10 November 2011
‘The streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes’ — Vladimir Mayakovsky[1]
If only…
What are Lefties to make of OWS? Is it ‘ours’? Where is it headed? Is it socialist? And what is it with occupations anyway? Continue reading
Tag: right
The BBC: NATO’s media partner-in-crime By William Bowles
25 October 2011
Well they’ve finally silenced Muammar Gaddafi, the man the BBC calls “an oddball until the end”. The manner of his capture and death seems not to bother the BBC but then who cares about ‘oddballs’?
Labouring under an illusion By William Bowles
30 September 2011
Note: This is in the way of a continuation of my last essay ‘In the belly of the beast‘.
Nothing could illustrate the paradox better than the Labour Party, ‘the party of labour’, financially supported largely by Britain’s biggest trade unions (representing around five million public employees) bankrolling the party which has led the way in attacking what’s left of the gains made since 1945. In a word, a traitorous political party that once again, faces the task of reinventing itself.
What is going on in Libya? By William Bowles
29 August 2011
29 August 2011
Some Tweets on ‘African Mercenaries’
J0nblaz @al_Jamahiriya @journalist92 This what we mean by Black Libyans being pursued & executed by NATO rabble terrorists! goo.gl/tkaDP
MikePrysner Rebels are correct; many Black Africans being lynched in #Libya were “hired by #Gaddafi.” They’re called immigrant workers, not mercenaries, about 3 hours ago
Book Review: The ‘Empire of Chaos’ or living in the age of impunity By William Bowles
1 August 2008
Book Review: International Justice and Impunity – The Case of the United States, edited by Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer and Diana G. Collier. Clarity Press, 2008.
Impunity: N. Nonliability, exemption, let-out, immunity, special treatment.
Impunity: Vb. Exempt, set apart, absolve, grant immunity, are just some of the descriptions my Roget’s Thesaurus lists for the word impunity.
Other descriptions listed by the Thesaurus are perhaps even more apt:
Owe no responsibility, be free from, have no liability, spare oneself the necessity, exempt oneself, excuse oneself, the list goes on…
“The American ambassador to the United Nations in the middle of the 1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has thus congratulated himself in his memoirs, for having rendered “totally ineffective, on the instructions of the State Department, all measures taken by the United Nations [with regard to the 40-plus UN resolutions on Palestine]”. — ‘Rudolph El-Kareh, The American Politic in the Middle East, Force, Impunity, Lawlessness.’ (p.64)
Robert Mugabe, yet another man the West loves to hate By William Bowles
29 June 2008
Robert Mugabe is bit like Osama bin Laden, if he didn’t exist they’d have to invent him, and invent him they have, with a vengeance.
Book Review: Why the Left doesn’t get it By William Bowles
15 June 2008
Book Review: ‘Deer Hunting With Jesus – Dispatches from America’s Class War’ By Joe Bageant
“Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations.”
This is the hardest review I have ever had to write. Who am I writing it for seems to be at the heart of my dilemma. But let me say first that this book is a witty, insightful and sympathetic portrait of a world most of us are only aware of through cliché or stereotype. Who are we talking about? The so-called American Redneck.
Failing to make the right connections By William Bowles
7 August 2007
I’m torn, really torn between trying to keep up with the deceptions the corporate press keep feeding us and wanting to ignore the entire sorry mess completely, but well you know how it is, almost without exception, everyday there’s a story that grabs my attention because it represents all that’s wrong with the way events and their causes are reported.
The Independent on 4 August ‘07 had a major story on bottled water titled ‘Bottled Out’ about a campaign currently being waged in New York and other US cities to ban the bloody things, the rationale being the amount of energy taken to produce and ship the plastic bottles the H20 comes in (bottled water is more expensive than petrol). With revenues totaling $11 billion in 2006, it’s really big business (especially for the two major distributors and marketers, Pepsico and of course, Coca Cola).
An all-consuming greed by William Bowles
26 July 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 to your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life … So all passions and all activity are submerged in greed — Karl Marx, Notebooks, 1844 (emph. added)
While I writing this I’m listening to the delightful and delectable Bill Evans playing his heart out and I understand totally what the great man is saying, but I am not entirely surprised that some (perhaps many) people don’t understand Marx’s commentary on the destructive power that the accumulation of capital has on the individual. The reason I suspect has to do with how it rules our lives in ways that do not reveal the underlying causes of how the greed of a few powerful men determine the lives of the many, perhaps in part because we think we’d like to be where they are (isn’t this the heart of the fantasy that we’ve been sold)?
The New Dark Age 