Why not WSWS? One of the less quoted websites, if you happen to be frequently surfing the lefty websites on the Internet, is World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), and I find this odd.

True, WSWS "thumbsucker" pieces tend to be written in a drier, more scholarly-flavored style than the hipsters at, say, Buzzflash may care for. But they are well-reasoned and generally on the money.

Sometimes, as in this case, the WSWS writers (who do not always sign their work, as NY TImes editorial writers also do not) manage to look at an issue with fresh eyes. Consider this point about the recent blackout.

Within 45 minutes of the lights going off over a large swath of North America, leaving some 50 million people in the US and Canada without power, officials in the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Department announced that the disaster had not been caused by an act of terrorism. This assessment was repeated by state and local officials to an anxious population.

For nearly two years the Bush administration has issued repeated warnings of heightened terror threats based on little more than unsubstantiated “chatter” supposedly detected by one or another intelligence agency. It has, by such means, deliberately set out to spread fear and pani,c the better to impose its agenda of war abroad and repression at home.

Yet, when a genuine disaster struck the American people, the administration rushed to affirm that there was no evidence of terrorism—before any investigation into the cause of the blackout had even begun. How did the Homeland Security analysts know that terrorism was not to blame for the blackout before the source of the cascading power failure had even been pinpointed?

The Homeland Security Department was created, in the name of the “war on terror” and national security, to concentrate and extend the police powers of the state. It is a center of the administration’s offensive against basic democratic rights. The blackout demonstrated the degree to which a pre-existing political agenda of social reaction and militarism, rather than a legitimate concern over the potential threat to life and limb from terrorist groups, motivated its formation and has, since its inception, guided its operations.

The entire piece is well-worth reading.

Exactly so. Loeb looks at the new lootocracy.

As 2001 Nobel economics laureate George Akerlof said recently, in calling the administration "the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history, "This is not normal government policy What we have here is a form of looting."

The whole essay is here.