Free Republic

Mandela wins BBC's 'global election' Former South African President Nelson Mandela has topped a BBC poll to find the person most people would like to lead a fantasy world government. More than 15,000 people worldwide took part in the interactive Power Play game, in which players were invited to choose a team of 11 to run the world from a list of around 100 of the most powerful leaders, thinkers and other high-profile people on the planet. The second choice was former US President Bill Clinton. The winning 11 were exclusively male, with Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi...

Americans can thank the legacy of Leon Trotsky for some of the most influential research on the addictive qualities of food. It was Trotsky's great-granddaughter who helped make obesity a top priority of the federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse. When Nora Volkow became director of the institute in 2003, it was far better known as the home of research on drug addicts, not junk food. But Volkow's restless interests expanded in recent years from cocaine abuse to include the puzzle of why people overeat. Intellectual upheaval is the birthright of Volkow, an intense, fast-talking scholar with weaknesses for...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/cmp/20050715/tc_cmp/165702500 UN Panel: No Single Nation Should Control Internet Addresses Aoife White Thu Jul 14, 9:38 PM ET BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP)--A U.N. panel created to recommend how the Internet should be run in the future has failed to reach consensus but did agree that no single country should dominate. The United States stated two weeks ago that it intended to maintain control over the computers that serve as the Internet's principal traffic cops. In a report released Thursday, the U.N. panel outlined four possible options for the future of Internet governance for world leaders to consider at a November "Information...

Here is the list so far for sponcers to this hate America fest: ANSWER Code Pink UFPJ NION Al Awda World Workers Party Ruckas Revolutionary Communist party Moveon.org ACORN Campus Antiwar Network International Socialist Org Greens Party Muslim Student Association CPUSA

WASHINGTON — Megan Watson, leader of Mainstream Moms, is so angry at military recruiters for invading schools to sign up unwary youth for combat in Iraq that she and her group launched an online movement, “LeaveMyChildAlone.org.” “They offer these trinkets to lure our children to enlist,” Watson said in a phone interview from her home in Bolinas, Calif. “This is very aggressive, demographic targeting to have conversations with our kids that should not be happening.” All branches of the military are falling short of recruiting goals as parents say, in effect, “Hell no! My kids won’t go!” Watson blasted the...

A.N.S .W.E.R.'s response to Bush:Hit the Streets September 24!Recognizing that the people of the United States have turned dramat ically against the war and occupation of Iraq, Bush went on national televi sion tonight to defend his imperial foreign policy. He repea tedly invoked September 11 as a pretext for the criminal and illegal war ag ainst Iraq. Bush took to the airwaves tonight because the antiwar m ovement is growing in strength. Our power poses a major poli tical obstacle to the continuation of the war and occupation. Now Bush has taken on the additional role of Recruiter-in-Chi ef, urging young people to sign up for military...

At the culmination of a gathering of global 'antiwar' groups in Istanbul to hold court on the liberation of Iraq led by the United States and the United Kingdom, the jurors who heard testimony against the liberators issued their findings which included a declaration of support for the terrorists in Iraq who are killing American, British and coalition soldiers and Iraqis.The World Tribunal on Iraq is endorsed by leading leftwing organizations from around the world including American-based groups like Not in Our Name Project, United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink and International ANSWER.The war on terror has reached a...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US anti-war group vowed to surround the White House in a sea of demonstrators during coordinated protests scheduled to take place in Washington, as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco on September 24. The ANSWER Coalition expects more than 100,000 people, from families of US soldiers to trade unions and diverse religious groups, to take part in the demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

Momentum Buildsfor Sept. 24 Mass Marchin Washington DCThe importance of the mass antiwar protests being organized on September 24 is driven home by two major new stories appearing today (M ay 19). A front-page article in the New York Times, headlined "Generals Offer a Sober Outlook on Iraqi War", is further confirmation of what has become crystal clear over the past month: The U.S. war strategy is in deep crisis and there is no more a "light" at the end of the tunnel in Iraq than there was in Vietnam. Pulling back from their rosy assessments of just a...

Saul Bellow, Trotsky, and Mexico By Stephen Schwartz Reforma | April 19, 2005 In the first week of April, Holy Father, John Paul II, Pope of the world’s Catholics, died at 84 in Rome. Three days later, he was followed in death by the sole contemporary individual who could be called the Pope of the Jews, if that community were to acknowledge such a figure of authority: Saul Bellow, the Canadian-born American author and Nobel laureate. Bellow died, aged 89, in Massachusetts. As the Pope represented the Catholic virtues, Bellow embodied the Jewish values of high intelligence, dedication to the...

