Discontented Soul

The Truth about Social Security
by Charles R. Morris
Published on Saturday, February 12, 2005 by Commonweal

The first important fact about the Social Security “crisis” is that there is no crisis. The second important fact is that the Bush administration’s proposals for fixing the “crisis,” especially its “privatization” scheme, are perversely designed to make the system’s finances much more precarious than they are now and to impose deep benefit cuts. In fact, it would be hard to conceive of a more destructive set of policy initiatives than those the president is advocating. And it’s all completely unnecessary. Here’s why...

Copyright © 2005 Commonweal Foundation

The New Politics of Capital
by William Greider

Published on Friday, February 11, 2005 by The Nation
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While dispirited Democrats stew over their party's uncertain future, they might check out an unusual cluster of progressive "activists" forming within their ranks. Some politicians with real muscle are pursuing far-ranging possibilities for reforming the economic system. Their potential for driving important change is not widely recognized, perhaps because the reformers are drawn from unglamorous backbenches of state government--treasurers, comptrollers, pension-fund trustees. Yet these state officials, unlike the minority Democrats in Congress, have decision-making power and control over enormous pools of investment capital. They are fiduciaries who manage the vast wealth stored by state governments in public-employee pension funds, invested in behalf of working people--civil servants, teachers and other types of public workers--who as future retirees are "beneficial owners" of the capital...

© 2005 The Nation

Mideast: No Peace Without Justice
by Robert Fisk
Published on Friday, February 11, 2005 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centers. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out "targeted killings" -- i.e., murders -- of Israeli military leaders.
The Palestinians have promised to end all "acts of violence" against Israelis while Israel has promised to end all "military activity" against Palestinians. So that's it, then. Peace in our time.
A Martian -- even a well-educated Martian -- would have gathered that this was the message, supposing he dropped in on the fantasy world of Sharm el-Sheikh this week. Palestinians had been committing "violence," the Israelis carrying out "innocent" operations. Palestinian "violence" or "terror and violence" -- the latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 9/11 -- was now at an end.
Mahmoud Abbas, who told a close Lebanese friend this year that he wore a suit and tie so that he would look "different" from Yasser Arafat -- went along with all this. Just which people were occupying the homes of which other people remained a mystery...

As the world celebrates the global warming pact's debut, Bush continues to pander to the energy industry

by Laurie David
Published on Friday, February 11, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

Next Wednesday, in the enormous glass-paneled European Union Parliament building in Brussels, hundreds of men and women will gather to mark the start of a new era. A similar celebration will be held in Toronto, another in Casablanca and others in Tokyo, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Auckland and Mexico City, among other places.
In each of these cities, people will be celebrating an unprecedented international treaty that's going into effect that day. It is the product of eight years of work and it has brought 141 countries together. It represents exactly the kind of broad global undertaking that idealists all over the world have been striving for since the end of World War II: a massive, worldwide plan to address a terribly pressing problem confronting the entire planet.
The treaty is the Kyoto Protocol, a collective response to the greatest security crisis in the world — global warming...

© 2005 LA Times

Getting the Purple Finger
by Naomi Klein
Published on Friday, February 11, 2005 by The Nation

"The Iraqi people gave America the biggest 'thank you' in the best way we could have hoped for." Reading this election analysis from Betsy Hart, a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, I found myself thinking about my late grandmother. Half blind and a menace behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, she adamantly refused to surrender her car keys. She was convinced that everywhere she drove (flattening the house pets of Philadelphia along the way) people were waving and smiling at her. "They are so friendly!" We had to break the bad news. "They aren't waving with their whole hand, Grandma - just with their middle finger."
So it is with Betsy Hart and the other near-sighted election observers: They think the Iraqi people have finally sent America those long-awaited flowers and candies, when Iraq's voters just gave them the (purple) finger...

