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1471 [lbo-talk] Iraq fallout -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 31 August 2003 POWER VACUUM The assassination of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, following last week's killing of the United Nations envoy, exposed the dangerous power vacuum in that country. As is widely understood, the coalition was prepared for war, but not for reconstruction. More pointedly, the regime that they destroyed was, for all its terrible faults, the only viable order in Iraq. Until an alternative power ...

Document Size:	10127
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 31 11:53:17 PDT 2003

1472 [lbo-talk] Hutton's fantasy politics -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 24 August 2003 HUTTON'S FANTASY POLITICS Britain's chattering classes are enjoying the spectacle of the government's spin-doctors on the dissecting table of Lord Hutton's enquiry. Having pointedly withheld their support for the British contribution to the war in Iraq, the government's critics in the media are pleased to see Hoon, Campbell and this week Blair on the rack. Though one of the regulators of Iraq's twelve-yearlong blockade, David Kelly's subsequent qualms about the war ...

Document Size:	8051
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Aug 23 12:19:18 PDT 2003

1473 [lbo-talk] Blackout, Amin, Zimbabwe -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 17 August 2003 SUPERPOWER? The East coast energy blackouts indicate the weaknesses of the America's economy. Its strengths are well known: successively expanding workforce buoying a booming consumer goods sector. But the expansion of the US economy in the 1990s was predominantly extensive, rather than intensive. More people were drawn into productive work, by recruiting women and immigrants into the labour force (In September 1999 the Scientific American reported that more than o ...

Document Size:	8195
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 17 03:45:03 PDT 2003

1474 [lbo-talk] Liberia, Solomons, Leslie -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 3 August 2003 LIBERIA, SOLOMONS: IMPERIAL MISSION-CREEP At the beginning of this year, America and Australia made to (unequal) partners in a 'Coalition of the willing' that was denounced in protests at home and across Europe for their intervention in Iraq. Strangely, no such protests have been encountered in the latest decision of these two to send troops abroad. Australia's new force in the Solomon Islands and America's long-awaited intervention in Liberia have been welcomed by ...

Document Size:	9317
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 3 04:46:24 PDT 2003

1475 [lbo-talk] Education, Oil, Galloway -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 27 April 2003 EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION? That was the pledge that Tony Blair made in 1997, but midway into his second term and despite large injections of cash into the education system, schools are warning that they may have to sack teachers to balance their budgets. An angry Education Secretary Charles Clarke blamed Local Authorities for salting away additional funds, while they in turn blamed the government - and by implication the teachers - for increasing wage costs th ...

Document Size:	10541
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 27 06:09:53 PDT 2003

1476 [lbo-talk] Timid Corporation -- rank: 1000

In message <20030420190002.23020.68194.Mailman at infothecary.org>, lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org writes >Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:James Heartfield wrote: > >>THE TIMID CORPORATION > >James, you've been singing this song a long time. I'm curious - do >you think the world would be a better place with more cowboy >capitalists? Is the problem with contemporary capitalism that it's >not capitalist enough? Well, I cannot claim authorship: th ...

Document Size:	5897
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 21 00:25:54 PDT 2003

1477 [lbo-talk] Timid capitalists -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 20 April 2003 Book of the week THE TIMID CORPORATION For hundreds of thousands of years men watched the sun and the moon cross the skies, unaware that they were really seeing the rotation of the Earth they were standing on. Financial journalist Benjamin Hunt's fine book, The Timid Corporation, dispels a similar confusion about modern capitalism. Hunt shows that the overwhelming perception that financial markets are 'out of control' or that runaway capitalism is locked into an 'ir ...

Document Size:	9459
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 20 03:15:11 PDT 2003

1478 [lbo-talk] Looting, Warnography, Incubators -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 13 April 2003 LOOTING THE LIBERATION Donald Rumsfeld turned on journalists for running stories about the widespread looting and disorder in 'liberated' Iraq: 'Henny Penny, the sky's falling down!' His point was that no matter how good the news, journalists were predisposed to see the negative side. Of course there is a problem. The Iraqis were bystanders at their own liberation, and have no ownership of it. Where real liberation takes place, the liberated are authors of their own ...

