandoning the mulish stubbornness of its refusal to sign Kyoto.

A new WWF report illustrates the growing sense of crisis and urgency surrounding global warming, and contrasts with the fundamentally inadequate and insincere approach of the Howard Government.

There is now irrefutable scientific evidence that human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing an ongoing rise in global temperature and that this warming is having impacts on human society and the natural environment today. Of great concern is the fact that many impacts are emerging at the high end of past scientific projections. In other words, international scientific reports appear to have been underestimating the speed and seriousness with which impacts would be felt. As a result, scientists are increasingly concerned that we may be approaching a set of tipping points, thresholds where large-scale qualitative changes will occur and new processes will be triggered that further amplify global warming. The result of reaching these tipping points could be that climate change becomes unstoppable and irreversible.

A climate tipping point may occur with global warming of 2-3oC but if warming reaches 3-4oC then the thresholds for irreversible change will almost certainly be crossed.

A favourite idea of the warmongers and far right is that the war against Hitler is never over, every enemy is a 'new Hitler', and anyone who speaks against a new war is an 'appeaser'. Overlooking the fact that, as John Pilger has said, the US is the Third Reich of our time (a great power bent on military aggression that must not be appeased and must be stopped), Hitler is long dead and the great crisis of our time is not the threat of Nazi militarism but the threat of global warming.

Its not enough that Hitler got jailed for mounting a coup, that he published a long book revealing his whole repugnant philosophy, that he made any number of screaming anti-semite and anti-democratic speeches, that once in power he simply murdered opponents and established a dictatorship, that he marched into the Rheinland.....

What does it take for people to wake up?

With there being no real dispute in the scientific community for many years, the Howard government has simply sat on its hands for a full decade and watched this crisis relentlessly develop. Of course there are links between the Government and the polluting industries, and the whole idea of putting the common good or the environment ahead of profits and markets is ideologically foreign.

The steps taken now are essentially 'public relations' in response to bad polling results. The Howard Government can generate no conviction in what it does. If it in anyway grasped the seriousness of the problem, chimeras like nuclear energy or clean coal would be abandoned; a carbon tax immediately introduced; firm targets set; renewable energy mandated; and many other action, including of course, abandoning the mulish stubbornness of its refusal to sign Kyoto.

Climate Change & Appeasement