This week: • Israel • Ken Late? •
• G8+1=0.25 • iSpinoza • Stuff •

 

Israel terrorises civilians

The Middle East teeters on the edge of total meltdown; terrorists lay siege, killing innocent civillians and inciting anger. Yup, that’s right, the region’s terrorists-in-chief Israel has been at it again, using false pretences to extend their boundaries and kill indiscriminately while the rest of the world sits around and at worst asks the Israelis to show “some restraint”.

The Israeli reaction to attacks by Palestinian militants and Hizbollah is rather bizarre. Although, both Palestinian militants and Hizbollah were originally targeting legitimate military targets, Israeli retaliation was clearly aiming against civilian targets, civil infrastructures and mass killing directed against an innocent population.

Writing last week in the Independent, Robert Fisk reported: “It was a brisk start to Day Two of Israel’s latest ‘war on terror’, a conflict that uses some of the same language— and a few of the same lies— as George Bush’s larger ‘war on terror’. For just as we ‘degraded’ Iraq— in 1991 as well as 2003— so yesterday it was Lebanon’s turn to be ‘degraded’.

“That means not only physical death but economic death and it arrived at Beirut’s gleaming new £300m international airport just before 6am as passengers prepared to board flights to London and Paris…

“Then the Israelis went for the Hizbollah television station, Al-Manar, clipping off its antenna with a missile but failing to put the station off air. That might be a more understandable target — “Manar”, after all, broadcasts Hizbollah propaganda. But was it really designed to find or recover the two Israeli soldiers captured on Wednesday? Or to take revenge for the nine Israelis killed in the same incident, one of the blackest days in recent Israeli Army history although not as black as it was for the 36 Lebanese civilians killed in the previous 24 hours.”

Likewise Gaza has been struck ludicrously hard. Two bridges were destroyed and the Gaza Strip’s only power plant was bombed. The power plant does more than provide energy to more than half of the Gaza Strip’s 1.3 million residents. It also fuels critical water and sewage pumps.

Lebanon, which stuck to a peace accord despite Israeli provocation for 17 months, and which was lauded last year by the US for its democratic elections and freedom from Syria, has once again been cast as the terror hotspot of the region. The government and the population at large have nothing to do with the machinations of Hizbollah yet it is the innocent civillians who suffer.

Israel used the snatching of a soldier as a reason to go to war, a conflict it had signed off on months before and was itching for. The soldier was captured in a military operation. Today, several hundred Palestinian children and women are locked in Israeli prisons. They deserve their freedom no less than he does.

“Is it not astonishing”, asked Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website, “that the entire world knows the name and face of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, while the hundreds of Palestinian children held in Israel’s dungeons, not to mention 10,000 adult prisoners, thousands held without charge and trial, abducted from their homes in the middle of the night by Israeli occupation forces, remain nameless and faceless before a silent world?”

Any armed resistance by Palestinians in the face of a brutal, racist and illegal occupation is condemned, while the massively disproportionate violence of the Israeli armed forces, delivered through tanks, jets and millions of dollars in US funding, is considered isolated “excesses” or “unfortunate incidents”, like the June 9 obliteration of a Palestinian family on a Gaza beach by Israeli artillery.

A small sample of the weekly reports from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights gives a glimpse of the “restraint” exercised by Israel in the lead-up to the soldier’s kidnapping: May 4–May 10 — nine Palestinians killed by the IDF, 24 Palestinian civilians, including seven children, wounded; May 11–May 17— nine Palestinians killed in the West Bank, 41 Palestinians, including 13 children, wounded; May 18–24 — nine Palestinians killed, 26 civilians, including 10 children, wounded.

MIT professor Noam Chomsky says the US and Israel are punishing Palestinians for electing Hamas.

This latest Israeli assault, far from being an “overreaction” to the capture of an Israeli Defence Force soldier, is part of a strategy to destroy the ability of the democratically elected Hamas government to resist settling the “Palestine/Israel conflict” (as the dispossession of Palestinians is banally labelled) on Israel’s terms and sap the Occupied Territories population’s will to resist.

