Naomi KLEIN

Dans une de ses récentes chroniques, Thomas Friedman, le chroniqueur des affaires étrangères du New York Times, discourait des joies de travailler dans un centre d’appel de Bengalore, en Inde. Ces emplois, qui redonneraient aux jeunes « confiance en soi, dignité et optimisme », seraient bénéfiques non seulement pour les Indiens, mais également pour les Américains. Pourquoi ? Parce que les heureux travailleurs, payés pour aider les touristes américains à retrouver les bagages perdus sur des vols Delta, sont ainsi moins tentés de jouer avec de la dynamite et de poser des bombes dans les avions.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist, wrote about the joys of call-centre work in Bangalore on February 29. These jobs, are giving young people "self-confidence, dignity and optimism" - and that’s not just good for Indians, but for Americans as well. Why? Because happy workers paid to help U.S. tourists locate the luggage they’ve lost on Delta flights are less inclined to strap on dynamite and blow up those same planes.

Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the $18.4 billion in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can meet.

On April 6, deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled it out: there will be no role for the UN in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The US-run regime will last at least six months, "probably
longer than that". And by the time the Iraqi people have a say in choosing a government, the key economic decisions about their country’s future will have been made by their occupiers. "There has to be an effective administration from day one," Wolfowitz said. "People need water and food and medicine, and the sewers have to
work, the electricity has to work. And that’s coalition
responsibility."

Gordon Brown has a new idea about how to “make poverty history” in time for the G-8 summit in Scotland. With Washington so far refusing to double its aid to Africa by 2015, the British Chancellor is appealing to the “richer oil-producing states” of the Middle East to fill the funding gap. “Oil wealth urged to save Africa,” reads the headline in London’s Observer.

The global antiwar protests that surprised the world on February 15 grew out of the networks built by years of globalization activism, from Indymedia to the World Social Forum. And despite attempts to keep the movements separate, their only future lies in the convergence represented by Cancún.

Fighting AIDS was supposed to show George W. Bush’s softer side. "Seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many," he said in his State of the Union address this past January. He has since reconsidered, deciding instead to offer a few more opportunities to the few.

Don’t think and drive. That was the message sent out by the FBI to roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies on Christmas Eve. The alert urged police pulling over drivers for traffic violations, and conducting other routineinvestigations, to keep their eyes open for people carrying almanacs. Why almanacs? Because they are filled with facts - population figures, weather predictions, diagrams of buildings and landmarks. And according to the FBI Intelligence Bulletin, facts are dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists, who can use them to "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning."

Le président russe Poutine excédé d’être interpellé par des journalistes sur sa gestion de la crise à Beslan a répondu par l’ironie : « Invitez Ben Ladden à Bruxelles et à Washington pour discuter avec lui, a-t-il affirmé. Personne ne nous fera la morale sur l’idée de parler à des assassins d’enfants. »

My first run-in with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army came on March 31 in Baghdad. The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, had just sent armed men to shut down the young cleric’s newspaper, Al Hawza, claiming that its articles comparing Bremer to Saddam Hussein incited violence against Americans.

Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn’t mired in a bog or a marsh in Iraq (quagmire’s literal meaning); it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: Who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump?

What does it take to become a major news story in the summer of Arnold and Kobe, Ben and Jen? A lot, as a group of young Philippine soldiers discovered recently. On July 27, 300 soldiers rigged a giant Manila shopping mall with C-4 explosives, accused one of Washington’s closest allies of blowing up its own buildings to attract US military dollars-and still barely managed to make the international news.

Less than twenty-four hours after The Nation disclosed that former Secretary of State James Baker and The Carlyle Group were involved in a secret deal to profit from Iraq’s debt to Kuwait, NBC was reporting that the deal was “dead.”

L’invasion de l’Irak a pavé la voie à ce qui pourrait constituer le plus grand boom pétrolier de l’histoire. Tous les signaux convergent : les multinationales sont libres d’avaler les entreprises nationales, elles renvoient leurs profits exponentiels à la maison, elles profitent de « congés de taxes » et elles paient des droits risibles de un pour cent au gouvernement.

On April 6, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled it out: there will be no role for the UN in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The U.S.-run regime will last at least six months, "probably longer than that."

April 9, 2003, was the day Baghdad fell to U.S. forces. One year later, it is rising up against them.