Document Size:	9672
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 13 04:28:25 PDT 2003

1479 [lbo-talk] Peace, Hamza -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 6 April 2003 WHY HAS THE PEACE MOVEMENT FAILED? February and March saw the largest mass protests across the world for more than a decade. Millions marched in Europe - especially Britain, Italy and Spain - followed by hundreds of thousands more across the Middle East right through Turkey to Pakistan and even Indonesia. Even in the USA the Churches opposed the war; in Britain, support for the anti-war demonstrations was fashionable among the London elite; in France, Belgium and Ger ...

Document Size:	9218
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 6 07:16:10 PDT 2003

1480 Exams, Protests, Iraq -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 29 September 2002 WORST POSSIBLE A-LEVEL RESULT British education minister Estelle Morris sacked exams watchdog William Stubbs after a row about A-level results, reported last WEEK. Far from government intervening to raise the bar for A-level standards as was claimed, Morris intervened politically to lower standards at the behest of private schools, embarrassed at having failed to deliver the promised results. Following an enquiry, the Education Department has undertaken to re-gr ...

Document Size:	8158
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Sep 29 02:08:51 PDT 2002

1481 Exams, Germany -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 22 September 2002 ALL MUST HAVE PRIZES 'At last the Dodo said "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll Britain's private school sector began a challenge to new A-level examination results that saw Education Secretary Estelle Morris concede first a public enquiry, and today that the qualification might be scrapped altogether. The independent schools' headmasters protested when their star pupils failed to get the expected A ...

Document Size:	8732
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Sep 22 05:56:24 PDT 2002

1482 Iraq -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 15 September 2002 UNITED NATIONS' HUMAN SACRIFICE Interviewed by the BBC's Michael Cockerell British Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked whether, in the words of a former US Secretary of State for Defence (Robert McNamara), he was prepared to 'pay the blood price' to keep the special relationship with the United States of America. Blair 'vigorously assented', indicating a willingness to shed British blood to maintain ties with the White House. But on past precedent, it will be or ...

Document Size:	7256
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Sep 15 07:03:51 PDT 2002

1483 Amateur hour in Jo'burg -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 8 September 2002 AMATEUR HOUR IN JO'BURG Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma has been an activist in the African National Congress since the mid-seventies, when she left South Africa to lead the party's youth wing in Britain. Dlamini Zuma might not have been the obvious choice to chair a difficult international conference, where tensions between Europe and America were cranked up by environmental activists and Third World critics. But at their meeting in Washington this July US Secretary o ...

Document Size:	7732
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Sep 8 04:32:35 PDT 2002

1484 Morris, Irish Labour, Fire fighters -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 27 October 2002 SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER Britain's beleaguered Education Secretary Estelle Morris surprised everybody by quitting, just as she had been thought to have gotten over her worst trials (see previous WEEKs). More remarkably Morris admitted that she had not done as well as she wanted in her resignation letter. Ironically, her candour about her own performance has muddied the waters even further. Instead of leading to an understanding of what is wrong with Education policy ...

Document Size:	11753
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Oct 27 05:21:02 PST 2002

1485 Exams, Indonesia, Australia -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 20 November 2002 DEGRADING A-LEVELS 'Not worth the paper they are written on' was the judgement on the A-level qualification that had politicians and commentators queuing up to denounce Britain's Tory opposition leader Iain Duncan Smith. But this is a case of blaming the messenger. As much damage as the Conservatives did to education before 1997, the damage to the A-Level was entirely the work of the current administration, and much more than a question of public confidence. It b ...

Document Size:	10775
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Oct 20 03:55:19 PDT 2002