Happy Birthday Hulk Hogan! Yes, today is the Hulkster's 51st birthday. What can I say about this True American Hero™? I think I speak for us all when I say that he should be our next president. He'd show Osama bin Loony a thing or two!

Masters of the Universe

Speaking of international trade agreements: Focus on the Global South has a good analysis of the recent WTO meeting in Geneva. If you didn't get enough of my pedantic scribbling, check out the FGS piece.

Institutionally, among the innovations is that the General Council has now become de facto the supreme institution for WTO decision-making. What the July meeting came up with was effectively a ministerial declaration without a ministerial meeting. . . .

Only some 40 trade ministers were present in Geneva for the July GC meeting, with many representatives of countries that played a key role at the Cancun ministerial, such as Kenya and Nigeria, absent. Obviously, with some 100 ministers of WTO member countries absent, a great many governments failed to fully grasp the significance of the meeting.

The piece identifies the G20 -- a bloc of nations less wealthy and supremacist than the G8 -- as well as new coalitions like the G33 and the G90 ("composed of the Africa Group, ACP [African Caribbean and Pacific countries] and the Least Developed Countries"). Important stuff, if not as riveting as musclemen in Spandex.


Goss and Monsters

Did you know that Porter Goss, Bush's choice to replace Tenet as director of the CIA, used to be a Latin American operative? It's true; he

worked in Miami, which was becoming a magnet for Cuban emigres. Some were recruited by the CIA and trained for what turned out to be one of the agency's greatest disasters: the 1961 invasion of Cuba that was crushed by Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs.

Goss also served the CIA in Haiti during the Duvalier regime, although when he was there and what he did remain classified.

But undercover CIA escapades in a region noted for US imperialism and covert death squad activity notwithstanding, AlterNet's David Corn has identified another important reason to be wary of Goss's potential helmship of the Agency.

As chairman of the House intelligence committee, Goss co-authored a letter to Tenet chastising the Agency's work prior to the Iraq war. The letter pointed out that "there were significant deficiencies with respect to the IC's [intelligence community's] intelligence collection activities concerning Iraq's WMD programs and ties to al-Qa'ida prior to the commencement of hostilities there." The CIA's resulting NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] (which insisted that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons" and "Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs") was, according to the letter, "based on too many uncertainties."

However -- and this is the rub -- Goss split with co-author Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) on whether or not the NIE was deficient in its analysis and presentation. The letter read: "The Ranking Member [Harman] believes it was. The Chairman [Goss] believes it was not."

Corn notes:

For some reason, Goss was comfortable bashing the CIA for insufficient intelligence collection, but he declined to criticize it for cooking up an NIE that overstated the intelligence. Was he trying to protect the White House, which had pointed to the NIE to justify its case for war (even though Bush aides acknowledged Bush never bothered reading the 90-page report)?

The piece ends with an entirely logical conclusion: "Goss should be questioned about this during his confirmation hearings. . . . Unless [he] is willing to acknowledge the complete extent of the problems within the intelligence community -- and to be frank about them -- he is not suitable to be America's top spy in these dangerous times."


HalliBush Wars, Inc.

While Kerry has suggested that he'd like to bring home many US troops from Iraq as quickly as six months after taking office ("depend[ing] on broader international assistance, better stability in Iraq and other factors" -- AP), Bush and pseudopal John McCain are suggesting the exact opposite.

"I think the events on the ground right now indicate clearly that we cannot bring anybody home," McCain told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview Wednesday. "In certain areas we may even have to strengthen our troop presence in the form of special forces and others. . . . I just don't know how you achieve it without knowing the facts on the ground six months from now."

It's true that six months is a long time (and a great deal can change in that time), but as Diane pointed out to me, Kerry could very well just be talking a big game to win support from the disenchanted-with-US-deaths crowd, and throw his word around like . . . well, like an election campaign promise.

