I have received one of these bizarre emails...

Scare Tactics by Union Opposition
http://ouunion.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html#665748052663704970

If you need more evidence that the Committee for an Independent Faculty is trying to scare people away from signing cards, consider reading the following article:Claim That AAUP Could Bypass Union Election is Unrealistic (The Post)As I (and others) have stated previously, it is possible to circumvent an election only if the union initiates it (which it would never do), and only if Ohio University also agrees to recognize the union without an election (and Ohio University would NEVER agree to do this). University administrators are trained never to say never, but according to Rebecca Watts, who is Chief of Staff to President McDavis, the administration would indeed request an election before recognizing a faculty union.In other words, the card drive is completely legitimate, faculty should not hesitate to sign cards if they support unionization, and the Committee for an Independent Faculty should stop trying to scare people.** Consider sharing your comments! This blog allows readers to respond ANONYMOUSLY. No login is required. Please share your insight as well as your questions, comments, and concerns. Post an ANONYMOUS comment today!

Tags: Ohio University

Czech president's State visit ends on acrimonious note
Thursday, November 13, 2008
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2008/1113/1226408582949.html?digest=1

Labour Party spokesman on European affairs Joe Costello accused Mr Klaus of "an act of unprecedented diplomatic discourtesy by a visiting head of state". "I am well aware that Mr Klaus is an extreme right-wing figure who likes to court controversy," said Mr Costello, who added that a dignified but firm diplomatic protest about the president's behaviour should be made to the Czech government.The Minister of State for European Affairs, Dick Roche, said Mr Klaus's description of Mr Ganley as a dissident was "misguided, misinformed and insulting" when applied to a state which had an unbroken tradition of democratic political life and free debate."Given the type of business activities that Mr Ganley has been involved with, the comparison is not simply over-the-top but an insult to the selfless men and women that challenged communism," said Mr Roche.

Tags: Lisbon Treaty

Democracy Now!
President-Elect Obama and the Future of US Foreign Policy: A Roundtable Discussion
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/6/president_elect_obama_and_the_future

Rahm “Israel” Emanuel is of course known for a variety of reasons, including the Dead Fish story. But more telling is what his being selected for White House Chief of Staff means for Obama’s foreign policy, and his direction on Israel in particular.

This from Ali Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, who took part in today’s fascinating round table on Democracy Now, discussing the significance of Obama (the show also featured Columbia’s Mahmood Mamdani, who made a great point about how Obama will need a very active voice from the left in order to give him a sense that that constituency matters at all).

Abunimah discussed both the Emanuel appointment and the recent controversy surrounding the McCain/Palin campaign’s McCarthyist attacks on Obama for his friendship with Rashid Khalidi:

ALI ABUNIMAH: Well, I thought it was quite ironic, since a lot of racists have tried to make an issue out of Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, that the same kind of people might be happy with Rahm Israel Emanuel’s middle name. And indeed, Emanuel is one of the most hard-line supporters of Israel in the Congress and has been for many years. He’s the son of Benjamin Emanuel, who actually was a gun runner for the Irgun, the Zionist, pre-Israel Zionist, militia that carried out numerous terrorist attacks on Palestinian civilians, including the bombing of the King David Hotel. Of course, Rahm Emanuel himself is not responsible for any of that, but his record is sometimes far to the right of President Bush when it comes to supporting Israel. But I think the important thing here is not just the appointment of Emanuel, but the greater context here, which is that from the days we knew Barack Obama as a small-time politician in Illinois, I won’t tell you, and I’ve never said that he was incredibly progressive on Israel-Palestine, but he was certainly more open-minded than he is now. And what he’s done systematically throughout the campaign is to distance himself or to throw under the bus, as the term goes, any adviser or friend who was suspected of having pro-Palestinian sympathies. In other words, he has succumbed to the McCarthyite and racist campaigns that says if you associate with even very moderate Columbia University professors, for example, or take their advice, that that’s the biggest crime.

Tags: Obama, Election 2008, US foreign policy, Empire, Orientalism, Khalidi

First, an interesting Obama quote on the potential of the White House website.

I want to open up transparency in government, so that you guys know what is happening. I want to revamp our White House website. I know it’s nice to take the virtual tour of the China Room,” he notes sarcastically, “but I want people to be able to know, ‘today, this issue is going on…today’s President Obama talked about his proposal for $4000 student college tuition credits, it’s going to be going into this congressional committee, these are the key leaders in the House and Senate that are going to be deciding on the bill, here are the groups that are involved that are supporting it, you should contact your Congressman. Just creating the situation that if people want to get involved and it’s easy. The information is out there, but trying to track it down isn’t…The more we can enlist the American people to pay attention and be involved, that’s the only way we are going move an agenda forward. That’s how we are going to counteract the special interests.