 

• Here’s some of the carnage brought about by the Israelis who are, we are constantly reminded, NOT terrorists what so ever.

 

 

Kenny Boy: Laid in the cold ground?

With Ken Lay’s well timed flying of the coop, the saga of Enron (the company that made the term creative accounting a buzz-term for screwing all investors) is that much closer to an end, writes Yahuda Bangs. And an unsatisfying end indeed, especially those left high and dry when the mirage evaporated, still clinging to the faint hope that their Enron stock certificates might one day be worth more to them than wallpaper. For according to the laws of the Republic, when a defendant in a federal criminal case dies prior to having exhausted every chance to prove his innocence, the entire prosecution process returns to square one. Having died before final appeal, Lay leaves this world with the same squeaky clean criminal record that he came into it with. This may seem to be mere semantics, since his name is practically a synonym for “corporate fraud” — however, from a legal standpoint, the name of this rose is all important.

By dying innocent in the eyes of the law, Lay’s estate cannot be held liable for any of Lay’s criminal misdoings, since with the absence of a defendant these misdoings are now impossible to prove legally. The victims of the Enron collapse who were still hoping for restitution have only the far more difficult legal option of suing his estate in civil court, at best an uphill — and likely fruitless — battle.

Some might see Lay’s relatively early death (from heart disease, according to the coroner, though his friends claim he died of a broken heart rather than a bad one) as just deserts. But to the victims of the Enron collapse who lost savings and pensions, this must come as a pyrrhic karmic victory.

Those who still had skeletons buried in his closet can’t be mourning too hard. Lay was just a few months away from the bitter end of a legal process, the endgame of which most likely would have presented him with the opportunity of cutting a deal with prosecutors; something along the line of dropping dime on other high ranking fraudsters in exchange for less time and a higher class of prison. The world will never know what swansong Lay may have sung, but chances are good that members of Dubya’s inner circle — and likely even the chief fraudster himself — are breathing a bit easier with Lay out of the picture.

And though his family is still wearing black, or at least somber earth tones, there probably isn’t too much wailing and gnashing of teeth inside the casa del Lay. With their patriarch’s death in a state of legal grace, Lay’s family is sitting pretty on whatever is left of the fruits of their Papa’s fraud, not to mention the reported ten million from his life insurance policy. Lay may not have been able to take it with him, but he left as much of it behind as he could.

Naturally, there are those who believe that Lay saved his best trick for last. The theory goes that, with a little help from rich friends on high, an extremely well paid-off coroner, and perhaps one shaved and showered wino with the misfortune of having Lay’s uncanny resemblance to Elmer Fudd, Kenny Boy pulled off one final act of accounting fraud. ardly the usual morning read for conspiracy theorists, the Murdoch-owned New York Post (a paper that tries to channel Huey Long’s Joe Six-pack populism and remain unswervingly loyal to George Bush and all the billionaires he’s ever loved at the same time, making the paper’s covering the Enron scandal a particular challenge) hinted at the possibility that Kenny might be on and not under Terra Firma.

“Before they put Cheato Lay’s coffin in the grave CHECK HE’S IN IT”, screamed the front page, in 30-point typeface no less.

Tom Clancy stuff? Perhaps. But say what you will about Lay, he was (and maybe still is) a man who thought (or still thinks) big. And the Bush administration owed him favours, to use Cheney parlance, big time. Lay’s money (earned through accounting fraud) was instrumental in bringing the most ruthlessly corrupt administration in American history to power (through accounting fraud).

Of course, there are those who see even more sinister hands at work. A week after his death, and the Blogosphere is still abuzz with chatter about black operations against a man who simply knew too much about too many to be allowed to cut any deals. Perhaps Darth Cheney visited Aspen on the day of Lay’s death to deliver words of support along with a batch of “special pudding, made by Laura Bush herself.”

