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. (more…)

How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America

by Zbigniew Brzezinski

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us. (more…)

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, (more…)

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 terror”, 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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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 (more…)

. Middle East investments soar

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…” (more…)

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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. (more…)

A Green ‘High Road’
for Venture Capitalists

By Andrew K. Burger
EcommerceTimes.com

(Nov. 8, 2006) When it comes to alternative, renewable energy, European companies and countries have been leading the charge. “We see several trends concerning financial investments into solar energy,” said Edwin Koot, the founder and principal of Solar Plaza.

Making the Case for Enterprise Mobility: Wireless Management and Spend Control. Find out how AT&T was able to reduce spiraling enterprise mobility costs and boost the efficient use of assets.

Venture capital (VC) and private and public investments in alternative energy continue to grow at their highest rates since the OPEC crisis of the 1970s.

Around the world, the persistence of much higher fossil fuel prices, heightened power demands — particularly in the fast-developing economies of China and India — national employment trends, security concerns, and growing evidence of sharp climate changes are contributing to what amounts to a clean technology boom. (more…)

.What They Say…

Globalists have been fighting against the increase in bilateral trade deals since the failure of the Doha round of the WTO. They much prefer multilateral deals that lay the foundation for globalized business. Says Michael Treschow, chairman of Ericsson, “We make source components from dozens of countries. What good is a deal with India if India does not have the same kind of deal with China? It just cuts across the supply chain. It is not countries that do business with countries but companies that do business with companies.” Goodbye to commerce nationalism, for transnational capitalists it just gets in-the-way of business. (more…)

MRZine Book Review:

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. (more…)

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.

When I was 18, before student tracking in the public schools had been formalized, an informal tracking system was nevertheless in place: the university track, the craft track, the poultry worker track, and the prison track. I was somewhere between the last two. Both my parents were working in a defense contractor factory, and I was left adrift in the factory-worker ’burbs to be trained by television and alcohol. Raised on a curriculum of McCarthyism, I did the most logical thing I could think of to avoid both the factory and eventual incarceration with the ne’er-do-wells with whom I was keeping company. I joined the Army, and volunteered to fight communists in Vietnam.

(more…)

Can the revolution outlive its leader?

Late one Friday afternoon in March, a crowd gathered for a rally in downtown Havana to denounce an incident that had occurred the previous evening in San Juan, Puerto Rico. During a game between Cuba and the Netherlands in the first international Baseball Classic, a spectator held up a sign to the television cameras which said “Abajo Fidel”—“Down with Fidel”—and shouted similar sentiments to the Cubans on the field. Among them was Antonio Castro, an orthopedic surgeon, who is the Cuban team’s doctor and one of Fidel Castro’s sons. A Cuban official angrily confronted the protester, whereupon Puerto Rican policemen detained him. He was released after receiving a lecture about freedom of speech. Cuba won, 11–2, but the following day, in a tone of high umbrage, Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper, Granma, decried the “cynical counter-revolutionary provocations” of U.S. and Puerto Rican officials.

(more…)

Since George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, the Christian right in the U.S. has come under new scrutiny, here and around the world. Some, of course, are celebrating the religious right’s rise to power; but a great many others are worried about the political direction the country has taken - on matters of war and peace, on the future of respect for liberty and diversity, and on prospects for equitable and sustainable development.

(more…)