One Woman's Journey from Warlord Somalia to Neocon Washington

by Chesley Hicks, WW4 REPORT

Book Review:

The Caged Virgin
An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2006 (translated), originally published in Netherlands 2004

Infidel
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2007

Nicaragua Sticks It to Tio Sam —Again!

by Michael I. Niman, Art Voice, Buffalo, NY

For the very first time ever,
When they had a revolution in Nicaragua,
There was no interference from America
Human rights in America
Well the people fought the leader,
And up he flew...
With no Washington bullets what else could he do?

—The Clash, "Washington Bullets," 1980

In the flash of this moment
You're the best of what we are—
Don't let them stop you now— Nicaragua.

—Bruce Cockburn, "Nicaragua," 1983

How a Yippie conspiracist changed America, mainstreamed marijuana and was destroyed by his dream...

The Vietnam GI Revolt & Iraq

by Michael I. Niman, Art Voice, Buffalo, NY

The name Vietnam is back in our vocabulary, as we seem to be developing an interest in history—or at least in the history of wars that just would not end. Americans seem to be catching on that if we ignore history, we're condemned to repeat it. The problem is that certain crucial elements of the Vietnam story have been censored from our national memory.

For starters, a couple of apologies.

Yes, our February issue is coming out five days late, and our daily weblog has been inactive for nearly a week. This is because your hard-working editor (yours truly) has been down with the flu. (At first I thought it was an ultra-virulent genetically-modified strain of SARS, but I was just being bionoid.)

Stephen Kinzer Traces a Century of Destabilization

by Tom Cornell, The Catholic Worker

OVERTHROW: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, Henry Holt & Co., New York 2006

In the Gaza Strip, reality parodies Monty Python.

Avid surfers from several Gush Katif communities are threatening to take their boards out to sea on evacuation day and commit mass suicide by drowning. Settlement secretariats, psychologists and social workers have known about the plans of these young men, aged 16-21, for several weeks.

In the belly of the beast, the Business section of the NYT, appeared today an unbelievably nice article about the Venezuelan socialist revolution underway.

The articles describes Chavez' push to transform both public and private enterprises into worker-managed and worker-owned businesses.

While worker-managed businesses have been the dream of the world's socialists, in Venezuela they may become a reality. Using tottering companies as the entry point, Venezuela is offering financial incentives in exchange for carrying out "co-management," in which workers are decision makers, in some cases even owners, of businesses across the country. The plan essentially casts the state in the role of rescuer. Four state-owned companies - another aluminum plant besides Alcasa, a coal plant and a power plant - have begun the programs. But incentives like cheap credit and debt write-downs from the government have also enticed more than 100 private, small and medium-size companies to adopt worker management models. Twenty-three of those have agreed to hand over between 10 percent and 49 percent of their shares to employees.