—
excerpt from Obama’s speech to his staff

via obama08

And now from Lonely Sandwich:

Could it be that the aspiration of this candidate is to make of his White House a platform for community involvement? Is he, in essence attempting to make a technologically-aided social network in the service of democracy? If so, would he be instituting the most open and participatory executive branch our nation has seen, directly following the most closed and secretive? Huh. Something to think about...

Tags: Election 2008, Obama, Social Networking

Please forward, with apologies for cross-posting

PRESS RELEASE *** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HEADLINE: Caucus for a New Political Science Issues Statement, Defends Rashid Khalidi
CONTACT: Nicholas Kiersey
EMAIL: kiersey(at)ohio.edu
WEB: http://www.apsanet.org/~new/
STATEMENT: http://homepage.mac.com/thenervousfishdown/files/khalidi.html
PHONE: (740) 466-5799

The Caucus for a New Political Science issued a statement today condemning recent efforts by John McCain and Sarah Palin to impugn the integrity of Dr. Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.

Founded at the American Political Science Association’s 1967 annual meeting in Chicago, the Caucus is the oldest organized grouping of progressive political scientists in the United States. The Caucus is united by the idea that Political Science as an academic discipline should be committed to advancing progressive political development.

Today’s statement follows below.

For further information, contact:

Nicholas Kiersey
Phone: (740) 466-5799
Email: kiersey(at)ohio.edu

Christine Kelly
Phone: (973) 632-7346
Email: KellyC(at)wpunj.edu

Jennifer Leigh Disney
Phone: (803) 524-9608
Email: disneyj(at)winthrop.edu


Statement:

The Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) hereby expresses its outrage at Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign's efforts this week to impugn the integrity of Dr. Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. Khalidi is one of the world's leading scholars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Palestinian history. As academics who rely on scholarship like Khalidi's for our own research and teaching, we simply cannot let these slurs pass unremarked.

In her efforts to discredit Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Governor Palin tried to suggest that Khalidi is "yet another radical professor" in Obama's circle of friends and associates. This, of course, by way of questioning Obama's patriotism and fitness to serve as President of the United States.

Palin's comments are, at best, suggestive of a deep-rooted ignorance of Middle Eastern affairs. More troubling still, they point to a tendency to engage in a politics of demonization and the possibility of a systematic chilling of academic freedom and freedom of speech, the likes of which we have not seen since the era of Joseph McCarthy.

Khalidi is a scholar of the relationship between cultural identity and political power. In a world where terrorism has become such an irresponsibly used catch-phrase, we need level-headed politicians who are unafraid to examine their own cultural biases. Rashid Khalidi's scholarship on the objectification of and prejudice against Arab culture in Western discourse provides an exemplary set of tools in this mission. That a scholar like Khalidi should have become the target of such ignorant rhetoric as demonstrated by Senator McCain and Governor Palin last week is both embarrassing and disgraceful.


Sincerely,

The Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS)

Nicholas J. Kiersey, PhD
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Ohio University, Chillicothe

Christine Kelly, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
William Paterson University

Jennifer Leigh Disney, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Winthrop University

Cornel West, PhD
Professor
Center for African American Studies
Princeton University

Department Fox Piven, PhD
Professor, Political Science and Sociology
City University of New York.

Stephen R. Shalom, PhD
Professor of Political Science
William Paterson University

Stephen Bronner, PhD
Professor, Political Science
Rutgers University

Mark Kaswan, C.Phil.
Department of Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

Michael McIntyre, PhD
Assistant Professor
International Studies
DePaul University

Foad Izadi,
Doctoral Candidate and Instructor
Manship School of Mass Communication
Louisiana State University

Yoav Peled, PhD
Department of Political Science
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel

Ed Webb, PhD
Political Science & International Studies,
Dickinson College

John Ehrenberg, PhD
Professor of Political Science and Department Chair
Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus

Hamideh Sedghi, PhD
Visiting Scholar
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Harvard University

Sheila Collins, PhD
Director, MA in Public Policy and International Affairs
Department of Political Science
William Paterson University

Sanford Schram, PhD
Professor, Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research
Bryn Mawr College

Gerard Huiskamp, PhD
Chair, Associate Professor of Political Science
Wheaton College

Stephen S. Smith, PhD
Professor of Political Science
Winthrop University

Jacob Segal, PhD
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York

Jacinda Swanson, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Western Michigan University

Victor Wallis, PhD
Professor
Liberal Arts Department
Berklee College of Music

Bruce E. Caswell, PhD
Associate Professor
Political Science Department
Rowan University

