In light of the continued media enablement and support of the neocon agenda, it’s instructive to note just how many media companies worldwide the Bush/Saudi royal family investment vehicle the Carlyle Group has an interest in.
I’m just sayin’.
[H/T Commenter Brooklyn Girl at Digby.]
You’d think someone aspiring to Z-list blogging slebdom’d know better than to parade her underwear as outerwear. Visible underwiring’s a big no-no, as is nippleage. But then consider the circles she moves in – not exactly known for their taste or sartorial splendour.
[I was going to title this post Atlas Jugs, but that would’ve been beneath me.]
Cliff Richard’s Wired for Sound:
Far be it from me to intrude in the three-sided war between Sadly, No, The Editors and the true evil genius behind the liberal blogosphere, Atrios, but I had to do this.
For some reason I’ve not seen much discussion of this article in The Nation by Ronald Aronson, on why the left in America needs more socialism. Neither the socialist blogs
I frequent nor the more general leftie blogs (as listed on Prog Gold seem to have paid any attention to it. Which is a shame, as I think it makes some good points:
We would be further along on all of these fronts today had it not been for the immense success of the Anglo-American right in insisting, for nearly a generation now, that in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative,” that the onservative project of free markets, privatization and deregulation is simple obedience to necessity. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history” fourteen years ago, he ruled out picturing “to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.” Capitalism’s victory over Communism in the cold war silenced any and all alternatives, present and future, he said. And today, among apologists for global capitalism like Thomas Friedman, the ideological assault on alternatives has become even more insistent, the faith in the market almost total.
Successful ideological and political campaigns close up the space in which imagination might conceive of a world different from the status quo. Alternatives become “unthinkable.” In contrast, for two generations, between 1917 and 1989, the prospect of social change and political action worldwide were nurtured by the competition between two different world-embracing economic systems. Ugly as it was in so many ways, the Soviet Union not only spurred imitators but stimulated and sometimes supported resistance movements and, more relevant to us, along with the presence of vigorous socialist movements and ideas it encouraged thinking and acting toward alternatives that would be neither capitalist nor Communist. The 1930s through the ’70s saw important and still relevant efforts at social change led by anarchists (Spain), social democrats (Scandinavia), non-Stalinist Communists
(Yugoslavia, Italy), coalitions of socialists and Communists (Chile), and coalitions of leftists and less ideological forces of national liberation (Nicaragua, South Africa). Until the end of the cold war, alternatives to capitalism and Communism seemed both thinkable and possible.Today, when the bottom line is touted as the answer to every question, Americans are imprisoned in a mental world shaped by economic trends. Ironically, its ideologists have become pitchmen for a capitalist caricature of Marxism–promulgating a crude
economic determinism in which the market rules every social, mental and geographic space. Since the fall of Communism, market-oriented ways of thinking, feeling and seeing have permeated our lives and our culture to a degree that Marx never dreamed of.Yet the real Marxism, although no longer embodied in movements or governments, has never been truer or more relevant: Most of the world’s main problems today are inseparable from the dynamics of the capitalist system itself. With corporate capitalism everywhere in command, the outlook is for increased poverty, more environmental degradation, ever more uneven distribution of resources and
the undermining of traditional societies and ways of life, for a culture dominated by marketing, advertising and uneven global development.
The big question is, is the American left actually interested in building an alternative to capitalism? Certainly the Democrats aren’t, whether the old elite or the new, improved “netroots”. Most aren’t even leftwing liberals, let alone socialists. There no longer is a great Democratic Left like there still was even in the eighties: it has disappeared during the nineties, during that long period after
the fall of the Soviet Union when it did seem, as Aronson refers to, that there was no alternative to unbridled, neoliberal capitalism.
But America desperately needs a real, socialist left, if only to keep the Democrats honest. It cannot be a coincidence that the most progress: the New Deal in the thirties, civil rights legislation in the fifties and sixties, the creation of welfare systems in the sixties, happened at time when there were alternatives to the left of the Democrats. If it wasn’t for socialists and communists, would any of it have happened?
Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.
Read more about:
socialism,
US politics
On June 24th, Denice Denton committed suicide, after having been hounded for several months by Malkin directed wingnuts:
An even better example of this started two weeks ago at U.C.-Santa Cruz, where a group called Students Against War protested and successfully expelled military recruiters from a job fair. The anti-war students had done this before and won themselves a place in a Pentagon surveillance file. That hardly slowed them down — they remained confident enough, after their latest stunt, to fire off a media advisory and make themselves available for interviews. Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin read their press release and posted the students’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses on her own site, directing hordes of death threat-tossing readers their way.
Malkin’s UCSC post was titled “Seditious Santa Cruz vs. America.” Even after the UCSC students cried uncle and pulled their phone numbers offline, Malkin continued to post their information alongside the office numbers for the “capitulationist chancellor” who had refused to purge them.
Now the article on Denton’s death mentioned she had already been the subject of a physical attack:
Not only were the protests against her personal, but at times she faced physical threats. A year ago, in the middle of the night, someone thrust a large metal pole through a window in the president?s home. Denton was in another room at the time, but had she been in the room where the glass was broken, she could have been seriously injured, according to a Santa Cruz spokeswoman. Several other times, protesters showed up at her door, refusing to leave. Several people who knew Denton said that she didn?t feel secure and there were rumors on the campus about her having around-the-clock security. The spokeswoman said that there had been some improvements in security, but that reports about around-the-clock security were exaggerations.
And then Malkin wades into this situation and thinks it a wonderful idea to post Denton’s contact information and direct her followers to make their views known to her. Now, when these shitstorms happen it is more than a little threatening to anybody on the receiving end, as you never can be sure what some wingnut will do, but to a woman already fearing for her physical safety it must have been absolute hell.
Denice Denton may have committed suicide without this Malkin directed flood of hatred coming her way, but it may also have been the very thing that drove her over the edge. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that Malkin behaved not just irresponsibly in directing her followers to take on Denton, but maliciously. She is not stupid, she knows the power she can unleash at her enemies and she choose to unleash it. That makes her partly to blame for Denton’s death.
Read more about:
Michelle Malkin,
Denice Denton
