DN!: Spies for Hire: Carlyle Group to Become Owner of “One of America’s Largest Private Intelligence Armies”
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/19/spies_for_hire_the_secret_world
Democracy Now!
May 19th, 2008
The secretive investment fund the Carlyle Group is in the process of buying part of Booz Allen Hamiliton, the major military and intelligence contractor. We speak with investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, author of the new book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. [includes rush transcript]
Mark Braund, Guardian: Radical solutions
Radical solutions
Progressives do have answers to the current economic crisis, they just haven't been given the attention they deserve
Movement towards an economy which is better aligned with progressives' moral aspirations is impossible until we escape a number of assumptions. First, that private individuals are entitled to appropriate the economic rent which accumulates in land values; second, that the creation of money should be left largely in hands of privately-owned banks; and third, that the already wealthy should be able to create and exploit markets in financial devices to the detriment of the majority of citizens.But instead of targeting these fundamental assumptions which underpin the unjust outcomes and chronic instability of the current economic order, progressives focus on the wrong things.
The Buch-McCain Challenge
I just took The Bush-McCain Challenge -- an online quiz to see if you can tell the difference between George W. Bush and John McCain. Check it out, and see if you can do any better than I did!
http://Bush-McCainChallenge.com/?rc=tafcarrot
Atlantic Monthly: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
JUNE 2008 ATLANTIC MONTHLY
The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.
BY PROFESSOR X
There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.
Robert Fisk: Review of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Promises and betrayals
Robert Fisk
Published 01 May 2008
Seven Pillars of Wisdom was hailed on its first appearance as a historical and literary masterpiece. But, argues Robert Fisk, this memoir of the Arab revolt, and T E Lawrence's other writings, also offer prescient warnings about western policy in the Middle East
In the Sunday Times in 1920, Lawrence might have been addressing his words to George W Bush or Tony Blair. "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour," he wrote. "They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows . . . We are today not far from a disaster."
BBC Washington diary: Miracle needed
By Matt Frei
BBC News, Washington
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7389151.stm
I think it is safe to assume that Rupert Murdoch has been struck off the Clinton family Christmas card list.Apart from Mrs Clinton herself, it is very hard to find people who do not believe this is over.Hillary is in denial - on life support.Now it is just a question of consulting the relatives - i.e. the super-delegates - about when to pull the plug and how to preserve maximum dignity.
Robert Greenwald: McCain's "Spiritual Guide" Wants America to Destroy Islam
From: http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/38133-mccain-s-spiritual-guide-wants-america-to-destroy-islam?utm_source=rgemail
You may have heard of Rev. John Hagee, the McCain supporter who said God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its homosexual "sins." Well now meet Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a "false religion." In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis. John McCain actively sought and received Parsley's endorsement in the presidential race. McCain has called Parsley "a spiritual guide," and he hasn't said whether he shares Parsley's vicious anti-Islam views. That's because the mainstream media refuses to ask. And so, we've taken matters into our own hands, joining Mother Jones to present the truth about McCain's pastor. Since the media won't question McCain about his deeply bigoted pastor, it's up to you to call attention to this issue. Make McCain's pastor problem a major story by forwarding this video to your family, friends, and colleagues. We can't let McCain get away with aligning himself with a religious leader who's called for an all-out war on Islam, someone who draws no distinctions between Muslims and violent Islamic extremists. Now is the crucial time to act
The Progressive: I detest Cinco de Mayo
I don’t have anything against having fun. But, as a historian, I am enraged at the ways that corporations distort history in order to sell something. In this case, binge drinking, partying and food. May 5 should be celebrated for what is truly represents rather than for what corporations want us to believe it stands for.
New York Sun: Robert Nozick and the Coast of Utopia
BY DAVID LEWIS SCHAEFER April 30, 2008 URL: http://www2.nysun.com/article/75572
Yet Nozick's libertarianism, which compares income taxation to forced labor, suffers from a corresponding defect of its own. Nozick never acknowledges the need for a liberal regime to guarantee some level of social security and educational benefits to all citizens, to the extent its circumstances allow, if only to ensure the continued loyalty of the poor to that regime. Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on political life, relegating considerations of feasibility (i.e., of conformity with the likely demands of actual human beings) to be resolved by others, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant's dictum, "let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it."
and:
Ironically, however, Nozick himself ultimately acknowledges that his entitlement theory is insufficient to refute demands for a redistributionist state, since it can never be demonstrated that existing holdings derive from an unbroken series of voluntary transfers: Doesn't every people's collective title to their land derive from some original act of unjust conquest? Hence, surprisingly, he ends up suggesting that something like Rawls's difference principle is morally required after all, in the name of "rectification," on the dubious premise that those currently least-well-off have the highest probability of being descended from previous victims of injustice.
Eurozine: The politics of the global movement
Magnus Wennerhag
The politics of the global movement
It could be claimed that the protests, criticisms and demands of the global justice movement are expressions of a will to renegotiate the different forms of political autonomy. In the closing years of the twentieth century, the movement has emerged in part from criticism of the negative social and political effects of economic globalization, in part from a desire to make the globalization process more socially sustainable and democratic. We are thus talking about criticism not only of the democratic deficit among supranational and global institutions, but also of the market-orientated economic policies with which these institutions have been linked. New communication technology has facilitated the linking up of the various organizations, networks and movements which have this critical stance and certain political goals in common. In this way, the movement has become a rallying point for a multiplicity of actors such as trade unions, environmentalists, church groups, organizations promoting international solidarity, women's organizations, new organizations such as ATTAC, political parties, and others. The movement's concrete statements in the public sphere have mainly consisted of mass protests and, since 2001, large alternative conferences, so called social forums. At the global level, the World Social Forum has been held in Porto Alegre, Mumbai, Nairobi and other cities, but many social forums have also been arranged at continental, national and local levels.
and:
The global justice movement can be seen as a political response to this in a double sense. Firstly, the movement exposes the democratic shortcomings of nation states and the democratic deficit in global institutions. Secondly, the movement formulates what can be seen as the social question of our time, namely the growing inequalities arising from the more market−oriented policies of global institutions and nation states. The common good as well as a will to democratize global power is used to stem the wave of privatization.
Counterpunch: In Praise of Hippies
Ignorant History
In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture
By BILL HATCH
One of the great achievements of the hippies is that they have never been a part of either faction in terms of ideology, sexual or otherwise. Although they are capable of a social cohesion at times, under certain specific circumstances (from a good party to a political action), hippies are firm believers in the individual's right to private property and will fight any timber corporation to prevent encroachment on it. I didn't even understand Peter Coyote's statement, quoted reverently by De Groot, "Any structure is mutable, but once you've chosen it, you have to accept it -- if you're ever going to get any depth. Because depth only comes in the struggle with limits." But, I have no doubt whatsover that Ringolevio, by Diggers founder Emmett Grogan and Coyote's leader, was the best book ever written on the Haight Ashbury, generally considered to be the fountainhead of lamentable "anarchist excesses." A second take always worth rereading, is the series of articles written by Nick Von Hoffman and illustrated by the great photography of Elaine Mayes, on the anarchic market in marijuana in the Haight. It could not be organized even by organized crime, which tried.