We speculated about what one of President Bush’s background advisers would tell us if abducted from a hotel for a day or two and subjected to questioning by an Underground Revolutionary Court, having taking a truth drug. Lies, of course, will continue to be told if they are contained in the questions, so a truth drug would probably only help to smooth the process a little. As a result, we feel that in what follows, although the truth surely makes an appearance, lies (and secrets) still skulk around in many places, as well as omissions, denials and all the other tracks that lead back to the obscure, hidden from us because of our own involuntary dependence on lies. But although Power knows itself very well and conceals a myriad of secrets, there is always far more it can never comprehend.

“On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 meters away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometers away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 meters away.” (Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, 2003

The University of Milan was the place to be in those years. Everywhere else in the country students were taking over classrooms and telling the professors they should teach only proletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a few incidents, a constitutional pact –or rather a territorial compromise –held. The Revolution held the grounds, the auditorium and the main halls, while traditional Culture, protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, where it went on talking as if nothing had happened. (Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s Pendulum”,1989)

The American public is being prepared. If the attack on Iran does come, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no truth.

By John Pilger

The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news; pronouncements about a “civil war” and “sectarian violence” were repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had never happened and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no hint that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.

The looting of Iraq’s oil wealth is unprecedented in the history of corporate crime, writes criminologist Dave Whyte

Two officials from Custer Battles pose with $100,000 “cash bricks” of $100 notes. The $2 million was hauled off in duffle bags

The neo-liberal transformation of Iraq is portrayed as a humanitarian venture. Western corporations and occupying governments now talk of the liberation of Iraq from the “tyranny of Saddam’s planned economy”.

On the day that major hostilities were declared over, Tony Blair told the Iraqi people, “Saddam Hussein and his regime plundered your nation’s wealth. While many of you live in poverty, they have the lives of luxury. The money from Iraqi oil will be yours – to be used to build prosperity for you and your families.”

Abundance is revealed by Capital in its crises of overproduction, which might appear to have been institutionalized during the 20th century with the growth of the military-industrial complex…

There are two answers to the question: yes and no. They are both arguments against the (capitalist) system. The “no” answer is the usual one cited as proof against the system, and we shall start with that, showing how it transmogrifies into a “yes” answer.

Petroleum might not have become such a key commodity in the world had certain U.S. oligarchic circles not successfully beaten off the ethanol movement in the United States in the 1930s¹, in particular, through the Rockefeller (oil and banking, among many other things), Dupont (chemicals) and General Motors alliance which overcame the attempts of the farming lobby, supported, perhaps surprisingly, by Henry Ford². The farming lobby sought unsuccessfully to get President F.D. Roosevelt to authorize ethanol for automobile fuel.

The reality is that there is no pensions crisis, or at least not in the way we’re told.

There is a crisis of older people left in poverty, and millions of workers anxious over their future.

But there is not a crisis caused by growing hordes of the old leeching off “productive workers”.

Abundance! Not such a bad idea. Natural abundance. Plants oozing with flowers and fruit. Galaxies of innumerable stars –the infinite, the eternal.

It is not a new idea –who were those people who talked “irresponsibly” about a potential plenty that Friederich Hayek referred to in his 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom”? Perhaps an American accountant, a follower of Thorstein Veblen? How many people have heard of Stuart Chase today? Or of his books? In 1934, he wrote “The Economy of Abundance.” It seems that despite today’s overwhelming abundance such ideas are now very scarce…