OU: Scare Tactics by Union Opposition
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!
Lisbon Treaty news: Czech president's State visit to Ireland 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.
DN: Obama Immediately Shifts to the Right on Foreign Policy
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.
Lonely Sandwich: Obama's White House Social Networking Plans
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...
PRESS RELEASE: Caucus for a New Political Science Issues Statement, Defends Rashid Khalidi
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
Irish Times: Crisis allows us to reconsider left-wing ideas
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
Chronicle: Professors Found to Keep Political Views Quiet, but Students Detect Them
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."
REUTERS: 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.
Gina Gershon Parodies Sarah Palin (VIDEO)
Obama's Chicago Days: Was He Ever Leftwing?
Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart
Wednesday 30 July 2008
by: Jodi Kantor, The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/article/teaching-law-testing-ideas-obama-stood-apart
Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality - whether Americans will elect a black president - he led students through African-Americans' long fight for equal status.
So how do you go from being that person, to being this person?
How Chicago Shaped Obama: A Look at the Rise of a Politician
Democracy Now! Interview with Ryan Lizza
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/28/how_chicago_shaped_obama_a_look
The other thing that it did, besides the fact that his constituents now were so much different, the overall goal of redistricting in Illinois was to take back the State Senate for the Democrats. They gerrymandered the state, and they accomplished that in 2002. So, after 2002, Barack Obama, who had been a state senator since January of 1997 in the minority, where he couldn’t get much done, he’s now a state senator in the majority. And that allowed him to do—to actually get some things passed and get all of the issues—and get all of the things passed that he would then use as a platform for his 2004 Senate campaign. So that redistricting was incredibly important to his political career. I think you could make an argument that without that redistricting, he may not have been a real contender in that US Senate race.
Interesting further comments from Lizza:
At the same time, he made a—if you read it today, it still stands up very well. He made a very powerful case against the Iraq war at a time when a lot of Democrats weren’t doing that. But there were certainly some politics in mind. And if you talk to some of the people who were in that audience that day, one of the common things you hear is, “Wow, this guy is not just talking to us, he’s talking to either some statewide or national crowd. This speech seems pointed for the—seems more like for the history books than just for us here at this antiwar rally.” And this comes up throughout Obama’s political history. He often had his eye on the next rung of the ladder, if you know what I mean.
And finally, from the excellent Adolph Reed:
“Where Obamaism Seems to be Going”
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=697&Itemid=34
This is what passes for a left now in this country. It is a left that can insist, apparently, that Obama's FISA vote, going out of his way (after all, he could simply have followed the model of Eisenhower on the Brown decision and said that the Court has ruled; therefore it's the law, and his job as president would be to enforce the law) to align himself - twice, or three times -- with the Scalia/Thomas/Roberts/Alito wing of the Supreme Court, his declaring that social problems, unlike foreign policy adventurism, are "too big for government" and pledging to turn over more of HHS and HUD's budgets to the Holy Rollers are both tactically necessary and consistent with his convictions. So, if those are his convictions, or for that matter what he feels he must do opportunistically to get elected, why the fuck should we vote for him?
House Committee Holds Rove in Contempt!
Today the House Judiciary Committee of the US Congress voted to hold Karl “M.C.” Rove in contempt by a 20-14 vote!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/presidentbush/2008/07/rove-in-contemp.html
This is how the LA Times framed the charge: “Failing to honor a subpoena to testify about his role in the federal and possibly political prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a popular Democrat sent who was to prison on corruption charges that are now under appeal”
This is how AP frames the charge:
“allegations of White House influence over the Justice Department, including whether Rove encouraged prosecutions against Democrats such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.”
Also:
“For his part, Rove has denied any involvement with Justice decisions, and the White House has said Congress has no authority to compel testimony from current and former advisers. His attorney, Robert Luskin, had urged the panel in letter not to vote for a citation, calling it a "gratuitously punitive" action that would serve no purpose because the question of executive privilege is already pending in two other cases in federal court.”
Still, Pelosi has said she won’t put the recomendation to the House until September.
Lisbon & Ireland
http://www.irishleftreview.org/2008/07/22/lisbon-immigration-ireland-voted/#more-348
Not sure I buy it, but worth reading.
Probably the largest factor that swung it was that the Yes campaign failed utterly in providing the undecided voter with a very good reason why they should have voted Yes to Lisbon. They provided a lot of reasons why they shouldn’t believe what the No campaigners were saying, but nothing about why it would be good for them, and for Ireland, to change the sovereignty of their constitution to ratify this particular treaty when it was stated that it was purely a procedural document.
Asia Times: Unsolicited advice for Bush on Iran
Unsolicited advice for Bush on Iran
By Jim Lobe
And:Indeed, hawks outside the administration who are nonetheless closely associated with administration hardliners led by Vice President Dick Cheney have been complaining bitterly about the decision to send Burns since it was announced. The neo-conservative Weekly Standard called the move "stunningly shameful", while former UN ambassador John Bolton said it was proof of the administration's "complete intellectual collapse".
On speculation that Israel may be preparing to take unilateral military action against Iran's nuclear facilities, Brzezinski said it would not be a "smart strategic choice" due to the likelihood that the US would even become "more bogged down" in the region. Scowcroft said he would tell the Israelis to "calm down".
Bob Herbert on Al Gore's Speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt9wZloG97U
No doubt, this is one of the greatest speeches I have ever seen. Please take 30 minutes of your time to watch it. Turn off your phone, lock your door, tell anyone who might distract you to go away. Then make a cup of tea and focus, hard. Do whatever you have to do. But make it happen. I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that this will be one of the most important 30 minutes of your lives.
And I'm not the only one who feels this way:
Yes We Can
Saturday 19 July 2008
by: Bob Herbert, The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/article/yes-we-can
My view of Mr. Gore's passionate engagement with some of the biggest issues of our time is that he is offering us the kind of vision and sense of urgency that has been so lacking in the presidential campaigns. But the tendency in a society that is skeptical, if not phobic, about anything progressive has been to dismiss his large ideas and wise counsel, as George H. W. Bush once did by deriding him as "ozone man."
Informal Review of Soros, 'The New Paradigm'
I picked up a copy of George Soros's new book this week, 'The New Paradigm'. Its a little bit self-involved, but if you can get past this, its actually quite worth the effort. The basic argument is that blame for the current debt crisis should be lain squarely at the feet of modern economic theory, and its misguided belief that it is a 'science'. The idea that economics is a science is misguided, he argues, because relations between human beings are slippery things, and ultimately resistant to study through scientific method. Simply put, any such method would require objectivity. Yet it is impossible to ever be fully objective about a process in which you are yourself a participant. The analytic principles you would apply in the natural sciences are not legitimate for this purpose because you'll never have perfect information about the ongoing processes in which you are yourself participating and, more importantly, you'll never be able to completely remove your own bias from the analysis.
The solution to this philosophical problem, Soros argues, is to introduce reflexivity into our analysis. Reflexivity requires us to lower our expectations about what we can claim to know about human affairs. Making absolute predictions about future performance, for example, is impossible because any assumptions upon which such predictions might be based are necessarily incomplete, and tentative. Yet it is not enough simply to resolve this issue on an esoteric or philosophical level. For we have 'bet the farm,' so to speak, on a global financial system built around a set of non-reflexively developed assumptions. Namely, the assumptions of economic theory.
As a science of human relations, economics proves its worth by identifying generalizable patterns of human behavior over time. To do so, however, it necessarily relies on metaphor to limit the complexity of the things it sees. Take for example the fundamental argument of classic economic theory, that supply and demand always tend towards 'equilibrium' in the long run. The idea is that, with good enough information, the unrestrained pursuit of self-interests will always lead to an optimal allocation of resources.
As a functional metaphor for economic analysis, the idea of economic equilibrium may hold up for long periods of time. Yet it should not be accepted as dogma. For what are these concepts, of supply and demand? How are they made?
Economics says we have, each of us, inbuilt or 'given' outcome preferences. These are our most fundamental and timeless traits because they are so deeply embedded in our human nature. Now, certainly, if we really possessed such enduring traits then our analytical dilemma would be over. For these preferences would make our behavior in different contexts predictable, following basic laws of cause and effect over time. The problem, however, is that in financial markets the participants are not passive entities. They are reflexive beings, with capacities both as actors (agents of change) and observers (agents of knowledge). And given that each capacity has the potential to influence the other, those fundamental traits posed by economic science appear anthropologically specious.
If we are reflexive beings then the premise that we engage in the market in a purely rational fashion appears somewhat overstated. For where rational actors adapt their expectations to new information in order to maximize their interests, reflexive beings develop beliefs which, if held collectively, can create fundamental shifts in the nature of the market itself.
Contrary to economic equilibrium theory then, we find that actors do not approach the market from a position of externality, with preformed preferences, ever-adapting to new information about their position relative to an ideal point of equilibrium. Beliefs and perceptions, not expectations, are what we really need to be thinking about. Beliefs literally 'constitute' the economic system (and, I would argue, far more than even Soros lets on!).
So what does all of this mean for the current debt crisis? Well, Soros is clear here. The emergence of a new set of beliefs about the market is more than a mere reflection of what is going on 'out there', more than a mere change in expectations. Instead, it is an event with significance for the market itself. It can fundamentally re-write the basic narrative metrics that actors use to describe risk.
Soros goes through a series of booms and busts to show how well his theory holds up: the Conglomerate Boom of the 1960s, the 1980s International Banking Crisis, the late-90s Asian Financial Crisis, etc. At each point, his model is used to show that the market and its participants were engaged in reflexive behavior conditioned by certain basic understandings of what was 'normal' in the game. In the 1980s, for example, the creditworthiness of borrowers and the willingness of the debtors to lend were involved. But the creditworthiness of Mexico was not a 'real' thing in its own right. Rather, as it turned out, Mexican creditworthiness *mattered* historically only to the extent that it existed in the heads of the independent banks who narrated it.
And they narrated it as 'just fine' all the way to the bust. That is, the "moment of truth" where "reality can no longer sustain the exaggerated expectations" (66). Indeed, even at this moment they did not necessarily 'correct' their behavior. Like lemmings over a cliff, beliefs can drive the market often far, far on, past the moment of truth, and into calamity. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance," as Soros cites Chuck Prince, the CXO of Citibank (84). It turns out, then, that there is little that is rational in the process at all.
So how about today's situation? In the current conjecture, are prices just a reflection of reality or are they effecting reality? Soros argues the latter. As he says, equilibrium is an ever "moving target" (72). And in this sense markets are always wrong. But sometimes they are more wrong than others. And you know you are in one of those moments when "some form of credit or leverage and some kind of misconception or misinterpretation" start to radically skew our economic affairs (78).
The current crisis is unlike any that has occurred before. Namely because it involves two bubbles, not just one. While the US mortgage crisis is the immediate "trigger" bubble, another "longer-term super-bubble" is by far the more important of the two. For where the misconception driving the property boom was that "the value of collateral is not affected by the willingness to lend," the super-bubble is driven by a more foundational issue: "market fundamentalism," the desire to extend the principles of laissez-faire economics to the entire domain of human global activity (91).