© 2005 The Nation

Academic Freedom? What Academic Freedom?
by Dave Lindorff
Published on Thursday, February 10, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Amid all the controversy over the observations of University of Colorado professor and leftist Indian political activist Ward Churchill concerning the military justifiability of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, it's easy to overlook the fact that freedom of academic expression on ... university campuses is already virtually dead...
But for many teachers ... - indeed for most teachers on some campuses and all at some - tenure is a thing of the past...
Clearly, a person who has no job security has no freedom of expression. Such professors and adjuncts are no better off than the worker in a Wal-Mart or a General Electric factory - which means they have no more freedom of speech than a 12th century serf. They speak out at their own risk...
With the bloodhounds of the right getting into full McCarthy lynching mode these days, including organized groups of student yahoos who monitor their teachers' lectures and backed by a phalanx of right-wing media mouths ready to amplify any complaint about non-mainstream viewpoints expressed by teachers in or outside the classroom, the fight for academic freedom has become more than academic. Yet instead of working to strengthen this important and historic tradition not just of tenure but of the very culture of free expression on campus, administrators are caving in to political pressure and undermining both.

Manipulative Math on Social Security
by Pierre Tristam
Published on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

It would be inaccurate to call the president's characterization of the future of Social Security "inaccurate." When he said in the State of the Union address that "by 2042 the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt," the president was simply lying...
By any standard, a system that is "exhausted and bankrupt" is a system that cannot pay a cent. By all accounts, including those of the White House, the Social Security Trust Fund will be able to pay full benefits at least through 2042, and by other government estimates, at least through 2052. After that, if not a single change is made to the program (which has been adjusted numerous times over the past 70 years to keep up with evolving realities, as any government program should be), the system will still be able to pay out 70 percent to 80 percent of benefits. Bankrupt? Not even close.
The president is abusing another misconception that has the ring of gospel: That the fewer people pay into Social Security, the harder it is for Social Security to meet its obligations. Bunk...

It isn't just the number of workers paying into the system that matters. It is the kind of worker they are. A single engineer making $90,000 a year will contribute as much money to Social Security as eight burger-flippers making minimum wage. Not all benefits are drawn equally, of course. But some redistribution (the kind that rankles Republican sensibilities) is built into the system. Productivity also matters. It took more than 10 farm workers to feed 100 people 70 years ago. It takes one farm worker to do that today. It'll take even fewer in the future. Apply the same productivity principle to Social Security, and the worker-to-retiree ratio begins to look as outdated as the mule-driven plow. Yet mule math persists...
A crisis is indeed facing Social Security. It isn't bankruptcy. It is President Bush's proposed thievery, on Wall Street's behalf and with voodoo calculations, of the nation's most successful and functional government program.

Forget the UN. The US Occupation Regime Helped Itself to $8.8b of Mostly Iraqi Money in Just 14 Months
by George Monbiot
Published on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

The Republican senators who have devoted their careers to mauling the United Nations are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet on Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll. Norm Coleman's mustard turned to honey. Convinced that the UN is a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States, they had been ready to launch the attack which would have toppled the hated Kofi Annan and destroyed his organization. A report by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN's oil-for-food program, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his own hands. But Volcker came up with something else...

Will Bush Soften Rhetoric or Grow more Shrill?
by James Carroll
Published on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 by the Boston Globe

Diplomacy consists in the capacity to see things from the point of view of the other party. The triumphs and failures of US diplomacy across two generations define this truth, especially in relationship to Moscow. George W. Bush has begun his second term by declaring himself a proselytizer for American-style "freedom," and one wonders how this ambition falls on the ears of those on the far side of Europe? Especially so when practically the first headline Bush's new secretary of state drew was "Rice chides Russia." What does it mean that the first signal that Condoleezza Rice has sent to Vladimir Putin is a kind of scold?
Secretary Rice is famously an expert on Russia, but does she know the history of the tone of voice? Scholars debate the origins of the Cold War, but there is no question that the World War II alliance between Moscow and Washington first ran off the track within days of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, when Harry S. Truman gave, as he put it, "a straight one-two to the jaw" of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov...

