contributions

Rounded numbers
Rounded lives
The 100th soldier
From the UK dies
Tears of grief
Tears of shock
The 100th soldier
Another loss
Mourning on
Mourning off
The 100th soldier
We count the cost
Of wars fought
In our name
Of loss loss
With no gain
Of cost cost
To our shame
The 100th soldier
The 1st
The 25th the 3rd
The numbered souls
On lists and roles
Names no longer called
This memoriam
The final
For them
They drew their last breath
Final thought...
Noble cause?

By Jonathan Weisman
In eight concise paragraphs, two moderate and two conservative House Republicans put into writing last week what they say many of their colleagues quietly fear: the GOP’s plunging poll numbers, rising public support for a Congress controlled by Democrats and the increasing belief among voters that the Republican Party is corrupt.
House Republicans will gather Thursday to elect a successor to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) as majority leader, and the perceptions of (…)

Editorial
A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.
The first was that the (…)

by Humberto Márquez
CARACAS- A day of international protests against the occupation of Iraq, on Mar. 18, will mark the start of a series of demonstrations and mobilisations organised at the sixth World Social Forum, which ended Sunday in Venezuela.
A conference against the U.S. occupation of Iraq will be held Mar. 24-27 in Cairo, Egypt, announced the international Assembly of Social Movements, which met on the final day of the WSF in Caracas.
Some 2,200 civil society organisations (…)

by Ferd Wulkan
More than 2,000 SEIU members who work for the University of Massachusetts (UMass) left SEIU in late 2005, just as SEIU was leaving the AFL-CIO. What’s most surprising is that SEIU preferred to lose these workers, rather than let them have a democratic local.
Members on four UMass campuses, in 10 bargaining units, were represented by four different SEIU locals until 2003. Through a top-down reorganization of locals under SEIU’s New Strength Unity Plan, all these units were (…)

And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power
By Robert Fisk
"The Independent" — — Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn’t we award this to those Algerians in 1990? And didn’t they reward us with that nice gift of an Islamist government - and then they so benevolently cancelled the second round of elections? Thank goodness for that!
True, the Afghans elected a round of representatives, albeit that they included some warlords and murderers. But then (…)

By Jennifer Moses
BATON ROUGE, La. — While the rest of the country wakes up in the morning to read about the latest round of Washington scandals, the misery in Louisiana continues unabated. Except for a few older, historical neighborhoods on "high ground," New Orleans is uninhabitable, and Cameron Parish, in the southwest corner of the state, basically no longer exists, having been wiped out by Hurricane Rita.
Meanwhile, though Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf Coast (…)

by Susan Webb
Iraq’s labor movement has formed a united permanent coordinating committee to “make its positions known” to the Iraqi government, and to challenge the dictates of international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Six union federations, including two Kurdish labor organizations, issued a joint statement, Jan. 16, stressing “the importance of complete sovereignty for Iraq over its petroleum and natural resources” to “develop them in a (…)

By Michael Parenti
In December 2005, the reactionaries who are running the government and ruining the country decided to cut about $42 billion from the human services budget over the next few years. Most of the cuts will come out of the hides of the very poorest among us. The victims include persons afflicted with disabling diseases who already have trouble trying to live on a monthly federal pittance.
But there is another side to this Scrooge story. There are others among us who are (…)

By Tom Engelhardt
This Tuesday, the presidential State of the Union Address rolls around yet again. Only four Januaries have passed since the President used a State of the Union Address to brand Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — the first two then bitter enemies, the third completely unrelated to either of them and on the other side of the planet — as a World-War-II-style "axis of evil." It was the first great State of Disunion deception of the Bush administration’s regal reign of error. Only (…)