I don’t know about you, but there’s only so much plodding through the mucky trail of kleptocrats and fascists (and, God help us, perhaps even worse) before I need to wash that crap right outta my mind.

Enter, Hugo Chavez.

President Chavez’s closing speech at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre reminded me that so long as there are fascists, there will be anti-fascists. And the lyrics of folksinger Rovics continue to give me the hard-headed, honest hope that even when they win, their victories are neither eternal nor absolute, and will always meet resistance. We’re way passed utopias here; we can’t exactly kid ourselves anymore about building the New Jerusalem. But we may yet be able to light some more candles against the darkness.

And we do have our victories. The enduring fact of Hugo Chavez, for one. We need to remember that the bad guys don’t always win. And nowhere do we find more examples of this than in Venezuela.

So a little mental hygiene today, on the side of the righteous angels who know what deserves rebellion.
Full Article: rigorousintuition.blogspot.com

“Imperialism is not invincible”
Venezuela’s Chavez Closes World Social Forum with Call to Transcend Capitalism venezuelanalysis.com/news

by Ward Churchill
In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.

I am not a “defender”of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people “should” engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”
Full Article: counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON – They met just before the speech began: the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq and the daughter of a man killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. They found some comfort in a spontaneous moment that electrified President Bush’s State of the Union address.

The two women, both touched by death in Iraq, reached out for each other while lawmakers, military leaders, the president and the nation watched. Their locked embrace inspired the longest applause of the evening.
Full Article: yahoo.com.news

Well at least women are good for something in this great warmongering fest. We’re supposed to cry and wave our handkerchiefs as our sons and husbands go off to the slaughterhouse. ‘Spontaneous moment’-yeah right.

A statue of former Belgian colonial king Leopold II has been re-erected in the centre of the Democratic Republic of Congo capital, Kinshasa.
The statue of Leopold riding his horse is still dirty after spending 40 years in an open-air dump.

The Congolese culture minister said DR Congo’s history should be revived.

Leopold II set up the Congo Free State in 1885 as his personal possession and left arguably the worst legacy of all the European colonial regimes.

Holocaust

Former BBC Kinshasa correspondent Mark Dummett says King Leopold II turned the country into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.

Leopold’s legacy of violence

In front of the statue outside the central station, one man told the BBC:

“He left us in poverty. He exploited our raw materials and left us with nothing.”

Another said: “It’s important for us to remember our past, like the Jewish people remember the Holocaust.”
Full Article: bbc.co.uk

The British high commissioner to Kenya launched a renewed attack on corruption last night, claiming that “massive looting” of public funds was devastating the country’s economy.
Sir Edward Clay’s fresh attack on sleaze follows a speech last July accusing the government of being “gluttons”, which caused a furore.

Last night Sir Edward claimed that foreign associates of the previous government of Daniel arap Moi were working with officials of the new government to steal public funds through crooked procurement ventures.

“We are not talking about minor corruption. We are talking about massive looting and/ or grand corruption which in total has a huge impact on Kenya’s economy,” he said in a speech at Kenya’s Journalist of the Year awards, released to Reuters.

In a speech to British businessmen last July, Sir Edward accused the government of President Mwai Kibaki of “arrogance, greed and perhaps a desperate sense of panic to lead them to eat like gluttons”.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
Perhaps Sir Edward would not like to recall that African ‘gluttons’ are the pure product of European ones. They have excellent role models.

The Anglo-Dutch giant Shell today reported the biggest-ever profits by a UK company, revealing that it had made $17.5bn (£9.3bn) – or £25m a day – last year, despite being plagued by a reserves scandal.

Thanks to soaring oil prices, Shell’s profits, up by 38% from the year before, beat the previous UK record of £7.7bn, which was set by the HSBC bank.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

By Richard Oxman
Ward Churchill, University of Colorado at Boulder professor, recently resigned his post as head of the school’s ethnic studies department following an uproar over an article he wrote about the people who died in the World Trade Center 9/11 event. Pressure had been applied.

The longtime native rights activist and leader of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement had written an article underscoring how US foreign policies in Iraq and its support of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians played a role in the attack in inspiring the hijackers. He questioned whether the victims inside the World Trade Center should be described as “innocent civilians.”

I remember (very well) the first time I came across his “little Eichmans” take; if I live long enough…I think it’ll stay with me more vividly than the JFK assassination moment has to date.