I do believe that a more international presence is desperately needed in Iraq, but I don't know how I feel about a total withdrawal of US forces. Witness the mess in Najaf. There's no question that US soldiers are engaged in a spiral of death and destruction with Sadr's people. One of Iraq's deputy Presidents, Ibrahim Jaafari, has called for US troops to leave the city and allow Iraqi forces to take over. (He also called on Sadr's troops to pull back.) But the governor of Najaf asked for the US troops to intervene. Obviously, there are many things about this situation that we can't know at present, but I'm as hesitant to take the "Bring 'em all home now" position as I am the "Send more of 'em in now" side.

It all goes to show the hopelessness and self-destructive nature of war itself. We shouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place.

As for getting rid of the man who made that call -- Tariq Ali made an important point recently about what a Bush defeat would mean for the world who watches.

If the American population were to vote Bush out of office, I think the impact globally would be tremendous. . . . People would say this guy took his country to war, surrounded by these neocons who developed bogus arguments and lies to go to war against Iraq, he lied to his people, he misused intelligence information, and the American people have voted him out. That in itself I think would have a tremendous impact on world public opinion.

An intriguing way to look at it: Will we hold responsible the administration that led us down such a wretched and violent and suicidal path in the name of hegemony and resource control?


RNC: Carrot or Stick?

Meantime, many folks on the left (especially my special lady Diane -- see BlogNews below) are looking forward to the Republican National Convention at the end of the month as a way to voice opposition to the Bush administration. The city of New York has agreed to allow United for Peace and Justice to march through the streets of Manhattan, but wanted to send the post-march rally way out to the Westside Highway; UFPJ has rejected the idea and continues to push for a Central Park rally.

Meanwhile, there's some concern over tactics. Amy Goodman recently interviewed Norman Mailer; he said we should use the carrot:

The immediate need is to defeat Bush. But to do that, to do that, we have to reach the middle. And the only way we can reach the middle at this late day is that if we're extraordinarily peaceful in our demonstrations before the election. Because the media are just waiting there like coiled springs hoping that there will be a few maniacs who will cut loose. Maybe there will be a few people who will know what to do with the American flag as far as the republicans are concerned. And that is -- the republicans are hoping that we'll make [expletive]s of ourselves. They're counting on that. . . .

We have got to curb our rage for the next four months. Not put it away forever, far from it. Far from it. This rage is legitimate. But I think it's going to be more powerful after Kerry’s in.

A trenchant point, that. But noted direct-action advocate and lifelong peace activist Starhawk disagrees.

We must form a counterforce on the streets, the only place where social movements that challenge power have ever been carried forward. We will act nonviolently, to embody the values we stand for of compassion and liberation, and to make clear where the violence in society stems from: those same policies of lies, brute force and fear and their enforcement on those unwilling to collude with them. . . .

If we don’t take action, if we limit ourselves to mild expressions of discontent, we will undoubtedly be safer in the moment. But we will have moved further into a huge, longterm danger, of continuing the slide into tacit acceptance that we are not the people we thought we were, not the liberators of the world but its jailors, not the defenders of human rights but the torturers of Abu Ghraib.

First off -- it's absolutely not true that the streets are "the only place where social movements that challenge power have ever been carried forward." If that's true, then Shirley Chisholm and Cynthia McKinney are irrelevant (or worse). Part of what make social movements great is that they are carried out on all fronts -- from the front of the line in protest marches to the front of the US Senate. Some people choose to work inside the system, and that's a legitimate choice -- it does not make the person obsolete or unimportant. (Indeed, in some ways it takes more courage to work in the Belly of the Beast than to remain on the outside without the associated constraints and pressures. I've been meaning for years to work up a longer piece on this whole inside/outside dilemma, but I just haven't gotten around to it.)

I think I agree with Norman Mailer, as unaccustomed as I am to saying those words. Starhawk is right that we need to be visible at the RNC; but the dangers of giving a bad name/face to the non-Bush side far outweigh the potential good that would come of bringing heat and fire to power at that time and place.

