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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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Tom
Paine & anti-Americanism
By John
Maxwell
This week the governing Republican
party in the US is in one of its periodic frenzies about
Bill Clinton, frothing at every orifice, dusting off moth-eaten
hypocrisies in search of ideological kryptonite to hurl at the
political Superman they most fear. The reason is that Clinton
has just published his autobiography and nearly a million people
have grabbed the book – at $35 a shot – many after
standing in queues for more than 24 hours to be sure of getting
a copy autographed by the great man.
It is a bad time for Republicans, many of
whom must be suffering from that brand new ‘acid reflux
disease’ – the only known cure for which is a little purple
pill whose side effects seem as dangerous as the
‘disease’ itself. It is also a bad time for the rest of us,
being carried along in a train driven by fools. In the meantime,
it is a serious crime to criticise the current Administration.
To do so is anti-American.
On Friday, it was 37 years since Muhammad Ali
was sentenced to prison for refusing to fight in an unjust war
against the Vietnamese people. “No Viet Cong ever called me
‘“ni * * er’ ’” he said. Of course he didn’t say
‘Ni * * er”, but, if I print out what he said, the software
which controls international email will reject my column
on some technologically impenetrable ground which, interpreted,
adds up to the ersatz gentility that prevents a spade from
calling a spade a “ni* * er,” even if he is speaking about
himself.
Ali is now a genuine American hero, as is Bill
Clinton, and the pusillanimous pantywaists who persecuted them
are now on the wrong side of the public opinion polls.
This week it was disclosed not only that most Americans (54%)
considered the Iraq War a mistake, but that a majority of US
citizens, for the first time, now believe that Saddam Hussein
had nothing to do with 9/11. So the last major lie justifying
war has evaporated.
The US mass media appear to be shocked at the
charge that Saddam Hussein might have been tortured, although
the same networks continue to replay that disgusting video of
his medical examination after capture – in itself a
clear breach of the Geneva Conventions which prohibits the
humiliation or invasion of privacy of any prisoner of war.
Mr Bush is now busy denying all sorts of
things, among them, probably, the knowledge of who in his
entourage criminally ‘outed’ Valerie Plame, the CIA deep
cover operative whose husband Joseph Wilson, fell afoul of
the White House over the ‘nuclear’ pretext for the Iraq war.
The President denies that the White House has
ever considered the idea of torturing US prisoners of war in
Afghanistan and Iraq. The several learned
disquisitions on the subject prepared by White House
lawyers were, according to Condi Rice merely
‘musings” and opinion pieces. What sort of person, I wonder,
muses about torture?
Perhaps the sort of man who spends hours on
Civil War battlefields, dreaming of a different result. Perhaps
the sort of man who can dispense with ersatz gentility long
enough to snarl on the floor of Congress, at a US Senator and
tell him to “F • •k-off.”
Perhaps it is the sort of man like Mr Cheney,
that fugitive from a Gahan Wilson cartoon, who is under
investigation in France, Nigeria, the UK, and his own country
for a variety of offences dealing with wrongful enrichment.
A Prevalence of Crooks
As the discredited witch-hunters of the
Clinton era take their last bows on the media stage, their
insouciance provokes me to remember a curious fact. Republican
Administrations over the last 60 years appear to be plagued by
functionaries with a curious weakness for getting into
federal trouble. . There have been one or two casualties on the
Democratic side but the Republicans have amassed an unenviable
collection of exconvicts and otherwise disgraced former
‘public servants. President Eisenhower’s chief of staff,
former Governor Sherman Adams, was disgraced for the then
new offence of ‘influence peddling”.
In the next Republican Administration, Vice
President Agnew went to jail, as did Messrs. Haldeman, Erlichman,
and Colson while President Nixon himself narrowly escaped with a
pardon from his successor, Gerry Ford. The Reagan and Bush
Administrations were riddled by scandals, Contra-gate, Iran-Gate
which sent Oliver North to prison, a fate narrowly escaped by a
slew of others, including former Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger, mentor of Colin Powell, National Security Adviser
Robert McFarlane, who attempted suicide and such luminaries of
the present Bush administration as Elliott Abrams, Admiral
John Poindexter, and, of course, the ineffable Otto Reich,
notorious for his connection to such terrorists as Orlando Bosch
and Luis Posada Carriles.
Reich and Roger Noriega are now
the intellectual directors of the Bush administration’s Latin
American outreach. Noriega, of course, was the right hand man of
the notorious racist and Castro-hater Jesse Helms, father
of the legal atrocity known as the Helms Burton Act. To
report such facts is obviously, ‘anti-American”
The man who actually won the last
presidential election, Al Gore, is now painted by the major
American media as somewhat demented, because, like Howard Dean,
he is capable of righteous anger.
