BY SHAYNE NELSON
DISPATCH FROM PARIS ///•\ Dateline: 28 June 2007

Very few people today connect the brilliant strategies of Charles de Gaulle with today’s situation in France, but unless I’m mistaken, there’s a direct link. Not only does the major Paris airport bear the General’s name, but the political climate still suffers, I believe, from one of his major coups.

Back in the early Sixties, (I believe it was ‘61) the powers that be approached de Gaulle asking him to take the reins of the sovereign nation of France. The general hedged, and hesitated, and played hard to get, then finally said he’d only do so on three conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

BY PHIL ROCKSTROH

A sprawling Mcmansion under construction. The styles increasingly resemble “bourgeois castles,” the compulsion to “ape one’s betters” so typical of those who need to flaunt their wealth to reassure their own sense of self-worth. Cost to the environment is also much larger than in normal construction.

In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent’s Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality — disappeared — by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being “scraped” from the landscape as an infestation of bloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as the dreams of petty tyrants.

In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as mcmansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of widespread suffering. Read the rest of this entry »

BY JASON MILLER
Sculpture: “The Id” by TJ Dixon and James Nelson
Dateline: 6/24/07
NOTE TO OUR READERS: We will be most grateful if you also pay attention to our special note at the end of this feature. Thank you. —The Editors.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.–Sigmund Freud

Frightening as it may be, the Earth’s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTICE TO OUR READERS: THE EDITORS WILL BE GRATEFUL FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO A SPECIAL MESSAGE AT THE END OF THIS FEATURE. THANK YOU. WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY SiCKO by clicking here. Broadband required.

We know what the diagnosis is and what needs to be done. Now the question is whether the American public has what it takes to drive the con men and other crooks from the corridors of power.

Three reviews of this important film published in The Nation magazine.

SiCKO Is Boffo
by David Corn
Dateline: 6.21.07

In 1971, Edgar Kaiser, the son of the founder of Kaiser Permanente, one of the first big HMOs, went to see John Ehrlichman, a top aide to President Nixon, to lobby the Nixon White House to pass legislation that would expand the market for health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Ehrlichman reported this conversation to Nixon on February 17, 1971. The discussion, which was taped, went like this:

Ehrlichman: I had Edgar Kaiser come in…talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make.

President Nixon: Fine.

The next day, Nixon publicly announced he would be pushing legislation that would provide Americans “the finest health care in the world.” Read the rest of this entry »

In almost any country in the world this charming couple would be classified as simply “mainstream liberals,” centrists, but in America many insist on calling them leftists. The confusion—seeded in great measure by the zealots of the right—contributes a great deal to the troubles ordinary Americans have in sorting out what’s what on the political spectrum.

BY E.J. DIONNE Jr. | Dateline: JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Friday, June 22, 2007

Why can’t the left get any respect?

Whenever you use the word “left” in American politics, you feel almost compelled to add quotation marks. Today’s left is not talking about nationalizing industry, abolishing capitalism or destroying the rich. What passes for “left” in American politics is quite moderate by historical standards. Read the rest of this entry »

BY JONATHAN STEELE | Dateline: The Guardian (U.K.) June 22, 2007

The Hamas emblem. Hamas, or Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya or "Islamic Resistance Movement,"[1]) is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist organization. It was elected in January 2006 as the government of the Palestinian people.[2] Since the Battle for Gaza in June 2007, when it took by force sole control of the Gaza Strip, its members were ousted from its positions in the Palestinian National Authority government in the West Bank and were replaced by rival Fatah members.

