The pain, suffering, and chaos continues in Iraq, thanks to the George W. Bush led Demublican/Republicrat United States ruling regime. Many are now calling it a civil war caused by the U.S. occupation, as various ethnic and religious factions carry out murder, torture, and other sundry atrocities. The "election process" overseen by Uncle Sam has only aggravated matters, as many Iraqis see the elections and the resulting government as merely a farce controlled by the United States. As was the government of Saddam Hussein at one time, for let us not forget (as much as the U.S. government and its corporate media would like us to) that ol' Saddam was once one of "our S.O.B.'s" as Franklin Roosevelt once referred to the brutal thug Nicaraguan dictator Somoza.

The struggle continues in South Africa, where despite the ending of apartheid a little over a decade ago, much of the black population still lives in poverty due to the same global inequalities in wealth (backed by the military muscle primarily of the United States) that keeps the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going, that keeps idiotic and fascist domestic policy like the "War on Drugs" going, and that generally makes it difficult for progressive social change to happen. Nevertheless, from Soweto to Ann Arbor and everywhere else, people of conscience carry on and this gives me hope for a better world.

Organized labor in the United States limps along in these Postmodernist Late Capitalist Times, with a few scattered victories but a lot of stagnation and collaboration with corporate capital. Also, much of Big Labor continues to support the all too often weak and worthless (or maybe just plain as sold out to Capital as the Republicans) Democratic Party and its candidates. While there may still be a few Democrats left worth voting for, more and more the differences between the Big Two Parties are merely rhetorical as both fall ever deeper into the clutches of the corporations. I held my nose and voted for Kerry last time, but from now on I will be voting for Green Party candidates across the board.

And from Germany we have the following newsblip: "No smiling for passport photos!" Apparently it is just a technical concern, as a picture of an unsmiling face supposedly works better with facial recognition systems. Still I could not help but think of the lyric from the Grateful Dead's "The Other One:" "...the heat came round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day!"