Soros goes into some detail about the ideology behind the super-bubble, and the development over time of a range of 'synthetic' securities of such complexity that they were beyond the understanding even of the regulators. Nevertheless, believing in the myth of market equilibrium, the regulators confidently abdicated their responsibility to investigate these instruments. All too casually, as we now know, they assumed the market would automatically correct any excesses.
How does Soros propose we remedy the situation? Case-by-case solutions are required. But at the general level, he argues, we need a more cautionary approach to the use of leverage. If creditors can expect to be continuously bailed out by central banks when their willingness to lend gets them in trouble then regulators should exact a price for this. And the public should support this, too. For given that the US housing market is especially unlikely to bottom out on its own any time soon, it is clear that the costs of this breakdown will dwarf the costs of the regulative regime that might have prevented it.
What are we to make of these arguments? Critical social science theorists will not find anything particularly new or innovative in this text. But the books importance lies not simply in what it is saying, but who is saying it. This is not the sort of radical free-market ideology you would expect from a financial speculator. And while I am not an economist, I am nevertheless fascinated that someone like Soros should start to enter into the realm of social science philosophy for guidance on the operations of economic markets.
Obviously enough, this book won't be put on any freshmen economics course reading lists. On the one hand, its just too incendiary - I can't imagine many economists would want their students to read about why the most essential assumptions about economic science are perniciously wrong. On the other, its a little too self-indulgent. But no surprise there. Its not an academic book, and its not meant to be. After all, these are the critical musings of a multi-billionaire with an enormous ego and little personally at stake.
Yet I can't help but feel that this book ought to be read. If for no other reason than it gives us some pause to reflect on just how much power we have given to the operative assumptions of economics. We have essentially abandoned vast tracts of the public sphere to market-based governance in the hope that it will arrange optimally efficient outcomes. Moreover, perversely, we tend to think that any effort to to re-regulate any of these lending practices would be incommensurate with the values of democracy. But just how democratic is a way of life governed by the logic of casino capitalism?
Economists say they are simply scientists telling us the truth about ourselves. But they are so much more than that. When they teach us that we are market-based creatures, they are creating a powerful metaphor about man's nature, and passing it off as a universal 'truth'. Warranted by their status as 'scientists', this truth works to erect limits on the horizon of questions we may be permitted to ask legitimately about what life is and what it is for. It is to this deeply political question that Soros wishes to draw our attention. And if he is right that we are witnessing the end of the current economic era, one can only hope that his message will get a fair hearing as we move to debate the terms of whichever system of exchange emerges to replace it.
- Nicholas J. Kiersey
Drudge Power
Witness the maelstrom set off by a Drudge headline posted last evening that blared: "CHICAGO SLAPDOWN: REV. JESSE JACKSON SAYS OBAMA TALKING DOWN TO BLACKS."The item, which featured a hint at the comments made about Barack Obama by Jackson in front of an active Fox News Channel mic and later reported on "The O'Reilly Factor", immediately shot around the newsrooms of the country and reporters sprung into action.The Post's Jonathan Weisman posted a piece entitled: "It's Jackson vs Jackson on 'Ugly' and 'Demeaning' Obama Remarks"; The New York Times "Caucus" blog wrote an item of their own -- "Jackson Apologizes for Remarks on Obama" -- as did the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal among many, many other news outlets. Every cable network covered the story extensively and the CBS and NBC evening news both fit the story into their ever-shrinking news hole.While the story would almost certainly have gotten attention due to its salacious nature, make no mistake: Matt Drudge made that story and ensured that it dominated the world of political journalism for at least 24 hours."Drudge has become center court at Wimbledon," said Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant and adviser to former governor Mitt Romney's presidential bid. "If it doesn't happen there, it doesn't happen."What explains Drudge's reach?
Christopher Hitchens, WATERBOARDED
By John Dolan, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2008.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/90292/?ses=bea37389b24e8773a7f5fc4506075382
Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!Hitchens announced the news like he'd brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. "Believe me," he told a waiting nation, "it's torture." Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it's "extreme interrogation." I thought everybody over the age of 5 knew that, but as usual, I misoverestimated the media. Hitchens' tame little torture session is the biggest S&M video on the web since "9˝ Weeks."Hitchens' video is totally fake -- there's even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist's office, and his "interrogators" treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only 11 seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face. Eleven seconds! Think about the timeline here: For five long years he supported this stuff when it was happening to other people. Once it happened to him, he needed exactly 11 seconds to see the light.
NYT: China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE
July 2, 2008
But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
Hersh: PREPARING THE BATTLEFIELD
PREPARING THE BATTLEFIELD
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
JULY 7, 2008
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
Keith Olbermann Special Comment
NJK
Added: December 06, 2007
Keith provides his infamous special comment segment, focused on the warmongering of President Bush, even with knowledge of the NIE report made public this week. He highlights the subtle changes in Bush's rhetoric in August, after he supposedly did not hear the details of the NIE report.
ASM: What is a Prostitute?
American Sexuality Magazine
http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/MagArticle.cfm?Article=885&ReturnURL=1
In Egypt the oldest profession isn't just a sex-for-cash exchange
By L.L. Wynn
In short, it was not the injection of money into a sexual relationship that defined it as prostitution. While everyone agreed that “prostitutes” probably did accept money in exchange for sexual acts, the exchange wasn’t seen as fundamentally different from that of an unmarried woman who had sexual relationships with boyfriends who supported her financially. Both were seen as existing on a continuum of immoral sexuality, but that didn’t necessarily mean the women were “prostitutes.”Nor was “prostitution” even necessarily about sex, since a woman could be labeled a prostitute when there was no proof that she was sexually active at all. For example, sometimes Zeid and Lina would have disputes over whether a particular friend of Lina’s was a “prostitute” or not. Zeid, for example, claimed that one of Lina’s childhood friends was a prostitute because she drove around alone after midnight. Lina argued, “She’s just bored! She’s so innocent, you can’t believe it—she’s never even been kissed!”
WTC7: Controversy and conspiracies debunked
NJK
Controversy and conspiracies III
Mike Rudin 2 Jul 08, 09:00 AM
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/07/controversy_conspiracies_iii.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/7483700.stm
The mystery of the missing tapes didn't last that long. One very experienced film librarian kindly agreed to have another look for us one night. There are more than a quarter of a million tapes just in the Fast Store basement at Television Centre. The next morning I got a call to say the tapes had been found. They'd just been put back on the wrong shelf - 2002 rather than 2001. Not so sinister after all.
Kiersey: EU of city-states is all Greek to me (Irish Independent)
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/eu-of-citystates-is-all-greek-to-me-1415947.html
By Nicholas Kiersey, USA
Friday June 20 2008
[printable version]
FOR Kevin Myers, the ideal model for the EU would be a commonwealth based on the city-state system from ancient Greece. Thucydides must be turning in his grave!
Does Mr Myers need reminding of the cut-throat logic of realpolitik that defined the relations between the Greek city-states? Commonwealth indeed.
If nothing else, the Europe of Schuman and Monnet represents a meaningful effort to break with that legacy, to put aside the egoism that has haunted our mutual past, and to reconstitute the European polity in such a way as to make a reversal practically unthinkable.
The EU is far, far from perfect. But its imperfection should be absolutely desired to the extent that it throws a spanner in the bloody logic of inter-state rivalry. In this light, the flaws in the Lisbon Treaty are sufferable. And, indeed, we should note that these can mitigated within the processes it would allow.
Let us recall, the history of the EU to date has been one of progress towards ever deeper union interrupted by episodic assertions of state egoism (sometimes known as isolationism, Gaulism or Thatcherism). These periodic assertions are possible because of the lingering power of the discourse of sovereign supremacy. These assertions will continue to haunt Europe until we realise that a way to bridge our Irish ethnicity is with a European national identity.
So long as this task is unfulfilled, Europe will run the risk of reversal, which would be an injustice of imponderable scale.
The task today remains one of completing the European project.
Hopefully the process of ratification can continue across the EU, and the Irish will be given a chance to reconsider their decision at an appropriate time.
Nicholas Kiersey
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Ohio University
Options for Irish Progressives on Future Lisbon Treaty Settlement
Simply put, I think the NO vote was misguided. There were obvious problems with the Lisbon Treaty. And we all know what they were (the militarism and the fact that it was incomprehensible to most people, to name just two issues). But I contend that these problems can only be truly solved thru ever-deeper integration. Brussels is a disgrace, its true. But we must remember that to a limited extent, the dysfunctionality of Brussels is *purposive* and a good thing.
Am I crazy? Absolutely not. Because while commentators like Kevin Myers can casually toss out their Timothy Garton Ash-esque aphorisms on why the EU ought to be a "commonwealth" of states (for Myers, akin to the commonwealth of Ancient Greek City States - a laughable idea, Thucydides must be turning in his grave!), the rest of us must surely accept that the Europe of Monnet and Schuman has not only kept us at peace with each other for decades now, but has fundamentally reconstituted the European polity in such a way as to make a reversal practically unthinkable.
The EU is far, far from perfect. But its imperfection should be absolutely desired to the extent that it throws a spanner in the logic of inter-state rivalry which led to continuous bloodshed known by our forebears. Moreover, its imperfection can and should be tolerated to the extent that the status quo is insufferable and we must not go backwards. To stay still is to risk a reversal to the inter-state Europe, which would be an injustice of imponderable scale.
Why do I believe this risk to be so present? Because the history of the EU is one of continuous reassertions of nationalism (sometimes known as isolationism, Gaulism, or Thatcherism - whatever name you like). These periodic assertions are possible because of the lingering power of the discourse of sovereign supremacy (which is a beast neither of the left nor right). These assertions haunt Europe today because we have yet to "de-ethnicize our nationality, and denationalize our ethnicity," as a professor of mine once wrote. And so long as this task is unfulfilled, Europe will run the risk of reversal.
If I could nominate a secular saint, it would be Altiero Spinelli, the visionary intellectual who while in a fascist prison drafted what became known as the Ventotene Manifesto, which was the ultimate blueprint upon which the ECSC was later founded. This document should be read in our high schools, folks. Therein is stated in clear and precise terms the nature of the threat of the logic of sovereignty.
Its simply a question of identifying the worse evil. The flaws in the Lisbon Treaty are sufferable. And they can be addressed within the process. But to halt in the face of such a challenge is, in this instance, to sup with some very dodgy angels indeed.
What we need is a Europe that satisfies our dreams, not a sovereigntist cottage off in the backwoods living with pro-life zealots and Trotskyists. These people are seriously crazy. They aspire to produce crisis in the world, and thereby to render it more pliable to their agendas.
Please don't get me wrong, I am deeply sympathetic to the more intelligent critics of the Lisbon Treaty who wanted to vote no because it was such a flawed document. In a way, they were right to do so. But if we adopt a more historical perspective, as I have tried to do here, and understand that at the core of the EU's bureaucratic mess is a kernel of humanistic vision which we must desperately keep alive, then the choice over Lisbon is really no choice at all. We simply should have voted yes. And whatever options may come our way now, we must remember the peace that is at stake.