To draw from one of Democracy Now!s headlines which delved into Churchill’s mind/recent statements: “They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the ‘mighty engine of profit.’ Churchill accused the victims of Sept. 11 as being among the Americans who were too busy in their own lives to see the abuses being carried out by the U.S. overseas. This week Churchill said ‘The overriding question that was being posed at the time was…why did this happen, why did they hate us so much,…and my premise was when you do this to other people’s families and children, that is going to be a natural response.”
Full Article:counterpunch.org

by Noam Chomsky
Let’s just imagine what the policies might be of an independent Iraq, independent, sovereign Iraq, let’s say more or less democratic, what are the policies likely to be?

Well there’s going to be a Shiite majority, so they’ll have some significant influence over policy. The first thing they’ll do is reestablish relations with Iran. Now they don’t particularly like Iran, but they don’t want to go to war with them so they’ll move toward what was happening already even under Saddam, that is, restoring some sort of friendly relations with Iran.

That’s the last thing the United States wants. It has worked very hard to try to isolate Iran. The next thing that might happen is that a Shiite-controlled, more or less democratic Iraq might stir up feelings in the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia, which happen to be right nearby and which happen to be where all the oil is. So you might find what in Washington must be the ultimate nightmare­a Shiite region which controls most of the world’s oil and is independent. Furthermore, it is very likely that an independent, sovereign Iraq would try to take its natural place as a leading state in the Arab world, maybe the leading state. And you know that’s something that goes back to biblical times.

What does that mean? Well it means rearming, first of all. They have to confront the regional enemy. Now the regional enemy, overpowering enemy, is Israel. They’re going to have to rearm to confront Israel­which means probably developing weapons of mass destruction, just as a deterrent. So here’s the picture of what they must be dreaming about in Washington­and probably 10 Downing street in London­that here you might get a substantial Shiite majority rearming, developing weapons of mass destruction, to try to get rid of the U.S. outposts that are there to try to make sure that the U.S. controls most of the oil reserves of the world. Is Washington going to sit there and allow that? That’s kind of next to inconceivable.

What I’ve just read from the business press the last couple of days probably reflects the thinking in Washington and London: “Uh well, okay, we’ll let them have a government, but we’re not going to pay any attention to what they say.” In fact the Pentagon announced at the same time two days ago: we’re keeping 120,000 troops there into at least 2007, even if they call for withdrawal tomorrow.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Urgent action must be taken in order to prevent Africa from bearing the brunt of global warming, a scientific conference on climate change was told today.

If current trends continued, temperatures in sub-Saharan Africa could rise by 2C with rainfall declining by 10%, according to Anthony Nyong, a scientist at Jos university in Nigeria. “There must be substantial and genuine reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the principal emitters,” Dr Nyong wrote in a paper presented to the conference, taking place in Exeter.

The event was called by the prime minister, Tony Blair, in order to stress to world leaders the importance of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Mr Blair has pledged to make Africa and curbing climate change the top priorities for the UK’s presidency of the G8 group of the world’s eight richest nations this year.

Dr Nyong said the G8 accounted for almost half the global carbon dioxide emissions in 1999. Scientists say carbon dioxide is a major factor in climate change, with most agreeing that much of it is caused by car exhausts and electricity generation.

The US stands almost alone in the developed world, however, in disputing this human element in the phenomenon.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Well, maybe the US is counting on it rather than disputing it.

by Robert Fisk
The gale tore into Baghdad yesterday, stripping the walls of election posters, sending miniature whirlwinds between the shuttered shops of Rashid Street, giving new meaning to the black hoods and masks worn by the policemen at Tahrir Square.

Tahrir–“independence”–is a word which a lot of people voted for on Sunday; not for “democracy” as the Western media would have it, but for freedom; freedom to speak, freedom to vote, freedom from the Americans.

They were in Baghdad, too, yesterday, driving their Humvees through Karada, circling the city in their Apaches and their little bee-like Sioux spotter helicopters.

For days we will have to wait for the election results. A spokesman for the Shia Muslim Iraqi National Alliance is quoted in The New York Times as saying that the Americans and British say his party might have won more than 50 per cent of the vote–the Shia Republic has come of age!–and it’s all the talk of Baghdad when the people hear it in Arabic on their own networks from the Gulf. But how could the Americans know now that the INA has won more than half the votes?
Full Article: counterpunch.org