The Myth of Land Ownership

Housing Crisis, System Failure

Saturday 21 August 2010

by: Rick Wolff | MRzine | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/housing-crisis-a-symptom-capitalisms-failure62507

"The US housing industry's basic problem is the system in which it is embedded. The larger capitalist economy shapes the gap between the costs of privately produced homes and American workers' earnings. Over the last 75 years, US capitalism has bridged that gap by means of private credit guaranteed and/or subsidized by the government. This system provides incentives as well as opportunities for excessive home prices, diminished wages and salaries, and excessive quantities, risks, and costs of housing credit. The last 30 years have seen all three phenomena converge into a systemic crisis."

Death by Globalism

Economists Haven't Got a Clue

Death By Globalism

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09012010.html

"The Krugman Keynesian school is just as deluded. Neither side in “The Great Stimulus Debate” has a clue that the problem for the U.S. is that a large chunk of U.S. GDP and the jobs, incomes, and careers associated with it, have been moved offshore and given to Chinese, Indians, and others with low wage rates. Profits have soared on Wall Street, while job prospects for the middle class have been eliminated."

A Glorious Non-bullshit Time

Waking Up in the 1930s

by Howie Stier

http://www.truthdig.com

Sept. 3, 2010

"The ’30s was a time when people had very little and there was nothing to hide behind … it was a glorious non-bullshit time,” wroteCharles Bukowski, the poet and author who grew up in Los Angeles during the Depression, and who was moved by the image of the unemployed men, the fathers of classmates, killing the day sitting on the porches of east Hollywood.

Today, in his old neighborhood, he’d find the unemployed, mostly young creative types who came to L.A. to work in TV and film, filling the cafes, the ubiquitous shops emblematic of L.A. culture. Noon and you can’t find an open table in any of them. But the coffee shop-goers don’t come here to socialize, to discuss politics or movies, or even to have coffee. These are offices for those without a reason to be in an office, where they sit silently, staring at laptop screens, poring over Craigslist job offerings, firing off résumés into cyberspace, pecking away at pipe-dream projects. And they are filled with hope and unable to share the poet’s sensibility and embrace of a non-bullshit time."

They Make Solitude and Call it Peace

"To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name empire; they make solitude and call it peace.”
- Tacitus

"What US Left Behind in Iraq is Even Uglier Than You Think"

by Nir Rosen

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/08-9

"Seven years after the disastrous American invasion, the cruelest irony in Iraq is that, in a perverse way, the neoconservative dream of creating a moderate, democratic U.S. ally in the region to counterbalance Iran and Saudi Arabia has come to fruition. But even if violence in Iraq continues to decline and the government becomes a model of democracy, no one will look to Iraq as a leader. People in the region remember -- even if the West has forgotten -- the seven years of chaos, violence, and terror. To them, this is what Iraq symbolizes. Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other failed U.S. policies in the broader Middle East, the United States has lost most of its influence on Arab people, even if it can still exert pressure on some Arab regimes."

The New Diplo History: Treading Lightly with Concern to the MIC

"Politics and Foreign Relations"

Fredrik Logevall

Journal of American History, 95 no. 4

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.4/logevall.html

Professor Logevall assays the health of Diplomatic History as a craft, and makes the case for the role of domestic politics in the foreign policy making. This seems fair enough, but my question is what kind of domestic politics? In Logevall's recently co-authored America's Cold War, there is a bit of ambiguity on this point. Throughout, the authors argue that "domestic variables predominate over foreign ones" (6), and in general they argue that party or electoral politics were behind the systematic hyping of the Soviet threat. But they also argue that the military-industrial complex “became a power within itself, a vested interest largely outside the perimeter of democratic control, and arguably the single greatest factor in post-1941 economic life in the United States” (8). But they do not offer any explanation for of the relationship between party or electoral politics and the MIC. Presumably, or implicitly, they are arguing that domestic political concerns are paramount, and that the MIC has its thumb on the domestic political scale (thereby precluding the emergence of a truly Realist, George Kennan style foriegn policy - but that's a different argument, see Stephanson's critique). But this is never made explict. As a consequence there is a critical ambiguity concerning the democratic basis of American foreign policy. Is US fp shaped by electoral politics (which are presumably democratic, at least until that myth is dismantled), or the MIC - which they explicitly state is not subject to democratic controls.

As a consequence Stephans critqued the book for holding to anti-democratic assumptions - that a Realist fp is corrupted by domestic (presumably democratic) influences. The authors respond that they never said that the domestic influences corrupting US policymaking were democratic - they are rather highly undemocratic (see the exchange here). However, this was never made exlpicit in their book, which is unfortunate.

The "vision thing" again

The Democratic Party could learn a lot from the Right:

Can You Say, Fascism? The Political Consequences of Stagnation

by Walden Bello

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/02-6

"The blunder was Obama's taking responsibility for the crisis in a gesture of bipartisanship, in contrast to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who "refused to take any blame for the economic hardships." Reagan and Thatcher devoted "the early years of their government to convincing voters that economic disaster was entirely the responsibility of previous left-wing governments, militant unions, and liberal progressive elites." "

The "vision thing" again. It must really sting Democrats to realize that all the "Hope and Change" rhetoric was just so much vacuous sloganeering. A rather cynical exercise in exploiting the anxiety of the electorate for short-term political gain:

"But progressives should not take comfort from the dead end offered by tea party economics. They should try to understand what has led to the failure of Obama's pallid Keynesianism. Beyond the tactical mistake of taking responsibility for the crisis and the failure to advance an aggressive anti-neoliberal narrative to explain it, the central problem that has plagued Obama and his team is their failure to offer an inspiring alternative to neoliberalism. ... For progressives, the lesson to be derived from the stalling of Obamanomics is that technocratic management is not enough. Keynesian moves must be part of a broader vision and program. ... such a program cannot simply be dished out from above by a technocratic elite, as has been the fashion in this administration, one of whose greatest mistakes was to allow the mass movement that brought it to power to wither away. The people must be enlisted in the construction of the new economy, and here progressives have a lot to learn from the Tea Party movement that they must inevitably compete against in a life-and-death struggle for grassroots America."

The Democratic Party is an Abomination

I, for one, hope the Democrats are absolutely trounced in the November elections. Democratic politicians are enablers for a craven system.

Harry Reid's Anti-Islamic Agenda

Wednesday 01 September 2010

by: Stephen Zunes, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/harry-reids-anti-islamic-agenda62863

"When Sen. Joseph Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, tried to alter the wording of the war resolution so as not to give President Bush the blank check he was seeking and to put some limitations on his war-making authority, Reid, as assistant majority leader of the Senate, helped circumvent Biden's efforts by signing on to the White House's version. As the Democratic whip, Reid then persuaded a majority of Democratic senators to vote down a resolution offered by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin that would authorize force only if the UN Security Council voted to give the US that authority and to instead support the White House resolution giving Bush the right to invade even without such legal authorization. (By contrast, a sizable majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives - under the leadership of then-whip Nancy Pelosi - voted against the Republican resolution.)

...

Iraq is not the only area where Reid is willing to support mass violence against Muslim peoples. Reid co-sponsored a Senate resolution defending Israel's massive onslaught on the predominantly Muslim Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 and of an earlier resolution defending the 2006 Israeli attack against predominantly Muslim southern Lebanon, wars which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 Muslim civilians. Reid directly contradicted findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and various UN agencies in insisting that Israel's attacks against civilian population centers was legal. But when it comes to killing Muslim civilians, the facts don't matter to Reid. Just as the facts about the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center don't matter to Reid. Just as having a bigot as their leader doesn't seem to matter to Senate Democrats."