-- Nicholas Kiersey
Labour’s Rendezvous with Lisbon
http://www.irishleftreview.org/2008/06/16/labours-rendezvous-lisbon/
June 16th, 2008
Key Quote::
So how do progressives proceed? The Labour Party passed up the opportunity to create a new credibility with the electorate in its haste to take up the catastrophist language that dominated both sides of the campaign. This is not about whether it should have supported the Treaty or not. But even campaigning for Yes it could have distanced itself from the negative ‘we have to be grateful’ and ‘we’ll become pariahs’ tone taken by the right-wing parties.For instance, Labour could have acknowledged that, while the Treaty would not have a qualitative effect on our ‘neutrality’ (such as it is), the issue of the militarisation of Europe is a wholly valid concern, a process unaffected by whether the referendum succeeded or not. Or, again, that while the Charter of Fundamental Rights is a great advance, the extent and limitations on the right to collective bargaining will still be determined by the European Court and that more safeguards are needed. Instead of adopting an ‘all concerns are allayed’ language, it could have risen above the desultory debate, and accepted that the more thoughtful contributions from the No camp raised legitimate points - points which Labour would take on board.
MondoGlobo!
All political change starts with defiance of some authority, some established power structure that does not want to be weakened or eliminated. We are reminding concerned citizens of this simple fact, and bringing non-authoritarians together.
http://mondoglobo.ning.com/profile/NervousFishdown
Gather.com
Gather.com: it's entertaining, engaging, and informative. It's the only social networking site connecting people and ideas. And it's the place to join countless quality conversations. Before you know it, you'll find yourself connecting more deeply with those you care about and the world at large - and having plenty of fun along the way.
http://nervousfishdown.gather.com/
ifimpresident.com
what: ifimpresident.com is a social utility designed to network people through ideas rather than personal relationships. it's goal is to foster a comfortable atmosphere, where political dialogue can be achieved respectably. Users will be linked to their peers based on their political views so that when you discuss politics through out site, it will be read by a targetted audience based on what views you yourself have. Sound a little complicated? To put it simpler, the more content you produce, whether discussions or policies, the more people will find and read your views.
http://www.ifimpresident.com/NervousFish1/
thepoint: make something happen
What makes The Point special? With any activity that involves a group of people, we want to know that enough others are participating for our contribution to make a difference. Once participation crosses that "tipping point," people are more than happy to take action. So, on The Point, each user-generated campaign is only "activated" when the tipping point is reached. The possible uses of The Point are limitless. Form an ultimatum against an unsatisfactory company. Raise money for a group purchase or charity. Broker an agreement between a group of people. Plan an event with your friends. Those are a few we've thought of, and you will think of many more. The Point facilitates any situation where people want to know that enough others are committed before they are willing to commit. Now you can know if your contribution will make a difference before you lift a finger or spend a dime.
https://www.thepoint.com/users/nicholas-kiersey/public
A Donkey and an Elephant Walk into a Bar
A Donkey and an Elephant is a social tool and political aggregator for folks into politics and activism from all political spectrums. Connect with other activists in your area and find like-minded groups and events! A great way to keep on top of what's going on in your area.
http://www.adonkeyandanelephantwalkintoabar.com/nervousfishdown/
REDBLUEAMERICA: Best Thinking, Both Sides
RedBlueAmerica.com is a place where people can find out how people with differing views from their own think. It is a place where they can test their thinking against the best thinking on the other side. It is a place where they can stay current – where they can find fodder for today’s equivalent of water cooler conversations – knowing that they’re getting the whole story. It is a place where they can talk with people who think differently, people who want to engage in a civil conversation about the issues. It is a place where they can share their thoughts, a place for thoughtful dialog.
http://redblueamerica.com/users/nervousfishdown
20DC
20DC is the first step in the future of politics. The way we elect candidates, organize action, disperse information and even fundraise is changing as fast as Internet technology develops. 20DC has a vast array of features that allow for political discussion and organization - all in one place and all online. The content of the site is created and controlled by users. After all, it wouldn't much of a site about popular democracy otherwise, would it?
http://www.20DC.com/profile.php?user=NervousFish1
Find me on ElectionTV2008
Here is my site:
http://www.election2008tv.com/share/NervousFishdown
Couple of oldies...
The Political Economy of the East Asian Financial Crisis
http://www.iol.ie/~kiersey/asiacrisis.html
The Political Economy of the East Asian Financial Crisis is about how and why the Asian Financial Crisis would occur. (By Nicholas Kiersey 9304517 MA Degree in International-Studies Supervisor: Camilla Noonan) July 1998
The Diplomacy of the American Civil War
Nicholas Kiersey. 9304517. BA Degree in European Studies. (Public Affairs). Supervisor: Dr. John Logan. March 1997. Submitted in part fulfilment for the ...
www.iol.ie/~kiersey/civwar.html
GNN: Urquhart: Speculate to Annihilate
http://www.gnn.tv/print/3726/Speculate_to_Annihilate
Speculate to Annihilate
The commodities crisis is being fueled by out of control capitalism
By Sam Urquhart
Published: Wednesday June 4th, 2008
Rising demand from both Chinese and Indian consumers has been flagged by many as the driving force behind the commodities surge, or “super-cycle” as economists like to call it yet there are far more powerful forces at work than Indian or Chinese demand. Those two nations together, despite numbering over 2 billion people, account for around 12 percent of global oil consumption. The U.S. alone accounts for 25 percent. Yet it is not U.S. consumers that is driving the destructive commodities super-cycle, it is its dysfunctional financial system.As Forbes online relates in a recent article on global oil prices, “Speculative investment in commodities has been fuelled by the dollar’s decline, with financial players buying into the market in a bid to hedge against the greenback’s fall and global inflation concerns.”
I'm up on ZSpace now...
I have a ZSpace now. I think it will be an interesting social networking site for activists - still a lot of work to be done on it but check it out anyway!
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/nervousfishdown
http://www.zcommunications.org/blog/nervousfishdown
Cheers,
Nicholas
Slate: Death of a Saleswoman
XX FACTOR XXTRA: WOMEN WRITING ABOUT POLITICS, ETC.
Death of a Saleswoman
HOW HILLARY CLINTON LOST ME—AND A GENERATION OF YOUNG VOTERS.
By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Wednesday, June 4, 2008, at 11:31 AM ET
Clinton didn't trust that the message of revolution embodied in her candidacy could animate American voters, particularly male voters. And she lacked the courage of her young, ecstasy-seeking self. And so she sent the message that gender was not a factor. Presumably, she did this based on the reasonable assumption that it was politically perilous to be a woman. But the paradox is that in taking the safe tack she thought made her more electable, she actually made herself less electable. She presented herself as a hard-bitten Washington insider, running on experience when a lot of American voters, particularly young women, were looking for transformation.
Foreign Affairs: How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor
How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor
C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007
Summary: Thanks to high oil prices and hefty subsidies, corn-based ethanol is now all the rage in the United States. But it takes so much supply to keep ethanol production going that the price of corn -- and those of other food staples -- is shooting up around the world. To stop this trend, and prevent even more people from going hungry, Washington must conserve more and diversify ethanol's production inputs.
C. Ford Runge is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law and Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. Benjamin Senauer is Professor of Applied Economics and Co-director of the Food Industry Center at the University of Minnesota.
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]
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
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.
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.
Financial Times: Why We Should Fear a McCain Presidency (by Anatol Lieven)
~NiK
Why We Should Fear a McCain Presidency
By Anatol Lieven, New America Foundation
The Financial Times | March 24, 2008
Mr McCain exemplifies “Jacksonian nationalism” -- after Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century Indian-fighter and president -- and the Scots-Irish military tradition from which both men sprung. As Mr McCain’s superb courage in North Vietnamese captivity and his honourable opposition to torture by US forces demonstrate, he also possesses the virtues of that tradition. Then again, some of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century were caused by brave, honourable men with a passionate sense of national mission.
John Yoo on Clausewitz
NiK
TITLE: Deconstructing John Yoo
DEPARTMENT: No Comment
BY: Scott Horton
PUBLISHED: January 23, 2008
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002226
Once again, poor John Yoo, the author of the original torture memorandum and steady defender in public fora of waterboarding and crushing the genitalia of small children, feels he is being persecuted. This has been a steady theme of his writings in the Journal, in which he has lashed out against former Attorney General Ashcroft, the Supreme Court in its Rasul and Hamdan decisions, and his colleagues in academia. This time the victimizer is his own alma mater. A Yale Law School clinic has supported a lawsuit filed against him in federal court in San Francisco seeking nominal damages ($1 plus attorney’s fees and costs) on behalf of Jose Padilla. The Wall Street Journal and other organs of the Neoconservative world (of which the soft-spoken Yoo is a card-carrying member) reacted promptly and in unison. This law suit is a ludicrous act of harassment, they say, blasting away against Yale Dean Harold Koh and a series of additional windmills who have nothing to do with it.
The Nation: Rigged Trials at Gitmo
Rigged Trials at Gitmo
ROSS TUTTLE
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/tuttle
A key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.
And:
Colonel Davis's criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed "sexy" and of "high-interest" (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. "I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system," he wrote. "I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively."
Amartya Sen: More on "Imperial Illusions"
by Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen responds to Niall Ferguson's letter about the legacy of British imperial rule in India.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=42348eec-0823-4c4b-8b86-c2d9db78cc46
Even after overlooking that misattribution, it can, however, be asked whether Ferguson should be so sure that India could have done little of the kind that Japan did. His comparisons with "Qing China" and "Ottoman Turkey" are certainly worth considering, but does he not overlook here the extent to which there were early industrial and financial developments, as well as global affiliations, already in India? I commented on this in my essay: "When the East India Company undertook the battle of Plassey and defeated the Nawab of Bengal, there were businessmen, traders, and other professionals from a number of different European nations already in that very locality. Their primary involvement was in exporting textiles and other industrial products from India, and the river Ganges ... on which the East India Company had its settlement, also had (further upstream) trading centers and settled communities from Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Prussia, and other European nations." Despite the early history of industrial and financial developments in India, we cannot, of course, be sure what would have happened there in the absence of British conquest, but Ferguson's ridicule of what he calls "Meiji India" avoids the important issues involved.
Hugo Chavez vs Exxon
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papantonio talk about the legal battle between Hugo Chavez and Exxon Mobil over oil profits in Venezuela. If Exxon is victorious, Chavez has threatened to cut off oil supplies to the US.
