Stephen Walt on Netanyahu and the U.S. Congress

'The smallest minds and cowardliest hearts': Is Congress clapping for apartheid?

Posted By Stephen M. Walt

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/25/the_smallest_minds_and_cowardliest_hearts_is_congress_clapping_for_apartheid

Alperovitz on the "New-Economy Movement"

Published on Friday, May 27, 2011 by The Nation

The New-Economy Movement

by Gar Alperovitz

 

The idea that we need a “new economy”—that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if critical social and environmental goals are to be met—runs directly counter to the American creed that capitalism as we know it is the best, and only possible, option. Over the past few decades, however, a deepening sense of the profound ecological challenges facing the planet and growing despair at the inability of traditional politics to address economic failings have fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders.

Why the Rich Love High Unemployment

Why the Rich Love High Unemployment
Tuesday 24 May 2011
by: Mark Provost, Truthout

"The administration's problem is not a question of economics, but a matter of values and priorities. In the first Great Depression, President Roosevelt created an alphabet soup of institutions - the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) - to directly relieve the unemployment problem, a crisis the private sector was unable and unwilling to solve. In the current crisis, banks were handed bottomless bowls of alphabet soup - the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) - while politicians dithered over extending inadequate unemployment benefits."

Former economic adviser to Obama, Steven Rattner:

"Perversely, the nagging high jobless rate reflects two of the most promising attributes of the American economy: its flexibility and its productivity. Eliminating jobs - with all the wrenching human costs - raises productivity and, thereby, competitiveness."

Hedges on "the liberal class"

Why Liberal Sellouts Attack Prophets Like Cornel West
by Chris Hedges

"The destruction of the old radical and militant movements—the communists, socialists and anarchists—has left liberals without a source of new ideas. The link between an effective liberal class and a more radical left was always essential to the health of the former. The liberal class, by allowing radical movements to be dismembered through Red baiting and by banishing those within its ranks who had moral autonomy, gradually deformed basic liberal tenets to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization and permanent war. Liberalism, cut off from the radical roots of creative and bold thought, merged completely with the corporate power elite. The liberal class at once was betrayed and betrayed itself. And it now functions like a commercial brand, giving a different flavor, face or spin to the ruthless mechanisms of corporate power. This, indeed, is the primary function of Barack Obama."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/23-4

Of course, for a prophet, West was caught rather flat-footed by Obama's "betrayals"...

Vijay Prashad: The World We Want is the World We Need

Vijay Prashad: The World We Want is the World We Need
"I too believe in the End Times. In the End Time for Capitalism, a system rooted in the destruction of the human spirit. Democracy is our prejudice, but it does not fully exist yet. It is an idea, it provides space for action, but it has not yet been incarnated fully: the secular Rapture will be the day when Democracy will come into its own."

John Mearsheimer: Obama and the Iron Cage

John Mearsheimer: Obama and the Iron Cage
Many Palestinians, on the other hand, did not like Obama's assertion that it made little sense for them to go to the UN General Assembly this September and win recognition for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. Surely they also noticed that shortly after saying that "every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself," the president said that the Palestinians would have to be content with "a sovereign non-militarized state," which means that they will not be able to defend themselves against Israel or any other state for that matter. Hypocrisy appears to be wired into the DNA of American foreign-policy makers.

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

Too many journalists report official narratives of the powerful, missing the stories of working class people.

by Nir Rosen

"The American media always want to fit events in the region into an American narrative. The recent assassination of Osama bin Laden was greeted with a collective shrug of the shoulder in the Middle East, where he had always been irrelevant, but for Americans and hence for the American media it was a historic and defining moment which changed everything."

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201151882929682601.html

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Obama and the Mideast Arms Trade | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Obama and the Mideast Arms Trade | TomDispatch

"Along with Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, and Brett Lambert, the deputy assistant secretary for industrial policy, Lynn is creating a comprehensive plan to sustain and enrich weapons makers and other military contractors in the coming years. “We’re going sector by sector, tier by tier, and our goal is to develop a long-term policy to protect that base as we slow defense spending,” Lynn said. America’s Middle Eastern allies are seen as a significant partner in this effort."

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do
by: Dave Johnson

Lots of regular people having money to spend is what creates jobs and businesses. That is the basic idea of demand-side economics and it works. In a consumer-driven economy designed to serve people, regular people with money in their pockets is what keeps everything going. And the equal opportunity of democracy with its reinvestment in infrastructure and education and the other fruits of democracy is fundamental to keeping a demand-side economy functioning.

http://www.truthout.org/actually-rich-dont-create-jobs-we-do/130538074

Israeli Myths & Propaganda. Ilan Pappe

Oil Wealth, U.S. Backing Enables Saudi Arabia to Crush Dissent in Bahrain and at Home

Toby Craig Jones on Democracy Now!
Oil Wealth, U.S. Backing Enables Saudi Arabia to Crush Dissent in Bahrain and at Home

The Internet as Playground and Factory: Jonathan Beller

http://vimeo.com/7449081

See also:

Jonathan Beller, Digital Ideology Presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/JonathanBeller/jonathan-beller-digital-ideology-presentation