In a recent speech which should be reprinted
in every newspaper brave enough to speak of Freedom, Al Gore
recently asked:
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What would Thomas Jefferson think of
the curious and discredited argument from our Justice
Department that the president may authorize what plainly
amounts to the torture of prisoners - and that any law
or treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment of
prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the
constitution our founders put together?
What would Benjamin Franklin think of
President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent
power - even without a declaration of war by the
Congress - to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth,
at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even
if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United
States ?
How long would it take James Madison
to dispose of our current President's recent claim, in
Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no
longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is
acting in his role as Commander in Chief?
I think it is safe to say that our
founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent
developments in American democracy and that they would
feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger
that has the potential to threaten the future of the
American experiment. |
But Al Gore may be in serious danger of being
deemed Anti-American for expressing such sentiments.
Tom Paine
It is no accident that this column is called
“Common Sense”; it is a direct tribute to my fellow
journalist and muckraker, Tom Paine, a hero of the American,
French and Haitian revolutions who dared to assert his
treasonous doctrine of the Rights of Man, of Freedom and of the
dignity of the ordinary human being who was in his eyes, not
inferior to any king in any respect.
We are at the tail end of a long panic,
provoked in their own selfish interest by people who do not care
about the wretched of the earth or about much except their own
enrichment. Few of us remember that one of the first antidotes
proposed to 9/11 was a tax cut for the rich – to “restore
confidence.”
In a column two weeks after September 11,
2001, I quoted Tom Paine on the uses of panic, One peculiar
advantage of panics, he said “is, that they are the
touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men
to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.
In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an
imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They
sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public
to the world."
For the exposure of the true character of
ourselves and our governors, we should be grateful. But
fear still drives many of us into denying what we know to be
true. Paul Wolfowitz has admitted what many of us suspected from
the start, that in Iraq we were being dragged by deception into
a conflict which made no sense and had the potential to create
more violence and unreason. Iraq, he said, was ‘do-able”
In my column written four days after
September 11, I said:
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In all the millions of words about
Tuesday's horrific tragedy, few have been driven
to ask Why? To seek the real reasons. Blasting the
visible manifestations of a cancer may achieve cosmetic
improvement, but the concealed body of the parasitic
tumour will not disappear.
Injustice is the most eloquent
recruiter for terrorism. Injustice breeds desperation.
Suicidal behaviour is almost always a desperate call for
help. People who are willing to destroy themselves along
with randomly selected groups of innocents are
speaking the language of violence, which they know their
enemies understand. Unfortunately, while their enemies
understand the language, they do not usually listen to
the message.
If terrorism is to be ended, the
factors which provoke that behaviour must be eliminated.
You cannot kill ideas by killing men. There can be no
security without justice and men become desperate when
they have nothing to lose. |
Those thoughts do not require genius either
to formulate or to understand. Yet, the so-called leaders
of our so-called free world operate as if they control history,
ignoring all the danger signs in the roads through which they
drive their intellectual Hummers.
As the day approaches when ‘sovereignty’
is to be handed over to CIA puppets in Baghdad it does not seem
to have occurred to anyone that the people blowing up police
stations have anything of importance to say.
Iraq, Mr Wolfowitz said, was “do-able.”
What has been done however, cannot be undone. The
eggs have been broken, the omelette is being prepared. Who is
the cook?
In the Muslim world the war has provoked the
most extreme passions of people who have long endured the abuse
of those who speak idly of Freedom and Democracy. The Saudi
puppet regime which has enslaved its citizens for as long
as I have been alive, is now teetering on the brink of anarchy.
The Americans, by their decision to surrender “sovereignty”
in Iraq, are in fact admitting the obvious – that neither they
nor anyone except the Iraqis can bring peace and order to Iraq.
Pakistan, roiled by the same forces let loose by the war on
terror, threatens to fall to the terrorists. And Pakistan has
“The Bomb.“
Iran waits, patiently. Turkey is considering
its options. Egypt turns over, restlessly in its sleep.
Palestine bleeds.
Eternity in a Blue Dress
Meanwhile, the same Press which considered
the Pope’s encounter with Fidel Castro less significant
than semen on a blue dress, is calmly telling the rest of us
that all is well in the best possible for all worlds. And it is
more important to deride Bill Clinton and Al Gore than to
examine whether they have anything to say which might help
prevent even greater calamity
In Baghdad, the Americans will take over the
seat of Iraq’s Government, the Republican Palace, as its
embassy, unconscious of the insult it is thereby offering to the
people whose lives it disrupted for no good reason. To point out
facts like these is to be labelled anti-American.
But, as I said two weeks after September 11,2001:
| A country which can tolerate the fact
that black people in the Bronx have the same survival
rate as peasants in Bangladesh, cannot speak about
Freedom and Justice as being indivisible. A country
whose elite members can earn as much as the Gross
National Product of Barbados, cannot export any real
idea of democracy to the world. It cannot export Tom
Paine. |
That, of course, is virulently anti-American.
Copyright ©2004 John Maxwell
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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