Tuesday's new CD day, so i walked up to Kim's Uptown on 114th and Broadway and picked up the new Cure album, which was released today. I agree with Pitchfork's assertion that the self-titled new record is probably the Cure's best since Wish - Wild Mood Swings didn't come close and Bloodflowers was formulaic and somewhat boring. The Cure seems more in the vein of the variant and schizophrenic textures and moods of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me or Head On The Door than the more staid poppiness of Wish. It's also proably the first Cure album i know of to feature gigantic anti-piracy labels obscuring most of the cover art, and thus marks the consolidations and transformations in the recording industry since the band first appeared 25 years ago. Robert Smith has repeatedly hinted that he'll stop performing soon. Bloodflowers was supposed to be the band's final album, before every band from A Perfect Circle to 311 started riding the band's coatails to fame and someone in the Cure camp realized another album might be a good idea. The Cure is at the very least a much better goodbye than its predecessor was.



That said, the "End of The World," the first single, ahs lost its appeal for me - too emo, i guess.

A day after a Christian Aid report alleges that US oil companies have sifted away 20 billion dollars of oil revenues from the restructured puppet state, the "handover of sovereignty," however meaningless, begins two days early. This won't prevent insurgent attacks, so what's the real reason for this accelerated timetable?

Woohoo

Happy birthday to my mother!

The supreme court scratches Cheney' (and the energy lobby's) back, the FEC rules that it gets to regulate advertising for political documentaries, and over 70 are dead in Iraq.



It's morning in America, indeed.

Today's times' expose on the institutionalization of torture tactics by occupation forces is devastating, and, although much of this information was already available - the ghost detainees, the dogs, the forced masturbation, shocking and disgusting. There's a deeply homophobic logic behind this colonial subjection of bodies to state terror. The imperial occupation of Iraq thus threatens a wide spectrum of movements for global social justice. We need to hold the American military state apparatus accountable for what they have been doing, and we need to end the occupation now.

The New York Times gets something right:

Aside from a brief reference to "my poor judgment," the governor's resignation speech was peculiarly self-serving. An outsider who had no idea the state had been struggling through a seemingly endless series of scandals might have assumed Mr. Rowland was giving up his job to accept an ambassadorship. In truth, the questionable dealings under Mr. Rowland's leadership ranged from who paid for the vacation house hot tub to a $220 million deal with Enron that left the state taxpayers holding the bag.



The inquiries into Mr. Rowland's affairs uncovered a raft of associates who were happy to give the governor gifts, forgive debts or let him in on favorable deals. These same people wound up with state loans or contracts. The best conceivable defense for the governor was that he regarded this as normal.

I hope this doesn't mean that there will be an end to the federal investigation against the governor, nor that we will simply assume that officials in his cabinet, including Ms. Rell, were innocent of wrongdoing.

While we (and by we, i mean Josh and Phoebe,) are enumerating the deeds of Rowland-style governance, we should add to the list illegal strikebreaking against nursing home workers, protesting against which during the summer of 2001 many Connecticut residents, including one UOC founder, were arrested.

Are you tired of being white? A "gringo?" Are you tired of boring music, country western line-dancing, and the missionary position? Well, according to my television, then what you need is new Dentine Fire(TM). Yes folks, one pack of Dentine and you'll be transformed from just another gabacho into a sultry, sexy Latino/a, a member of America's most commodifiable new ethnic minority. Always envied the Ricky Martin lifestyle? Wished you could identify more with farmworker claps and Gloria Anzaldua? Well then clearly, you need new Dentine fire



I would wager that what Kinetz describes as the "mollifying effect R&B has had on some hip hop" has done more to sexualize hip hop dancing than vice versa. Somehow i can't see people grinding to KRS or De La (or Wu Tang, or Tribe...)



John Rowland will finally resign tonight. It's about fucking time.

I've lost interest in blogging about branding - particularly of the garment variety, because i couldn't really see anything anyway, but the game - after the mets pulled themselves together and came back from trailing 2-0 to win it in the bottom of the tenth inning with what would have been a grand slam by mike cameron - was really fun, even if the massive comercialization - particulalry since the last mets game i went to ten plus years ago, was really frightening.

there's something surreal or ironic or one of those other words we all pretend we understand about reading Andrew Ross's chapter on sweatshop productiona dn the branding of sports in his new book as i prepare to head off to Shea Stadium with alyssa, my brother Lev, and my brother's friend from the Center School. I'm not planning on buying any mets merchandise today, but i am going to keep my eyes open and interrogate branding techniques employed on and off the field. The mets are playing the detroit tigers, so god knows, they may actually win. I don't think i've ever seen the mets win at Shea. I can't believe i'm blogging about baseball.

Steve Greenhouse's article in today's times is informative and disturbing. There is a danger that the sensationalist manner in which Greenhouse deals with lock-ins obscures larger issues of immigrant workers' legal status and power on the job, but i think Greenhouse is good about looking at some of the structural issues at work here and (possibly because the Fifth Avenue folks already have) making some important connections.



thanks for the link to Vlorbik

Otto Reich just appeared on NPR and stated that Aristede deserved to be deposed because he'd stolen an election. I will say no more.

