“ This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can’t perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews — all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.
Autonomous Oblast
"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."
-- Aldous Huxley
-- Aldous Huxley
Apr 03
Retro❉Politics
Mar 30
Link → Resilience Economics by JAMAIS CASCIO
From the mind of Jamais Cascio
Excerpt:
ONE MODEL FOR A NEW WORLD ECONOMY
If the Industrial-Era economic system is, in fact, on its last legs, it would be useful to think through some of the possible post-capitalism models that might emerge.
I don’t think we have enough early indicators to create a solid vision, so anything we talk about will have to be something of a thought experiment. What kinds of constraints would we face? What kinds of demands? Consider the following, then, at best a scenario sketch.
Mar 29
Link → Obama as Gorbachev: a Regime in Crisis
Audio Podcast - 37 minutes:
Six people the from the US, Europe and Asia discus the scope of the International Economic Crisis, Obama’s potential choices and what outcomes we can expect, both positive and negative.
The consensus seemed to be this is a game changing crisis and the economic systems will be very different once the changes finish. Things can get dire or a new order could emerge that is more sustainable and just for every one.
They have a fascinating discussion.
- Ugo Mattei - Italy
- Christopher Lydon- US
- Alfred Gusenbauer - Austria
- Ho-fung Hung - China / US
- Nandan Unnikrishnan - India
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Samir Saran
Link → Spanish Court Weighs Inquiry on Torture for 6 Bush-Era Officials
vruz: (via The New York Times)
A Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said. The case, against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others, was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzón, the crusading investigative judge who ordered the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was “highly probable” that the case would go forward and that it could lead to arrest warrants.
united colours of vruz
Unburying The Lead
Mar 26
Link → "To be reminded that five groups of "Americans" were not represented at the Constitutional Convention--Indians, slaves, indentured servants, women, and men without property--is not simply a matter of retrospective political correctness masked as historical critique."
” Over the last few weeks, our nation has been rocked by reports of corporate misconduct and fraud, stock market decline, employee pension fund mismanagement and the specter of executives being led away in handcuffs. Even that paragon of purity, Martha Stewart, has been accused of being a liar and a cheat. Political leaders and Wall Street bureaucrats have rushed to implement reforms and institute harsher penalites. It has been intimated that the problem is isolated and aberrational rather than endemic and systemic. Such reforms are driven by a fear that unless this problem is quickly “resolved,” uncertainty and anxiety may spread from the investment to the consumer side of the economy and then we’re in real trouble. But the issue is deeper than a matter of “confidence.”
The problem with the analysis so far is that, for the most part, it fails to ask the deeper questions. How we got in this mess may well inform how we get out.
An Historical Reflection
The American Experience, since its inception, has been shaped by an essential contradiction: the need to protect the privileges of the elite coupled with a fear of the masses in tension with the professed ideals of democracy and the proclamation of the ideology of equality. The men of means who crafted our foundational documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights) and thus who shaped our National Identity were men who were themselves formed by an 18th century English culture of hierarchal and hereditary aristocracy dependent on a “neo-feudal” exploitation of the lower classes.
Edmund Morgan writes in Essays on the American Revolution: “The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class; the new against the established.”“
Rev. Hartshorn Murphy, Sept. 2002 -The Rector’s Rant: A Historical and Theological Reflection on These Economic Times
I found this really really interesting. Especially given that it was written 6 1/2 years ago by an Episcopalian priest.
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heaven spent
Caterpillar Cowboy
Mar 24
Link → Business as Usury
THOMAS GEOGHEGAN | May 6, 2008
The American Prospect
Excerpt:
Business as Usury
Before Congress goes after bank misdeeds on Wall Street, let’s stop the petty theft on Main Street — predatory mortgages and usurious loans. Had we protected the poor and the weak, the problems of our mighty banks might not be so great.
We may be the first society since the Code of Hammurabi to be operating with no law against usury at all.
I’d at least like to hear a Democrat, any Democrat, call for a cap on interest rates. For Visa and MasterCard, I’d go for 12 percent. (Does anyone bid 11?)
As to payday loans, let Congress end them. But how will people get money? If people can’t get credit from Visa and MasterCard, let’s set up little state-run banks to offer little payday loans, or encourage NGOs to do so. New Dealers used to think in those terms. But they used to go to movies like It’s A Wonderful Life.
Jan 23
Fox News Fear Imbalance
I heart you, Daily Show.
(off topic)
Mashable on Tumblr
Jan 13
Jan 09
“ Obama should be more innovative in his policy approach to Cuba. He should propose ending the travel ban to Cuba altogether, and lifting the trade embargo. This would do more for accelerating meaningful reforms in the island than continuing with a policy that has failed to deliver results for almost 50 years.
