JACQUES R PAUWELS—To the British soldier and poet Isaac Rosenberg too, the poppies were a strong symbol in the sense of blood and sacrifice; in his poem “Break of Day in the Trenches”, he wrote that “the roots” of the poppies “are in man’s veins.”
It was not a coincidence that poppies flowered abundantly in Flanders’ Fields in the spring of 1915. Normally, the minuscule seeds of this flower penetrate deep into the earth to wait there, sometimes for years, for the soil to be upturned for some reason, and thus exposed to the sunlight and warmth they suddenly germinate. With the digging of miles of trenches and the explosion of tens if not hundreds of thousands of shells starting in the fall of 1914, the conditions were created for an unprecedented burgeoning of poppies the following spring in that corner of Belgium, of course most spectacularly so in the immediate vicinity of the trenches and in the pockmarked no-man’s land.
CAPITALIST SICKNESS
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JON. COOK—Traditionally, the ideological pluralism represented by those appointed to public bodies has varied from a moderate, gently reformist identification with turbo-charged capitalism (neoliberalism) to a complete, dog-eat-dog identification with neoliberalism. Riddell is on the more moderate wing of that already narrow spectrum.
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Is This the End of the Unreformable Democratic Party?
25 minutes readMICHAEL HUDSON—History has been rewritten almost daily this week, almost immediately as it occurs. A Wall Street Journal editorial on November 4 spun its view of what is at issue for the Democratic Party: “Voters warn Democrats to walk away from the Sanders-Pelosi agenda.” The Democrats’ own leadership quickly agreed with this take, playing the blame game against the Progressive Caucus for insisting on economic reforms that opinion polls have reported are precisely what voters say they want.
But these are not the policies that the party’s major donors want. What really is at issue is just whom the Democratic Party (and their duopoly partners the Republicans too, of course) supports: corporate lobbyists and the Donor Class, or wage-earning voters seeking economic policies that benefit them as employees, consumers and debtors.
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JOE BIDEN IS CONTINUING DONALD TRUMP’S DEFORESTATION PLANS
18 minutes readWALKER BRAGMAN—On Tuesday, president Joe Biden was one of 100-plus world leaders who pledged to end and reverse deforestation by 2030 during the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland. His Build Back Better framework, similarly, pledges “historic” investment in forest management.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, Biden has been plowing ahead with his predecessor’s approach to deforestation of public lands in the Kootenai National Forest.
On Biden’s watch, the US Forest Service is quietly moving forward with a series of Donald Trump–era plans to open up commercial logging in the Kootenai, despite the fact that the impacts of these projects were never subjected to rigorous analysis.
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KIM PETERSEN—The US is a country established through genocide and dispossession of the Indigenous peoples, and it set up an apartheid reservation system for those Indigenous peoples that survived. From this vantage point, it seems no wonder that Israel escaped criticism by the US since the US lacks a moral basis from which to castigate Israel. The same holds true for Canada, a country that still practices apartheid with its Indian Act and reserve system. Canada also steadfastly supports Israeli apartheid.