Pelosi Serves Big Money Over Workers -- and Democrats
by William Greider
In terms of economic consequences, the new trade agreement with Peru is trivial. In political terms, however, it delivers an ominous message. 

When faced with a choice between money and their own rank-and-file, the Democratic leaders in the House will go with the money, even if it requires them to pass legislation with Republican votes.

In the course of editing PFP, I'm occasionally contacted by people I don't know personally, responding to stories published here. They often claim to know the story behind the story, or  claim to be at the centre of the action.

by Chris Cook

The symbol of the end of the 'Gilded Age' and ultimate refutation of Hope in the still young 20th Century, the ‘Trenches’ of the First War, horrors filled with dead farm boys, a-swim in mud, blood, rats and the reek of futility was given an eerie revisiting today in Palestine. Through the courtesy of BBC television, we witnessed not the flower of Europe's manhood going "over the top," but the women of Palestine, desperate to shield their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers from the relentless, and pitiless, and murderous Israeli Defence Force, mounting the barricade to face naked the guns.

No, it's not the famous namesake hotel heiress, but Paris, eternal city of light, ablaze in the aftermath of Sunday's presidential elections.

Though receiving scant notice in the North American press, Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who typified himself during the campaign as the French equivalent of a "uniter, not divider" has done just that in the capital. It all promises for a tres chaud Ete in the city of love.

The state allowed he be held in house arrest pending the outcome of the growing scandal hearing. Shreiber, a Canadian citizen, has fought the extradition proceedings launched by Germany for his alleged involvement with political crimes committed in that country more than a decade ago. Here's how GR covered the initial press discovery of the connections between Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Shreiber back in 2001 and a link to an interview I did with journalist and author, Stevie Cameron, who co-authored the ground-breaking book on the Shreiber-Mulroney connection, 'The Last Amigo.' 

Letter from PGA Bloc Montreal to Council of Canadians Expressing
Concerns Over Invite of Representative of Mexican PRD
by PGA Bloc
Dear allies at the Council of Canadians and participants of the August 19th, 2007 'Integrate-This' Teach-In:

We are writing to you as members of various grassroots anti-capitalist social justice groups that have come together under the Peoples Global Action (PGA) principles in Montreal to manifest, as you will also be doing, our opposition to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and the leaders’ summit to take place in Montebello some days from now.

by Chris Floyd
 

Well, Karl Rove got the banner headline he wanted for all the final Sunday papers before the ele ction: Saddam Hussein Is Sentenced to Death.

The political impact of the story will probably be neglible. Saddam has been a dead man walking for three years;  and the fate of this former Bush Family protégé has nothing to do with the anti-war sentiment across the country.

However, in regard to the Iraqi insurgency as a whole, I think we can safely say that Saddam' s conviction will prove to be a major turning point, every bit as momentous and transformative as all the other major turning points, such as the death of al-Zaqarwi, the various Iraqi elections, the destruction of Fallujah, the capture of Saddam, the killing of his two sons, or Bush's glorious announcement of "Mission Accomplished" on that golden day in May 2003.

Yep, there's no doubt about it: we've definitely turned the corner now. Why, in six months' time…..

(Robert Fisk has more on the verdict -- especially the fact that some of the Saddam's chief co-conspirators somehow escaped justice: This was a Guilty Verdict on America as Well.  Not sure how long the article will remain freely available from The Independent, so copious excerpts are provided here after the jump.

Jonathan Schwarz finds the smoking guns confirming that the bloody civil war now tearing the Palestinians apart has been the aim of the Bush Administration's Middle East policy since Hamas won the free, democratic elections there in January 2006.

"The past is never dead; it's not even past." -- William Faulkner

WATERTOWN, Tennessee – The 20th century was well into its seventh decade, but he still came to the back door every time he needed to see "Mister Edsel" about some business or other. No amount of cajoling would induce him to knock on the front door. Finally, one day, in exasperation, my father told him: "Jim, if you don't come around to the front next time, I'm not going to talk to you. This just won't do." Jim shook his head, perplexed; it seemed a concept too radical to grasp or accept: knocking on a white man's front door.

The past lives longer in the South, as Faulkner, that great bard of race and sex, knew well. Habits of subservience from the days of slavery more than a century before were still lingering here and there, as I could see on my own back porch that day, watching Jim and my father.

It was like a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird; and indeed, "Mister Edsel" had come to play the role of Atticus Finch in the town: an advocate and mediator for people like Jim – a black man from the country, deprived of education, shunted into stoop labor, living in the margins, forever under arbitrary threat from an uncaring officialdom or from sudden outbursts of the deeply-ingrained racial enmity that lurked beneath the placid surface of the white faces all around him.   

It was an unsought role that came to my father simply because he was one of the few white men who treated black people like they were ordinary, fully-fledged human beings, not lepers or clowns or dangerous trash. It was a rare attribute in those days – and it is still much rarer than most would care to admit, even in the "New South," where Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. stands within reach of becoming the first African-American senator from the old Confederacy since Reconstruction (or as some still like to call it, "the Yankee Occupation").

Ford's surprisingly strong campaign has exposed fault lines long buried beneath Tennessee's creeping – or rather, galloping – suburbanization, where old ways, both good and bad, are rapidly being submerged in the undifferentiated glop of modern American franchise culture. But when money and power are on the line, atavism is the order of the day: ancient fears and hatreds re-emerge – or are mightily encouraged to re-emerge, with all the subtle and not-so-subtle arts of high-tech mass persuasion stoking the flames.

For the stakes in the battle for Tennessee's Senate seat – once considered a lock for the Republicans – have suddenly grown exceedingly high. A Ford win could wrest control of the chamber away from the GOP, putting a serious crimp in the party's bacchanal of greed and graft. What's more, it opens up the possibility of investigations, subpoenas – and worse – for an Administration that is not only suppurating with massive corruption, incompetence, extremism and deceit, but has also openly acknowledged several criminal actions, including torture and warrantless surveillance. The Bush Faction simply cannot afford to face accountability for its monumental failures and misdeeds.

And so in late October, with Ford rising rapidly in the polls, even overtaking his opponent – Bob Corker, a typical tycoon-politician with a bland manner masking sharp practice in his murky business dealings – the Bush Party got serious and whipped out a barn-burning theme from days of yore:  the "hot black buck with nothing but white women on his mind."

(more after the jump; plus an MP3 on a related theme at the end.)