Bush managed to muster a solitary tear when reflecting on the loss of young lives (only American ones, obviously) in Iraq. He closely resembled a crocodile at that point.

Even quasi-sincere concern would have made him think twice before committing them to combat on the basis of canards.

Unless it was glycerine, what makes the single tear even more galling is that it followed the announcement that even more young Americans will be sent into harm’s way.

As Phil Ochs sang more than 40 years ago, “It’s always the old to lead us to the war/ It’s always the young to fall/ Now look at all we’ve won with the sabre and the gun/ Tell me is it worth it all?”   more »

How we respond to these resource pressures will determine what kind of society we shall have and what sort of planet ours will be.

The dramatic changes which will be required raise central issues regarding the logic of capitalism.

Writing from prison in 1915 and facing the likely prospect of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg in her Junius Pamphlet famously argued that humanity faced the choice between socialism or barbarism.

“We stand today,” she wrote, “between the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.”

The ecological crisis we face and the prospect of future resource wars make her warning all the more salient.   more »

Never in the history of our country has American politics been so dominated by sexually repressed men. It's that weird fascist thing. Inadequate men are so obsessed with goose stepping to glory that they're able to forget their insecure sexuality.

And this isn't just being flip. There's something deadly about a government without humor or sex -- and there’s about as many laughs in the Bush White House as the back ward of a mental hospital.

Remember how the pugs went berserk about Bill Clinton's extra curricular activities?

They spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars trying to impeach him for his private sex life (which should have stayed private!). Granted, the impact on his family was reprehensible, but we suddenly found ourselves in a Republican/Pharisee version of the Holy (?) Inquisition.   more »

When the Bush/Scowcroft/Baker faction decided to use Little George as their presidential poster boy to expand their Middle-East-based wealth and power, they didn't reckon with Cheney and Rumsfeld. They thought their boy would be personable and easy to control.

The key moment was when Cheney went looking for a vice-presidential candidate and found himself. Once they had given him the opening and he had publicly used it to aggrandize himself and his agenda, B/S/B realized that for the sake of party solidarity, they had to live with it.

When Baker engineered the coup that was Florida (and I do think one of the "perks" Bush offered as a candidate was that Florida was guaranteed ahead of time by Jeb and K. Harris), I think that B/S/B and C/R found themselves in an uneasy alliance -- goals were the same, but temperaments were different. Right there at the pivot was Little George.

It's pretty clear that Little George requires a constant stream of flattery and cajolery to keep him going, and this was to be supplied by Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes, and Condi Rice.   more »

War builds a humanitarian agenda. Throughout history, vilification of the enemy has been applied time and again. The Crusades consisted in demonizing the Turks as infidels and heretics, with a view to justifying military action.

Demonization serves geopolitical and economic objectives. Likewise, the campaign against "Islamic terrorism" (which is supported covertly by US intelligence) supports the conquest of oil wealth.

The term "Islamo-fascism," serves to degrade the policies, institutions, values and social fabric of Muslim countries, while also upholding the tenets of "Western democracy" and the "free market" as the only alternative for these countries.

The US led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas.   more »

The slave trade was, for more than two centuries, the central feature of Britain's foreign commerce - endorsed, supported and profitably enjoyed by the royal family, and by the families of sundry courtiers, financiers, landowners and merchants.

The personal and public wealth of Britain created by slave labour was a crucial element in the accumulation of capital that made the industrial revolution possible, and the surviving profits have remained a solid element within specific families and within British society generally, cascading down from generation to generation, in John Major's felicitous phrase.

In this context, the demand for reparations is a serious proposition, similar to the claim put forward by the families of Holocaust survivors for the return of property stolen by the Nazis.

Black people whose forebears were slaves, victims of that other Holocaust, are simply asking for the stolen fruits of their ancestors' labour power to be given back to their rightful heirs.   more »