What does the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank helm mean?

What does the flat-earth commentary of NASA spokesman David Mould on global warming mean?

There is right now an Iranian hostage crisis. Can anyone describe this and explain what it really means?

The White House and others are now discussing a “South Korean” relation with Iraq. What does that mean?

There is a sudden and disconcerting increase in US trade with Cuba… in food. What does this mean?

Anyone wishing to answer these questions, and sending along key links, go to Feral Scholar.

Thoughtful, informed analysis sought.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:11 PM PDT

The first casualty of war is the truth.

Meet IVAW (if you haven’t already).

VIDEO

Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:24 AM PDT

Insurgent American is happy to publish Derrick Jensen’s latest reflection on the relationship between the people who work for the state: those of us who support it with obedience and taxes, and those who are employed by the state to exercise its “legal monopoly on violence.”

Why people hate cops

an essay by Derrick Jensen

I’m scared to write this essay, scared to have it published, scared it will be read by police officers or customs agents, scared that the next time I’m stopped for some traffic violation or the next time I try to cross a border, some police officer or customs agent will remember this article, and will make me pay for having written it.

I know what at least some police do to those they don’t like. I know what at least some police do to those who question their authority. I know what at least some police do with the power they have over our lives. This is what makes me afraid. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:56 AM PDT

This link to a recent article by Henry C. K. Liu explains (albeit in the arcana of high finance) what a liquidity crisis is; and where it is likely to lead… soon. What does that mean for us? It means get as independent as we can, as soon as we can, of the financial-industrial grid. This is a community, not an individual, effort.

US Economy: Liquidity boom and looming crisis

by Henry C.K. Liu

Economic growth in the US slowed to 1.3% in the first quarter (Q1) of 2007, the worst performance in four years of an overextended debt bubble. Yet the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rose to an all-time intra-day high of 13,284.53 to close at 13,264.62 last Friday, rising more than 1,000 points or 9% in the same period.

The DJIA is now 82% higher than its low of 7,286.27 on October 9, 2002, during which US gross domestic product (GDP) grew only 38%.

The 10-year cycle of financial crises

The historical pattern of a 10-year rhythm of cyclical financial crises looms as a menacing storm cloud over the financial markets.

The 30% US market crash of 1987, in which investors lost 10% of 1987 GDP, was set off by the 1985 Plaza Accord to push down the Japanese yen with an aim of reducing the growing US trade deficit with Japan. The 1987 crash was followed 10 years later by FULL

IA NOTE: Michael Hudson once wrote me in an email — after I’d been complaining about how difficult it was to follow the threads of financial analysis — that leftists are not generally “wired” to understand finance… that it functions almost as another language. I’d extend his remarks to more than just leftists. Like any new language (and this one is vitally important if we are to understand power in this new eopch of exterminism), repeated exposure, from varying facets, eventually renders the unfamiliar more familiar. So here is a link to a 1998 essay — written in language very familiar to the left — by Loren Goldner, on the emerging liquidity crisis. I hope it’s helpful. This is extremely important; because the wreckage of this hyper-reified system — even if the language is cripplingly arcane and often boring — is likely to be unimaginable.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 7:08 PM PDT

Democracy Now! has an excellent long interview with Bolivian President Evo Morales. Real 256k Video stream, Audio MP3, Transcripción en español.

Posted by BrianR as Analysis at 8:35 AM PDT

by Helen Forsey

The poster publicizing David Suzuki’s television series A Planet for the Taking stated: “We have long thought of ourselves as masters of the natural world, but now that drive to dominate and control is having dangerous consequences. Can we change the way we see our relationship with the other life forms on earth?”

“Right on”, most of us would say. But wait a minute. Does that description really apply so broadly, even in our modern Western societies? Don’t most women find it hard to imagine ourselves as “masters” of anything?

I am not quibbling over the choice of words. The “drive to dominate and control” has typically been seen as a mark of manhood, and the threat it poses is far from new. For women, children, and other living things, it has always been dangerous.

The view of the universe described in the poster is certainly the one that predominates in our culture, but it is a view of reality as men tend to experience it. If we accept it as gender-neutral we are making a grave mistake.

Historians tell us that mechanistic science, which gave rise to modern industrial society, was very much a masculine enterprise right from the start, filled with explicit images of the all-powerful male mind conquering a female Nature. Women pacifists, suffragists and abolitionists have long pointed out the linkages between war, male dominance, and other oppressions. Today, ecofeminists extend FULL ESSAY AT Natural Life Magazine

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:52 AM PDT

Hat tip to De for this one.