The breakthrough in relations that Gorbachev and Reagan achieved together, and that enabled the Soviet Union's peaceful demise, was built on the mutual abandonment of the scolding voice. America's triumphal assumption that it had "won" the Cold War defined the diplomacy of George H.W. Bush.
After World War II, the Soviet Union's massive sacrifices suffered at the hands of Hitler went unappreciated in the West, and after the Cold War, the savage economic and cultural dislocations that Russia willingly underwent as the price for a peaceful dismantling of its side of the conflict went unappreciated again. With Bill Clinton, the United States glibly declared itself the "indispensable nation" while dispensing -- for example, on the question of NATO expansion -- with any need to see Moscow's point of view. The arms control regime, including what Russia regarded as the sacrosanct ABM Treaty, was abandoned by Washington, and promised aid for post-Soviet economic recovery and especially for nuclear safety never fully materialized. Now Moscow finds itself with its old adversary intruding into territories once firmly inside a Russian sphere of influence; its old adversary embarked on open-ended military campaigns in the name of "freedom" defined as a rebuke to Russian realities; its old adversary in pursuit of a next generation of nuclear and space-based weapons systems; its old adversary presuming to "chide."
Bush will meet this month with Putin at a summit in the Slovak capital of Bratislava. It could be a pivotal moment, like those in the past, but will the shift be for good or for ill? Will Bush, from the pinnacle of his moral and martial dominance, have any idea of how things look - or sound - from the other side?

Critics Say Politicians Morally Obligated to Refuse Donations
by Jake Tapper and Avery Miller
Published on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 by ABC News

WASHINGTON - While its previous owners considered adult entertainment "immoral," Adelphia Communications Corp., the country's fifth-largest cable television provider, last week became the first to offer hard-core adult films on pay-per-view to its subscribers...
While the corporations generate millions in profits from providing adult content, their political contributions are often given to those elected, in no small part, because of their stance on "moral values."
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Cable has given millions in political donations since 1998. The national Republican Party committees are its biggest organizational recipient, with donations totaling $851,000. President Bush is its biggest individual recipient with $109,000 in donations.
Adelphia has given $166,000 to Republican committees, $17,000 to conservative Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., and $12,000 to Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., one of the most conservative members of the Senate...
"Maybe the Republicans will be a little more forthcoming about it now," said Connelly. "They certainly don't have any problem taking the money from it."

Do The Math On Dubya's Social Security Reform
by Harley Sorensen
Published on Monday, February 7, 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle

As the lawyers like to say, "Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus." The rest of us have to settle for "once a liar, always a liar."
We tend not to believe people who have previously lied to us, even if one of those people is the president of the United States.
President George W. Bush clearly lied to us about the need to start a war against the people of Iraq, so why should we believe him now as he barnstorms the country in an attempt to sell us on his Social Security "reform" plan?
("Reform"? That's funny. It's more like deform. Always be leery of a politician who says he's going to "reform" something.)...

Confirming Our Worst Fears About Torture
by James Rowe
Published on Monday, February 7, 2005 by the Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)

I haven't been able to get out of my mind the description of U.S. Army specialist Charles Graner as "primary torturer" that was used at Graner's January court-martial by a former detainee and victim of brutality at the Abu Ghraib prison...
What I can't shake is that Graner was described as the "primary" torturer, meaning there were others. We have to accept that there were (are?) moderate torturers, minor torturers, plus enablers and disguisers of torture - acting in our name, being paid out of the billions being spent on the Iraq and Afghan wars and the ill-defined and limitless War on Terror.
We have to accept the reality that there are VIPs who set these ugly and destructive practices in motion and unleashed them in a part of the world where our goals and motives were already widely mistrusted. These torture planners are smart and focused men and women who used clever legalisms, creative memo-writing and, when needed, either bureaucratic deniability or blunt, unambiguous orders to make policy, but also stayed clear of what befell Graner.
Which brings us to the nomination of attorney and former Texas Judge Alberto Gonzales to the post of U.S. attorney general by President George W. Bush.
It is undisputed that Gonzales, a long-time Bush loyalist, approved written legal arguments that gave Bush the authority to evade what Gonzales has called "quaint" provisions of the Geneva Convention...