I've been pretty truant with my blogging habits lately, and there's a great deal to blog - John Ashcroft hiding prisoners from the very imperial international red cross - a professor of mine once remarked that the red cross and bombing civilians seem to go hand in hand - for one. I might mention the so-called "comstitutional crisis in Connecticut over the impeachment of crooked governor and illegal strikebreaker John "G. is for 'Gifts'," i could talk about that firghtening article in the NYT about military recruitment. Hell, i could write about twelve pages of material just cursing out David Brooks and Charles Hill. I could wonder why the NYT moved the aforementioned story about ashcroft on its webpage down to the ehadline doldrums while gloating about Tiger Woods' abyssmal showing in a sport nobody outside the republican party goves a shit about. I could complain about my continuing unemployment and the concomitant feelings of depression and uselessness, review Andrew Ross's new book Low Wage High Profile, which i'm currently reading, or critique Rob Mitchum's hatchet job on Automato in tuesday's Pitchfork. But i really shouldn't gotta find a job after all. So check back later, and maybe i'll have solved my employment woes ad have something more substantial to say.

I've been pretty truant with my blogging habits lately, and there's a great deal to blog - John Ashcroft hiding prisoners from the very imperial international red cross - a professor of mine once remarked that the red cross and bombing civilians seem to go hand in hand - for one. I might mention the so-called "comstitutional crisis in Connecticut over the impeachment of crooked governor and illegal strikebreaker John "G. is for 'Gifts'," i could talk about that firghtening article in the NYT about military recruitment. Hell, i could write about twelve pages of material just cursing out David Brooks and Charles Hill. I could wonder why the NYT moved the aforementioned story about ashcroft on its webpage down to the ehadline doldrums while gloating about Tiger Woods' abyssmal showing in a sport nobody outside the republican party goves a shit about. I could complain about my continuing unemployment and the concomitant feelings of depression and uselessness, review Andrew Ross's new book Low Wage High Profile, which i'm currently reading, or critique Rob Mitchum's hatchet job on Automato in tuesday's Pitchfork. But i really shouldn't gotta find a job after all. So check back later, and maybe i'll have solved my employment woes ad have something more substantial to say.

Perhaps I was too alarmist in my last post. While the loss of card check, if the partisan and reactionary NLRB does rule it an illegal tactic, will be a huge setback to union's strategic planning and organizing, such an admittedly calamitous event might trigger - by necessity - new strategies for organizing workers - such as "minority unionism" and other unorthodox means of organizing shopfloor power - whether those shops are auto plants or nursing homes, discussion sections, day care centers, or cafeterias. Still, a declaration that a board election is the only process through which unions can gain recognition would be devastating. 50% of all NLRB-sponsored union elections are lost due to managerial anti-union attacks and intimidation. Workers are fired for organizing in one out of every three union drives. As GET-UP and GSEU have seen, even when unions (we think) win elections, employers can have ballots impounded and prevent the results of the election from being recognized for years, exploting a flawed and biased appeals process which only favors management. This kind of ruling would be unnaceptable.

I forgot to blog it yesterday - thankfully, josh didn't - but i find the republican-filled NLRB's challenge to card check neutrality extremely frightening. Should the board ban card check the american labor movement may be doomed unless workers take action to force a reversal.

Mike Bloomberg vs New York's workers



As home health care workers prepare to return to work (and for a possible second strike in 30 days if remaining agencies don't sign contracts,) and a day after protests by thousands of police, teachers, and firefighters, day care workers, members of SEIU local 1707, have walked out for what may wind up being a longer walkout. Mayor Bloomberg's insistence on a substandard contract has left workers without a contract for four years. This has to end. Bloomberg needs to value the indispensable work that day care workers do, and he needs to value the people who do this work. He does neither, and so workers must fight.

The simpsons has been coopted by Ronald Reagan's flag-draped corpse. I at first wondered if this was one final act of censorship, but the imperial ambitions of the reaganite agenda are of course far from dead, to the chagrin of untold millions around the globe - in Iraq, where reagan supported a brutal dictator named Saddam Hussein, in Guatemala, where Reagan excused the atrocities of Efrain Rios Montt's death squads as "totally dedicated to democracy" and "givena bum rap by the press," in El Salvador, where murdered nuns became international communist conspirators, in Nicaragua, in american school cafeterias bountiful with ketchup and poverty.



As the military band plays the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," I imagine John Brown, Ralph Chaplin, and ten thousand air traffic controllers with middle fingers extended, reclaiming a melody from one who never deserved it.