Washington’s fingerprints are all over the chaos that has hit Palestinians. The last thing they now need is an envoy called Blair

Did they jump or were they pushed? Was Hamas’s seizure of Fatah security offices in Gaza unprovoked, or a pre-emptive strike to forestall a coup by Fatah? After last week’s turmoil, it becomes increasingly important to uncover its origins. The fundamental cause is, of course, well known. Israel, aided by the US, was not prepared to accept Hamas’s victory in last year’s Palestinian elections. Backed by a supine EU, the two governments decided to boycott their new Palestinian counterparts politically and punish Palestinian voters by blocking economic aid. Their policies had a dramatic effect, turning Gaza even more starkly into an open prison and creating human misery on a massive scale. The aim was to turn voters against Hamas - a strategy of stupidity as well as cynicism, since outside pressure usually produces resistance rather than surrender. Read the rest of this entry »

THE GREAT DEMOCRATIC PARTY IMPLOSION AS A RESULT OF GROSS BETRAYAL

BY PHIL ROCKSTROH | Dateline: 6/21/07

Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public? Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It’s the world’s way of delivering the life lesson that it’s time to shed the vanity of one’s innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here’s lesson number one for political innocents: Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve the corporate elite. It’s that simple.

Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they’re entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they’re better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individual level, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means. Read the rest of this entry »

PHOTO CAPTION: The bitumen-impregnated sands of Alberta, Canada are said to rival the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, but extracting and refining it from these sandy clumps requires a great deal more energy than the light to medium crude of the Middle East. Sunco currently produces 1 million barrels of synthetic petroleum a day from its oil sand operations in Alberta, Canada. It plans to increase production to 2 mbd by 2010. Photo courtesy of Suncor.

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BY FRAN F.

I envision the history of this world being written from some time in the future. The period of 300 years, from the industrial revolution in Europe to the present, will be, I am sure, recorded as the most destructive and insane time on this Earth, perhaps only outdone by the legendary destruction of Atlantis, which we really know nothing about.

It is said that 16,500 years ago there was a great war on Earth which destroyed civilizations [perhaps Atlantis, perhaps Mu, or both] that only exist in legend now, and for which we have no real evidence. Objects keep appearing in the earth that we interpret to be very old technology: the Dropa stones, the Baghdad battery, what appear to be electric lights in ancient Egypt. Supposedly King Tut was buried with a piece of steel over his heart, although we don’t usually think of the Egyptians as having that technology. The Temple at Baalbek, the Pyramids, Machu Picchu … we still don’t know how these things were made, even though modern archeologists and engineers attempt to explain them. Read the rest of this entry »

INNOCENT ANIMALS ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE BEING CONDEMNED TO RAPID EXTINCTION ON ACCOUNT OF MANMADE GLOBAL WARMING.

BY GEORGE MONBIOT Dateline: May 12, 2007
[Note: This is a reply to Cockburn’s second article on climate politics and climate change, which, while it did not directly respond to Monbiot’s or Mann’s first reply to Cockburn’s original article, did mention Mann by name.]

People who deny that manmade climate change is taking place have this in common: they do not answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science of climate change. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply repeat them as if nothing has changed, then move on to another line of attack. Read the rest of this entry »

CLIMATE DENIER (!) ALEX COCKBURN. HIS MOTIVES FOR THIS UNCHARACTERISTIC STANCE, which makes him an objective ally of criminals outfits like ExxonMobil, ARE HARD TO FOLLOW.

BY GEORGE MONBIOT | SOURCE: ZNet Magazine | Science
Dateline: May 03, 2007

[Note: Click here for Alexander Cockburn’s precipitating article “From Papal Indulgences to Carbon Credits Is Global Warming a Sin?” Go here for ensuing debate…]

Let me begin this response with an admission of incompetence. I am not qualified to comment on the scientific claims made in Alexander Cockburn’s article. But nor is Cockburn qualified to make them.

When a non-scientist attempts to dispute the findings of an entire body of science, a good deal of humility and a great deal of research is required. Otherwise he puts himself in the position of the 9/11 truthers. Though they might know nothing about physics, structural engineering, ballistics or explosives, these people still feel qualified to assert that the experts in these fields are wrong, and that the Twin Towers were in fact brought down by controlled explosions. Read the rest of this entry »