How Dumb Does George Really Think We Are?
Commentary from The Laura Flanders Show , February 5, 2005
Published on Monday, February 7, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Oh really. How dumb does George really think we are? Does the President really think we'll fall for it a second time?...

The Iraqi Elections Were Designed Not to Preserve the Unity of Iraq but to Re-Establish the Unity of the West
by Tariq Ali

Published on Monday, February 7, 2005 by the Guardian/UK

The US, unlike the empires of old Europe, has always preferred to exercise its hegemony indirectly. It has relied on local relays - uniformed despots, corrupt oligarchs, pliant politicians, obedient monarchs - rather than lengthy occupations. It was only when rebellions from below threatened to disrupt this order that the marines were dispatched and wars fought.
During the cold war, money was supplied indiscriminately to all anti-communist forces (including the current leadership of al-Qaida); the 21st-century recipients are more carefully targeted. The aim is slowly to replace the traditional elites in the old satrapies with a new breed of neo-liberal politicians who have been trained and educated in the US. This is the primary function of the US money allocated to "democracy promotion". Loyalty can be purchased from politicians, parties and trades unions. And the result, it is hoped, is to create a new layer of janissary politicians who serve Washington...
Carl Schmitt, a theorist of the Third Reich, developed the view that politics is encompassed by the essential categories of "friend" and "enemy". After the second world war, Schmitt's writings were adapted to the needs of the US and are now the bedrock of neocon thinking. The message is straightforward: if your country does not serve our needs it is an enemy state. It will be occupied, its leaders removed and pliant satraps placed on the throne.
But when troops withdraw, satrapies often crumble. Occupation, rebellion, withdrawal, occupation, self-emancipation is a pattern in world history.
At the Nuremberg trials, Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, was charged for providing the justification for Hitler's pre-emptive strike against Norway. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Jack Straw in a dock of the future? Unlikely, but desirable.

© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.

US Losing the Race to Engage Muslims
by Russ Feingold
Published on Monday, February 7, 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor

...The generous outpouring of American support for tsunami victims in South Asia is a credit to our nation, but it doesn't make up for our neglect of many other regions. That neglect has serious implications for our security in the post-9/11 world. The US is in a long-term fight against a radical ideological movement in the Islamic world, yet our policy toward many struggling Muslim nations is either shortsighted, underfunded, or both. From Somalia, where we have no policy at all, to Tanzania, where we have no ambassador (despite the fact that terrorists attacked our embassy there in 1998), the US is not rising to the policy challenge. Our indifference can create a vacuum that others - whose interests may clash with our own - can easily fill.
I suspect that Mali hopes to get some much-needed assistance from Iran. Saudi money is funding the establishment of extremist schools and mosques around the world. With a different agenda, the Chinese government is offering the kind of tangible support across Africa that creates goodwill and longstanding relationships, building roads and soccer stadiums, making long-term loans, and trying to secure access to African oil markets. Mali, a Muslim democracy and one of the poorest countries in the world, has attracted more American interest than many of its neighbors, but our diplomats still struggle to find the resources to compete for hearts and minds there. Meanwhile, other forces quietly make their own long-term investments in the region...

