Consultation Alberta Style

Ralph Klein promised consultation with the Volk of Alberta over his "discussion paper" on Third Way Health Care reform. When challenged by the Liberals to speak to Albertans at open forums they are sponsoring or in a televised debate, he balked and said the only discussion will be in the Legislature. Then he traveled to B.C. to discuss his ideas at a closed meeting where tickets sold for $100 per and $500 if you wanted to sit with Ralph.

The public is so worn down by years of Klein's threats on health reform, people hardly know where to turn. The democratic ethos is so eroded in this province with so few people prepared to contradict the premier, it's questionable whether a real debate is possible. An arrogant Klein said a few days ago he'll just make the legislature sit until he gets his way.Doctors' conditional support for Klein's third way a great letdown

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Prison Nation

Belarus held a farcical election today, with police patrols in the main square in order to avoid a Ukrainian like Orange Revolution. The people apparently voted for the dictator by over 80%. Mr. Lukashenko who rules Belarus was once a prison guard. Poor Belarus is a prison nation. Belarus vote ends in dubious landslide
Even in One Party State Alberta King Ralph only gets 72% in the popular opinion polls.


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The Spectacle of War on Terror

An excellent article in New Left Review, available online, is a review of NLR's Verso publication Afflicted Powers Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
by the Retort Collective based in the Bay Area of San Fransisco.

A collective effort they use Situationist theory of the Spectacle to analyze the current Bush phony war on Terror.

In light of the Pentagon release of Al-Qaeda materials this weekend that show Osama bin Laden understood the importance of media imaging of his war on the U.S. especially the attack on 9/11. It was the unreal reality of TV imaging, that then created the market response of 'reality' TV.

Retorts analysis of this as a Spectacular War, a media war fought in images and through media including the internet, becomes important for the Anti-War movement and the Left to understand.

They also use the theory that the permanent war economy that the US has embraced is a form of primitive accumulation of capital, which is also discussed in an earlier article in NLR.

It is this analysis that I have also posited here, that capitalism as globalization still requires primitive accumulation of capital, war zones with the consequential piracy and brigandism that marks the earliest form of capital accumulation.

Julian Stallabrass: Spectacle and Terror

The central claim of the book is that, with the attacks of 9-11, the us state was wounded at the level of the spectacle and cannot endure this ‘image death’ or ‘image defeat.

The perpetrators were fully conscious of what they were about, were in fact Debordian in their thinking, reasoning that capitalism is dependent on the colonized social circuits that comprise spectacle—including confidence in the market and the state, and an identification with commodity culture—and that to disrupt spectacle may have great and unpredictable consequences. The attacks, Retort claim, were not atavistic pinpricks but modern politics, an assault above all on the ‘ghost sociality’ purveyed by the media The assault on spectacle, not on economic power or even people, was their main business, and in this sense they were for a short time remarkably successful.

There is much that can be said to qualify this view. The motivations of the bombers themselves may never be known, although Retort point to tracts on media theory found in Al Qaeda camps. They must indeed have known that the consequences of their acts could not have been accurately predicted, and this makes their political motives—as opposed to their religious ones, or the desire for just revenge—murkier still. Retort are correct that the void at the level of the image in the mainstream broadcast media was remarkable

In any case, it may be that the point of terror is not merely to disrupt spectacle by producing indigestible images, but to exceed it. Retort highlight the paradox of the vanguard Islamic revolutionaries, who deny themselves all that capitalist spectacle has to offer, and harden themselves against mundane sentiment and appetite, yet who still hold to the effectiveness of the image, and propagate images of their acts through websites. Just as in their lives and deaths they seek the unmediated, so their atrocities perform it, being designed to produce real, bodily fear (not the sublime of air shows), to blanket a city with the smell of fire and blood, to bring to a people sunk in spectacle the ineluctability of arbitrary death. The July 2005 London underground bombings were not meant primarily to create images, but to spread the terror of living burial among the cityÂ’s populace.

Retort argue that the result of the spectacular defeat of 9-11 has been to push the state into actions that are as much governed by spectacle as by material considerations. Warfare has been elevated from an intermittent action to permanent imperial conflict. They claim that one frequently repeated charge of the anti-war movement—that the war was fought for oil—when taken too simply, ignores the ‘partially non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation. These include the effort to repair spectacle, and the drive to normalize war in the minds of citizens.

