Day: September 21, 2010

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… Give Protest A Chance! by Philip A. Farruggio + Hearts and Minds (1974)

by Philip A. Farruggio
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
September 21, 2010

Eight is (More Than) Enough: End the Wars! Stop the Wars!

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Remember the song “Give Peace A Chance”? Yesterday they held an international day for peace throughout the world. In New Smyrna Beach around 100 people came to lobby for peace. A great occasion with many noble souls attending. A few days earlier we held a progressive discussion group on activism, at the Port Orange library. We were lucky to attract 8 people. The main topic of our discussion was the Military Industrial Complex and how it controls our government (both major parties, including the tea sippers). This group, the one that Eisenhower (a cold warrior himself) warned us about in his 1961 Farewell Address, is responsible for the current two phony wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many Americans of good conscience do not buy into the propaganda of “Fight them there so they won’t come here” and “They attacked us on 9/11…. It’s payback time!” Question is: What are they doing about it?

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NATO Provides Pentagon Nuclear, Missile And Cyber Shields Over Europe by Rick Rozoff

by Rick Rozoff
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
Stop NATO-Opposition to global militarism
Sept. 21, 2010

The Pentagon’s number two official, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, was in Brussels, Belgium on September 15 to address the North Atlantic Council – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top civilian body – and the private Security & Defence Agenda think tank.

His comments at the second event, hosted by the only defense-related institution of its type in the city that hosts NATO’s and the European Union’s headquarters, dealt extensively with what Lynn referred to as a “cyber shield” over all of Europe, which he described as a “critical element” for the 28-nation military bloc to address and endorse at its summit in Lisbon, Portugal on November 19-20.

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Newly Disclosed Documents Shed More Light on Early Taliban Offers, Pakistan Role by Jeremy R. Hammond

by Jeremy R. Hammond
Featured Writer
DandelionSalad
Foreign Policy Journal
21 September, 2010

U.S. government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and recently posted on the website of the George Washington University National Security Archive shed some additional light on talks with the Taliban prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, including with regard to the repeated Taliban offers to hand over Osama bin Laden, and the role of Pakistan before and after the attacks.[1]

One of the recently released State Department documents, from March 2000, notes that a proposed “gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Multan, Pakistan figured prominently in discussions” about the mutual goal between the U.S. and regional players of stabilizing Afghanistan. Discussions on another proposed pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan had also been proposed that were “more advanced”, and the Pakistanis had gone to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials “to pursue these negotiations”. But neither “pipeline is likely to go forward in the mid-term”, the documented concluded.

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Law of Value 6: Socially Necessary Labor Time by Brendan M. Cooney

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

Aurisha (Bonfire Madigan)

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

brendanmcooney | September 20, 2010

[…] Our private labor doesn’t immediately become social. It must become value in order to be social. But in becoming value it is disciplined by socially necessary labor time. SNLT acts as an external force which disciplines our private labor, constantly compelling us to work more efficiently, yet never actually making our work easier or more fulfilling. SNLT creates the possibility for super-profits when one produces under the SNLT, and the search for super-profits drives much of the mad, chaotic development of the productive forces of a capitalist society, generating all sorts of unforeseen consequences. Continue reading →

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The Return of Marx by Brian Jones

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

by Brian Jones
SocialistWorker.org
February 16, 2009

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

Image via Wikipedia

The ideas of Karl Marx–that class society creates great wealth for the few at the expense of the many–ring truer every day. Brian Jones examines Marx’s revolutionary ideas in this first of three articles.

IN THE last 150 years of U.S. history, you can’t point to a generation whose most active, radical layers have not been drawn to the ideas of Karl Marx.

This was true of the abolitionist movement (Marxist immigrants even fought with the Northern Army in the Civil War), the early pioneers of our labor movement, the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) who passed through Socialist and Communist Parties in the first half of the 20th century, and of the many thousands who joined the Black Panther Party and other parties that declared themselves against capitalism and in favor of socialism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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