Trapped Like Mice: Israeli "Disengagement Plan"
by Jamal Juma

Palestine has been in the headlines of the Western mainstream media again. The preparations leading up to the elections on January 9 have given everyone enough news to cover — or rather: they have given the media enough news — to cover up what is actually developing on the ground. But it is this current situation on the ground that will, if it is not stopped in time, more effectively shape the future for the Palestinian people than any electoral process ever could.
Away from international attention, the destiny being prepared for the Palestinian people is showing its true face more clearly than ever before in the new Israeli plans presented to the public in the past few months. The Apartheid Wall, with its horrendous effects on Palestinian life and land, does not stand alone, but is today merging with the longstanding Israeli settlement policy and the creation of Jewish-only infrastructure into a comprehensive scheme for colonial domination and conquest.
An appalling plan for Palestine is shaping up behind Israeli slogans of "disengagement"; behind the British initiative to revive "the Road Map"; and behind the US drive to force through the completion of Israeli plans that finalize the Bantustanization of the Palestinian people. All three are combining to push for an end to all Palestinian resistance, which is seen as a pre-condition for controlling the Middle East from Jerusalem to Baghdad. The US administration in particular is highly aware that any possible chance of success for the occupation of Iraq, and for US-Israeli plans to shape the future of the Greater Middle East, depend on their ability to create "stability" for the Israeli colonial project of annexation, expulsion, and occupation in Palestine.
Among the recent plans announced by Israel, some were mere masquerades for the international media, while others revealed concrete Israeli projects. The latest modification to the path of the Apartheid Wall was a plan of the first kind. These supposed modifications were nothing more than the result of US and international pressure demanding maps that would enable them to defend the Wall in front of their constituencies and public opinion. The "new map" of the Wall represents a contorted game of numbers and definitions that has "lowered" the percentage of West Bank land stolen and destroyed by the Apartheid Wall to 6.1 percent.
But of course, as the media and political leaders praising the "new" plan inevitably fail to point out, this 6.1 percent needs to be added to the 11.8 percent annexed by the settlements and the 29.1 percent isolated in the Jordan Valley. Without even taking into account the additional land that has also been stolen from the Palestinian people for the construction of the settlers-only roads, this makes a total of 47 percent of the West Bank, and reveals itself as absolutely no different from the 47 percent that Israel intended to annex before the supposed modifications.
This game of numbers is also aimed at re-directing the way that the situation on the ground is talked about. It steers attention towards the size of the Bantustans being forced upon the Palestinian people, as if it was not the very fact that our people are being closed off behind walls that should create the outrage, rather than the question of whether these ghettos should be slightly larger. We are not fighting for bigger ghettos or for more colourful walls, but for liberation and justice in our land.
The real Israeli political project, meanwhile, can be found in the "disengagement plan" and the initiatives connected to this plan. The disengagement plan, far from being a withdrawal or giving the Palestinian people the right to statehood, demarcates in fact the full Bantustanization of our people. The rhetoric of the plan hides one of the best-elaborated and most effectively planned projects for the enslavement and destruction of an entire people.
This plan consists of four main construction projects intimately linked to the construction of the Apartheid Wall:
1. The Building of New Settlements and the Expansion of Existing Settlements
Settlements have always been at the core of the colonial project to control Palestine. The so-called "disengagement plan" claims to be about the dismantling of settlements: that is, the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip and of four minor settlements in the West Bank near Jenin. But at the same time, Israel has announced the annexation of all the other approximately 200 settlements in the Occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition, Israel is currently expanding and constructing new settlements in the Tulkarem and Qalqiliya areas, ensuring the permanent annexation of the Palestinian lands isolated by the Wall.
2. More Settlers-Only "By-Pass" Roads
These fenced bypass roads, heavily guarded by the Israeli military, are for settlers only — Palestinians are not allowed to use or cross them. These roads cut through the West Bank and destroy the Palestinian road system, allowing the settlers free access everywhere while at the same time annexing lands and isolating Palestinian communities from each other in the same way the Apartheid Wall does. Israel has announced the construction of a further 500 km of roads to reinforce this apartheid road network. This will ensure that Palestinian residential areas are nothing more than enclosed islands, totally isolated among the settlements and their road system.
3. Bridges and Tunnels
