Christopher Hitchens has departed the mortal coil. He used to to be a true anti-imperialist but ended as a supporter of Imperialism. Unlike other ex leftists however Hitch held on to a lot of his radical views and didn't disown his past (like Martin Amis did). But does this balance out his support for the slaughter in Iraq? Sean Fenley pens a critical obituary. ... read full story / add a comment

David Douglass reports on how some English Anarchists slid down a slippery slope with their support for Islamic rebels in Libya. Full text at link.

On Sunday November 6 I was confronted out of the blue by a political development in anarchism which knocked me off my feet. Surrounded by comrades in a fairly well attended meeting of the Northern Anarchist Network and the North East Anarchists at the Bridge Hotel in Newcastle, I listened with jaw dropping to the item on the agenda marked ‘Libyan Solidarity Campaign’.

The ‘Support Nato bombing tendency’ is how I would roughly designate it. I subsequently traced back this disturbing development to Ian Bone’s blog. Ian, a long standing comrade of mine, founder of Class War and many great initiatives, surely could not be the origin of this absurd and reactionary viewpoint? ... read full story / add a comment

Anne McShane writes about the cutbacks, the DCTU march and the inadequacies of the fughtback campaign to date. On November 26 2,000 demonstrators marched in Dublin against the December 5-6 budget. This budget marks year two of a four-year plan to slash public spending and raise taxes - all part of stringency measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank 2010 bailout.

The numbers on this year’s demonstration were tiny compared to last November. Then a mass demonstration was organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. An estimated 150,000 braved snow and ice to show their opposition to the strategy of draconian austerity. Militant speeches were given by the president of ICTU, Jack O’Connor, and its secretary, David Begg. Both pledged their active and wholehearted resistance to the IMF/ECB deal and vowed to defeat it. ... read full story / add a comment

This article by Jan Lundberg of CultureChange.org suggests we should be occupying the land as Jan has pointed out elsewhere that the Occupy movement hasn't really taken on the environmental crisis and sustainability into its core thinking and what will matter in the end is access to land for food when the whole system does eventually crash. ... read full story / add a comment

This article questions why the current crisis has so far failed to bring us together as a people and why, in the face of the prospect of economic meltdown, we're still merrily clinging to the status quo of individualism and conservatism. It also asks what role a progressive nationalism has to play in getting us out of the crisis. ... read full story / add a comment

See a wonderful protest of Tunisian for secularism and free speech against the Islamist attempts to silence free speech by attacking the broadcast of the film Persepolis via a TV station: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/oct/19/tunis...video ... read full story / add a comment

A thought provoking collection of essays from an Anarchist perspective. Issue 1 (2011) of the journal Anarchist developments in Cultural Studies has special edition on 9/11. Full texts at link.

Editorial

Ten Years After 9/11: An Introduction
Michael Truscello

Two New York City Radicals Discuss "9/11 Conspiracy Theories"

9/11 at Nine: The Conspiracy Industry and the Lure of Fascism
Bill Weinberg (93-102)

A New Path to Real Peace: Sander Hicks Responds to Bill Weinberg
Sander Hicks ... read full story / add a comment

This extract gives an update on the current state of play, and a little background, from the yankee 'backyard' of Latin America. It indicates there are lessons for our predicament that our betters would prefer we didn't learn.
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Libya is not only a republic. Officially, it does not call itself a ‘Jumhuriya’. Instead, it is described as a ‘Jamahiriya’, meaning a republic with a system of direct democracy. Not too many non-Libyans are aware that this North African country, conquered several times in the past - and which lost thousands of its citizens, including the legendary hero Omar Mukhtar, as martyrs, to colonialism - has been experimenting since the late 1970s with a governmental policy and practice that enables it to credit its own society as being ahead of a number of Western regimes that have habitually claimed to be the cradle of democracy.
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IRELAND is in the grip of a "heroin epidemic", while alcohol abuse among the young is leading them towards drug use, two youth support organisations warned yesterday.

The Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children were told by Spunout and the Aislinn Adolescent Addiction Centre that alcohol was both a gateway and relapse drug and that issues such as the availability of alcohol and its below-cost selling needed to be tackled as a matter of urgency. ... read full story / add a comment

Bad news for the AGW deniers. Another one of their papers is discredited. Even the editor of the journal that published it is resigning.

The editor of a science journal has resigned after admitting that a recent paper casting doubt on man-made climate change should not have been published.
The paper, by US scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell, claimed that computer models of climate inflated projections of temperature increase.
It was seized on by "sceptic" bloggers, but attacked by mainstream scientists. ... read full story / add a comment

Lee Sustar of Socialist Worker, US writes on developments in the Strian revolutionary movement and US sanctions and and attempts to lead the movement astray.

AFTER NEARLY six months of continuous mobilization in the face of savage repression, the Syrian revolutionary movement is debating its future as the U.S. tries to manipulate the opposition to suit its own aims in the Middle East.

