1. Zoophilia: Sex with Animals

2. A New Dawn in DC? Not So Fast...

3. John Pliger: Obama Is Part of the System

4. Obama Picks Neoliberal Pro-Israel Hardliner for Top Post

5. US Car Industry Near Collapse

6. Americans Abandon Consumerism

Art as Porn? Or Porn as Art? [Source]

During last week’s FIAC art fair in Paris, police were dispatched to remove photos by Russian artist Oleg Kulik on the grounds that they displayed bestiality.

In the more lurid photographs, taken in the late 1990s, the artist, naked, simulates sex with animals. Police seized the images, alleging that the fair was accessible to minors, and brought in Yelena Selina and Sergei Khripun, owners of Moscow art gallery XL, for questioning.

The works were later returned to the FIAC organizers.

According to Martin Bethenod, FIAC’s director, the raid “shocked” the art world.

“These images have an unquestionable artistic status since they have been shown, bought, exhibited, and edited since the 1990s,” he said, adding that Kulik's work is represented in France's national art

The internet 'bottom line' is porn.

This is a given for anyone who knows the ins and outs of the internet and has stumbled across images better left unseen.

Pornography involving anything and everything can be found on the wonderful World Wide Web – from foot fetish sites to your run of the mill BDSM pictures to highly erotic images of leafy greens.

However, for all you closet zoophiles reading this, it may come as a pleasant surprise to know you can find something that will tickle your fancy not just on some sketchy forum, but on the walls of a prestigious art gallery.

During the International Fair of Contemporary Art (FIAC) which ran October 23-26 at the Grand Palais in Paris, Ukrainian performance and visual artist Oleg Kulik presented a body of work containing 30 photographs depicting the artist simulating sex with animals in various poses.

These photographs were promptly removed by plain-clothes officers after the expressed concern of the images’ pornographic nature by customs officials.

The removal of Kulik’s photographs shocked the art community which proceeded to protest the investigation of Kulik’s artwork, extolling its artistic merit.

Despite their initial appeal to zoophiles, the purpose of Kulik’s work aims to explore and discuss the limits of a human-animal relationship rather than to promote zoophilia by arousing all those bawdy gallery-goers who would certainly be the target audience for such imagery.

This is not the first time that artwork has been removed from galleries for its sexual content. In fact, it is all too common.

Artwork by the likes of Gustav Klimt and Hans Bellmer were considered highly controversial at the time of their conception and, in part, still are. The open display of sexuality in both Klimt and Bellmer’s work made the general public uncomfortable, viewing their art as amoral and pornographic.

Nevertheless, such work is no longer considered pornographic today despite the obvious thralls of pleasure displayed on the faces of Judith and Danaë, and the sexual desire dripping from the fleshy bodies of Bellmer’s numerous Poupées.

So what is the difference between Kulik, Klimt and Bellmer? Do they not all produce bodies of work that is overtly sexual in one way or another?

Is it merely the depiction of zoophilia that sets off the alarm bells? Or is it the medium in which the artwork is created – photographs being too close to reality? More...

A New Dawn in DC? Not So Fast...

Will Obama get tough with Wall Street and reregulate the financial markets in the public interest? Not likely.

Obama’s campaign got more money from banking and financial services than McCain’s (which ought to give those who call Obama a “socialist” something to think about).

And one of Obama’s chief economic advisers during the campaign was Robert Rubin, who as treasury secretary under Clinton was a key supporter of financial market deregulation, including Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

Post-election reports indicate that Lawrence Summers, Rubin’s successor at treasury under Clinton, is a frontrunner for the same position under Obama.

A campaign bankrolled by Wall Street and advised by Rubin, and a Treasury Department headed by Summers, do not look like a promising recipe for “change we need.”

Will Obama give us real healthcare reform? Not likely. Any meaningful reform of our healthcare system will require standing up to the insurance companies and other powerful industry players.

But Obama’s campaign got nearly twice as much money from the healthcare industry as McCain’s.

It is consequently unsurprising that Obama’s healthcare plan leaves our private health insurance system largely untouched, as analyses by organizations like Physicians for a National Health Program have shown. Our private system costs far more and delivers far less than the public systems used in every other industrialized country, so the only reform that makes sense is to replace our private system with a public one.

Obama’s proposals don’t do that, and they don’t even constitute a significant step in that direction.