Israel plans the construction of sixteen junctions with bridges (which will be guaranteed freeways for Israelis) and tunnels (which will be controlled passages for Palestinians, guarded by Israeli occupation forces). These will be the only passage points for Palestinians needing to travel from one area or city to another within the West Bank. While providing a facade of "maximum contiguity" among Palestinian areas to the international community — after all, the claim goes, these junctions connect the Palestinian Bantustans with each other, thus providing "contiguity" — this project is in fact aimed at guaranteeing full Israeli control over the West Bank even after a mock "withdrawal" of the Israeli army. All tunnels will be provided with gates (this is already the case in the village of Habla, in the Qalqiliya district, where the Palestinian population is at the mercy of the occupation forces in order to pass to or from their village), which will enable Israel to impose full curfew over the West Bank, perpetrate collective punishment at will, and control all Palestinian life. To do so, it will need no more than sixteen military cars, one for each junction.
4. The CBIZ (Cross Border Industrial Zones)
The project of enslaving the Palestinian people, once we have been completely deprived of land, resources, trade, and livelihood, will be completed by the construction of Israeli Industrial Zones on our stolen lands that are located outside the ghettos defined by the Apartheid Wall, the settlements, and their road system. This is the key element that provides economic sustainability to the rest of the Israeli plans. These Israeli-owned industrial zones will be sites for labour intensive industries where the Palestinian people will be forced to work as exploited labour, enriching the Israeli economy in the attempt to earn a meagre living in the only way possible behind the gates of our ghettos. Israel has asked the US and Europe to fund the CBIZ, and thus to legitimize the Israeli political project, under the pretext of providing "work opportunities" for the Palestinian population. The CBIZ is also presented as a practical economic solution to a potential humanitarian disaster — after all, the argument goes, if the international community does not provide funding for this project, then the Palestinian population will be dependent on humanitarian aid (or simply starve to death in their ghettos, which might be upsetting for the world to watch). This humanitarian aid — like many other costs of the occupation of Palestine and the expulsion of Palestinians from their land — would thus have to be paid by the international community. In any case, under the BIZ plan, the Palestinian people will remain subjected, enslaved, and deprived of any possibility of self-determination.
The Apartheid Wall allows Israel to implement and link all of these policies into a coherent regime. It completes the Palestinian ghettos that have been prepared by the settlement policy and the road system. It also enables Israel to completely annex Jerusalem and to isolate it from the West Bank, thus providing Israel with a direct passage from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan Valley, while at the same time taking away the heart of Palestine from the Palestinian people.
In the light of these facts on the ground, it is obvious that no Palestinian state will be possible. It is also obvious that the continued violation of Palestinian rights and of international law remains the infrastructure of the new Israeli plans. The only future envisaged for the Palestinian people is one of ghettos and Bantustans, and a life under permanent Israeli control, domination, and humiliation.
A Palestinian farmer standing in front of the destruction caused by the Apartheid Wall in Beit Duqqu asked: "You took our country and killed our children. You destroyed our houses and bulldozed our fields and built your settlements, what more do you want? Why the Wall? ... You want to trap us like mice, you want to put a prison gate for us and start counting us as if we were some animals?!"
The Palestinian people will never accept a life lived under these conditions, where the occupation has been reinforced by the — seemingly — definitive colonization of the West Bank. This represents the completion of an apartheid system that by far exceeds the darkest times of South Africa, as it aims at the complete demise of our people.
We will never accept seeing our lands stolen and destroyed, our dignity taken away, our most fundamental rights violated every day, our holy sites barred in front of us, and Jerusalem - the historic, cultural, and economic capital of Palestine — annexed and isolated from our people. We will not surrender to this destiny. But we are asking for a response from the world to this project for our demise that is clear, effective, and immediate.
Six months after the International Court of Justice decision regarding the illegality of the Apartheid Wall, the settlement policy, and the Occupation, Israel has not given any sign that it will stop the construction of the Apartheid Wall. Rather, it has strengthened its colonial plans. International criticism has proven unable to bring about the changes that are needed. The international community has — as with all other UN resolutions regarding Palestinian rights — once again failed to take up its legal obligations to ensure that the ICJ de cision will be implemented and international law respected.
It is the people of the world who are being called upon today to defend the values of justice and freedom. The call for the isolation of Israel, through boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns, needs to get louder every day, in every city around the world. Individuals, organizations, networks, and institutions are already promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns throughout the world. The trend towards a new international anti-apartheid movement is emerging, and this is the grassroots support upon which the Palestinian people can build in the face of continued failures by the international community.
These different campaigns around the world must be begin a process that will make Israel pay a price for its crimes. Such a worldwide movement is necessary in order to end this vicious blend of occupation, expulsion, ghettoization, which will otherwise lead — as the new Israeli plans reveal when they are examined closely, away from the media show surrounding the Palestinian election process - to the total enslavement of a whole people.