Joe Kling, PhD
Professor of Government
St. Lawrence University

Amy Linch
PhD Candidate
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University

David Lempert, Ph.D., J.D., M.B.A., E.D. (Hon.)
Member, California Bar

John Berg, PhD
Chair, Government Department
Suffolk University

Beate Sissenich, PhD
Assistant Professor
Indiana University

R. Claire Snyder-Hall, PhD
George Mason University
Director, MAIS Program
Director of Academics, Higher Education Program
Associate Professor of Political Theory

Bron Tamulis
Graduate Student
University of California--Irvine

Nancy Love, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Penn State

Adolph Reed, PhD
Professor, Political Science
University of Pennsylvania

Jeff Goodwin, PhD
Professor of Sociology
New York University

Brian Caterino, PhD
Independent Scholar

William F. Grover, PhD
Professor, Political Science
Saint Michael's College

Tanya R. Austin
Illinois State University

Joseph G. Peschek, PhD
Professor of Political Science
Hamline University

Bruce E Wright, Ph.D
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
California State University, Fullerton

Margaret E. Farrar, PhD
Associate Professor of Political Science
Augustana College

Laura Olson, PhD
Professor
Lehigh University

Immanuel Ness, PhD
Professor
Department of Political Science
Brooklyn College /City University of New York

Benjamin Arditi, PhD
Centro de Estudios Politicos
Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales
UNAM
Mexico

Meredith L. Weiss, PhD
Department of Political Science
University at Albany, State University of New York

Alethia Jones, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Public Administration & Policy
and Department of Political Science
University at Albany, State University of New York

Kevin B. Anderson, PhD
Professor of Political Science, Sociology, and Women's Studies
Purdue University

Patricia Siplon, PhD
Professor
Department of Political Science
Saint Michael's College

Beverly A. Gaddy, PhD
Associate Professor, Political Science
University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg

Roberto Alejandro, Professor
Political Theory
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Mark Major
PhD Student - Political Science
Rutgers University




----------------------------------
Nicholas J. Kiersey, PhD
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Ohio University, Chillicothe

Tags: Khalidi, New Political Science, APSA, Edward Said

www.irishtimes.com:80/newspaper/opinion/2008/1018/1224279408893.html

Irish Times
October 18, 2008
Paul Gillespie
Crisis allows us to reconsider left-wing ideas

World view: In November 1857, Karl Marx wrote to Frederick Engels: "The American crash is a delight to behold, and it's far from over." He predicted the financial crisis - the most geographically widespread to have hit 19th-century capitalism until then - would deepen and lead to a complete collapse of Wall Street, writes Paul Gillespie

Notwithstanding his own financial distress, he had never felt so "cosy". Engels himself felt "enormously cheered". The events confirmed their theoretical analysis and political strategy of linking reality to preparedness.

That crisis spurred Marx to complete his economic studies on finance capital and its cycles of boom and bust, clearing the way for the more comprehensive Das Kapital, published 10 years later. It theorised the system as an anarchic, irrational and blind competition, pursuing profit and accumulation.

Credit and production expand in a contradictory way until they can no longer sustain profitability. Then collapse clears out waste, reorganises production and stimulates the capitalist state to amend the rules governing trade, finance and investment. The state's role oscillates between night-watchman and direct intervention, but its power should never be underestimated.

Marx's work has suddenly become popular again in Germany, as a new generation tries to understand the dynamics of these events and how they should be evaluated historically. There are disturbing memories of the 1929 crash and its awful political consequences, coming after the 1922-1923 financial collapse which destroyed German savings. As the crisis unfolded three weeks ago, German finance minister Peer Steinbrück was quick to claim "the US will lose its status as the superpower of the world economic system. The world will become multipolar." It is happening before our eyes. And Steinbrück says "generally we have to admit that parts of Marx's theory are not so bad".

Commentators have been quick to notice, and many to mock, such left-wing schadenfreude, whether directed at the US or capitalism as a whole. Germans especially should be aware of how hubris and nemesis can follow one another - as Steinbrück found out a mere 11 days after saying a bank rescue programme was not needed when he announced a plan to protect German bank deposits.

Although this is undoubtedly a grave crisis for finance capitalism, with deep effects on the real international economy, it is not - as yet - a systemic collapse. The extraordinary speed and depth of the events and the $1.8 trillion response to them, especially this week in the European Union, have helped avoid the meltdown heralded at the weekend by Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, British prime minister Gordon Brown, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero are taking the lead to create a "refounded capitalism" more capable of withstanding such cyclical shocks by better global regulation.

