Unholy Alliance

Dilip Hiro
TomDispatch.com
May 10, 2007

Recently Turkey came close to experiencing a soft military coup. In late April, faced with the prospect of the moderate Islamist Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul becoming president, the country’s top generals threatened to overthrow the elected government under the guise of protecting “secularism.” When the minority secularist parliamentarians boycotted the poll for president, the Constitutional Court, powerfully influenced by the military’s threat, invalidated the parliament’s vote for Gul on the technical grounds that it lacked a two-thirds quorum — something that had never been an issue before.

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Starving the Poor

Noam Chomsky
The International News
May 18, 2007

The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.

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Your Local News — Dateline New Delhi

Barbara Ehrenreich
AlterNet
May 16, 2007.

The world may be flat, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, but I always liked to think I was standing on a hill. Now comes the news that pasadenanow.com, a local news site, is recruiting reporters in India. The website’s editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere $20,800 a year — and no, they won’t be commuting from New Delhi. Since Pasadena’s city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away. And if they ever feel a need to see the potholes of Pasadena, there’s always Google Earth.

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The Strategy of Tension

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
The Cutting Edge
Monday, May 14, 2007

We are at War against International Terrorism, defending our Values and our Civilization.

Western anti-terror legislation does not allow the state to be considered in any way culpable for terrorist activities. As far as our elected representatives are concerned, terrorism is a problem of loosely associated groups of reactionary fanatics “attacking our freedoms”. The assumption, never explicitly stated for then it would be revealed, and easily and permanently ridiculed, is that the state is innocent, immune to indulging in such barbaric practices. Written into the rule of law itself, this assumption posits the state as a paternal Fuhrer, a God figure whom we must all entrust our lives and liberties to.

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Law and Order

Tariq Ali
The Guardian
May 16, 2007

Sixty years old this August, Pakistan has been under de facto military rule for exactly half of its life. Military leaders have usually been limited to a 10-year cycle: Ayub Khan (1958-69), Zia-ul-Haq (1977-89). The first was removed by a nationwide insurrection lasting three months. The second was assassinated. According to this political calendar, Pervez Musharraf still has another year and a half to go, but events happen.

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Republic or Empire?

Chalmers Johnson
Harper’s Magazine
January 2007

The United States remains, for the moment, the most powerful nation in history, but it faces a violent contradiction between its long republican tradition and its more recent imperial ambitions. The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

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Warning on Warming

Bill McKibben
New York Review of Books
March 15, 2007

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: “World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe,” reported an Australian paper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context— a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications.

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The Kennedy Myth Rises Again

John Pilger
The New Statesman
May 10, 2007

On 5 June 1968, just after midnight, Robert Kennedy was shot in my presence at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just acknowledged his victory in the California primary. “On to Chicago and let’s win there!” were his last public words, referring to the Democratic Party’s convention that would nominate a presidential candidate. “He’s the next President Kennedy!” said the woman standing next to me. She then fell to the floor with a bullet wound to the head. (She lived.)

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Car-Nage

George Monbiot
The Guardian
May 15, 2007

Corporate social responsibility often resembles the adventures of The Good Soldier Svejk. In 1914, about to be conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, Svejk puts on his old uniform and a volunteer’s buttonhole and, waving his borrowed crutches and shouting “to Belgrade, to Belgrade!”, has his landlady push him to the recruiting office in a bath chair. Jaroslav Harsek’s marvellous creation is lauded by the newspapers for his extraordinary patriotism.

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Sacrificial Wolfie

Naomi Klein
The Nation
May 14, 2007

It’s not the act itself, it’s the hypocrisy. That’s the line on Paul Wolfowitz, coming from editorial pages around the world. It’s neither: not the act (disregarding the rules to get his girlfriend a pay raise) nor the hypocrisy (the fact that Wolfowitz’s mission as World Bank president is fighting for “good governance”).

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