Group items tagged

This week, the president of wicked-Catholic Portugal announced that he's ratifying a law that legalizes gay marriage, even though he doesn't want to, because liberal lawmakers would just overturn his veto. Oh, to have that problem in your government! I was excited to hear the news, of course, but how quickly a little reflection turned into embarrassed head-shaking about how far behind this country is. I don't know about you, but as you may know, when I get moody about the ridiculous discriminatory laws against homos here, I make maps of weird stuff I can legally bone or marry. The longer the US holds out on this equality thing, the more wrong these are going to have to get. Today's: There are, you'll probably not be surprised to learn, three times as many states with no direct prohibitions against the sexual assault of an animal (according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund) as there are states that allow gay marriage.

The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe's single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?

Pop quiz: where did a government agency shut down cell service yesterday to disrupt a political protest? Syria? London? Nope. San Francisco. The answer may seem surprising, but that's exactly what happened yesterday evening. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) asked wireless providers to halt service in four stations in San Francisco to prevent protestors from communicating with each other. The action came after BART notified riders that there might be demonstrations in the city. All over the world people are using mobile devices to organize protests against repressive regimes, and we rightly criticize governments that respond by shutting down cell service, calling their actions anti-democratic and a violation of the rights to free expression and assembly. Are we really willing to tolerate the same silencing of protest here in the United States? BART's actions were glaringly small-minded as technology and the ability to be connected have many uses. Imagine if someone had a heart attack on the train when the phones were blocked and no one could call 911. And where do we draw the line? These protestors were using public transportation to get to the demonstration - should the government be able to shut that down too? Shutting down access to mobile phones is the wrong response to political protests, whether it's halfway around the world or right here at home. The First Amendment protects everybody's right to free expression, and when the government responds to people protesting against it by silencing them, it's dangerous to democracy.

When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), "Class struggle didn't escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn't it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?" I respond by challenging the premise that class struggle has disappeared. On the contrary, I say that class struggle is going on all the time in every major institution of society. One just has to learn how to recognize it. One needn't embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently. Workers' desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn't gone away. In fact, it's inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.

Today, by ordering a military trial at Guantanamo for 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants, Attorney General Eric Holder finally put the Obama administration's stamp on the proposition that some criminals are "too dangerous to have fair trials."

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world. It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."