In Defense of Food: Author, Journalist Michael Pollan on Nutrition, Food Science and the American Diet
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/13/in_defense_of_food_author_journalist
Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food but “edible food-like substances.” His previous book,The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and theWashington Post. His latest book, just published, is called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. [includes rush transcript]
DN: Frances Fox Piven on 'progressive' candidates
FRANCES FOX PIVEN: ... I wanted to comment on the question of program that everybody—all of us have brought up. Whose program do we like? Who is stronger, Hillary or Barack? Or was it Edwards in an earlier phase? I think that, look, these are all ambitious people. They all take money from unsavory sources. They’re all determined to win, to beat out their competitors. They all evade the troublesome issues in American society, if they can. The question of whether—who we should support is a question, rather, of which of these candidates is more likely to encourage and then be vulnerable to the movement politics, which sometimes sets presidents straight. You know, in 1932, FDR didn’t run with a good program; he ran with the same program the Democrats had run with in 1924 and 1928, and that wasn’t a good program. But nevertheless, his rhetoric encouraged people who were suffering as a result of the Depression—working people, the unemployed—and helped to fuel the movements, which then forced FDR to support initiatives which he otherwise would not have supported, including the right to organize. And I think you can see the same pattern in JFK, LBJ, so we—people who are our movement leaders don’t get to this stage of a presidential campaign.
ei: How Barack Obama learned to love Israel
~NJK
How Barack Obama learned to love Israel
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6619.shtml
"Obama offered not a single word of criticism of Israel, of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians."
Washington Post: The Church Doctrines of Pope Ron Paul
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011101859_pf.html
What's wrong with libertarianism?
By Michael Kinsley Saturday, January 12, 2008; 12:00 AM
Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order. But the modest success of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in the presidential campaign entitles them to some answers to the questions they raise. They say: People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt other people. If you agree, how do you justify (let's pick just two): 1) laws that forbid private behavior, such as recreational drugs; 2) government programs that redistribute one person's money to someone else?
OpenDemocracy: Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited
http://www.opendemocracy.net/node/35559/print
Michel Thieren
The question of how many Iraqis have died since 2003 has been reopened. In answering it, it is vital to clarify the criteria in making a scientific assessment, says Michel Thieren.
11 - 01 - 2008
The final analysis and computation compensated for a series of possible biases - such as the under-reporting of deaths because people have moved away from households and relocated across them, the impossibility of visiting some households for security reason, and the effects of migration of Iraqis to neighbouring countries. Although adequately controlled, these biases are still present, and this makes the final estimate of "151,000" the one that is, for that survey, the closest to the true toll. The survey released by the New England Journal of Medicine, therefore, concludes that between 104,000 and 220,000 people died in Iraq during the three years after the coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, with the highest probability that the true number is 151,000.
Charlie Wilson's Warlords
Charlie Wilson's Warlords
by Ivan Eland
http://antiwar.com/eland/
It is ironic that during the Cold War, liberals like Charlie Wilson and neoconservatives like Ronald Reagan agreed on pursuing this costly and interventionist containment strategy. The venues in which they preferred to challenge the Soviets may have differed – the neoconservatives preferred the futile effort to support the Contras in Nicaragua, while the liberals preferred backing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan – but they had the same foreign policy. The interventionist consensus continued after the Cold War and ultimately led to the blowback of 9/11. It shouldn't be any surprise that liberals and neoconservatives alike have opted for an interventionist foreign policy, since both support government activism at home (again, with differing preferences as to the areas of mischief). But unfortunately, 9/11 demonstrated that the cost of overseas meddling by Charlie Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and their liberal and neoconservative brethren in the state apparatus might be even higher than the cost which accrues from government intervention domestically.
Why Rudy Giuliani loves Norman Podhoretz
Norman's Conquest
Why Rudy Giuliani loves Norman Podhoretz
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Podhoretz was born in 1930 into a lapsed Orthodox Jewish family, the son of a sixty-dollar-a-week milkman. He grew up in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that profoundly shaped his character. In his book Ex-Friends, Podhoretz describes Norman Mailer, who grew up near him and attended the same high school, as a similar product of the local street culture: "Like me, and practically every Brooklyn boy I had known, he was direct and pugnacious and immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage." Podhoretz was a member of a gang called Club Cherokee and hung out with gamblers and other riffraff as a child. It was an environment in which, he recalled in a 1999 television interview, "the main desideratum was to be tough and not to back down from a fight. And to be a sissy, as people used to say, or a coward was probably the worst possible condition into which you could fall." It was the credo Podhoretz would follow all his life.
Review of Terry Eagleton: Terry Eagleton Presents Jesus Christ - The Gospels [Verso, 2007]
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John...and Terry.
By Andrew McGowan
In the book trade, it has been a better year or two for Jesus than for God. God has suffered the indignities of forays into pulp non-fiction by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others. Jesus has had wildly different treatments at the hands of everyone from Pope Benedict XVI to Jack Spong, or more locally from Peter Jensen to John Carroll, but Jesus’ reviews are uniformly glowing.
It might seem God needed Terry Eagleton’s attention more; in fact his review of Dawkins The God Delusion in the London Review of Books has become the stuff of legend – I can’t resist quoting the opening line:
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology”.
Read on...
Phelim McAleer is a very odd anti-imperialist...
Phelim has a pretty sound critique of NGOs and charities. They do in a sense salve the ills created by the status quo. However, he doesn't seem to be able to link this to capitalism. Instead, he takes a sort of Ayn Rand posture, suggesting that these NGOs breed dependency and neutering any desire for economic success. He's quite right to say that paternalism is a form of power and, indeed, can be imperialistic. But then he throws in these casual remarks about how the solution is to build more sweatshops ... and at that point you really have to wonder what the hell this guy is on!! I mean, aren't sweatshops in fact the accouterments of today's imperialism?
Here is the text of a letter I wrote to Today FM earlier this year, after an earlier 'McAleer' moment:
-------------
TO: Matt Cooper, TODAY FM.
Dear Matt,
I am writing to complain about a perceivable bias on your part in the course of interview this Friday, (Oct. 12) with Oisin Colan (Friends of the Earth, not sure if i have spelled his name correctly), and Phelim McAleer (again, I may not have the speling right), concerning Al Gore's recent Nobel Peace Prize.
Matt, I think you are a great journalist. I listen to your show via podcast (I live in the USA) and I always try to make time in my day to listen in.
I believe you bring intelligent and capable guests on the air. Almost always, I feel you leave your own personal bias out of the interviews. But I cannot for the life of me understand why you invited Phelim on your show. In his time as your guest, he systematically avoided supporting any of his arguments with any facts or figures, insisting instead on crass mischaracterizations of the nature of global warming and those who advocate any solutions for it.
First of all, I want to say that here in the US even the most right wing analysts are now starting to concede the risks of global warming. As such, people like Phelim are increasingly in the minority and, in fairness, come over as ill-informed and dogmatic.
I was surprised that you would have a guest on your show whose best response to Al Gore's award was the assertion that we all needed reminding of the fact that 20 years ago we were talking about global 'cooling'. It seems Phelim is one of those sorts of people who thinks that the things we knew in the past are always and everywhere equivalent to the things we know now. No chance then, for someone like Phelim, to think that science and technology might actually be telling us exponentially more about the earth today that they did 20 years ago.
Second, quite aside from this incredibly simplistic argument, Phelim then proceeded to inform us that Mr Gore was advocating a developmental status quo for the poverty-stricken on this planet. This is not true by any means, as Oisin was quick to point out. But Phelim then went on to advocate that the answer to all our problems was consumption, and more consumption still.
Matt, I was surprised that you let him get away with this. As a journalist you are obliged to accommodate as much of a spectrum of viewpoints as your can. However, surely there must be limits to this?
Phelim's argument in favor of unrestricted consumption represents the worst sort of Libertarianism. That he would be let make the ridiculous claim, as he did, that "consumption is the engine that has driven 200 million people out of poverty in the last 20 years" without any rebuke from yourself is, frankly, shocking.
The reality is that the gap between the world's rich and poor is growing, not diminishing. It hasn't seen any real reductions since the 1960s: "In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much."
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp
So where is Phelim coming from?
With respect, the constellation of economic powers that have been aggressively pushing what we call the "Washington Consensus" over the past 30 years or so has done more to hinder the cause of economic development than any other approach. As Naomi Klein argues in her new book 'The Shock Doctrine,' a direct line of progression can be drawn from the pro-consumption ideology of people like Milton Friedman to the destructive Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and the Argentinian financial collapse of a couple of years ago.
Where are the poor thriving today? In various places: Malawi, for example, has recently contravened the dictates of the Washington Consensus and enjoyed bumper harvest yields because of the reintroduction of fertilizer subsidies. See:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071012.FOOD12/TPStory/?pageRequested=all
Similarly, all across South America, the return of left-wing governments has boosted education and health by an order of magnitude. Gone are the days in these countries where the 'consumption' mantra led to the privatization of water and the deprivation of the multitudes in the barrios.
The idea that Friends of the Earth is the "enemy of the poor" is just dumb, and a view so unserious that it hardly merits mention on a show like yours. The reality is that the sort of social planning techniques we will need in order to turn the tide on global warming are precisely the same sorts of techniques that are already being used in many countries in South America. Just look at Brazil's emissions policies! In many respects, they're way ahead of ours.
And this is by no means to advocate a return to the state-centered planning of old-time socialism, either. Much of what is going on the South America is driven by an ethos of putting local democracy first.
Your show does not need people like Phelim. Sure, maybe they say the right sorts of reactionary things to get average Joe sending in his text messages, and the punters tuned in, keeping your ratings nice and high. But this is hardly the approach of serious journalism, right?
One good thing I take from your interview: That you need to descend to such depths to find a guest like Phelim to represent the side of the debate that still denies global warming can only mean that there aren't many of them left out there.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Kiersey
Cole: Combating Muslim Extremism
Combating Muslim Extremism
by JUAN COLE
American politicians should cease implying that Muslim nations and individuals are different from, or somehow more dangerous than, any other group of human beings, a racist idea promoted by the Christian and Zionist right. They should acknowledge that most Muslim nations are US friends and allies. A wise American policy toward the small networks of Muslim extremists would reduce their recruitment pool by the quick establishment of a Palestinian state and by a large-scale military drawdown from Iraq, thus removing widespread and major grievances. An increase in visible humanitarian and development aid to Muslim countries has a demonstrable effect on improving the US image.
The Paris Principle—Politics are sooo hot.
STEPHEN DUNCOMBE
The Nation
October 29, 2007 issue
It's because we know that we need to care. This celebration of ersatz aristocracy, as paradoxical as it sounds, is genuinely popular culture. People is the most profitable magazine in the United States, and E! (the CNN of celebrity gossip) reaches more than 89 million homes. If progressives want their politics to appeal to a majority of the population--which they should in a democracy--they ignore or misunderstand the popularity of celebrity at their peril. What would it mean to create a politics that speak to this fascination? Instead of bemoaning the narcissism of young people who spend hours managing their public selves on Facebook, we need to see it for what it is: the desire to be someone in our mediated age. This popular desire for recognition demands a change in the way progressives do politics
Fascism in America: Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/whos-afraid-of-naomi-wolf/2007/10/05/1191091363953.html
Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf?