In an audacious initiative, Sarkozy and EU Commission president José Manuel Barroso are meeting US president George Bush this weekend to seek a G8 summit next month on a new agreement to regulate global finance. Presumably it would include the president-elect. If that is Barack Obama, he will be confronted with a dramatic adjustment of US power to a more multipolar world, for which he is better prepared and which he is more willing to accept than John McCain.

Note that most of these leaders are from the centre right, not the centre left. Centrism is resurrected from the wreckage of radical right-wing deregulation, more than is the left. The argument is about re-regulation rather than redistribution, the public rather than the private interest, transnational against national sovereignty.

So far, that is. The traditional left has had little operational purchase on the crisis other than I-told-you-so utterances about their inherently cyclical nature. Confronted with this international convulsion, "the Left" is for the most part as weak and tame as it certainly is in Ireland. Popular anger here and in the US, for example, is far more radical, but not expressed in such vocabularies. This is a real challenge and also an opportunity for the left - just as it was for Marx and Engels 150 years ago.

But does the left refer to traditional social democracy, which accepts market capitalism but seeks to equalise it; to the "third way" variety popularised by Blair and Brown; or to the "democratic socialism" of post-Stalinist parties? What of more recent green socialism? How to classify the rump of traditional Stalinist parties in Europe, India and elsewhere? Should Chinese and Vietnamese one-state authoritarian capitalisms led by such communist parties be included? Where do the left of South Africa's ANC and the burgeoning variety of Latin American left-wing movements fit in? Is the US Democratic Party part of that family? How do all of these relate to the growing radical or far-left tendencies and social movements drawing on previous bottom-up revolutionary traditions such as Trotskyism and anarchism?

Big events revive these debates, but they need to be reinvented for new times. Conventional sociological post-industrialism accounts rendering left ideologies and movements redundant badly need revision in the light of falling living standards and growing inequalities. So does Fukuyama's notion of the end of ideology and the triumph of market capitalism - as he now admits. Big names too: Keynes, Polanyi, Kondratieff, Galbraith and now Paul Krugman are deployed by social democrats against those who want to resurrect Marx and Engels.

pgillespie@irish-times.ie

Tags: Capitalism, Marx

Goodness gracious me, look at how *LITTLE* Ireland spends on public goods and services as a % of GDP.

Now, where's all this Irish socialism we so often hear about? Eh? Ehhhh??????




http://notesonthefront.typepad.com/politicaleconomy/2008/10/october-20th-morning-the-recession-diaries.html

Is it really plausible that the cause of our fiscal meltdown and recessionary decline can be put down to 'uncontrollable spending' when 1. Ireland spends less (and I mean really less) than any other Eurozone country. 2. That Ireland's increase in expenditure amounted to 1 bloody percent of our GDP - at a time when our population was growing much faster than almost any other country EU country?Could it be that our ability to cope with the meltdown is encumbered, not because our spending is too high, but rather because our spending is too low?   Is it possible that we do not have the resources to engage in 'counter-cyclical' policies (that is, flood money into the economy to maintain activity) because of our low-tax, low-spend economy?  Other countries which much, much higher spending are going through hard times, yes - we're all living together in this global downturn; but these 'profligate' countries haven't seen their economic fall like a parachutist without a parachute.

Tags: Recession

Friday, October 17, 2008
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=rzdkw2qkBVkkk8sMcysBQBt6PCzyvffK
Professors Found to Keep Political Views Quiet, but Students Detect Them
By ROBIN WILSON

To test the contention that liberal professors try to indoctrinate students, the Woessners also tried to determine whether students' own political views changed over the course of a semester in a political-science course. While they found a very slight shift toward the Democratic side, they say the movement could not be attributed to the politics of the professors—the shift happened not only among students whose professors were Democrats but also among those whose professors were Republicans."Given that political-science professors appear to exert no real influence on students' party loyalties," the Woessners conclude, "it is unclear whether efforts to diversify the field by hiring more Republican professors would actually reduce the 'liberalizing' effects of higher education."

Alaska ethics probe says Palin abused her power
Sat Oct 11, 2008 12:24am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4998X420081011?sp=true
By Caren Bohan
CHILLICOTHE, Ohio (Reuters)

The Alaska inquiry centered on whether Palin's dismissal of the state's public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, was linked to her personal feud with a state trooper who was involved in a contentious divorce with the governor's sister.The inquiry found that while it was within the governor's authority to dismiss Monegan, Palin violated the public trust by pressuring those who worked for her in a way that advanced her personal wishes."Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired," the report said.The investigation was commissioned in July by Alaska's Legislative Council composed of 10 Republican lawmakers and four Democrats.

Tags: Election 2008, Sarah Palin