Peter Harling and Robert Malley of the pro-imperialist think tank, the International Crisis Group, correctly point out that these economic changes helped set the stage for the revolution:

"For the most part, the regime has been waging war against its original social constituency. When Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, came to power, his regime, dominated by members of the Alawite branch of Islam, embodied the neglected countryside, its peasants and exploited underclass. Today's ruling elite has forgotten its roots. Its members inherited power rather than fought for it, grew up in Damascus, mimicked the ways of the urban upper class with which they mingled, and led a process of economic liberalization at the provinces' expense."

... read full story / add a comment

How will the revolution in Libya advance now that Gadaffi has fallen? The dangers and opportunities are discussed in this article by Richard Brenner. More material regarding the Libyan revolution is available at the League for the Fifth international website.

In Tripoli in the early days of the uprising, Gaddafi’s forces had already murdered between 200 and 700 unarmed demonstrators. Like all victorious uprisings the Libyan Revolution will have to crush the remaining elements of the old regime including Gaddafi and his sons. They should not be tried but put to swift revolutionary justice. At the same time the revolution needs to discipline itself. The horrifying cases of killings of black people need to be stopped. Gaddafi hired sub-Saharan mercenaries but in Tripoli gangs seem to be treating black people all as Gaddafi mercenaries. Anyone doing this should be tried and punished harshly.
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Maciej Zurowski encountered angry locals and grinning cops when he went to Tottenham Police Station. Here are some excerpts from his article and interviews with locals. Full text at link.

On Sunday afternoon, it looked as if the police had been instructed to use a new tactic to contain the public anger: grin. The area around Tottenham police station, which had been subject to severe rioting the previous night, was cordoned off by the boys and girls in blue, each of them sporting an unpersuasive, frozen smile. Gathering in front of the police line were those who have not got much to smile about these days: the overwhelmingly working class denizens of the impoverished north London neighbourhood, which had seen its last major riot during Thatcher’s reign in 1985.

“Murderers! You’ve shot a young father dead,” the woman shouted, following the accusation with assorted expletives. As she walked off, two officers turned to each other and chuckled. You would have thought that homicide is not exactly a laughing matter, especially when you consider that 333 people have died under British police custody since 1998 and not a single police officer has been successfully prosecuted. But then that’s just human defence mechanisms for you.

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This report from the WSWS site accurately sums up the situation in Britain today and the outcome of the riots. It confirms most people suspicions that the state has used this to launch a vicious assault on the working class (read ordinary folk) of Britain. It has used the very same press that was embroiled just weeks ago in a huge phone hacking scandal. The state repression and right-wing hysteria unleashed reveal the preparations of the ruling class for police-state forms of rule

It is amazing that despite all the arrests and sentencing that: The riots were triggered by the police execution of Mark Duggan, a black 29-year-old father of four, in Tottenham, north London on August 4, followed by an unprovoked police assault on a peaceful protest over his killing two days later. Almost a fortnight later, no officer has been identified, let alone charged, for these crimes.

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Peter Manson writes about the London Riots. What was positive about and what was negative. But rioting itself is no answer to the problems facing the Working Class. Full text of the article is at the link below.

A positive and progressive rebellion against deprivation or unashamed and backward criminality? The reaction of the left to the riots in towns and cities across Britain has been polarised between these two extremes.

As readers will know, what started as a peaceful protest outside Tottenham Hale police station on Saturday August 6 was violently transformed after several hours and eventually sparked full-scale rioting and looting, first in London and then in major conurbations the length and breadth of the country. The original demonstration was against the brutal killing by police of Mark Duggan and their subsequent lying excuses and justifications.

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The High Court has ruled in favour of millionaire employers. Setting a legal minimum wage for the Catering Trade is unconstitutional. Baling out the banks is constitutional, banning strikes is constitutional. Letting multinationals rob our national resources is constitutional.

But catering workers cannot be paid e9.65 an hour. Thats unconstitutional. But the millionaire employers are going to get compensation from the State! No money for hospitals, plenty of money for bankers and exploiters.

Its time to say Enough! http://enoughcampaign.org/
Join in the Enough Campaign, join in other protests. ... read full story / add a comment

Interesting information regarding the lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008. Full story at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14002264

The lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 was mainly caused by a sharp rise in China's coal use, a study suggests. The absence of a temperature rise over that decade is often used by "climate sceptics" as grounds for denying the existence of man-made global warming. But the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that smog from the extra coal acted to mask greenhouse warming. ... read full story / add a comment

Ireland’s foreign-affairs minister assured the US ambassador in Dublin in 2006 that the Irish government was prepared to change the law that had allowed the acquittal of five anti-war activists for damaging a US Navy plane.

The revelation that a senior Irish official discussed possible amendments to domestic criminal law with the US ambassador is contained in a Wikileaks cable (see below) that has not been published or reported upon elsewhere, but which has been seen by Counterpunch.

At the time of the acquittal of the so-called Shannon Five, or Pitstop Ploughshares, in July 2006, the US embassy made a public statement expressing its disquiet about the verdict. The then foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, responded with what was seen as a firm public statement of his own, underlining the independence of the judicial system and stating that its verdicts were not a matter for discussion by government officials or between governments.
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SF Minister John O'Dowd sacks more public servants as evidence emerges of how the previous SF Minister had presided over lavish junkets organised by department members............. two articles from the Belfast Telegraph ... read full story / add a comment