“If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived,” Isaiah Berlin told his audience at Oxford when he assumed that position in 1958. Philosophy was at its best when it was being contentious, especially when it was being contentious about the meaning and purpose of our common existence. Too much agreement was an abdication of its ethical responsibility
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"Captured Europe" by Simon Johnson | Project Syndicate - 0 views
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The Greek default has turned out to be the proverbial dog that didn't bark. The lesson for Europe - and for the US - is clear: it is time to stop listening to what banks say, and start focusing on what they do. We must re-evaluate the distorted political economy of the financial sector, before the excessive power of the few imposes even larger costs on everyone else.
Chavez lauds new Latin American alliance - 0 views
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qt: Chavez called the foundation of CELAC an achievement 200 years in the making, the realisation of the ambitions of independence hero Simon Bolivar. "'Only unity will make us free,' Chavez said to applause at the opening ceremony. 'This is the path: Unity, unity, unity!'" "Usually all these countries, whenevever they would have met, it would have been the US and Canada. This is the first time they're doing it without these two countries, and their aim is to foster regional integration."
Open proposal to US higher education: end oligarchy economics, save trillions with educ... - 0 views
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Economics: I'm going to discuss trillions of dollars in a moment. As an economics teacher, I understand numbers this large are extremely difficult to imagine. If you are among the majority with this difficulty, I recommend that you follow the expert testimony that paints the picture, and know that success in this area of public education transformation that unleashes trillions of our dollars for human creative capacity in unimaginable power is sufficient to end the current economic crisis. This is the longest section of my briefing. If you tire in reading, please consider that at trillions of dollars of annual public benefits, you literally have nothing more valuable to do than understand the following facts and ideas. Harvard's Linda Bilmes co-authored a paper with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz estimating the long-term costs of current US wars at now $3 to $5 trillion ($30-$50,000 per US household of $50,000/year income), with total debt increase since 2001 of over $10 trillion. Remember, as demonstrated by the evidence disclosed by our own government, all the reasons Americans were told to go to war were known to be lies as they were told and applicable law proves these wars Orwellian unlawful. Just down the Charles River from Harvard, MIT's Simon Johnson (and former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund) describes our economy being lead by gambling oligarchs who have captured government as in banana republics (his words), and might plunge the US into an economy worse than the Great Depression. From his article under the telling title, The Quiet Coup: "Elite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The govern
US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassme... - 0 views
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It is for governments - not journalists - to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks' revelations
Simon Johnson: Tax cuts move U.S. closer to fiscal crisis - 0 views
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President Barack Obama is receiving congratulations for moving to the center on the tax agreement with Republicans last week. Both sides think they got something: Democrats feel this will nudge unemployment below 8.5 percent in 2012, helping the president get re-elected; Republicans achieved long-standing goals on measures such as the estate tax and think they will get most of the credit for an economic recovery that's already under way. The truth is, the deal moved us closer to a fiscal crisis, just as the euro zone now is experiencing.
Incipient Fascist State - 0 views
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Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.
Roger L. Simon » Obama's New Nomenklatura - 0 views
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OBAMA PROMISES IN HIS SECOND TERM A NEW CLASS OF PERMANENT ELITES
West 86th - The Administration of Things: A Genealogy - 0 views
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The task of philosophy was not to settle disputes, but to unsettle them, to encourage them, to keep them going. For it was only through disputation that we could resist the rule of experts and machines, the bureaucratic-technocratic society foretold by Saint-Simon and championed by Marx and Engels, a society in which we replace the “government of persons by the administration of things.”
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Louis de Bonald pointed to the hard choices that the state would have to make. “In the modern state, we have perfected the administration of things at the expense of the administration of men, and we are far more preoccupied with the material than the moral,” he wrote. “Few governments nurture religion or morality with the same attention that they promote commerce, open communications, keep track of accounts, provide the people with pleasures, etc.” 12
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Where did the tables turn? - Roger Simon - Politico.com - 0 views
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Except in Iowa, in January of this year, they did vote. Younger voters represented 22 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucus— the highest youth turnout in any state so far — and Obama got 57 percent of them to Clinton’s 11 percent. The youth vote, in fact, turned out to be about 30 percent of Obama’s total vote.
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But to my way of thinking, Clinton’s loss in Iowa was a critical one, because she was no longer inevitable. She had let Obama into the game. She had let a candidate with money and a message get off to a running start. She had allowed him to become a credible candidate.
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As it turned out, Obama had both a strategy and the money to execute it. His campaign knew what the race really was about: the acquisition of pledged delegates.
Where did the tables turn? - Roger Simon - Politico.com - 0 views
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Clinton’s campaign strategy in Iowa was a traditional one: Target those voters who had voted in the past — the most reliable kind of voters there are — and then get them to the polls. And some Clinton aides were openly contemptuous of Obama’s attempt to “expand the universe” and bring in younger voters.
Live With Talat - 27th February 2009 - 0 views
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