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World Focus: The gift of a wired president to a wired race
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Genopolitics and the American priorities
By Kweli Nzito, Ph.D.
The run up to the American presidential elections has been amply inundated with "expert" political analyses and forecasts from an assortment of think tanks and polls each endowed with its own unique margin of error, as to ostensibly render superfluous any added commentary from outside the traditional, entrenched -- mainstream if you will (and White of course) -- sources of wisdom. That said however, a habitual theme of the American presidential campaign should hardly escape an outside gazer's notice and one that warrants some mention: the shallowness of the protagonists, the two plus years of crass showmanship leading to a predictable anti climax; and a conspicuous absence of serious introspection, thus nurturing and sustaining the shallowness. Of no trivial import, is the extravagance unleashed onto this otherworldly enterprise that would in the end give way to four years of yet more surreal political gamesmanship, setting the stage for the cycle to replicate itself. In a manner of speaking, the end of history has paradoxically assumed cyclical dimensions in the land of the end of history, robbing the onlooker of any anticipation, zeal or curiosity as to what may lie beyond the end.
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By Dr. Winford James
There is no doubt that the United States of America is a great polity, perhaps the greatest polity in the present world. You look at its democracy, its legal system, its educational system, its sports, its military, its commerce, its press, its music, its cinema, and its accommodation of immigrants from everywhere, and you cannot fail to see greatness. Perhaps the greatest proof of its greatness is the ubiquity of its culture in the living rooms and consciousnesses of practically the rest of the world. Non-Americans, including Trinbagonians, routinely consume America, especially its food, clothing, songs, movies, politics, journalism, and scholarship.
And yet America is a sad, ugly place - in critical respects. And nothing brings this out better than the 2004 election campaign for the presidency which will be decided on Thursday this week.
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By William Blum, counterpunch.org
The CIA Should Wear a Ski Mask When They Use This Excuse
Time Magazine reported that the Bush administration had a plan to use the CIA to funnel money to candidates it favored in the forthcoming Iraqi elections. The rationale given was that Iran was probably bankrolling its own preferred candidate.{1} Whether Iran has actually been engaged in such I do not know, but what is certain is that it is irrelevant to American policy. The United States has been trying to fix elections in every corner of the world for more than half a century without any other foreign power being in the picture at all. This argument in the case of Iraq is reminiscent of the Cold War period in Western Europe, when the CIA was covertly financing many political parties, media, labor unions, student groups, women's organizations, etc. When this secret support began to be disclosed in the 1960s, supporters of the CIA would typically defend the Agency's sundry activities in Europe on the grounds that the Russians were the first to be so engaged there and had to be countered. But it should be borne in mind that all the different types of enterprises and institutions supported by the CIA in Western Europe were supported by the Agency all over the Third World for decades on a routine basis without a Russian counterpart in sight.
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