Mark Coultan
October 6, 2007
She writes: "I am not comparing the United States in 2007 to Nazi Germany, or Bush to Hitler. There will not be a coup in America like Mussolini's March on Rome or a dramatic massacre like Hitler's Night of the Long Knives."But she does see historical echoes everywhere. Bush supporters burning Dixie Chicks CDs are comparable to the Nazis burning books. The Administration's creation of the Department of Homeland Security is compared to the Nazi use of the term Heimat, "the Homeland".The Administration embedded reporters in the military. The Nazis embedded reporters and camera crews with its armed forces. Vice-President Dick Cheney said America was on a war footing after September 11, 2001. Nazi leaders said that after the Reichstag fire Germany was on a permanent war footing. The Administration unloads coffins of dead American soldiers at night and forbids pictures being taken. The Nazis did the same.
And...
Wolf concedes that some of her critics are more comfortable with the term "authoritarian" than "fascist", and says some people even view authoritarianism as attractive in what they see as a time of national emergency.But she says that the difference between authoritarianism and a fascist shift is when state terror is directed against individuals.Before she wrote the book, she asked an accountant to comb through her tax, employment and other records to identify anything that could be used against her, or distorted."Those in the public eye who are afraid to be forceful in opposition because of a secret they want to keep had better talk to their families or their constituencies, or their lawyers and accountants, painful as that might be in the short term," she says.Is this paranoia, or just sensible precaution? She seems surprised that someone would question her decision to investigate herself. "No one I've talked to in America thinks this is an overstatement. We are really scared here. Really scared.
Wheatcroft: Who Made Hillary Queen?
HEIR APPARENT
Who Made Hillary Queen?
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Sunday, October 7, 2007; Page B01
We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the rather useful institution of constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger.
RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
Posted by arthur magazine staff
CONSPIRACIES OF DUNCES by Douglas Rushkoff (from Arthur No. 26)
And...9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing. (At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.) That’s why, instead of nodding along with their long-winded, preposterous yarns under the false belief that any critique is better than no critique, we—the informed, intelligent, and reasonable members of the war resistance—must instead disassociate ourselves from this drivel. In other words, we must draw the line between the kind of analysis done by Greg Palast and that done by Pilots for Truth. If we don’t apply discipline to our thinking, we risk falling into the trap that even some of our best intellectuals have—like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who on reading a bit too much 9-11 conspiracy, has concluded that it all has some merit.
And that’s where I suspect all this theorizing really takes us: to the heart of a racist jingoism worse even than the triumphalism justifying our foreign policy to begin with. They can’t bring themselves to accept that our big bad government can really be so swiftly outfoxed by a dozen relatively untrained Arab guys. And rather than go there, they’d prefer to maintain the myth of American hegemony. On a certain level, it feels better to believe that we are only vulnerable by our leaders’ sick choice—not by our adversarsies’ increasing strength and prowess.
KLINENBERG: Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'
Naomi Klein looks at free-market fundamentalists and economic turmoil
BY ERIC KLINENBERG
The Shock Doctrine is a massive, courageous undertaking, and Klein’s impassioned critique of the violence that accompanies American economic imperialism is not merely necessary but urgent. At times, however, she overreaches, and her analysis falls short of her ambitions. The least developed idea is her boldest claim: that the practice of economic shock therapy not only partakes of the logic of physical torture but is also its moral equivalent. Klein persuasively shows that both Cameron and Friedman fantasized about their capacities to rebuild from clean slates and that neither adequately considered the human damage wrought by their shock therapies. But the two shock docs made scientific and political interventions that are strikingly dissimilar, and Klein’s argument would have been more compelling had she established a deeper connection between them.
Alice O'Keefe Wishes Manu Chau Was Not Quite so...
Lost in a century
Alice O'Keeffe
Published 27 September 2007
In contrast, La Radiolina sounds urgent and hectoring, laden with rock guitars, wailing sirens and lyrics that border dangerously on the facile: "In Baghdad/it's no democracy/just because it's a US country/In Fallujah too much calamity/This world go crazy, it's a fatality." In its lighter moments ("Me Llaman Calle" and "Otro Mundo"), La Radiolina recalls the best of Manu Chao, but too often it feels like being trapped next to a member of the Socialist Workers Party at closing time in the student bar.The feeling is not entirely dispelled by an hour in conversation with Chao; he has a tendency to make apocalyptic pronouncements, such as: "If we stay like this: chaos. End of civilisation. I mean what I'm saying. It's a matter of time" and "Capitalism is barbarity, it's the law of the jungle in money". Maybe so, but I find myself wondering what happened to the sensitive, poetic person I heard on his early albums.
Why couldn't they have got someone to interview him who was actually sympathetic to his ideas? I can't understand why the writer feels we would particularly care to have her status quo viewpoint inserted here. Would she find it so very implausible to think that it might be his political 'sensitivity' that makes his records so popular in the first place? Evidently so. Well, hopefully Mr Chao won't be too concerned about her strictures on how to be the nice, well-behaved sort of rock star that she would prefer to listen to. What piffle.
van Creveld: The World Can Live With a Nuclear Iran
Opinion
Martin van Creveld | Mon. Sep 24, 2007
Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.
Iran Targetted Over Iraq; Blind Eye to Saudi Role
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/25/142247
In a speech at Columbia University, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended Iran's right to nuclear power but denied Iran was seeking to build nuclear weapons. Ahmadinejad's appearance sparked widespread protests at Columbia. We speak with Trita Parsi, author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States" and Baruch professor Ervand Abrahamian, co-author of "Targeting Iran." [includes rush transcript]
TRITA PARSI: Saudi’s role -- well, a military report just came out about two months ago -- it was leaked in the LA Times -- that showed that about 45% of all the suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi nationals. We've known for quite some time that there's a lot of money flowing into Iraq from Saudi Arabia that is going to the Sunni insurgents, because their belief is that they're fighting a war against Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. We're not talking about that. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia got praised by Ambassador Crocker during his testimony. And I think it's a very one-sided way of looking at the problems we're facing in Iraq. And as long as we pursue a very political perspective on the Iraqi situation, then I fear that we will continue to be in a rather difficult mess over there.
Juan Cole: Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.
By Juan Cole
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/09/24/ahmadinejad/
And...There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality, penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran's rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.
Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.
Iranian University Chancellors Ask Bollinger 10 Questions
Iranian University Chancellors Ask Bollinger 10 Questions
TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Seven chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centers, in a letter addressed to their counterpart in the US Colombia University, denounced Lee Bollinger's insulting words against the Iranian nation and president and invited him to provide responses for 10 questions of the Iranian academicians and intellectuals.
Eurozine: Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution
G.M. Tamás
Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution
Eastern Europe today
State socialism in eastern Europe, though intolerably authoritarian, offered security and the opportunity for upward mobility, writes G.M. Tamás. Members of the middle class resist becoming déclassé but cannot identify with the communist institutions to which they owe their status. In order to defend social relations before 1989 without losing face, they portray the neoconservative destruction of the welfare state as the work of communists. The new counter revolutionaries can, then, be described both as left- and as rightwing – as the anti-communist enemies of communist privatizers and globalizers.
Dissent: Who Named the Neocons?
Who Named the Neocons?
By Benjamin Ross
SUMMER 2007
The Rosetta Stone that unlocks this linguistic puzzle is the next appearance of neoconservative in Dissent. It was in Fall 1975, just as Daniel P. Moynihan’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations began to propel the word into prominence. An article by John P. Diggins used it to describe William F. Buckley’s early collaborators Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Burnham.[10] The conservative writer B. Bruce-Briggs demurred in the Spring 1976 issue: "One must quibble with his use of the term “neoconservatives” to label the ex-Marxists who went over to the right before 1950. In contemporary usage, “neoconservative” labels those liberals who would not accept the “New Politics” shift during the mid1960s; they are careful to keep their distance from the premature antiliberals of Buckley and company. On the right, as the left, sectarianism demands scrupulous care in nomenclature." A neoconservative, for the Dissenters of the early 1970s, was either someone with a new variant of conservatism or a former leftist who had moved right. The term was applied to the group that evolved into today’s neocons, simply because they were the new conservatives of immediate concern. But its meaning was not limited to them. It was elsewhere that neoconservatism became a name rather than a description. Scientists know that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can sometimes trigger a hurricane on the other side of the earth. In this case, fluttering on the West Side of Manhattan is connected to a hurricane three decades later in Iraq. For the butterfly that has thus flown into history, scrupulous care in taxonomic nomenclature is indeed demanded.
Review of Mearsheimer & Walt's new book
BY SCOTT McLEMEE Special to Newsday
September 16, 2007
At the same time, they are wedded to the notion that the U.S. and Israel have distinct national interests - with the American interest defined, more or less, as sustained access to Middle Eastern oil. They reject the idea that Iraq was occupied in pursuit of oil. Hence, that policy was an effect of the Israel lobby's efforts on behalf of a different national interest. Here, we see the real limits of their analysis. After 1993, by their own account, the major focus of Israel's concern about its own security was Iran, not Iraq. But it was the American neoconservatives - defined by the authors as part of the Israel lobby - who drew up the plans for attacking Iraq. This scheme did win support among the Israeli public in 2002 and '03, but it's hardly a matter of subordinating American policy to another country's interests.
Mearsheimer & Walt: Seven Questions: The Israel Lobby Revisited
Posted September 2007
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt made waves in 2006 when they argued that a powerful “Israel lobby” distorts U.S. policies in the Middle East. Back with a new book expanding on the same topic, these noted realist scholars sat down with FP to explain why they are speaking out.
All politicians are sensitive to interest groups, whether it’s the farm lobby, or drug companies, or energy companies, or the National Rifle Association. Clearly, groups like the Israel lobby tend to exert their most profound influence on Capitol Hill, but they also wield considerable influence—like other special interest groups—over the executive branch. This is not to say that any of these organizations control U.S. policy, just that they exert a very powerful influence on it. And one of the ways you see that is in the presidential campaign that’s currently going on. American Middle East policy is clearly in trouble, and you would expect presidential candidates to be discussing and debating what ought to be done on a wide range of Middle East issues. But when it comes to Israel, all you get from presidential candidates is a competition for who can demonstrate the greatest devotion to Israel and willingness to back it almost unconditionally.
LRB: Anderson: Depicting Europe
Perry Anderson
http://lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/print/ande01_.html
9/20/07
Perry Anderson's review of some Europhile works, new and not so new, contains some interesting comments. Certainly the current path of the 'project' of the European Union is overshadowed by some serious problems: racial integration; brain drain from the East; Turkey; and the all pervasive issue of the Transatlantic Alliance. But perhaps the most troubling problem of all, and here Perry is quite right, is that the Europhile's have incredibly high notions of themselves, and the moral role of the Union:
Self-satisfaction is scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains this degree of political vanity?
