Capitalism, like Pac-Man, can munch up anything. Control and conformism, the two Orwellian bugaboos, reckoned without behavioural psychology, which teaches that the most effective form of control is achieved by rewarding the organism, not by punishing it. Capitalism understands behavioursim as totalitarianism does not.

In totalitarian countries, there are coups and revolutions and liberation movements. In capitalist countries, there are sales.

Consumer capitalism hopes to attract consumers to things that make them feel good, to things, that, in the language of behaviourisms, are "reinforcing".


(The dark side of the system is that the search for profits leads capitalists to market things that look good but aren't good -- cigarettes, the Corvair, militarism -- and to resist discarding them as long as somebody is making a buck from them.)

Consumer capitalism stands ready to push ideas, ideologies and revolutionary strategies with the same acumen it brings to marketing perfume and defence contracts; in street lingo, consumer capitalism is an equal-opportunity whore.   more »

Five years on from the atrocities of 11 September 2001, George W Bush and the neo- conservatives have managed to turn much of Afghanistan and Iraq into desolation, full of now lifeless things.

Amid this carnage lies another, unlamented casualty -- the colossal wreck of US and British foreign policy. The authors of that wreckage cannot conceivably claim they were not warned of the calamities they would unleash.

Millions of us told them what would happen if they seized on the events of five years ago to launch what the Pentagon now calls the "long war".

Four days after the attacks in New York and Washington I spoke in a sitting of the recalled British parliament.

I warned that if the US and its allies mishandled the response, they would create a thousand, ten thousand Bin Ladens. Five years on, is that not what's happened?   more »

Over the objections of the administration and Jewish groups that boycotted the event, Mr. Ahmadinejad, the man who has become the defiant face of Iran, squared off with the nation’s foreign policy establishment.

He parryied questions for an hour and three-quarters with two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations, then ending the evening by asking whether they were simply shills for the Bush administration.

Never raising his voice and thanking each questioner with a tone that oozed polite hostility, he spent 40 minutes questioning the evidence that the Holocaust ever happened — “I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this,” he said after hearing an account of an 81-year-old member, the insurance mogul Maurice R. Greenberg, who saw the Dachau concentration camp as Germany fell — and he refused to even consider Washington’s proposal for Russia to provide Iran with nuclear reactor fuel, and take it back once it is used.   more »

The United States is about to ensure that many more individuals who are falsely accused are deprived of the single most fundamental tool they need to establish their innocence.

In the push to enact legislation dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, both the White House and dissident Republicans in the Senate intend to strip away the hallowed safeguard of habeas corpus for some noncitizens held in U.S. custody outside the United States.

Habeas corpus (literally “produce the body”) is a legal proceeding that allows one to challenge his or her detention in a court of law. It is the most significant safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment.

Someone deprived of this right — which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and has been recognized by various societies all the way back to the Middle Ages — can be locked up, whether innocent or guilty of any offense, and never heard from again.   more »

Remember the rhetoric of anti-communism in 1989. "No more lies." Well, today it is back with a vengeance. In 1956, when Khrushchev's "secret speech" revealing the truth about Stalin's rule was leaked, it set off a crisis across the communist bloc, peaking in the Hungarian revolt.

This Sunday, the fuse was lit by the leak of the Hungarian prime minister's crude admission to a secret Socialist party meeting in May: "We lied throughout the past one and a half or two years. We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening and also at night."

The scenes outside Budapest radio 50 years ago and outside state television now could be confused. Then, students and nationalists ripped up the communist flag.

Now they tear down the EU flag. Each time the regime's defenders denounced hoodlums and fascists, but each time it was the revelation of government deceit which set off the explosion.   more »

The U.S. rival and close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro used his speech before the assembly to accuse the United States of myriad evils such as helping render the U.N. Security Council worthless by robbing small nations of power.

"The devil himself is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Right here," said Chavez, who also called Bush a "world dictator."

Speaking from the same podium from which Bush had addressed the assembly on Tuesday, Chavez said "it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of."

"The hegemonistic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very existence of the human species," Chavez said. "We appeal to the people of the United States and of the world to halt this threat which is like a sword hanging over our heads."   more »