Retort are surely correct to point to the state’s efforts to create images that can counter the memory of 9-11, and to their insufficiency: Bush on the flight-deck proclaiming victory in Iraq, Saddam’s statue toppled, the dictator captured, the SmokinÂ’ Marine who was supposed to embody the cool courage of the us armed forces, and so on. It is not that these were ineffective pieces of propaganda, but they have subsequently soured as the war and acts of terror have continued. The most memorable images so far gathered by the us armed forces in Iraq are those taken on the phone-cameras of the torturers of Abu Ghraib. Similarly, us political support for Israel is seen as no longer being driven by strategic or military considerations, which now would operate against such an alliance, but rather as an attachment at the level of the image: both are simultaneously democratic consumer societies and highly militarized states with a pioneer ethos, and both harbour the guilt and pride of having taken their land by expelling and exterminating another population. The us in seeing Israel looks into a mirror and cannot abandon its own reflected image.

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War Faking

As I said here the other day; Iraqi Distraction, the sturm and drang in the media about Operation Swarmer in Iraq was a distraction in order to boost Bush's poll ratings. Galloping Beaver follows up with an excellent essay pointing out that the whole mission was a hoax, an elaborate media build up for a basic excercise with joint U.S. and Iraqi forces.

An excercise folks. A flexing of muscle to coinside with the muscular speeches given by the President this week. And here is the irony it was all made for the 24/7 TV news networks.

As Time magazine reported, though they own CNN which played right into the Defense Department/Pentagon PR campaign,

But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. ("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op.

Meanwhile with all the photo op material provided by the Pentagon, no media were allowed on this secret mission, it still was part of the attempt by the US to pretend its Iraqi puppet army was ready to deal with security. Which of course it isn't.

In fact this whole operation has managed to further upset the Sunni's and provide further fuel for political sectarian differences, and all they got out of it was peoples personal weapons. So much for defending the Second amendment.

One leading Sunni Arab, Iraqi presidential security adviser Wafiq al-Samaraie, urged that the operation ease restrictions on traffic across Samarra's vital Tigris River bridge, and cease "disarming the people of Samarra of their own authorized weapons."

But the US has to start pulling out troops this year, as the Brits have already begun. That was their timetable all along. However as much as the US has pushed for a government and army in Iraq that could take over based on this timetable, to extract troops prior to the November elections in the US, the Iraqi's have failed to live up to US expectations.

This excercise was a fake, it was nothing more than a regular police action, in order to distract from the serious failure of the US military and political strategy in Iraq. Three years after "Mission Accomplished".

U.S. lowering goals in Iraq

By Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — Three years ago today, as they ordered more than 150,000 U.S. troops to race toward Baghdad, Iraq, Bush administration officials confidently predicted that Iraq quickly would evolve into a prosperous, oil-fueled democracy. When those goals proved optimistic, they lowered their sights, focusing on a military campaign to defeat Sunni-led insurgents and elections to jump-start a new political order.

John Moore, Associated Press

Iraqi security forces carry weapons turned in by militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr in Baghdad in October 2004.

Now, as the conflict enters its fourth year, the Bush administration faces a new challenge: the prospect of civil war. And, in response, officials appear to be redefining success downward again. If Iraq can avoid all-out civil war, they say, if Baghdad's new security forces can hold together, if Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all participate in a new unity government, that may be enough to allow the administration to begin reducing the number of U.S. troops in the country by the second half of this year.
In increasingly sober public statements — and in slightly more candid assessments in interviews with officials who refused to be identified — administration officials are working to lower expectations.
"It may seem difficult at times to understand how we can say that progress is being made," President Bush said in his weekly radio address Saturday, acknowledging that much of the recent news from Iraq has been bad. "But . . . slowly but surely, our strategy is getting results."
"We may fail," warned a senior official directly involved in Iraq policy. "But I think we're going to succeed. I think we're going to nudge this ball down the road. . . . It's not going to be easy, and it's going to take time."


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