Who knows? Perhaps Lay is alive and well, sequestered on some faraway private beach, enjoying Pina Coladas in the company of Dominican prostitutes hand-picked by Rush Limbaugh. If he is dead, we can only hope he spends the next chunk of eternity being viciously sodomized by barb-cocked demons. One “date” for every Enron employee or investor similarly screwed should do.

 

• Kenny Boy’s ‘death’ has created more conspiracy theories than anyone since Elvis — here’s a round up.

 

 

G8 largesse pie in the sky

Last summer, the Brits didn’t have the World Cup to keep them amused, so they made do with Bob Geldof instead and the huge, free Live8 concert in Hyde Park that saw the likes of Pink Floyd, the Who and Paul McCartney on stage. The event was staged as a curtain raiser to the G8 summit and the dramatic gestures of aid made by the world’s richest countries as part of the “Make Poverty History” campaign. One year on, and surprise, surprise those warm, fuzzy, made-for-camera images of Blair, Bush, Koizumi et al promising vast amounts of cash have failed to materialize.

“A parent makes a promise to a child and if that promise is broken cynicism and a lack of trust set in. The promise from the economically powerful to the economically weak is more important because if we break that promise, we kill them,” Geldof said in a press conference last week.

Geldof was speaking at the launch of a report by the campaign group DATA, headed by the U2 frontman and Africa campaigner Bono, to mark the first anniversary of the summit. DATA — which stands for Debt, Aid, Trade, Africa — said progress so far had been “painfully slow, proceeding at best at half-pace”.

Last year, the G8 promised $50bn (£27bn) with more aid every year by 2010, half of that going to Africa; comprehensive Aids treatment by 2010; debt cancellation for 38 of the world’s poorest countries; primary education for all children by 2010 and a trade deal benefiting Africa.

Jamie Drummond, the executive director of DATA, said: “The G8 strode forward down the promised path of debt, but have shuffled with a halting half-pace on aid, while falling backwards on trade. The campaigners around the world who got the G8 closer to the right path in the first place must now encourage them to accelerate down it.”

Campaign groups are building up for protests around the world in the run-up the summit of the heads of state of the G8 in St Petersburg next month.

Out of the G8 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Britain and US — DATA gave top marks to France as the only country on track for the 2010 aid target. It singled out Britain for praise for Gordon Brown’s campaign to launch a multibillion-pound initiative to front-load cash to fund vaccinations against killer diseases, and for its “leadership” on debt and the fight against Aids. It reserved its main criticism for Germany, whose aid budget fell last year, and Italy, which it said was “way off track” on the 2010 commitments.

However, by far the biggest hurdle continues to be the unlevel agricultural playing field that stymies African trade. The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU shows no sign of changing.

The United States, in particular, doesn’t have any indication that it will change agricultural subsidies soon, and with Iraq burning a hole in the Treasury, the chances of the US doubling its aid to Africa as it promised to do would appear about as likely as George Bush pulling out of Iraq.

 

• See what we wrote on the G8 summit last year and the plundering strings attached to debt reduction.

 

 

iSpinoza

I was grumbling in a cafe in Causeway Bay over the download software for my new iPod. Not everything is a “song” dammit; all music is sung. Some is bowed, some is plucked, some is blown in a saxophone cry “that shivers the cities down to the last radio” and some is hammered out by blind rock knockers when they knock off from work at their main job, knocking rocks.

However, when I plugged the damn thing into my hairy ear, out came something better than sex, better than drugs, even better than smoking, and this was Karl Richter’s Munich Bach Orchestra performing the introductory sinfonia from Bach’s cantata, Wachet Auf.

My otiose pal, Theodore Adorno, whose writings were correctly called the intellectual equivalent of white flight, has nonetheless to be dealt with on matters musical since he represented an end point, and, if Hegel is to be credited, the owl of Minerva flies at midnight: much is revealed at the finish of a tradition. Adorno correctly identified the disruptiveness of Bach, who generations of churchmen have tried to domesticate.

The sinfonia overwhelms the words to which most of the pious came to church to hearken unto. The sinfonia sets up a “beat” which manages to be slow yet insistent yet multilevel that looks far forward to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony’s slow movement.

