November 16, 2005
Charles Demers
Seven Oaks
This past Remembrance Day, Canadians wore their poppies with the especial pride of knowing that our military forces were busy securing the vast opium fields of Afghanistan, keeping the world
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2005.
Paris is burning, but race wasn’t the real spark
by Doug Saunders
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, November 12, 2005
In a country famous for having a revolutionary explosion every generation, this one has come as a complete surprise. It is hard not to feel strong admiration for the rioters: Spilling a minimum of blood, they have managed to awaken a myopic French society to the existence of a non-working class that had no name and no identity, that was ignored in the self-obsessions of the left and the right.
Perhaps France will one day be able to realize its revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and brotherhood, under the historic symbol of the burning car.
[A thoughtful and provocative analysis of the Paris riots, and the currents of race and class that led to the creation of an un-working underclass beyond the pale of France's social safety net.--D]
by Michael T. Klare
TomDispatch
In the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, White House spinmeister Conrad Brean seeks to deflect public attention from a brewing scandal over an alleged sexual encounter in the White House between the president and an all-too-young Girl Scout-type by concocting an international crisis. Advised by a Hollywood producer (played with delicious perversity by Dustin Hoffman), Brean “leaks” a fraudulent report that Albania has acquired a suitcase-sized nuclear device and is seeking to smuggle it into the United States. This obviously justifies an attention-diverting military reprisal. The press falls for the false report (sound familiar?) and all discussion of the president’s sex scandal disappears from view — or, as Brean would have it, the “tail” of manufactured crisis wags the “dog” of national politics.
by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
“The great lesson of the Watergate era was: However bad you think things are, however nefarious you believe the administration’s plans and actions might be, however deep you believe their roots might reach, it’s only going to prove worse as the facts emerge.”
Two presiding deities — and lively ghosts they are — continue to hover over the present administration: Vietnam and Watergate. Though the competition between them is fierce, this week Watergate suddenly surged to the fore as the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, famed investigative reporter turned imperial “stenographer” for the Bush administration, crashed and burst into distinctly Judy-Miller-esque flames.
FREE KNOWLEDGE!
Creating the Knowledge Commons in Saskatchewan
November 17-18, 2005
University of Regina
Multi-Purpose Room - Riddell Centre
Multi-Purpose Room, University of Regina
Friday, November 18
Doors open 7:30 pm
Entertainment by Del Sur al Norte, Info, Joelle Fuller, and DJ Hynx
Displays and short speeches celebrating indymedia
ID required
Tickets are available at the Briarpatch office, Buzzword Books, and the U of R Journalism School
$6 for students, $8 in advance, $10 at the door
You can help us spread the word by downloading a poster for the event and slapping it on the nearest billboard/telephone pole!
“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
— Rosa Luxemburg
France now accepts the need for social justice. No petition, peaceful march or letter to an MP could have achieved this.
by Gary Younge
The Guardian
November 14
“Rioting should be neither celebrated nor fetishized, because ultimately it is a sign not of strength but weakness. Like a strike, it is often the last and most desperate weapon available to those with the least power. Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don’t do it because either they have the levers of democracy at their disposal, or they can rely on the state or private security firms to do their violent work for them, if need be.”
‘If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” said the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Lawrence Boxall
Seven Oaks Magazine
November 2, 2005
“The primary task for the immediate future is to strengthen the unprecedented solidarity that the teachers built, both with other unions and with the public at large. In addition, we need to capitalize on the growing understanding of the interconnectedness of education, medical services and other government services as targets of neo-liberal globalization that simultaneously seeks to increase the exploitation of workers everywhere.”
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
The Columbus Free Press
While debate still rages over Ohio’s stolen presidential election of 2004, the impossible outcomes of key 2005 referendum issues may have put an electronic nail through American democracy.
“Studies have reported that for every two jobs Wal-Mart creates in a community, three are lost. Reports show the company runs local mom and pop stores out of business, breaks union drives, and pays such low wages that many full-time employees qualify for government assistance
Read our feed
Listen to the Dispatch