Maybe we should rename it the war of terror. If we hadn't already been paying attention, Abu Ghraib deminstrated how much the united states government relies on vilence and terror to subject and attempt to control its newly colonized subjects. As if Abu Ghraib weren't enough (or in fact much more than any body wanted) now we get this noxious revelation: Allawi, the guy we're installing to run the country, IS a terrorist, and an apparently mediocre one at that, with strong ties to the American Central Intelligence Agency. And before he was an expatriate terrorist, he was a state terrorist for the Ba'athists, having spied on students and supervised public hangings. Iraqi Freedom has gone the way of the theoretically upcoming new guns 'n' roses album.

Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.



Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said. Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.



No public records of the bombing campaign exist, and the former officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. They could not even recall exactly when it occurred, though the interviews made it clear it was between 1992 and 1995.



The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then.



One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed." Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb.



Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time.



But one former senior intelligence official recalled that "bombs were going off to no great effect."



"I don't recall very much killing of anyone," the official said.



When Dr. Allawi was picked as interim prime minister last week, he said his first priority would be to improve the security situation by stopping bombings and other insurgent attacks in Iraq — an idea several former officials familiar with his past said they found "ironic."



"Send a thief to catch a thief," said Kenneth Pollack, who was an Iran-Iraq military analyst for the C.I.A. during the early 1990's and recalled the sabotage campaign.



Dr. Allawi declined to respond to repeated requests for comment, made Monday and Tuesday through his Washington representative, Patrick N. Theros. The former intelligence officials, while confirming C.I.A. involvement in the bombing campaign, would not say how, exactly, the agency had supported it.

Would this apply to the military structures of command which made possible Abu Ghraib too?

The rally - commencing the first day of strike activities for the 25,000 some odd home health care workers striking 26 agencies around New York city, was amazing. I joined about fifteen thousand workers, convening in front of the 1199 building and shutting down city blocks as we listened to a crappy speech from howard dean, and better and more inspiring and powerful stuff from the unusually staid Al Franken, Dennis Rivera, Andy Stern and Chuck Schumer (whose entourage inlcuded a guy i know from high school and college and whose spanish is even worse than Dean's.) Rivera announced that one of the employer agencies had just settled - and more would by the end of the day, leaving only 10,000 of the 25-26,000 without a contract. Reading a letter from Mike "it don't matter if i write policies, i write checks" Bloomberg urging workers to return to work, Rivera presented the executive board's proposal - postponing the two more days of the three-day for one month, giving the other agencies one last chance to settle contracts granting workers a minimum of $10 an hour - which 15,000 Home Health Care aides won today. Emphatically, in a process Rivera rightly called "Democracy in Action," the workers, in an open air vote of thousands and thousands of people, rejected the proposal and voted to stay out for the remainder of the three days. After this, which was kind of amazing to watch, as thousands of workers chanted "strike" in unison, we marched down 43rd streed and turned on to ninth avenue, filling half the street (and thus moviing very slowly) down to 26th street, where we turned east, marched over to fifth, and then turned north again to 32nd street, where we heard a few more speakers and a live band playing a customized 1199 version of "aint no stopping us now."



What struck me, as i marched was the energy and feeling of power everyone had. The organizing that went in to this strike must have been pretty incredible, because these workers were out in force and "ready to rumble." And the crowds on the sidewalks and the windows of office buildings and balconies of new-development condos in hell's kitchen were behind the strike 100%.



feel privileged to have been able to stand in solidarity with these workers today and i applaud them for the victories they have won and look forward to those yet to come. You can read more about it here.

I'm heading downtown for the Invisible No More rally for the 23,000 Home Health Care workers poised to strike this week. If you're in New York, yous houdl come to. Contrary to what Josh says, it's right in front of the 1199 Building on 43rd street between 8th and 9th avenues.



Oh yeah, one of the guys from Avenue Q who was on TV last night when he won the tony award lives on the first floor of my parents building. Ah, the upper west side.

Reagan's dead, and the panegyrics are flowing like my freshman year roomate's urine on my dorm room floor. I won't bother linking to them, cause i'm sure youve seen enough already. From naming names to busting strikes to Iran Contra, Reagan proved himself hardly worthy of the veneration he's being granted by the so-called liberal media, and it's pissing me off.



Meanwhile, NYC is facing some strike action, repoprts this alarmist and problematic STeve Greenhouse piece.

A great article in today's times about the Las Vegas Culinary Union, HERE Local 226

While Ghazi al-Yawar criticizes the american military presence in the country of which he's just been selected president, the selection process was contentious and seems to illustrate the power struggle taking place over the state's future.

Late Monday, several members of the governing council said they would continue to hold out for Mr. Yawar, the group's choice



That raised the prospect of an ugly public battle between Mr. Bremer and Mr. Brahimi and the Iraqis on the council. And it suggested the possibility that Mr. Bremer, if he had an interim government in place, might move to dissolve the council himself.



Indeed, the senior administration official said there were expectations that the governing council, an American-appointed board that was created last summer, would dissolve itself shortly after the new government is selected.



"What Bremer and Brahimi are doing is very bad," said Mahmood Othman, a governing council member who was excluded from the negotiations on Monday. "They don't believe in democracy."

And these are the people that the U.S. appointed



Meanwhile,