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