William Bowles – Essays
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To Nuke or not to Nuke? That is the question By William Bowles
2 April 2007 “All options are on the table” – President Bush on Iran For well over a year now pundits on both the left and the right have been telling us that the US/Israel Axis is about to bomb/invade Iran; those on the right say it with glee and on the left with understandable… Continue reading
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Us and Them By William Bowles
29 March 2007 We are so used to the ruling political class making decisions ‘for us’ that we forget that they exist and act only because we allow them to. We allow it because we think that once elected, our representatives will act in our best interests. And because ‘we elect’ them every so often—itself… Continue reading
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Beware the Ides of March By William Bowles
25 March 2007 “Inspired” “Engineered” “Involvement” “Intelligence” “Circumstantial” “Link” — The BBC hedging its bets on alleged Iranian involvement in the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq “There is intelligence about this [Iranian involvement], but no hard proof” BBC 6pm News, 23/3/07 Well we all know what ‘intelligence’ means but this didn’t stop the same ‘news’ broadcast leading… Continue reading
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Madness and Capitalism By William Bowles
21 March 2007 “The body had to die so that labor-power could live.” — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 141. Anybody who has read Michel Foucault’s ‘Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’, and who agrees with him, will probably have a very different take on the entire… Continue reading
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Clarifying climate change By William Bowles
17-18 March 2007 I hope that my piece ‘Don’t bother breathing out’ (see below) didn’t lead readers to assume that I don’t think that global warming is not the result of human actions. If so, I wish to clarify that all the available evidence points to the fact that global warming is the result of… Continue reading
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So what gives? By William Bowles
12 March 2007 ‘[We come not as] conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’ — Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, Commander in Chief of British forces in Iraq, after entering Baghdad in March 1917. According to the best estimates, the dozen years of sanctions following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait led to something like one million deaths… Continue reading
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The economics of 7/7 and other mysteries of capitalism explained By William Bowles
26 February 2007 ‘When politicians wave abstractions around like flags—abstractions like ‘security’ or for that matter ‘freedom’—citizens should be immediately suspicious.”[1] There is one thing we can be certain of; the capitalist state is in disarray and in crisis. With every passing day its legitimacy crumbles further. Much of its prior claim to any kind… Continue reading
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Ties that bind By William Bowles
22 February 2007 If nothing else, groups like Medialens[1] perform an invaluable service to an otherwise woefully misinformed public pointing out the blatant and not-so-blatant bias in the corporate and state-run media’s coverage of events. Back in the mid-eighties I was involved in Extra!, a publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)[2], a New… Continue reading
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Yours Truly, ‘Disgusted’ of London By William Bowles
18 February 2007 Here in the UK we are, according to the statistics anyway, the fourth or fifth wealthiest nation on the planet at least in material terms but according to the latest UNICEF report we are at the bottom of the list of the twenty-one most developed nations when it comes to the treatment… Continue reading
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Gaea’s Revenge? By William Bowles
20 January 2007 “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theater, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume — your capital. The less you are, the less you give expression… Continue reading
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WWW or Whining, Waxing and Waning By William Bowles
9 January 2007 “China’s growth is replacing the US as the engine of the world economy. China is the world’s largest consumer of steel, cement, copper, aluminum and zinc and the second largest oil consumer. Says Robin Bhar of UBS, “The fact that growth in the developing world will offset the decline in demand from… Continue reading
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Book Review: Of Marxism and Magic By William Bowles
No doubt there will be people who consider that the title of this essay is to say the least, a contradiction in terms and on the face of it I would be forced to agree. However, before all the lefties amongst you start firing off letters of protest to yours truly, Marcos, ‘leader’ of the… Continue reading
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Serious Fraud By William Bowles
In an age of exploding communications where we now possess the tools to effectively challenge the dominant culture’s control of information, it is more than a little ironic that we find ourselves bereft of the traditional tools of political action that in days past would have enabled us to more effectively exploit these new conditions. Continue reading
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Beware of gringos bearing ‘gifts’ By William Bowles
“Staying the course”, the battle cry of the republic. Then comes the Iraq Study Group and predictably all the headlines parrot the news bites about a war ‘lost’ and a ‘change of course’. But is it a change of course or the same wolf dressed up as a dove creeping in through the back door… Continue reading
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Capitalism first – climate last By William Bowles
I think it should be pretty clear to all by now that regardless that the ruling elites of the planet know what’s in store for humanity, they do not intend to take the necessary steps to reverse the slide toward chaos. Yeah sure, lots of hot air to add to an already over-heated atmosphere but… Continue reading
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Book Review: Capitalism – past its sell-by date? By William Bowles
Historically, it has been the CIA which up until the 1990s did the dirty work for US imperialism as the record clearly shows. However, the CIA’s record in overthrowing foreign governments is far from being a success story. A new strategy was needed, and one which was untainted with the ‘dirty tricks’ label of the… Continue reading
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We are the Snails on the Slope By William Bowles
Are we the equivalent of the Snail on the Slope, intent on hanging on to what we think are our advantages even as we destroy the very basis of them just as the colonisers destroyed the forest that sustained life? We cannot say that we don’t see or know what is going on, we have… Continue reading
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WOT is to be done? By William Bowles
Y’know, I’ve been at this for what seems like a bloody lifetime, my first electronic missive hit the ether about 1983 when I started up an occasional column called ‘New York Online’ which for my sins spawned an eight-year long electronic journal of the same name running on my first Mac using a system most… Continue reading
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Crisis Management By William Bowles
Perhaps the most difficult thing to do when dealing with current events is to establish the link between economics and politics. Thus the corporate press never, ever present an event, the invasion of Iraq for example as having any connection with economics, indeed any attempt to do so is ridiculed (eg it’s not all about… Continue reading
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Leaving the scene of the crime? By William Bowles
The Independent’s front page head for Wednesday 25 October proclaimed loudly “We’re out of here” purportedly the words of General George Casey, the US’s head military honcho in Iraq. Of course the devil lives in the small print as any reading ‘between the lines’ reveals. And in any case, Casey’s comments are designed precisely to… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 