Nor is this “pure” or reinen music, absolute music. Layers of stories could be hung upon it as a peg, visions, revelations, which would almost be vulgar to divulge.

Lenin famously said that he could no longer listen to music, because it made you want to stop hitting people. And when I emerged into Causeway Bay, I could not find it in me to be annoyed with anything. All the girls seemed prettier than the usual norm, which is high, the men seemed like heroes.

Dann sind wir Helden fur diesen Tag — David Bowie

However, I have to put some popular music on this thing, and I still haven’t psyched out its strange download procedure, designed as the latter seems to be to protect the “intellectual property” not of “artists” but of suits. Bob Marley, like Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

I need girlwatching music, and for this, Greek and Brazilian popular music is best, where the lyrics are all something like there’s a girl across the river with a bottom like a peach and alas I cannot swim. I also need reggae on this stupid thing.

Adorno was really full of shit in the way only a great man can be full of shit:

My father, me thinks I see my father
Where, my lord?
In my mind’s eye, Horatio

Adorno thought that electronic reproduction debased music. But surely he was aware of the savagery of music production in the 17th and 18th century which make nonsense of his contention that modern pop music was more barbaric than the music of the castrati, or the self-serving French revival of the legend of the flayed satyr Marysas, who lost a music contest and was torn to pieces in the bitter wood.

However, it is hazardous to say what Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno was, and was not, aware of, for the same reason that the emotional life of our parents and grandparents is an unknowable thing in itself.

Adorno based an entire theory of popular music, of be bop a lu la, on a simple mistake: what he meant by Jazz in his ponderous essay On Jazz was white American pop of the 1930s:

Especially for you (hot cha) the moon is blue
Especially for you I go to the zoo (boop a doo)
It wasn’t Rag Time and it wasn’t Robert Johnson’s anguished cry
Me and the devil was walking side by side
And I’m gonna beat my woman until I get satisfied

The fact is that making money precedes everything else, and the iPod interface is bullshit because of this. The fact is that even Adorno had to admit that transcendance can occur in Causeway Bay, for the triumphant last words of Minima Moralia are that no philosophy is worth the name that rejects redemption.

One good thing about music: when it hits you feel no pain (Bob Marley said that).

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Get yer Media Goggles on: Israel
Media Lens has not one but two alerts on pro-Israeli leanings in the UK media. Kidnapped by Israel is a guest alert looking at the Kidnapping of thousands of Palestinians. Blaming the Victim looks at the bias in reporting on Palestinians.

 

Video Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons
Savaged by dogs, electrocuted with cattle prods, burned by toxic chemicals, does such barbaric abuse inside US jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the US prison system that were uncovered during a four-month investigation by the BBC.

 

Video The Curse of Oil Part 2: The Pipeline
The Curse of Oil part two follows the story of one pipeline, and the economic, ecological and political effects that it engenders. We forgot to put this in last issue, so we also have part 3 below.

 

Video The Curse of Oil Part 3: The Pipeline
The Curse of Oil part three looks at the drilling in Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the ecological disaster these represent.

 

Audio Gorgeous George on Talksport
Talksport radio in a moment of rash stupidity and marketing genius gave George Galloway a three-hour phone-in radio show for a week. One show covered the Israeli re-invasion of Gaza. As usual George gave short shrift to detractors, bullying the pro-Israel callers, mostly by getting them to retract or backup their facts, although he repeatedly interrupted one guy, ironically with the promise he’d let him speak. Overall there’s the usual entertainment of a Galloway gig, with some interesting facts on the Israel/Palestine war. For those who enjoy their politics with a spicy Bombast mix, we have the full Georgie.

 

Filipinos cheap and disposable alternative to US troops
Filipinos might have ‘Barred from entering Iraq’ on their passports but that has not stopped the likes of Halliburton tapping this cheap labour to run the gauntlet of dangerous operations in the war torn Middle Eastern state. Dead Filipinos don’t make the headlines, and at $600 a month, they are dirt cheap. Asia Times Online has more.

