be the change you want to see in the world

This is a question that many people have asked with increasing frequency of late. I am not an expert on fascism, but this website seems to have made up its mind on the subject. Its title, Project for the OLD American Century is a play on the NeoCon Imperialist blueprint published in advance of the 2000 election by Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and others.

The OLD Century site provides a guide to the characteristics of fascism and supplies links and materials in support of the thesis that America fits the profile. Make up your own mind, but I’ll leave you with this quote: Read more

I worked as best I could to ensure the election of John Kerry as President of the United States. I am a US citizen. I did my small part and then travelled to Seattle for election day. I did this not so much because I have a deep belief in the goodness of Kerry or the Democratic Party, but rather because I felt that the United States is controlled by a junta that is capable of pretty much anything. I felt that needed to be rolled back. As time goes by, that belief only gets stronger. The evidence continues to mount. The latest is recounted in Harpers’ recent article about vote-rigging in Ohio.

On election night in Seattle I sat with other Canadian friends who had travelled south for the election in the lobby bar of the Westin hotel, which was also the headquarters of the Democratic Party. I had spent the day walking around Seattle’s neigborhoods observing the election process and feeling confident we had defeated Bush. Nonetheless, we were drinking heavily, the whiskey and beer flowing fast. There was nervousness because the polls were very close. A dead heat in the crucial swing states. But the buzz in the hotel was great, and the US political atmosphere with the red white and blue everywhere was really energizing and infectious. Read more

If the rumors are true, and Britain was engaged in false flag operations in Basra and got caught, to what end would they be doing so? It just may be that the Occupiers now see that only Saddam had the capability of holding Iraq together, and inciting Shia populations in Basra and elsewhere through false flag ops will harden the calls for an autonomous region in the south. But this kind of thing never happens, does it? Nobody wants Iraq to break up, do they? To whose advantage would that be?

Yesterday I returned to academics after a thirteen year hiatus. I have been granted the privilege of auditing a graduate-level seminar lead by Dr. Arthur Kroker. Dr. Kroker is a widely acknowledged Canadian theorist, and, with his wife Mariloise, is editor of the venerable and now entirely on-line journal ctheory.

Six years ago a film took the pop culture world by storm. It was called The Matrix. Everyone thought this film was about the Internet and our virtual future. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Matrix was about the Body. The most important moment in the Matrix is the one that confused people the most. It is the moment when Morpheus and his followers locate Neo’s pod on the great biochemical power grid that supports the machine world.

Sitting in the room with the mirror, Morpheus offers Neo the choice of a red or blue pill. The pills are little trojan horse software programs. One would fix Neo so he can live a quiet life on the Matrix and not be bothered by the things that keep him up at night. The other will help him to “see how far the rabbit hole really goes.” In other words, it will free him from the Matrix and help him see the world as it really is. In the words of Morpheus, “The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

This was the key theoretical insight that drove much of cultural and political theoretical praxis in the nineties. The Matrix was the Foucauldian paradigm of power - not the power of violence and death at the hands of the King, but the power of dominant disourses and disciplines to achieve confomative compliance. As with the Matrix, deviance is dealt with as a programming problem. Read more

In pro wrestling the bad guy usually gets down on his knees at some point, begging the good guy to stop beating on him. The good guy, being good, usually relents, only to be sandbagged by the bad guy as soon as he lets down his guard.

Politics is like that as well. When one politician is saying “don’t play politics” with an issue or event, it usually means that politician is vulnerable and hasn’t come up with a strategy.

The strategy only works when political commentary can be rightly construed as gaming. The Katrina situation is no game, and Bush cannot escape criticism for real and devastating decisions taken by his administration that directly impacted the outcome of Katrina’s landfall.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, “The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana’s coast, only to be opposed by the White House. … In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana’s chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need.”

This is a very complex story of betrayal. Betrayal of half a million Americans living in direct threat of a hurricane-related catastrophe that has now been realized. The tax cuts and Iraq-related budgetary redirections have now come home to roost.

So it is not “playing” politics to insist that Bush be immediately and relentlessly held to account for his direct failings with regard to the Katrina disaster. It is simply good politics. Politics in the interest of America. Politics that aims to right wrongs and prevent further neglect and catastrophe.

It is “playing” politics to simply lie to the American people about what engineers had been telling the whitehouse for years. Bush said on Monday:

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we’re having to deal with it and will,” he said.

Holy shit. This is just about as good as Clinton’s “what the meaning of the word is is”. Bush will say he was talking about breaching (i.e. breaking) the levees, not topping them. Now that’s playing politics. And that’s disgraceful.

Hurricane Katrina