The best that can be said for Obama’s plan is that, unlike McCain’s, it probably won’t make things worse than they already are. And here too, post-election reports are already saying that Obama’s purportedly ambitious healthcare agenda is “likely to be downsized or delayed.”

Will Obama get US troops out of Iraq? Not likely. A lot of ink was spilled during the campaign analyzing Obama’s various pronouncements on this issue, and I have little to add except to highlight two of the more telling passages in the voluminous public record.

First, Samantha Power, who was one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers until she resigned for having called Hillary Clinton a “monster,” stated in an interview with the BBC that Obama’s highly touted withdrawal plans were nothing more than a “best-case scenario.”

She added that once in the White House, Obama “will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator.”

John Pliger: Obama Is Part of the System

AMY GOODMAN: You were just in the United States in Houston. You’re back in London right now. Your response to the election of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States?

JOHN PILGER: Well, my response, Amy, is that really anyone was better than Bush and the Bush administration. Having experienced election night in the United States and then seeing the response here, I feel that it’s time that analysis and critical thinking took over and that those of us who wish to think that way, who wish to think critically, really should start addressing the—this rather manipulated emotional response.

I don’t, in any way, cast doubt on the sincerity of the way people are speaking about the election of Obama around the world, although I think the reaction that you just played from the Middle East is rather more near the realism that is close to truth. But I do think we have to consider President-elect Obama as a man of the system.

Michael Moore had it right when he said the other day, let’s hope that Obama breaks all his election promises, as politicians generally do, because all his election promises, in terms of foreign policy, are a continuation of business as usual.

And even if there is a return to what used to be called a multilateral world, I think there has to be critical analysis of the return to the pretensions of America as a peacemaker around the world. We had to endure this, and I mean endure it during the Clinton years, and I don’t think that we, in the rest of the world, ought to have to endure it now through the Obama years, so that we have a continuation, if you like, of liberalism as a divisive, almost war-making ideology, being used to destroy liberalism as a reality, because that has gone on under so-called liberal presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, Democratic presidents. And President-elect Obama suggests to us, in his promises, that he is going to continue that, bombing Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Someone said to me—in fact, I was talking to my daughter when I got off the plane from Houston this morning, and she was—said, “What was it like over there?” And we were discussing it, and I said, “Well, it comes down to, I suppose, asking an Afghan child how they feel when their family has been destroyed by a 500-pound bunker-busting bomb dropped by the United States and dropped by President Obama, as he continues that war.

I think that’s the reality that we really have to begin to discuss now, having celebrated, and rightly celebrated, the ascent of the first African American president of the United States.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, John Pilger, what sign would you look for in these early days now, as Obama begins to move to a—in a transition period, that would indicate to you that he may be—he would be trying to break, in one way or other, from this neoliberalism of the Clinton years?

JOHN PILGER: Well, it’s difficult to know. Breaking from the Bush years is going to be the first, and I suppose breaking from the Bush years means actually talking to people and negotiating. I think breaking from, let’s say, the Democratic years—the Bush, yes—the Clinton years will mean giving us a sign that the ideological, rapacious, war-making machine that has been built over many years and reinforced, as perhaps never before during the eight years of Bush, that that ideological machine does not transcend a loss of electoral power.

You see, that’s really the central issue here, that a kind of ideological consensus has been built under Bush. Now, yes, Obama has been voted in, but will that vote, will that—will a new president transcend the—this ideological machine?

Between—you know, during the campaign, there was almost nothing between McCain and Obama in foreign policy. Indeed, Obama went further. I mean, he even declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

He threatened Latin America. He, at times, seemed to be going further than Bush. And, of course, people, realists, the so-called realists, would shake their heads and say, “Well, yes, he has to do that.”

Look, in answer to your question, I think he has to—in order to show that he is in any way different, he has to start dismantling this machine, for example, going against his promise to continue the embargo on Cuba, to drop that.

To reach out to the governments of Venezuela and Bolivia and Ecuador, each of which is under attack, subversive attack by the United States; to face the reality that Afghanistan is a colonial war.

And to not let the so-called withdrawal from Iraq be a sham, that it leaves these so-called enduring bases. That, any one of those, any change in one of those, would indicate that Obama is truly different.

