[pdf leaflet] So Wall Street has their cake and gets to eat it too. No surprise. And the politicians of all stripes wring their hands and make grandiloquent sound-bites of how they should be listened to.

It’s just so much noise. Both Democrats and Republicans are shocked. SHOCKED! So much for the reputation of Ivy League education being excellent. Most of us could have seen it coming.

“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Michael Ledeen (American Enterprise Institute)

The latest scandal that surrounds Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama’s previous involvement with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and that highlights his difficulty fully disowning this association with the politically radical pastor until a statement unequivocally doing so publicly on April 29th is angrily upsetting his fans and supporters who fear that the time it has taken him to do this may seriously undermine his popularity among Democrats, and so impair his bid for president.

The mainstream press has not been able to provide any explanation for this hesitancy to detach himself from Rev. Wright either. It is certainly a major concern as Obama attempts to win the Democratic primary in Indiana on Tuesday, May 6th.

“This video is about a Red Pill reporters trip to southern Wyoming and the worker abuses he found in the sheep herder camps. All workers were here legally on H2A work Visa’s and the guides for the Red Pill were former Chilean sheep herders who wanted to speak out about the abuse they went through. Workers for the camps are usually brought in from Mexico, Chile, Peru and Ecuador. Times are changing however, and now sheep ranchers are going to Nepal to find workers to import for labor. These men are on the job 7 days a week 24 hours a day this translates into a dismal wage of 90 cents an hour.”

Prisoners in the New Hampshire state prison in Concord, New Hampshire, stamp license plates with the state’s motto: “Live Free or Die.”

Source

If we may go by the trend emerging from the presidential primary results so far, we very likely will see the end of the CheneyBush era next November. Voters both Democratic and Republican have turned out in large, often record-breaking numbers to make preliminary choices from among the presidential candidates who have offered themselves. This is a healthy democratic trend.

According to the Pew Research Center, the upsurge in voter interest is sharpest and heaviest on the Democratic side and therefore concerns a much larger constituency than on the Republican side. More interesting, younger Democratic voters “are considerably more likely than their elders to be Hispanic, and slightly more likely to be black, more apt to say they have no religious affiliation and more likely to say they are ‘liberal’ in their political orientation.”

Not only that, but across the board regardless of race or ethnicity, “Barack Obama won a majority of the 2008 vote among this [younger] age group in every state that has held a primary or caucus thus far with the exception of California, Arkansas, and Massachusetts Obama also had a 54%-43% advantage among the next youngest age group, those ages 30-44.”

We read in the Boston Globe (Friday, January 4th) that the results of the Iowa caucuses among Democrats and Republicans are important for the unprecedentedly intense grassroots interest they reveal in the upcoming presidential election. But more to the point, to the extent voters in Iowa are still trying to make those two creaky old suits of armor work, they remain profoundly clueless.

On the surface, they appear to be lining up once more to perform the symbolic ritual of Throwing the Rascals Out. This time, it is true, the Rascals are a smelly bunch of radical pro-corporates quaintly christened “neoconservatives” - but who are in fact capitalist revolutionaries in the service of the military-industrial complex, out to stack the transnational energy deck in its favor. They have teamed up with an early protg, Osama bin Laden, to give political insurgency a slick new retro cachet, privatizing terrorism, which before the era of liberation struggles had always been the prerogative of the state. Now the whole corporate sham is tottering at the hustings.

In signing the recent executive order creating a new National Space Policy, President Bush has announced that the US will reject future arms-control agreements that might limit US military manoeuvrability in space. The document further announces that the US “will preserve its rights, capabilities and freedom of action in space … and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests.”

“Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power,” the policy declares and that to “increase knowledge, discovery, economic prosperity, and to enhance the national security, the United States must have robust, effective, and efficient space capabilities.”

SPC and WSP member, Bill Pritchard recorded an oral history in 1968-69. This is one he discusses the founding of the One Big Union in Calgary in 1919.

The Growth of American Thought. By Merle Curti. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1943. (848pp., $5.00)

Well written, interestingly constructed and partly original in its researches, Curti’s book is nevertheless a dull affair. This is not the writer’s fault, but results from the fact that American thought has not grown in depth but has been a mere accumulation of detailed knowledge incapable of changing the general climate of opinion. Save in technology, the whole intellectual development from colonial times to the present war has not been very impressive. However unwillingly, Curti’s book demonstrates the intellectual poverty which accompanied the development of capitalism, directed, as it is, towards profit-making. It becomes clear that American thought was never anything but capitalistic thought. More than that, as far as thought is concerned, this nation proved itself to be the capitalistic nation per se. This resulted largely from the opportunity it had to rid itself quickly of feudalistic ideologies. Having in this sense no past, and having as yet no future, America presents itself as the first and the last word in human development.