I addressed this in my classroom last autumn. We were reading Rifkin's book and I have to admit, there were moments when I felt extremely uncomfortable with my decision to put in on the syllabus. While the work does an excellent job of explaining in very accessible terms the 'problem of modernity', and the particular advantages of the 'European' socio-economic model in dealing with this problem, the author seems far too comfortable with his rather monolithic assumptions. To be sure, 'Europe' is a decidedly ambiguous project. On the one hand, it is driven by a Functionalist logic of integration. The results of this for the marginal are perfectly represented by Perry:
The role configured by the new East in the EU, in other words, promises to be something like that played by the new South in the American economy since the 1970s: a zone of business-friendly fiscal regimes, weak or non-existent labour movements, low wages and – therefore – high investment, registering faster growth than in the older core regions of continent-wide capital. Like the US South, too, the region seems likely to fall somewhat short of the standards of political respectability expected in the rest of the Union. Already, now that they are safely inside the EU and there is no longer the same need to be on their best behaviour, the elites of the region show signs of kicking over the traces. In Poland, the ruling twins defy every norm of ideological correctness as understood in Strasbourg or Brussels. In Hungary, riot police stand on guard around a ruler unabashed at vaunting his lies to voters. In the Czech Republic, months pass without parliament being able to form a government. In Romania, the president insults the prime minister in a phone-in call to a television talk-show. But, as in Kentucky or Alabama, such provincial quirks add a touch of folkloric colour to the drab metropolitan scene more than they disturb it.
We Europeans in America complain ad nauseum about the average American's lack of basic knowledge about their society. Yet how many Europeans are aware of the basic strategization of their own society? The answer to this question must be disappointing for the Rifkins of this world, as the following quote reveals.
In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is still blander in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. The EU ‘is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’, declares New Labour’s Mark Leonard, exalting Europe to the rank of a credit card.
So, Europe is now referred to as something akin to a corporation, one clear hint as to why its police forces might now be in the business not simply of dispensing justice but also maintaining the corporation's bottom line. With this stated, the next obvious question is what we really mean by the 'European Dream,' and whether or not there might somehow be a way to creatively intervene in its machinations:
Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, Kojčve held that whichever camp achieved it would emerge the victor from the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, understood categorically – not chronologically – as the realisation of human freedom, to an end. Kojčve’s prediction was accurate. His extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of plastic. The emergence of the Union may be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars, and what has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zigzag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.
Yes. But in a sense, this is just where the debate starts. On the one hand, Zizek warns us not to fall into the same psychological dilemma of 'false choice,' as confronted by the Amish teenagers. On the other, Negri, Alliez, et al., pushing for a more centralized (yet 'centerless'?) Europe, the sooner to beget the global Empire, the final obstacle to global democracy.
Flub away, Miss South Carolina
Well, it would be entirely unfair to gang up on the poor girl. But this Today Show sycophancy is just retarded. Basically, by saying 'atta girl, Miss South Carolina - it was just an attack of the jitters and you blanked, could have happened to anyone', they are completely ignoring some obvious facts. For starters, she didn't blank. Rather, the girl was actually trying to achieve something incredibly difficult. And no, I am not referring to the task of winning a teen beauty pageant.
As *everyone* knows, a good ol' southern gal would never stoop so low as to criticize her country in a beauty pageant! That there might be social problems in the star spangled home land is taboo! As such, the question was clearly out of order. Bless our heroine, however, rather than fall into the sneaky trap set by the questioner, she decided to try to redirect it. Unable to risk taking the question about poverty here in the USA seriously, she answers by referring to South Africa to 'the Iraq' and ... well, almost anything but what she feels she really must not say.
In a sense, the Today Show was doing much more than shoring up the poor girl's ego. They were actually engaged in a much more sinister activity. That is, they were performing according to a certain sort of text which demands unequivocally that the actual question which provoked the girl's mistake be banished from all thought. Naturally, the interviewers seem to suggest, anyone would crack under *that* sort of pressure. Of course they would, and there is the rub! Nobody would wish to blame such a nice and presentable young lady for trying her best to perform a script that it has taken the American media decades to perfect. So flub away, Miss South Carolina. At least they won't call you anti-American.
A final note: did you see how the revised answer was so careful? No suggestion that anyone in the USA had no access to a map, or suffered from shite education. This is a shame because, in fact, the 'statistics' tell us that over 10% of Americans cannot read or write at all, 20% of the nation has basic literacy issues, and 13% of all American 17-years-olds are functionally illiterate.
See:
http://www.ahalenia.com/id/id11/illiterati.html
http://www.efmoody.com/miscellaneous/illiteracy.html
"One of the great things about books is sometime there are some fantastic pictures." - George W. Bush
Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein: Sin Patrón
http://lavaca.org/seccion/actualidad/1/1593.shtml
Sin Patrón
Stories from Argentina's worker-run factories
Preface, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein
There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent leftwing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies." Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic, worker management. It's an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: "We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages, making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work, we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."
openDemocracy: Turkey's political opening
By Gunes Murat Tezcur
http://www.opendemocracy.net/node/34130/print
The centre-right AKP, formed by members of an earlier and explicitly Islamist party, thus reinforces its position as the single most authoritative force in Turkish politics. It increased its share of the vote by 13% (to 47%) compared with the election of November 2002 when it was elected to office, and will control 340 of the 550 seats in parliament (a slight reduction thanks to the niceties of voting distribution). If now it can translate its popular mandate into a concerted project of political reform, Turkey may emerge as the only Muslim-majority country in the middle east where secularism and democracy coexist. This will in turn facilitate Turkey's long-sought entry to the European Union and make the country a stabilising force in regional affairs.
IHT: Review: The Secret History Of The American Empire
By John Perkins. 365 pages. $25.95. Dutton
Review by Joe Queenan
http://iht.com/articles/2007/07/13/arts/idbriefs14C.php
Yet even though Perkins is perhaps the nicest person to come along since Alcuin of York, his book is not without its flaws. Because so many of the anecdotes and even the general outline of Perkins's conspiracy theories date from the '60s, a better title might have been "Rip Van Winkle Versus the Trilateral Commission." The author also has a tendency to play fast and loose with the facts, skating over Castro's myriad crimes in Cuba and Mao's festive homicide in China. He is weak on American history, somehow confusing the monstrously inhospitable Iroquois tribes with the Little Sisters of the Poor. He describes Che Guevara's death in ludicrously dramatic terms, when in fact this trendsetter, fashion plate and full-service psychopath came to a clownish end. He seems to believe that the C.I.A., having murdered the democratically elected presidents of Chile and Ecuador, then put Linda Tripp on the payroll in a plot to destroy Bill Clinton - and frankly, this sounds a bit far-fetched. He suggests that the first President Bush invaded Panama because Manuel Noriega had incriminating photos of George W. Bush snorting cocaine and engaging in kinky sex. If only history were this much fun!
The reviewer is a little too hard on Perkins. This is actually an agitprop book you can really love. Listening to the guy on Democracy Now, its all very seductive. And, truth be told, surely contains much that scholars of today's resurgent primitive accumulation need to know about. Its all very well to go after the book for its presentation of facts. Similarly, it can be criticized for its lack of theoretical rigor. But the author is neither historian nor theoretician. It was written as agitprop and must be appraised as such. Moreover, much of its content is consistent with requests from neomarxist scholars for more data on just how the empire is being run on the front lines... This is largely anecdotal but I don't think that necessarily disqualifies its usefulness.
Borders, language, and the future of European integration: insights from the 19th century Habsburg Empire
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/362
Max-Stephan Schulze
Nikolaus Wolf
7 July 2007
The key hypothesis concerns the importance of ethno-linguistic networks for trade. If ethno-linguistic networks were an important factor, then the intensification of networks among members of the same ethno-linguistic group, and the simultaneous decline of transportation costs, should have produced a border effect inside the Empire. That is, all else equal, two cities with little or no ethno-linguistic differences will tend to trade more with each other than cities with larger differences.
Tomgram: Roger Morris, The Gates Inheritance
The Gates Inheritance
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174812/roger_morris_the_gates_inheritance
posted June 19, 2007 2:25 pm
Think of him as the spymaster who came in from the cold. Well, it wasn't actually so cold out there. After all, Robert Gates was on innumerable corporate boards and the President of Texas A & M University (which, not coincidentally, houses the library, presidential papers, and museum of George H. W. Bush under whom he served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency). But after two dozen years in the CIA and on the National Security Council, after a career which touched (or more than touched) on just about every great foreign policy event in Washington's world from the final days of the Vietnam War and the great Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union to the Central American wars of Ronald Reagan, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Afghan anti-Soviet war, and so much else, he was out of Washington and in hibernation until James Baker's Iraq Study Group called him back. Then, of course, he was picked by George W. Bush as the replacement for the disastrous reign of error of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Washington Montly: Those Weren't the Days
Those Weren't the Days
Nixon has been looking better lately compared to George W. Bush. But in fact he's as bad as we remember.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Nixon in particular broke new ground as a polarizer. He wanted to turn his domestic critics into the functional equivalent of traitors; the antiwar college kids, whom he loathed, were supposed to serve as a kind of domestic Fifth Column, like the communists of the early 1950s, that could shore up the Republican base and stigmatize the Democrats in the eyes of the Silent Majority he felt he represented. In 1970, for example, Nixon’s press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler read a statement of Nixon’s after the shooting of students at Kent State which declared that it “should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” It almost seemed that the president of the United States was blaming the students for their own deaths. According to Dallek, nothing shook Nixon’s conviction that he needed to wage warfare on his opponents. Despite his landslide election victory in 1972, Nixon was, Dallek writes, “almost morbid,” convinced that his adversaries in the Georgetown salons and elsewhere were already plotting to undo him. Indeed, “he saw the price of reelection as a fresh round of conflict with domestic enemies”—read liberal elites.
LA Times: Roman Empire: gold standard of immigration
The ancient superpower could teach the U.S. a thing or two about a strong multicultural society.
By Cullen Murphy
June 16, 2007
So it's natural to wonder if the Romans might have anything to teach Americans. I'd argue that they do. One lesson is that the notion of "taking control of the borders" is overrated; borders were pliable then, and are even harder to define (or police) now. A second lesson is the importance of nurturing a national culture. It was the source of Rome's power, just as it is the source of ours.
Hitchens under fire...
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/03/chris-hitchens-latest-blackout.php
How does Christopher Hitchens do it? Before the rest of us have had our morning coffee, the British-born savant has already polished off 5,000 breezy words for Vanity Fair, a polemic for the New Republic, a book review for the Atlantic, a Viagra confessional for Maxim, and a half-gallon of Scotch
Review of Scahill's Blackwater...
SCOTT TAYLOR
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070324.BKBLAC24/TPStory/Entertainment/Books
In defending Blackwater from lawsuits filed by the victims' families, its lawyers argue that the company should be immune from any liability since it is part of a "U.S. Total Force that includes contractors." Since these mercenaries are not subject to U.S. military law and have been granted immunity from prosecution in both Iraq and Afghanistan, they literally operate outside the law, with a licence to kill.