Obama Picks Neoliberal Pro-Israel Hardliner for Top Post

During the United States election campaign, racists and pro-Israel hardliners tried to make an issue out of President-elect Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein. Such people might take comfort in another middle name, that of Obama's pick for White House Chief of Staff: Rahm Israel Emanuel.

Emanuel is Obama's first high-level appointment and it's one likely to disappointment those who hoped the president-elect would break with the George W. Bush Administration's pro-Israel policies.

White House Chief of Staff is often considered the most powerful office in the executive branch, next to the president.

One of the most influential politicians and fundraisers in his party, Emanuel accompanied Obama to a meeting of AIPAC's executive board just after the Illinois senator had addressed the pro-Israel lobby's conference last June.

In Congress, Emanuel has been a consistent and vocal pro-Israel hardliner, sometimes more so than President Bush. In June 2003, for example, he signed a letter criticizing Bush for being insufficiently supportive of Israel.

"We were deeply dismayed to hear your criticism of Israel for fighting acts of terror," Emanuel, along with 33 other Democrats wrote to Bush.

The letter said that Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian political leaders "was clearly justified as an application of Israel's right to self-defense."

In July 2006, Emanuel was one of several members who called for the cancellation of a speech to Congress by visiting Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki because al-Maliki had criticized Israel's bombing of Lebanon.

Emanuel called the Lebanese and Palestinian governments "totalitarian entities with militias and terrorists acting as democracies" in a 19 July 2006 speech supporting a House resolution backing Israel's bombing of both countries that caused thousands of civilian victims.

US Car Industry Near Collapse

General Motors (GM) and Ford Motor (F) report quarterly financial results Friday — almost certainly huge losses — but more telling will be how fast the automakers are burning through their cash hoards.

The cash-burn numbers will signal the likelihood of the until-recently unthinkable: a Detroit automaker filing for bankruptcy-court protection to try to survive — or simply going out of business.

"It just feels like a matter of time" until one company makes such a dramatic move, says Kevin Tynan, an analyst at Argus Research.

That includes Chrysler, 80.1%-owned by private investment company Cerberus Capital Management and thus not required to disclose profits and losses.

Germany's Daimler, which owns the other 19.9%, valued the stake at just $268 million in June and recently wrote it down in the third quarter to $0.

The numbers show the traditional American auto industry is near collapse — so close that industry and labor heads have been pleading for a federal bailout to survive.

Detroit auto executives and the head of the United Auto Workers union met Thursday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to ask for broader access to low-interest federal loans.

While Americans have been distracted by how to pay for $4 gasoline, or how to retire on 401(k)s that some now bitterly joke have shrunk to 201(k)s, or how to fix the roof when the bank won't cough up a home-equity loan, America's already staggering industrial icons — the Detroit 3 — have been hammered by disappearing sales.

"The plunge in consumer confidence coupled with the difficulty in obtaining credit has caused the near collapse of the auto market in recent months," Troy Clarke, president of GM's North America operations, says. "This may be the most crucial time in the history of our industry."

New vehicle sales have tumbled to a level that, adjusted for population growth, hasn't been this low since just after World War II, an "unsustainably weak level," says Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis.

Americans Abandon Consumerism

New signs piled up Thursday that the ailing economy is taking another turn for the worse, with a mounting toll on ordinary Americans.

Retailers reported the worst October sales figures since at least 1971, a grim harbinger for the holiday shopping season.

The report sent stocks lower for a second straight day, handing the Dow Jones index its biggest two-day percentage loss since Wall Street's October 1987 collapse.

Another dose of bad news is expected today, when the government reports on unemployment for October. Economists estimate that 200,000 or more jobs disappeared last month, about double the average this year. That would bring job losses to about 1 million in 2008.

"This is probably just beginning for the average worker and consumer," said Ed Leamer, director of UCLA's Anderson Forecast, who predicts that large job losses are likely to continue for five or six months.

"The consumer is going to do some serious belt tightening, which means that businesses won't sell as much and that means employment is going to be cut," Leamer said.

Americans are already reining in their spending. Sales at major chain stores surveyed fell by 0.9% last month compared with October 2007 -- and by 4.2% if discount king Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is excluded, the International Council of Shopping Centers said.

"These are awful numbers," said Michael Niemira, the council's chief economist. "All this concern about the financial markets caused consumers basically to freeze up any purchase that had a whiff of discretionary spending."