The creator of George Smiley looks on as Russian and US agents are swapped in the largest such event since the cold war:

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/spy-swap-john-le-carre

Which Russia did these deluded spy-babies fantasise about when they played under the bedclothes with their top-of-the-range spy toys, cleared their magic dead-letter boxes, dispatched their magic microdots, and lied away their lives to their friends, neighbours and lovers?

Whose great cause did they imagine they were serving, these virtual martyrs who are about to be sent home in disgrace to the breast of Mother Russia? Were the ghosts of Russia’s past whispering to them, or the ghosts of her future? Was it the old, fervent, unawakened Russia that dreams of Josef Stalin’s second coming that they imagined they were serving? The tsars of the Holy Russian Empire brought alive according to the prophecies? Or was it the unholy-Russian-Empire-in-the-Sky that floats above the kleptocratic Kremlin of Vladimir Putin?

More…

Capitalism is a crime! from PSLweb.org on Vimeo.

Note: This link to the post on the World Socialist Web Site. At the top of the article is a Print option which provides easier reading, studying and printing. This article is an excellent example of the historical research and political analysis provided by the WSWS.

Seven years since the US invasion of Iraq
The crisis of American capitalism and the war against Iraq
By David North
20 March 2010

On this, the seventh anniversary of the US war against Iraq, we are reposting a statement by David North, chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, which was originally published by the WSWS on March 21, 2003, at the onset of the US invasion.

Exposing the lies used to justify this unprovoked war of aggression as well as the predatory imperialist aims that underlay it, the statement warned correctly, “Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster.” More…

Chris Hedges, a columnist on the truthdig website, writes:

There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.

You can read the full article at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_rebels_20100308/

Lowell Denny, writing in his blog East of Modernity, says Obama is “an effective and competent head of a capitalist party.”

“Rather than suffer the irritation of watching Obama continue to break promises, as recent democrats [sic] have been wont to do, let him break away and lead a party of wanna-be progressives who make touchy-feely commercials, and steel [sic] your money, water rights, land rights, and bomb your soft-targeted neighborhoods.”

Hostile takeovers in the union industry remind us that unions are part of the capitalist system. Admittedly ameliorative for its members, they often function as both lobbyists and supplicants to owners of inherited wealth, built from the sweat of wage slaves. Until wage earners become owners, they and unions will continue to support the system that deprives us all of a decent life. That may be the best some can hope for, but it isn’t much to inspire civic engagement.