Building a fraudulent case using coercion
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17184.htm
First and foremost that Iran is not in breach of any international conventions or agreements. Processing of uranium is entirely within the guidelines of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has accounted for all fissile material and confirmed that none have been diverted to prohibited activities.
CounterPunch: Pre-emptive strike against Chirac
CounterPunch February 6, 2007
Pre-emptive strike against Chirac
Frenzy in France Over "Iranian Threat"
By Diana Johnstone
The Socialists can find nothing better to do than to crow over Chirac's "blunder". The French left in general has never seen the point of supporting Chirac's action in keeping France out of the Iraq quagmire. From the viewpoint of the sectarian left (and the French left, in its countless splinters, is incurably sectarian), what matters is not to do the right thing but to do whatever one does for the right motives -- and aconservative politician like Chirac is by definition incapable of doing anything for the right motives.
A lesson in political power...
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2004397,00.html
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
PALLAST at his best: Tinker Bell, Pinochet and The Fairy Tale Miracle of Chile
In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule. In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.
Carter: Israeli apartheid 'worse'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6169107.stm
"Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects 200-or-so settlements... with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road."This perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa," Mr Carter said.
Dowd: The Oval Intervention
December 9, 2006
The Oval Intervention
By Maureen Dowd
He is loath to give up his gunslinger pose to go all diplo. He cleaves to the neocon complaint that it is the realists who are now being unrealistic, thinking the administration can bargain with Syria and Iran, or that the Army can train Iraqi security forces (or, as they are known there, death squads) in a matter of months when they haven't been able to do it in years.
Battlestar Galactica, BitTorrent, and the Day TV Died
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html
May 13 , 2005 | PART ONE: HYPERDISTRIBUTION
Now we have a paradox: the invention of an incredibly powerful mechanism for the global distribution of television programming brings with it a fundamental challenge to the business model which pays for the creation of the programs themselves. This is not at all BitTorrent's fault: the technology could have come along a decade ago, and if it had, we'd have stumbled across this paradox in the 1990s. This is a failure of the value chain to adapt to a changing technological landscape — a technological desynchronization between producer and audience. Once again, there's no need to find fault: things have changed so much, and so quickly, I doubt that anyone could have kept up. But the future is now here, and everyone in the creative value chain from producer to audience must adapt to it.
Nir Rosen: Anatomy of a Civil War
--------------------------------------
Anatomy of a Civil War
Iraq’s descent into chaos
Nir Rosen
Three years later, Shia religious parties such as the Iran-supported Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (its name a sufficient statement of its intentions), or SCIRI, controlled the country, and Shia militias had become the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army, running their own secret prisons, arresting, torturing, and executing Sunnis in what was clearly a civil war. And the Americans were merely one more militia among the many, watching, occasionally intervening, and in the end only making things worse. Iraqis’ hopes for a better future after Saddam had been betrayed.
Ortega wins stunning victory in Nicaragua
BY LETTA TAYLER
Newsday Latin America Correspondent
November 7, 2006, 10:40 PM EST
Managua, Nicaragua -- Former revolutionary and U.S. nemesis Daniel Ortega was declared Nicaragua's president-elect Monday night, cementing a dramatic comeback that adds a seventh leftist leader to a Latin America at odds with the Bush administration. Read More...
NEO CULPA - VANITY FAIR EXCLUSIVE: NOW THEY TELL US
~NiK
VANITY FAIR EXCLUSIVE: NOW THEY TELL US
Neo Culpa
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612?printable=true¤tPage=all
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
by david rose vf.com november 3, 2006 Read More...
How Borat reveals American bigotry and foreign policy double standards.
The Crazy Kazakh Correspondent
How Borat reveals American bigotry and foreign policy double standards.
By ADAM DOSTER
While Baron Cohen originally set out to satirize bigotry, the comedian unintentionally ended up highlighting the emptiness of the Bush administration’s foreign policy rhetoric. Kazakhstan is an important ally for the United States: After 9/11, it offered the U.S. Air Force landing rights for operations in nearby Afghanistan and have since opened up the country’s oil reserves, which are expected to pump 3.5 million barrels of oil a day over the next 10 years to various American oil companies. After their private meeting, Bush wasted no time in lauding the achievements of Nazarbayev, thanking him for his “commitment to institutions that will enable liberty to flourish.”
James Dobson Hearts Ted Haggard
James Dobson Hearts Ted Haggard: But Not In a Gay way. That would be a sin.
http://www.queerty.com/queer/news/james-dobson-hearts-ted-haggard-20061102.php
We knew it was only a matter of time until the conservativos came out in defense of Ted Haggard, the evangelical homo-hater who may or may not have been sucking off a rent boy, Mike Jones. James Dobson, the equally haterific leader of Focus on the Family, has released a statement admonishing Jones and praising Haggard's role as a religious leader...
It is unconscionable that the legitimate news media would report a rumor like this based on nothing but one man's accusation. Ted Haggard is a friend of mine and it appears someone is trying to damage his reputation as a way of influencing the outcome of Tuesday's election -- especially the vote on Colorado's marriage-protection amendment -- which Ted strongly supports.He has shown a great deal of grace under these unfortunate circumstances, quickly turning this matter over to his church for an independent investigation. That is a testament to the character I have seen him exhibit over and over again through the years.
Ted Haggard
Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters
Michel Thieren
OpenDemocracy
18 - 10 - 2006
How many civilians have died in Iraq? Iraq Body Count and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health give widely different answers. Michel Thieren examines what is at stake in their contrasting approaches and estimates.
For the Johns Hopkins study, a civilian dies in Iraq every three minutes from a war that has long perverted the meaning of both the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello. That civilian would not have died if the coalition had not come. For Iraq Body Count, the same story is told almost twice per hour. How much of a difference does it make? That is the political question these two statistics convey to the world, even if statistics themselves cannot answer it.
Nicolas Sarkozy v. Ségolčne Royal: French Politics Go Populist
A TABOO IS BROKEN
French Politics Go Populist
By Britta Sandberg
For years, the private lives of French politicians remained just that. Even sex scandals at the highest levels were hushed up. No longer. Both Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolčne Royal have opened up in the hopes of winning the presidency.
WP: Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442_pf.html
The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.
Labor's love lost
How Britons came to hate Tony Blair and America, and why the next prime minister will pay the price.
By Andrew Brown
Sep. 14, 200
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/09/14/blair/print.html
As soon as the Conservative Party elected as its leader David Cameron, a man too young to be tainted with Thatcherism, Blair's days were numbered. Cameron wrote much of the very pro-American Conservative manifesto at the last election and must therefore take some responsibility for the failure of the Conservatives to capitalize on Blair's unpopularity. But since then he has navigated shrewdly to put Blair between himself and Bush. On the anniversary of 9/11 he delivered a speech that was widely considered to be a repudiation of neoconservatism. Of course, this doesn't actually mean distancing himself from Washington -- how many neocons will be found there in 2008? -- but it does show clearly what must be done to get yourself elected in Britain today. That Thatcher was at the same moment in Washington offering her support to Bush won't have harmed Cameron at all.
Senate Panel Defies Bush on Detainee Bill
The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091406R.shtml
Thursday 14 September 2006
Hours after Mr. Bush huddled with House Republicans, he suffered a defeat on the other side of the Capitol, as the Senate Armed Services Committee endorsed legislation that would give suspected terrorists more legal protections than the president desires.
And more:
Mr. McCain was one of the four Armed Services Committee Republicans who voted against Mr. Bush's proposals. The others were Senators John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman, Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina and Susan E. Collins of Maine. The measure that the panel endorsed and sent to the Senate floor would let suspects see evidence against them and would bar statements obtained through torture or coercion.
Climate change and global justice: a letter to Al Gore
Camilla Toulmin 27 - 7 - 2006
Al Gore's arguments about addressing climate change in his film "An Inconvenient Truth" leave Camilla Toulmin with more questions than answers.
I left your lecture with mixed feelings, realising that the intellectual gulf across the Atlantic ocean – even in relation to a leading US liberal voice – was much wider than I had thought. If it is to be bridged, there has to be movement towards a shared understanding of the vision needed for 2012 and beyond. Here, I believe – as you seem not to – that questions of justice, redress and adaptation are critical to making a fair and robust deal.
Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors
-NiK
The New York Review of Books
August 9, 2001
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14380?email
Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors
By Hussein Agha, Robert Malley
Mr. Malley, as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli
Affairs, was a member of the US peace team and participated in the
Camp David summit. Mr. Agha has been involved in Palestinian affairs
for more than thirty years and during this period has had an active
part in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
camp david
Monbiot: Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong
The assault on Lebanon was premeditated - the soldiers' capture simply provided the excuse. It was also unnecessary
George Monbiot
Tuesday August 8, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1839281,00.html
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail". The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that "of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared ... By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board".
HEZBOLLAH IS NOT A PUPPET OF SYRIA AND IRAN
HEZBOLLAH IS NOT A PUPPET OF SYRIA AND IRAN
Reza Aslan is the Iranian-American author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam"
By Reza Aslan
But it would be a grave exaggeration to claim, as the White House repeatedly has, that Hezbollah is merely a puppet of Syria and Iran. Nor is it necessarily the case that the current conflict between Israel and Lebanon bears the fingerprints of Assad and Ahmadinejad.
Israel's War Against Lebanon's Shi'a
The two weeks of Israeli air and sea bombardment following Hizballah's raidon an Israeli army convoy have placed all of Lebanon under siege. But thebombing has been concentrated in areas populated by Lebanese Shi'a -- thesouthern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and, most of all, the south.This pattern shows that Israel aims to play on Lebanon's sectarian tensionsto impel Hizballah's disarmament, with potentially very dangerousconsequences for Lebanon.
Jim Quilty reports from Beirut on "Israel's War Against Lebanon's Shi'a" in
Middle East Report Online:
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero072506.html
Tom Hayden: Things Come ’Round in Mideast
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060718_tom_hayden_things_come_round/
Posted on Jul 18, 2006
By Tom Hayden
Editor’s note: In this essay, veteran social activist Tom Hayden, drawing upon his own rude political awakening to the realities of Israeli and Middle East politics during the 1980s, warns that the Israel lobby in the U.S. aims to “roll back the clock” and “change the map” of the region and that its neoconservative supporters will probably try to use the current Middle East crisis to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.
It is still painful and embarrassing to describe these events of nearly 25 years ago, but with Israel today again bombing Lebanon and Israeli officials bragging about “rolling back the clock by twenty years” and reconfiguring the Middle East, I feel obliged to speak out against history repeating.
How do I read today’s news through the lens of the past?
What I fear is the rehabilitation of the discredited U.S. neoconservative agenda to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. The neoconservatives’ 1996 “Clean Break” memo advocated that Israel “roll back” Lebanon and destabilize Syria in addition to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. An intellectual dean of the neoconservatives, Bernard Lewis, has long advocated the “Lebanonization” of the Middle East, meaning the disintegration of nation states into “a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties.”