While I generally think property destruction is counter-effective, other forms of "getting into the gears of the machine" are quite legitimate -- and showing the Powers That Be just how angry we are can serve an urgent purpose; so I was cheering for nonviolent mayhem in, say, Seattle. But this is a different context, and we need to have different goals.

In an election cycle, our first job ought to be to persuade and inform; not just illustrate our ire. Protests are obviously important; but it may be the case that good ol' pound-the-pavement voter registration and candidate canvassing is a more efficient use of activist time and humanpower.


Politics: Other

The International Herald Tribune had an interesting opinion piece today about how hard Americans work relative to workers in Europe. Breaking through the stereotypes, the authors note that Americans work harder because they have to, not so much because they want to.

Americans are compelled to work as long as they do in part because of the pervasive insecurity of American life. In the absence of the generous pensions, government-subsidized college education, universal health care and other benefits that Europeans take for granted, Americans see long hours of work as the only way to obtain needed benefits and generate savings for college and retirement. The real threat of job loss, even for professional employees, forces workers to maximize their earnings in the present. In the absence of strong labor organizations and laws that protect workers, employees are in no position to protest long hours.

In addition, employers have both the motivation and the ability to encourage or require long hours of their employees. It is cheaper to pay overtime than to hire a new employee and underwrite their benefits. It is even easier to demand long hours from managers and professionals who have no legal protection and whose own insecurity has grown enormously in recent years. The "culture of overtime" quickly takes root in this soil.

So you mean that if we stop bashing unions around every corner and unite as working people, we might have more time for family and leisure? What an insane notion! An excellent sentence in the concluding paragraph: "Europeans have gained politically and socially what many Americans say they want individually but have been unable to achieve politically." Touché.

And a group of conservatives (besides seeking to abolish the International Baccelaureate program) have launched an effort to get Ted Rall's work out of newspapers. They claim his 'toons are "melodramatically ideological, simple-headed, snarling, and tasteless." There's no question that Rall is not a polite artist; but then what artist worth a damn ever has been? I like being jarred out of complacency by Ted's envelope-pushing, even if I don't always agree with him. Fortunately, the article quotes a United Press Syndicate editor as saying that "none of the papers that received the laptoplobbyist.com letters have decided to drop Rall's work."

Go look at that anti-IB page. It's insane! ("The goal is to enlist your children in a movement to destroy America as we know it and turn over the reins of our government to the UN.")


BlogNews

Diane has a blog! Diane has a blog! Actually, it's a collective blog of Madison Women for Peace, but still -- Diane has a blog! This is especially exciting in light of the fact that she has scored -- via WORT -- a pass into the RNC itself. Huzzah! So check the W4P blog at the end of August for live on-the-spot reporting and all the time for news and analysis from our local Code Pink affiliate.

Christie has also launched one. 'Tis the season to start a blog! Huzzah!


Also: Noam Chomsky and Tim Wise no longer have their own blogs. All of ZNet's bloggers have been aggregated into the ZNet Blog, a group project. You can still focus in on just Chomsky, but then you'll miss other cool stuff, like Justin Podur reporting live from Venezuela.

And finally in the blogosphere -- check out Brian Sack's amusing blog Banterist, where he patrols the streets as a Grammar Cop and guides us through the amusing world of Online Dating Profile Photography.

Whew! What a long post this is turning out to be!


Random

Coming soon: Mountain Dew Pitch Black. In other news: Who gives a [expletive]? (I do, apparently.)

Tip: If you are a guest at a wedding in the Philippines, do not trip and accidentally touch the bride's butt. You may be killed and eaten. (Thanks to Nate for the link.)

Okay, it's time for lunch. Actually, it was time for lunch about half an hour ago.


TimeWaster™

Get depressed with Boogie's photography. Gangs, crack, skinheads -- "I guess that hopelessness is what I'm trying to capture." Powerful but disturbing. (For something more upbeat, make a virtual snowflake. Mine is #4228772.)

Today I'm listening to: Onomatopoeia!