.
US Foreign Policy Set
To Change Dramatically
Analysis by Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service News Agency
WASHINGTON, Nov 9 (IPS) - The abrupt replacement of Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld, by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Robert Gates, combined with the Democratic sweep in Tuesday's mid-term elections, appears to signal major changes in United States foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.
A career CIA analyst until his retirement in the early 1990s, Gates, a favorite of both former president George H.W. Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, has shared their ‘realistic' approach to U.S. foreign policy and shown little patience with the neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists, like Vice-President Dick Cheney. Or with Rumsfeld, who dominated the younger Bush's first term after the Sept.11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon and led the march to war in Iraq.
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by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Phillipines
After the May 14 elections, are we any closer to the democratic society that our grade school textbooks proudly proclaim the Philippines to be? Unfortunately, the general picture emerging from the stories and the images that have so far dominated the tri-media and ordinary people’s accounts is that of a nightmarish elections and post-elections situation that has confirmed our worse fears. The farcical nature of the electoral process in this country has been laid bare, much worse than even our most dire predictions.
There was widespread disenfranchisement, vote buying, “flying voters†and innumerable delays, disruption and even failure of elections due to outright grabbing of election paraphernalia, bombing of polling places and terrorizing of poll officials and the voters themselves.
The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) has been flagrantly pro-administration. This is proven by the (more...)
by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net
.US hegemony rapidly disappearing
US economic and political hegemony has degraded further in the rapidly globalizing world. At the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz has lost control through his own corrupt crony capitalism. But his problems stem as much from Iraq as his current missteps. Globalists who fill the bureaucracy at the World Bank never were comfortable with the US unilateralist coming to their home and Wolfowitz opened the door for their attacks. That the US can no longer control the internal politics at the World Bank is a good indicator of how far its political influence has fallen. 
The 2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift
by Robert Brenner
How should the Democrats’ 2006 recapture of Congress be interpreted in the context of the broader trends in American politics over the last decades? In what follows, I will examine the development of the two parties against the background of underlying shifts in the balance of class forces in America, to read the conjuncture of 2006 against the deeper structural movements of the American polity—from the labour struggles of the 1930s and construction of the New Deal Democrats, through the Great Society reforms of the postwar boom, to the political paradigms of the capitalist offensive with the onset of the long downturn. Within this framework, I will argue that the rise of the Republican right, building from bases in an expanding, non-unionized South, 
by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Philippines
How ironic that while the rest of the world, including the people of the USA, are waking up to the Bush administration’s big fat lies about the “war on terrorâ€, Filipinos continue to be fed with the same sort of lies by the Arroyo regime. In fact the latter is in the process of completing the railroading of a so-called Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB) that is the result of high-profile lobbying as well as arm-twisting by high officials of the Bush government. A two-day special session of the Lower House of Congress has been called by Mrs. Arroyo to ratify the bill so that she can quickly sign it into law. 
by Chris Hedges
The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America’s open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy. 
A low-profile industrial revolution based on corn and sunflower seeds is being born in Terni, a middle-sized Umbrian city, situated some 100 kilometers north of Rome. On Friday 13 October, in this once-prosperous steel and chemical industry cluster, the Italian company Novamont, pioneer in the sector of biodegradable products, inaugurated the "first green bio-refinery in the world, able to produce bio-polyesters based on vegetable oil." European leader in bio-plastics based on starch thanks to its star product, Master-Bi, 35,000 tons of which already are turned out by the Terni site, the firm is raising its production capacity to 60,000 tons, or about 60% of the global market.
Compared to 40 million tons of petroleum-based plastics consumed in 
Flooded with money from soaring oil prices there has been an explosion of investment banks, private equity funds and venture capital coming out of the Middle East. But unlike the 1970s and 1990s when both governments and investors relied on international banks to handle their wealth local transnational capitalists are now guiding their own funds. That means petrodollars aren't being recycled through New York and London but through such firms as Dubai's Istithmar and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Funds are expect to hit $10B by 2007. David Jackson, chief executive officer at Istithmar says, "In 2003, people hardly understood what private equity and alternative investments really were; now every other day we get wind of another fund." Says another banker, "In the past, they would just give the money and put it in the US. Now they want to do their own deals…" 
The End of Faith:
Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris.
Norton, New York, 2004.
ISBN 0-393-03515-8. 336 pp. Cloth $24.95.
Reviewed by Alexander Saxton
Sam Harris' The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason is unusual among books recently issued by mainline publishers in that it begins by rejecting all religious faiths -- not just Islam or fundamentalist Christianity but ALL -- as contrary to reason and detrimental to the human condition. Thus far, your reviewer could read with enthusiastic agreement. But unfortunately, after this strong opener, Harris' book goes downhill as he develops four themes that become increasingly problematic and end by contradicting his starting assertion. 
Author Stan Goff, a retired 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, sounds a warning call that many of the historical precursors of fascism—white supremacy, militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization—are ascendant in America today.
Can the revolution outlive its leader?