Author: mara.ahmed

AS MANY of you have no doubt witnessed, the word “socialism” has returned to the forefront of the American political debate. Newsweek had a front cover declaring “We Are All Socialists,” the Nation magazine had a forum on what socialism is today, and even the New York Times had a discussion on the meaning of the word.

Socialism, depending on who you’re talking to, can mean anything from the bureaucratic dictatorship of the Soviet Union, to the social reforms of Western Europe, to even, in the case of people like those in Glenn Beck’s “9/12” movement, a guttural curse word to be spat at every policy deviating slightly from the reactionary cesspool from which they emerged.

What I, an actual living socialist, will advance tonight as socialism differs fundamentally from all of these, and is the definition of socialism which stands in the revolutionary, self-emancipatory tradition of Marxism–a tradition which takes as it’s foundation that it is those who work and produce and farm and create who are responsible for all the wealth in the world, and that it is they, not an elite of the super-rich or a bureaucratic clique, that have the right and power to take and manage the world’s resources in society’s interests.

However, this idea–that people should be able to come together to democratically decide their future as a community, as a county, city, nation and ultimately species–one which seems on the surface so self-evident, is one which is completely at odds with the capitalist system under which we live today. Full article.

get out of afghanistan, use that money to pay for healthcare, don’t be afraid of big govt – if there’s no big govt, there’s going to be big corporations over which u have no control. at least u can vote for govt. watch video.

Turkey extended a regional peace drive to Iraqi Kurds when Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu met with top Kurdish officials in a landmark visit to Arbil. “It is time for Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis to rebuild the Middle East. Therefore, it is time for everyone to take brave steps,” Davuto?lu told a joint press conference with Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani late on Friday. Barzani praised Davuto?lu’s visit, saying it is even more significant now as the Middle East is passing through such a sensitive time. Full article.

“Your presence in the region is not good for peace,” a resident of the tribal areas said, referring to the U.S. military, “because it gives rise to frustration and irritation among the people of this region.” At another point he told Clinton, “Please forgive me, but I would like to say we’ve been fighting your war.” A similar point was made by Sana Bucha of Geo TV during the live broadcast interview. “It is not our war,” she told Clinton. “It is your war.” She drew a burst of applause when she added, “You had one 9/11. We are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan.” Full article.

Malalai Joya is one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists. In 2005, she became the youngest person ever elected to the Afghan parliament. She was suspended in 2007 for her denunciation of warlords and their cronies in government. She has just written her memoir, “A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman Who Dared to Speak Out.” She spoke in New York at the Northeast Socialist Conference on October 23, 2009. Watch her speech.

CNN’s heidi collins interviews malalai joya. collins is such an arrogant moron – talking down to malalai about what it’s like to be an afghan living under american occupation – she says: occupation is “your” word and many would take exception to that. the americans r there to protect afghan civilans of course. so revealing of the hubris and inanity of empire. watch the interview.

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“Domestic extremism” is the subversion of the new surveillance state, though without even the spurious definition the cold war term was given. The police intelligence apparatus insists it’s only interested in “extremists”, not the groups they’re part of. […] That is even more true of Britain’s Muslim community, where the line the authorities are busy blurring is between political protest and terrorism. […] In reality, both the mass surveillance and the government’s decision to widen its target from the violent to the elastic McCarthyite catch-all of “extreme” is spreading fear and mistrust, intimidating Muslims from taking part in mainstream politics and undermining the very people who can most effectively challenge those drawn towards indiscriminate violence. Full article.

I feel that our strategies in Afghanistan are not pursing goals that are worthy of sacrificing our young men and women or spending the billions we’re doing there,” Hoh said. “I believe that the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them — not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West. The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them. Full article.

In Britain earlier this month, a two-judge High Court panel rejected arguments made first by the Bush team and now by the Obama team and decided to make public seven redacted paragraphs in American intelligence documents relating to torture allegations by a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay. The prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British national, says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and at a C.I.A.-run prison outside Kabul before being transferred to Guantánamo. He was freed in February. To block the release of those paragraphs, the Bush administration threatened to cut its intelligence-sharing with Britain, an inappropriate threat that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeated. The objective is to avoid official confirmation of wrongdoing that might be used in lawsuits against government officials and contractors, and might help create a public clamor for prosecuting those responsible. President Obama calls that a distracting exercise in “looking back.” What it really is is justice. Full article.

KABUL – Terrified U.N. workers scrambled over the roof or leaped from windows to escape choking smoke and gunfire after being awakened at dawn Wednesday when Taliban militants wearing police uniforms stormed a residential hotel packed with foreigners.

The assault, which killed 11 people including three militants, was one of a series of brazen attacks aimed at undermining the Nov. 7 presidential election runoff. It underscored the risks facing U.N. and Afghan officials in organizing the vote and the massive challenge for the U.S.-led military force in curbing the determined insurgency. Full article.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Suspected militants exploded a car bomb in a market crowded with women and children Wednesday, killing 100 people and turning shops selling wedding dresses, toys and jewelry into a mass of burning debris and bodies. Full article.

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them. This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class. Full article.

The bigger story is that the Taliban are not, in fact, gone from Swat, so even the stated goal of the mission has actually not been accomplished. The Pakistani Army’s new counter-insurgency strategy is to arm local militias to fight the Taliban, which means that the Army is circulating even more weaponry in the area, leading to its further destabilization. Also, there is a reign of terror being unleashed in these “war zones,” and its author is the Pakistani military, rather than the Taliban. Dead bodies have been dumped in the middle of towns, and experts agree that the marks on these bodies are consistent with the Pakistani military’s torture techniques. Cell-phone videos circulating on the Web show military personnel breaking into homes, and dragging away and torturing people. Full article.

brilliant brilliant interview on afghanistan: “more troops, more drone attacks, more death squads – more taliban we will be facing, however unpopular they might be” (dan ellsberg, who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the pentagon papers, a top-secret pentagon study of US government decision-making about the vietnam war, which led to the end of the war). watch interview.