The Hindu: Imperial apologists peddle poisonous fairytale
-NiK
Date:29/06/2006
URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/06/29/stories/2006062903831100.htm
Opinion - News Analysis Imperial apologists peddle poisonous fairytale
Priyamvada Gopal
Neocon ideologues are being given free rein by the media to rewrite the history of Britain's empire and whitewash its crimes.
Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that was empire can explain the elevation of the neoconservative ideologue Niall Ferguson to chief imperial historian on the BBC and now the U.K.'s Channel 4 TV station too. His aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the American Right, is being presented as a new revelation. In fact, Mr. Ferguson's "history" is a fairytale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism — a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide, and forced resettlement — is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.
The Hindu: The perils of dissent in U.S. universities
The perils of dissent in U.S. universities
Hamid Ansari
The quest for sanity should begin by undoing thought-control devices such as the Campus Watch in American universities.
According to the Jewish Week report, the move was prompted by Professor Cole's views on U.S. policy in Iraq and on the Israeli policy in the West Bank: "When Cole's potential hiring became publicly known, several of his detractors including the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin and Washington Times columnist Joel Mowbray, took various steps to protest the decision. They wrote op-ed pieces in various publications and Mowbray went as far as to send a letter to a dozen of Yale's major donors, many of whom are Jewish, urging them to call the university and protest Cole's hiring."
Palast: The Zarqawi Invitation
-NiK
Unreported: The Zarqawi Invitation
By Greg Palast
t r u t h o u t | Report
Aljibury's main concern was that busting Iraqi collaborators and Ba'athist big shots was a gift "to the Wahabis," by which he meant the foreign insurgents, who now gained experienced military commanders, Sunnis, who now had no choice but to fight the US-installed regime or face arrest, ruin or death. They would soon link up with the Sunni-defending Wahabi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was committed to destroying "Shia snakes."
Kiersey: The Diplomats & Diplomacy of the American Civil War
Please be careful if you need to cite it. It is by no means the work of a qualified historian.
Nicholas
you can download it here: kiersey 1997 diplomacy US civil war
Hersh: LISTENING IN
by Seymour M. Hersh
Issue of 2006-05-29
Posted 2006-05-22
A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public’s right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. “When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that ‘we’ll never be able to collect intelligence again,’” the former official said. “They’d whine, ‘Why do we have to report to oversight committees?’ ” But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. “We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal.”
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.’s carefully constructed rules were set aside.
Boycott Cibo Bistro and Wine Bar
Sadly, when I confronted the bar tender serving my food about this, she had nothing to say. She didn't care. As she shrugged and walked away from me, I couldn't help but think that what she was really trying to say was: 'Don't get political on me, I just work here'.
As long as their menu continues to refer to 'freedom' anything in this stupid and ridiculous manner, I will not eat there again and I encourage you not to either.
NiK
My letter to the Open Policy Insitute, Ireland
http://www.openrepublic.org/index.html
------------------------------
Dear Messrs. Gurdgiev and MacDonnell:
I was prompted to write to you after my father, Jerry, emailed me a link to your organizations Policy Watch circular. After some examination of your website I have two points I would like to offer you (in the spirit of healthy debate):
1. Frankly, I have to say I am very disturbed by the following claim in the article 'Capitalism works. Look at Enron':
"Enron, in the end, becomes an example of what's good about the American system of capitalism. The truth came out, the guilty people paid the price and those contemplating stealing money from shareholders must now walk in fear of the courts. Transparency won the day"
Would that it were so! While I have no wish to get into an argument with you about the flaws or merits of capitalism, I think there is very little about the Enron scandal that the American judicial system can be proud about. One need only reflect on the fact that the recent incarceration of Lay and Skilling does NOTHING to compensate those who were screwed by them or their company. Moreover, the particular crimes for which they were punished were not their most egregious but, rather, the crimes for which they could be most easily prosecuted. Might I refer you to the transcript of today's edition of Democracy Now!, a radio show which broadcasts in the US, to get some nuance on the more sinister aspects of this whole affair:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/26/1410242
If you don't want to read the whole thing, here is the most relevant excerpt - From BBC journalist Greg Palast:
"Now, you have to understand what's happening here. That means, despite the fact that this one guy is getting nailed and stands -- two guys could go up the river, for up to a century in the case of Skilling, in fact, they're not charged with their big crimes. The Bush Justice Department went way out of its way to make sure that the big crimes were not busted. After all, these guys played games with not only the books of their company, but they took down the California power market, ripped off consumers with other power companies as co-conspirators, with investment banks as co-conspirators, $9 billion. $9 billion from the consumers of California ... what they did was is they hung out Ken Lay and Skilling to dry, but the mob stays there; just like when Capone went up the river, we saw the legacy of the mob. In this case, Skilling and Lay go up the river for these technical infractions, but the power mob still stays there.
It was, you know, the Justice Department -- in fact, justice wasn't done. It wasn't even begun, because you have the situation in which, for example, the investment banks, which had to pay almost $7 billion in civil settlements, they should now be indicted. They're co-conspirators with Lay. But in fact they were let off the hook, and the law firm which brought these investment bankers to heel, the co-conspirators, made them pay the $7 billion, that law firm has now been indicted: Milberg Weiss. In other words, the Bush administration is sending out a very clear signal to big business: okay, we had to hang out -- we had to sacrifice some guy; we needed a sacrificial lamb; we gave the crowd Lay and Skilling. But big business, it's business as usual. We have nailed the law firm that went after Enron. No new indictments. The power markets remain controlled by basically a mob of power pirates, the co-conspirators to Enron. They could not have done this alone."
You don't have to be a rabid capitalism-bashing liberal to get Palast's point: Justice in this case will require far more than the throwing of Lay and Skelling in the clink. In fact, it will require nothing less than a massive and courageous investigation into widespread abuses by an array of corporations and government actors. The following article is revealing in this sense:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=284&row=1
2. The claim on the actual homepage for your organization about Chomsky and Herman's views on the genocide in Cambodia is in my mind very problematic. Quite aside from being utterly confused as to why you decide to put this quote as the very top item on your homepage at all (I must assume you feel that by giving such a lofty priority to this quote you are somehow making yourself attractive to a certain category of reader), I must object that I have read a lot of Chomsky and I think if whoever wrote that particular point did too then they would certainly wish to revise their view.
Chomsky is in fact very well-known for his argument that the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam should be praised to the extent that it put the 'killing fields' there to an end (see his book, World Orders Old and New). Chomsky can be criticized for a great many things but playing down the genocide in Cambodia is not one of them. If you are looking for a source on this, you can read his own words on this controversy here:
http://www.zmag.org/forums/chomcambodforum.htm
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Kiersey
HERSH: THE COMING WARS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
What the Pentagon can now do in secret
Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31
Posted 2005-01-17
George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way
Ivins: The Best Little Whorehouse in Washington
By Molly Ivins
Truthdig
Monday 08 May 2006
On other hand, if you expect me to pass up a scandal involving poker, hookers and the Watergate building with crooked defense contractors and the No. 3 guy at the CIA, named Dusty Foggo (Dusty Foggo?! Be still my heart), you expect too much. Any journalist who claims Hookergate is not a legitimate scandal is dead-has been for some time and needs to be unplugged. In addition to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, Hookergate is rife with public-interest questions, misfeasance, malfeasance and non-feasance, and many splendid moral points for the children. Recommended for Sunday school use, grades seven and above.
Politics
Observer: The new kid in the barrio
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329473656-102280,00.html
Sunday May 7, 2006
Observer
What does Chávez's revolution stand for? Is it Marxist or religious in its inspiration? Does it represent a new economics, as he insists, or is it dependent on the old capitalism he claims to despise? Then there is Chávez himself. Is he democratic or authoritarian? Above all, where does the rhetoric of his struggle with the US, with its threats, its risky alliances and ominous warnings of invasions and 1,000-year resistance wars, begin and end? Above all, what is real, and what theatrical performance? Certainly his left-wing credentials are not in doubt. Born in 1953 of mixed Amerindian, African and Spanish descent (his parents were schoolteachers in Sabineta), Chávez came from the group to whom he now appeals: the poor. As a boy he was sent to live with his grandmother, but it was the army - which he joined at 17 - that moulded him, giving him the education that would otherwise have been unavailable. And it was as a young officer that Chávez first developed his ideas about 'Bolívarianism' that later were forged into his Revolutionary Bolívarian Movement-200.
Morales: South America's New Hero
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,414036,00.html
South America's New Hero Indian, Coca Farmer, Bolivian President By Jochen-Martin Gutsch
Is he a socialist? A revolutionary? Or at least a bit of each? Morales leaves the small makeshift stage. He has talked about the country's natural gas industry, which he wants to nationalize. It's his big plan in a country with South America's second-largest reserves. An extremely valuable natural resource lies beneath Bolivian soil, and Morales has just told his audience, as he told other audiences before, that it's a resource that has always benefited others, foreign corporations, for example, and that it must be returned to the Bolivian people.
Happy May Day!
1. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7830
What you need to know about May Day
by Leo Panitch; May 11, 2005
2. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/01/1337209Ever since, May Day and Labour Day have represented in North America the two faces of working-class political tradition, one symbolizing its revolutionary potential, the other its long search for reform and respectability. With the support of the state and business, the latter has predominated but the more radical tradition has never been entirely suppressed.
The Origins of May Day: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America
Democracy Now; May 1st, 2006
It was also the period when American industrial capitalism was booming. The largest corporations in America were being created then, and yet people in the United States were thinking these were bad organizations, that they could be stopped, that somehow they could create an economy that was run by local people, run by workers themselves. The things that we think were inevitable in the 20th century didn't seem so in 1886.
NEWSWEEK: Fired CIA Officer Denies Leak
By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Monday 24 April 2006
A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK.The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, "categorically denies being the source of the leak," one of McCarthy's friends and former colleagues, Rand Beers, said Monday after speaking to McCarthy. Beers said he could not elaborate on this denial and McCarthy herself did not respond to a request for comment left by NEWSWEEK on her home answering machine. A national security advisor to Democratic Party candidate John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Beers worked as the head of intelligence programs on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff and later served as a top deputy on counter-terrorism for President Bush in 2002 and 2003. McCarthy, a career CIA analyst, initially worked as a deputy to Beers on the NSC and later took over Beer's role as the Clinton NSC's top intelligence expert.
The Strange Alliance between Ukrainian “Progressive Socialism” and Russian “Neo-Eurasianism”
http://hnn.us/articles/23821.html#
One of the worrying results of the March 2006 elections to the Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, was that the so-called “Popular Opposition” bloc led by the head of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Natal’ya Mikhailovna Vitrenko (b. 1951), managed to come close to passing the 3% barrier (with 2.93% of the official turnout) and thus almost entered the Rada. Vitrenko is the premier representative of radical anti-Westernism in Ukraine; she has also made herself known with her frequent invectives against Ukrainian politicians whom she does not hesitate to call “natsisty” (Nazis). Both of these circumstances are ironic in as far as Vitrenko has been for some time officially allied to a well-known Russian propagator of the West’s worst invention: fascism.