The National Socialist Democrat Abortion Party (NSDAP) has found its Leon Trotsky. His name is Howard Dean, and, despite NSDAP claims to the contrary, as long as he is the party's national chairman he will be the face and voice of the party the public will see and hear. Anybody who really believes that he will be merely a fund-raiser, political technician and organizer who will be content to lurk largely unseen in the background doesn't really know Howard Dean. He is no shrinking violet. Even if he wanted to, he could never accept the role of the man behind...

The "Neo-Con" Phenomenon .... day dreams of grandeur--without understanding of how human societies ... actually function. . . . we had never heard--or at least never paid enough attention to have noted--the term "neo-con," before the inauguration of George W. Bush in January, 2001. We understood that the President, who called himself a "compassionate conservative," was not really Conservative on many issues. But we took him at his word . . . Our first notice of the "neo-con" phenomenon came . . . after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks . . . The first impression was of a...

In one of the first in-depth studies written about neoconservatism in the 1970s, "The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics" (1978), Peter Steinfels observed that it is impossible to understand the neoconservatives without understanding their history. Yet it is precisely the history of "the neocons" that is today being systematically distorted by paleoconservatives through the polemical campaign they are waging against leading neoconservative intellectuals and the foreign policy of the Bush administration. As part of the two-decade old civil war within intellectual conservatism, paleoconservatives have forcefully asserted that neoconservatism is a descendant of American Trotskyism, and that neoconservatives...

(Communists who believe in Trotsky) US media and liberal establishment: accomplices in the assault on Fallujah Statement of the World Socialist Web Site editorial board 9 November 2004 A murderous operation is under way in Fallujah and the entire media and political establishment in the US is an accomplice in the crime. The unfolding massacre in the Iraqi city has failed to elicit an outcry, or even significant questioning of the assault, from these circles. No editorialist at a major newspaper or television news commentator has even hinted at moral qualms over the American onslaught. Not one columnist at the...

1. How Can Europe Be United? Briand senses the need of improving the historical lot of 350 million Europeans who are the hearers of highest civilization but who find it impossible to live through a single century without a dozen wars and revolutions. For the sake of pacifying our planet, MacDonald has crossed the Atlantic. On the agenda are the United States of Europe, disarmament, freedom of trade, peace. Capitalist diplomacy everywhere is cooking up a pacifist stew. Peoples of Europe, peoples of the world get out big spoons to swallow it with. Why all this pother? After all, aren’t...

Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay. Between them they seem to show the alternative paths for the intellectual. The one is of J. M. Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky. Both were obviously men of attractive personality and great natural gifts. The one the intellectual guardian of the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation to keep our society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal fortune in the process. The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and under Stalin, providing throughout...

Was Reagan the 1st neoconservative? Posted: June 14, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Would Ronald Reagan have invaded Iraq? Would he have declared a doctrine of preventive war to keep any rival nation from rising to where it might challenge us? Would he have crusaded for "world democratic revolution"? Was Reagan the first neoconservative? This claim has been entered in the wake of his death. Yet, it seems bogus, a patent forgery, a fabricated claim to the Reagan legacy, worked up in the same shop where they made the documents proving Saddam was buying up all...

You’ve also got our history with Saddam a bit mixed up. As you admit, we helped Saddam. We supported him, providing him with arms and funds, for the war with Iran.. We were also, of course, selling arms to Iran for that same war. Later, Saddam started to not be as reliable of a go-to guy as he had been. We didn’t object to his gassing his own people, but we thought maybe he wasn’t the best person to rule this oil rich land. Then, when Saddam asked permission of the US to invade Iraq, the US under George Bush...

LGBT Americans for Dean "I believe in equal rights under the law, period. And that means equal rights for everybody under the law, including those who are gay and lesbian." Howard Dean Join the Rainbow Riders in Iowa! Okay, all of you glbti and allied Dean supporters. We are going to Iowa to help the Dean campaign win the Buckeye State caucuses. Iowa has been the first-in-the-nation caucus state since 1972, sharing with New Hampshire’s primary, the honor of those all-important first races of the presidential campaign season. Hundreds of activists are joining together in Iowa over the next month...