 

USA nears bankruptcy?
The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country’s central bank.
A certain Professor Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. “To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors,” he asked.
According to his central analysis, “the US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds’’.

 

Video Exclusive Uncensored Interview with Mordechai Vanunu
30 Minutes with Vanunu is a 2006 interview which focuses on how “Israel is not a democracy unless you are a Jew” — as Mordechai Vanunu says. Vanunu was the whistleblower who showed the world that Israel had nuclear WMDs. In this video he also points out that the facility that produced the enriched uranium is now dangerously over it’s lifespan, and only operates when the prevailing wind is going to Jordan.

 

Video Florida Con Salsa
Populist candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador released a preliminary video yesterday of what he says proves he was cheated out of last week’s presidential election. Greg Palast reports for Democracy Now! on voter fraud in Mexico’s presidential election. Palast likens it to the 2000 and 2004 elections in the US.

 

New CERN inititive to beat malaria in Africa
Much like SETI@home, Africa@home hopes to use spare computer time to vanquish one of the biggest killers in the world: malaria, which kills over a million people every year.

 

Video UFO Review
Coutesy of archive.org, original broadcast in 1996, this film looks at some of the UFO websites out there, and talks to some of those involved.

 

Podcast round up
Out on the internet, new-fangled things are always a-foot. One of these is podcasting. Spinoza is not the only one who has an ipod, so the little red email thought we’d check out this new technology. And after an initial test, we’ve found that despite the MTV-esque hype, there’s some pretty good stuff out there. So here’s a round-up:

 

Podcast Democracy Now!
The always informative Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman is available in two main flavours: video or audio. Video is for those with a fairly hefty broadband connection, as each one weighs in at about 119mb. Squirrels will also need a lot of disk space too, as these come in 5 times a week. For those with space and pipes to spare, there is also a high quality MPEG4. Audio is a slightly more pedestrian 27mb for the hour-long report, and comes in an optional spanish version, too.
Feeds are available on the web here (or there are the audio version and video version in the itunes store).

 

Podcast RU Sirius
Veteran weirdo and Hyperdelic priest RU Sirius has a podcast! We only just found out so we can offer no review as yet, but it’s bound to be smart and interesting, like. Here’s the itunes link.

 

Podcast Gilles Peterson in Brasil
No politics involved, just a musical trip to mothership for the maestro. Gilles loves latin music and football. Travelling to Brazil is consequently like dying and going to heaven for him. We get to listen to some great tunes, and learn about Brazil’s music. Here’s the itunes link.

 

Podcast BBC World Service Documentary Archive
Well the title says it all, there’s all sorts of interesting stuff available, covering a wide gamut of things. Here’s the itunes link. All BBC podcasts are on the web here.

 

Podcast Greg Palast
Perhaps America’s only working investigative journalist, billed by one wag as the Sid Vicious of investigative journalism, Greg Palast’s podcasts are mostly extracts from his latest book, and therefore definitely worth a listen. Here’s the web feed.

 

Podcast BBC Newsnight
Any show that features Greg Palast gets our vote. This is sadly only a highlights show — but it is about 30-45mins long. Here’s the itunes link. All BBC podcasts are on the web here.

 

Podcast Mother Jones Radio
Mother Jones magazine is a fairly good political rag, on the whole. Mother Jones radio follows suit. Although an episode on Iran annoyed the little red email, purely because their “expert” was the son of the previous dictator, the Shah — hardly a balanced view, and giving airtime to him seemed a little like giving airtime to Ahmed Chalabi before the Invasion of Iraq: in that he’s almost certainly got his own agenda which he’ll be furthering, and he is about as utterly out of touch with Iran as the rest of us, so we’re really going to be listening to fantasy Interspersed with propaganda. That aside, MoJo is pretty good listening. Here’s the itunes link. Here’s the web link.

 

Adbust Timely piece from CDC
This is a timely piece from the California Department of Corrections, a splendid group who have produced some excellent busts.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then why is the Alaskan ecosystem in such upheaval?