Marjorie Cohn: Assassinating Bin Laden‏

Osama bin Laden and the "suspected militants" targeted in drone attacks should have been arrested and tried in U.S. courts or an international tribunal. Obama cannot serve as judge, jury and executioner. These assassinations are not only illegal; they create a dangerous precedent, which could be used to justify the targeted killings of U.S. leaders.Osama bin Laden and the "suspected militants" targeted in drone attacks should have been arrested and tried in U.S. courts or an international tribunal. Obama cannot serve as judge, jury and executioner. These assassinations are not only illegal; they create a dangerous precedent, which could be used to justify the targeted killings of U.S. leaders.

http://www.counterpunch.com/cohn05102011.html

William J. Astore: The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes‏

"In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the whim of what we might now call a unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite."

http://www.counterpunch.com/astore05122011.html

Walden Bello: Bin Laden's Game‏

"But one cannot escape the fact that he succeeded in unleashing a chain of events that led to his nemesis, the United States, becoming a diminished power compared to what it was in the halcyon days of unilateralism at the end of the last century. In the duel between Washington and Osama, the latter was, at the time of his death, far ahead on points."

http://www.counterpunch.com/bello05122011.html

Mike Whitney: A Short History of Bubblenomics‏

"It might surprise you to know that the Fed has become so skilled at bubble-making, that the condition of the underlying economy doesn't really matter any more. By fixing interest rates below the rate of inflation and attaching a liquidity-tailpipe to the stock market (QE2), the Fed has been able engineer a boom in equities, while the so-called "real" economy languishes in a near-Depression. In fact, consumer credit is actually shrinking (excluding student loans) while margin debt (the amount that speculators borrow to buy stocks) continues to soar. This is an astonishing development. The Fed has created a bifurcated market where bankers and hedge fund managers are able to rake in billions off their gaming operations while 300 million working Americans remain mired in debt."

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05062011.html

Patrick Cockburn: Portrait of the US Press in the Hour of Its Fall‏

"The media is often credited or blamed for an independent sceptical spirit which it seldom shows in reality. In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion. Even then it usually needs important politicians to be standing on the same side of the fence. The Afghan war is unpopular in the US, but there is no effective anti-war movement because the Democrats, once so critical of the Iraq war, are now in the White House and, if Obama goes on being presented with targets as vulnerable as Trump, are likely to stay there."

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick05092011.html

Andy Kroll: The McJobs Economy‏

"Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald's was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices."

http://www.counterpunch.org/kroll05092011.html

Robert Lipsyte: Why the NFL Would Do Us a Favor by Canceling the Upcoming Season‏

"It's not exactly a fair fight, which of course is why unions were invented. It's estimated that half of the NFL owners are worth at least a billion dollars each, while slightly less than half of NFL players make more than a million dollars annually. The average player's career lasts fewer than four years."

http://www.counterpunch.com/lipsyte05102011.html

Pierre Rimbert: Can France's Left Thinkers Escape the Ivory Tower?‏

"Back in the 1930s, Paul Nizan depicted academia as conservative and filled with “watchdogs”. Then in the radical 1960s and 1970s, human sciences, social critiques and revolution seemed to go together. Their connection has enlivened an institution riven with tensions, designed to back the bourgeois regime but also capable of nurturing revolutionaries. This contradiction may explain why critical publishing is both fascinated and repulsed by academia and lecturers or researchers. The stereotype of the independent publisher suggests a 30-40 year-old who has begun, or even finished, a doctorate in human sciences but hasn’t found a research or higher education post that allows him or her to combine academic work with anti-Establishment action. Though this picture fails to take account of the diversity of the new “militant” publishers, it captures their conflicted environment, falling somewhere between the scholarly and the political."

http://www.counterpunch.com/rimbert05112011.html

Are We Still on an Imperial Planet?

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Are We Still on an Imperial Planet?

TomDispatch‏

"What if this isn’t an imperial planet any more? What if, from resource scarcity to global warming, humanity is nudging up against previously unimagined limits on unbridled growth? From at least the seventeenth century on, successive great powers have struggled over the control of vast realms of a globe in which expansion seemed eternally the name of the game. For centuries, one or more great powers were always on hand when the previous great imperial power or set of powers faltered.

In the wake of World War II, with the collapse of the Japanese and German empires, only two powers worthy of the name were left, each so mighty that together they would be called “superpowers.” After 1991, only one remained, so seemingly powerful that it was sometimes termed a “hyperpower” and many believed it had inherited the Earth.

What if, in fact, the U.S. was indeed the last empire? What if a world of rivalries, on a planet heading into resource scarcity, turned out to be less than imperial in nature? Or what if -- and think of me as a devil’s advocate here -- this turned out not to be an imperial world of bitter rivalries at all, but in the face of unexpectedly tough times, a partnership planet?"

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175386/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_are_we_still_on_an_imperial_planet/#more

Exploring Capitalism Through the Lens of the Big Lebowski: Part I, Man

"Their are two key moments to understanding Mr. Lebowski. The first is his first meeting with Dude in which he says, “Every bum’s lot in life is how own responsibility, regardless of who he chooses to blame.” To which Dude puts on his bullshit-resistant shade and does not respond. Mr. Lebowski continues as Dude exits, “Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost! The bums will always lose!” Brandt approaches from the opposite end of the hall, asks how the meeting went, and Dude replies, “The old man told me to take any rug in the house.” Here Dude reveals himself to be an Illegalist of sorts."

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/79176/exploring-capitalism-through-the-lens-of-the-big-lebowski-part-i-man/