This essay by Bill McKibben shows a couple of things, (1) that self-sufficiency in the money-energy grid is unreal and (2) that it is a community effort, not a individual-survivalist one (a decidedly male fantasy in many cases). This is an important bit of nuance for Insurgent American because we see “off the grid” as part of a long term strategic approach to a politics of resistance; not as a withdrawal strategy (and let the devil take the hindmost). At the same time, IA is not promoting one-way sectarianism and more-revolutionary-than-thou disrespect directed at people who don’t achieve line-item agreement on some program. The people who are actually trying intentional communities, experimenting with self-sufficiency, home-schooling, et al, are running our laboratories for us. The day will certainly come when the skill sets required to cope with a very “long emergency” — and the people who can pass these skills along — are in great demand. This process, however, is inevitably political… and that requires that we continue to assert ourselves into the often grubby and tedious, sometimes perilous, always contentious arena of politics. As my esteemed co-conspirator De likes to say, that means localizing our efforts. Changing conditions and self-organization will default to networking and bottom-up coordination, not like a great ship with its officers and captain, but like kefir grains that ferment throughout society. Here is Bill McKibben’s piece:

Old MacDonald Had A Farmers’ Market – total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal

By Bill McKibben

Generations of college freshmen, asked to read Walden, have sputtered with indignation when they learned that Henry David went back to Concord for dinner with his family every week or two. He’s cheating; his grand experiment is a fraud. This outrage is a useful tactic; it prevents them from having to grapple with the most important (and perhaps the most difficult) book in the American canon, one that asks impossibly searching questions about the emptiness of a consumer economy, the vacuity of an information-soaked era. But it also points to something else: Thoreau, our apostle of solitary, individual self-reliance, out in his cabin with his hoe and his beans, the most determinedly asocial man of his time — nonetheless was immersed in his community to a degree few people today can comprehend.

Consider the sheer number of people who happened to drop by the cabin of an obscure eccentric. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he writes. Often more visitors came than could sit — sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. “Half-witted men from the almshouse,” busybodies who “pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out,” a French-Canadian woodchopper, a runaway slave “whom I helped to forward toward the north star,” doctors, lawyers, the old and infirm and the timid, the self-styled reformers. It’s not that Thoreau was FULL ESSAY AT In Character

Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:46 AM PDT

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001). He has been posted here before, because he is a unique asset in his well-developed understanding of the world of international “diplomacy.”

Bhadrakumar follows up on these developments with another fascinating look inside the dynamic of a proto-bloc in Eurasia that has clearly seen the handwriting on the wall for the US, seemingly interminably trapped and isolated in its dreadful occupation of Iraq.

Russia draws Europe into its orbit
By M K Bhadrakumar

On May 9, the Chinese People’s Daily admitted, “If we look at US-Russian relations closely, it is clear that we are standing at the edge of a new cold war.” It was an assessment long in coming.

Chinese commentaries in recent months have tended to view the growing tension in Russia’s relations with the United States as the inevitable manifestation of the “pulls and pushes” of a complex, but in essence interlocking, relationship of cooperation and competition, where each side is optimally realizing its FULL ARTICLE

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:42 AM PDT

The Town of Carrboro, in North Carolina, is working with the Carrboro Community Garden Coalition to create a public garden at the “Martin Luther King Jr. Park for at least the next few years”. This is a great example of a small US town with real progressive values transforming how we live in America. (Slowly but significantly.) Lets hope the idea of community gardening spreads.

Collaborative gardening is certainly an activity that requires teamwork. Right now there are about 20 folks involved in Carrboro’s community garden effort and it’s increasing rapidly through word of mouth. McGreger said that many of the folks involved in this project had known each other before but have become much closer as they’ve worked together on the garden, and that the community-building aspect of it is as exciting as the growth of the food itself.

The group is planning to do a lot of its work on Saturday mornings but as of yet has no regular schedule. If you’re interested in getting involved you can e-mail ccgc@riseup.net to be added to their electronic discussion group.

Hamm said that their vision is that the garden project will let people see that community gardens can be “abundant, beautiful and doable,” and inspire similar smaller projects throughout the rest of the town, state and world. For instance, he’d like to see Carrboro move from this initial townwide garden to having small ones in each neighborhood all over the community, allowing folks to work in even smaller and locally oriented groups to produce food.

McGreger said another nice aspect of the process in getting the garden started has been the opportunity “to learn how to participate in direct democracy.”

Check out the whole article Making the Community Garden grow at the Orange Politics blog.

Posted by BrianR as News at 4:54 PM PDT

Hat tip to Amee for this compelling video on Women coping in Iraq.

Dispatches: Iraq, the Women’s Story

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:34 AM PDT