Jamal Juma' is the coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign.

Paranoia Grips the U.S. Capital
by Eric Margolis
Published on Sunday, February 6, 2005 by the Toronto Sun

The film Seven Days In May is one of my all-time favourites. The gripping 1964 drama, starring Burt Lancaster, depicts an attempted coup by far rightists in Washington using a top-secret Pentagon anti-terrorist unit called something like "Contelinpro."
Life imitates art. This week, former military intelligence analyst William Arkin revealed a hitherto unknown directive, with the Orwellian name "JCS Conplan 0300-97," authorizing the Pentagon to employ special, ultra-secret "anti-terrorist" military units on American soil for what the author claims are "extra-legal missions."
In other words, using U.S. soldiers to kill or arrest Americans, acts that have been illegal since the U.S. Civil War...

Instead of being fired for the grotesque military-political fiasco in Iraq and the shameful torture scandals, Rumsfeld has just managed to create a new, Pentagon spy/special ops organization, blandly named "Strategic Support Branch," that will replace or duplicate many of the CIA's tasks...

Equally worrying, the Pentagon's new special-ops units are headed up by notorious religious fanatic, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who calls the U.S. Army "the house of God" and Islamic insurgents "agents of Satan." He warned Muslims, "my God is bigger than your god, which is an idol."
Boykin's command will now dispatch post-modern Christian crusaders to cleanse the world of Satanic Muslims and other miscreants...
Now, George W. Bush, who clearly believes he holds the mandate of heaven after being re-elected by the less mentally active half of American voters, has decided to "unleash" special forces and all sorts of irregular units, including mercenaries, uniformed bounty hunters, and mutants sporting t-shirts proclaiming "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out." These militarized thugs and video arcade Rambos are sure to run amok, dragging America's once good name ever deeper into the mud...
The second Bush administration has been taking dangerous steps that continue to curtail personal rights, further emasculate the supine, cowardly U.S. Congress, and empower ideological or religious extremists and shadowy agencies with unrestrained powers that endanger Americans at home, and all abroad suspected of troubling the Pax Americana.

Men will do more housework when women lower their standards a little, but that will never happen — because ALL women would have to lower their standards together, and give up the status game of “My house is perfect, your house is adequate, her house is a sewer.”

Women want to "own" their sphere of influence - the domestic - AND expect/are expected to shine in men's sphere too. Women will get more co-operation around the house if they forgo adherence to the stereotype of men as "breadwinners" who must buy their women's loyalty with gifts.

Actually as one who has suffered on and off because of Australian society’s stereotypical views of MEN, I have a lot of sympathy with women who are expected to be “good wives and mothers” AND compete in the “male sphere” as well. Any challenge to “gender roles” is welcome.
Sadly, our society seems to be moving towards a “scientific” view that such stereotypical behaviours are the result of nature not nurture.