The Luckiest Day

Friday the 13th is actually a luckier day than most contrary to the numeroligist mystic types. A Dutch study has looked at the numbers and has determined that traffic accidents, fires and theft are actually down on the infamous day.

Eco-Tourism

A Slate journalist goes eco-touristing in Honduras. Who wins? How is it eco?

Machu Picchu

It looks like a German looted the Incan city earlier than thought.

Indigenous People

Was very captivated by the pictures of the indigenous people in Brazil that were photographed from the airplane that were making the rounds lately. Did a little Googleing and came up with this site on indigenous languages in the US.

Where's the Outrage?

The US government has now documented its own widespread torture both in Iraq and in sordid dungeons around the world in the name of the WAR ON TERROR. Where's the outrage?

Assasinated in Zimbabwe

The body of Tonderai Ndira was found this week, the 43rd Zimbabwean opposition activist to die in violence since elections in March. Journalist Farai Sevenzo looks back at his life and the circumstances leading up to his murder.

The death of an activist.

David, After a Short Stay in the US

Iron Man as Anti-Imperialism

Favre does anti-imperialism.

Edward S Curtis

Doing some research on Native Americans for a class and I stumbled on THIS! Amazing.

Israel at 60

A discussion On Point.

Cosmopolitan dynamism yet brutal occupier.

How We Discipline the Poor

The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars — an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

An editorial from the NY Times.

May 8

A salute to Mordecai Anielewicz on the anniversary of his death.

France 68

Philosophy in the streets. A BBC Radio documentary on the intellectuals of 68 in France.

Shut Down the Userers!

Why shutting down Payday and the like is a good idea.

Ennglish Only!!

Moyers on Wright

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court Justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Bill Moyers take.

On the 40th Anniversary of My Lai

The logical outcome of a racist empire.

The BBC explores the destruction of villages and free fire zones in Southeast Asia in the context of the Vietnam War.

Bitter?

ABC's debate, bittergate and the Jeremiah Wright treatment have shown us how pathetic our political culture has sunk. And now the Democrats have internalized the narrative! Thanks Hilbillary and the DNC.

Three articles have caught my eye throughout this phase of the agitprop:

Bill Kristol's ominous "The Mask Slips" which exposes the centrist millionaire Obama as the closet Marxist that we know all silver tounged Ivy Leaguers are,


Paul Krugman's opportunistic "Clinging to a Stereotype" which "debunks" for the liberal set the tenuous link between the poor and backward ideas,

and

Mark Schmitt's "What's the Matter With Bitterness?"


All three articles take on the issue of economic stress and reactionary politics. One, Schmitt's take, embraces the link while the others shamelessly exploit the link for partisan political purposes. Schmitt's take goes to the essential politics of the time; if the Democratic Party is to even be a liberal party of the New Deal type they must look at the last 30 years as a time of speculation and supply side redistribution in the upward direction, including the Clinton years. Schmitt correctly realizes that if the US wants to maintain the standards of living and mobility for the working class that existed from 1945 to 1970 a new deal has to be dealt. He gives up on the answer but the below post on Germany is at least a swat in the right direction.

From Schmitt's article:


"While Tom Frank's claim was that Republicans had, in effect, tricked voters, Obama was suggesting something different -- that the Democratic Party had tricked them as well. "They fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not," he said, in the context of explaining (to a supporter who was planning to go to Pennsylvania on his behalf) why people might be cynical about another 10-point plan or promise from a politician.

That's an indictment of the Clinton years as sharp as Clinton's indictment of Gore and Kerry. Obama is basically arguing that the 1992 campaign that promised "Putting People First," with a sharp, substantive agenda of public investment and health care -- the basic Truman/New Deal package -- instead put the bond market first, delivering balanced-budgets, NAFTA, welfare reform, and symbolic appeals to the suburban middle-class swing vote. The near-full employment economy of the Clinton years was a boon for many poorer areas and families -- many cities recovered from the crisis of the late 1980s, African Americans did well, and much of the Rust Belt economy improved. But it did very little for the coal, steel, and textile towns in the region that Gore lost, areas dependent on transferable industries disproportionately affected by globalization.

Why not bring that critique?"

Social Democracy

The Euro has skyrocketed, regulations keep small and medium size businesses afloat through government regulation, taxes are high, unions are as powerful as ever and the public sector is thriving. A recipe for disaster? If you were to read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the New York Times or any other liberal western media outlet you would think that this a description of a country in the depths of crisis but alas I describe Germany and Northern Europe where the economies, although beginning to slow at the moment, maintain growing wages, trade surpluses and continuing growth BECAUSE of the above recipe of government planning and state intervention, not in spite of it.


German exports boom.

The US on the other hand has thrown over the helm to the speculator class. One does not have to read Monthly Review to get an understanding of the power of finance capital of late. The fight between finance and manufacturing capital was at least a fair battle from the 30's to the 60's but since then the movement of money and capital has become the national religion and we have all, but particularly the working classes in the cities, have paid the price.

Here's how we got here.

The 2008 election will not solve the serious issues that have been in the making for 40 or so years. One of the primary reasons is the bait and switch of racism that much of the white working class has bought into, why exactly are my wages on the decline? It must be those immigrants and welfare! The other reason is that much of the suburban types that hold sway in the Democratic party like Wall Street, they have bet the farm on it and Hillbillary and Barack represent, and have represented, them well. It will take a lot more than a vote to change the direction of this massively leveraged ship.

Free Hu Jia!

Chinese jail dude for talking too much.