The January 30, 2005 elections in Iraq are the textbook definition of "demonstration elections." Unlike Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who issued "a fatwa saying all Shiia men and women have an obligation to vote in the upcoming election," the Moktada al-Sadr faction "uttered not a single word about the vote" at Friday Prayers, according to the New York Times, foreshadowing "a less than overwhelming voter turnout in many parts of Iraq" (Dexter Filkins, "Shiite Faction Ready to Shun Sunday's Election in Iraq," January 29, 2005). The Times insinuates that the Sadr faction are against democracy itself, solely by virtue of their quiet refusal to browbeat their vast following into embracing the elections tomorrow. Needless to say, the idea that it is people's right to evaluate whether or not an election is free, fair, and democratic and that boycotting an unfree, unfair, and undemocratic election is a time-honored tactic of democrats everywhere is unspeakable in the corporate media.

After Seymour M. Hersh's revelation that "[t]he [George W. Bush] Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer" (Seymour M. Hersh, "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret," The New Yorker, January 24, 2005), more frightening news. Two newspapers on the left and right ends of the political mainstream report that the US Air Force is flying its combat planes into Iran's airspace, "templating" Iran's air defense positions, and daring Teheran to shoot US planes down -- an act that simultaneously prepares for the next war, serves as a provocation, seeks to create a pretext for war (if the planes are shot down), and (if nothing else) escalates its ongoing psychological warfare against Teheran.

What would send all the dead trade unionists spinning in their graves? The fact that cops are more unionized than almost all other groups of workers in the United States today.

Worse, from 1983 to 2002, workers in "protective service occupations" including police officers "had the highest union membership rate of any broad occupation group in every year."

This week saw George Bush inaugurated again and we all heard him pledge to spread freedom around the world. And readers will find out here just what that really means. The White House has embarked on their new year's agenda and the first order of business was to cancel the Hubble servicing mission, Powell says some things George Bush does not want to hear and it has been confirmed that US-installed Iraqi puppet Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is every bit the assassin we suspected him to be. Lots of graft and corruption in the financial industry, just in time to serve as warning about Social Security privatisation, and after passing the $550 billion Medicare bill, Republicans are now worried that the program is costing too much and standardised testing is showing the way to pupil enlightenment.

Among countless counter-inaugural actions held nationwide on January 20, 2005, the feistiest one took place in Seattle. Look at the photograph of Seattle Central Community College students forcing Army recruiters off campus. Naturally, no national media carried this news except Yahoo! News. What makes this action especially promising? The class and race of the students who organized it. According to Andrew Goldstein's profile of Seattle Central students, "everyone at Seattle Central lives off campus, and 80% hold full-time or part-time jobs."

Roland Lehoucq reports that "If global consumption continues to increase at the present rate, the time will come when energy use will outstrip the capacity for renewal." The energy potential of renewable sources has an advantage over fossil energy resources: these resources can be renewed. Yet, depending on the energy sources, various projections of limits include 40, 120, 220, 850 years. Lehoucq also notes that "the Earth gets from the sun 13,000 times more power than humanity consumes .... from a human perspective, the sun is an inexhaustible source of energy." Yet, even the energy available from the sun has limits. Read on....

Investigative journalist Robert Parry sees the Bush administration moving the United States toward becoming a permanent "counter-terrorist" state, using torture, cross-border death squads, and collective punishments to defeat perceived enemies in Iraq and around the world. Now, since his re-election, Bush is considering the adoption of the practices that used to suppress leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s when insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala were crushed through the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, according to Parry.

In a much publicized article in The Atlantic Monthly, William Langewiesche wrote: "For the most part, . . . the insurgents' attacks are less nihilistic than they are logical and precisely focused, whether against the American coalition and its camp followers or their Iraqi agents and collaborators. The truth is that however vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional 'collateral' casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces" ("Letter from Baghdad," January/February 2005).