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Asif Sheeraz

Watch Kal Tak - 25th May 2009 - 0 views

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    Fouzia Wahab Sec. Info. PPP, Senator Zahid Hussain ANP and Hanif Abbasi PML-N in fresh episode of Kal Tak discussing issue of reservations on movement of IDPs to other provinces with Javed Chaudhry.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Another Crazy Idea: Wash Your Food Before You Eat It | Ayliana87's Xanga Site - Weblog - 0 views

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    A Libertarian rebuttal to the post two links down on my profile, written a little more intelligently than most, from somebody who I find myself liking a little - but still showing some of the glib blindness that drove me away from that movement. Eg. responding to the report of the selling of tainted meat by saying that one could prevent the problem by cooking the meat until it's medium (ie. greyish red, instead of grey outright, and only mostly tasteless). "See", she seems to be saying, "even without governmental regulation, you have a choice", not quite getting that it isn't a reasonable choice. Selling meat that doesn't have to be cooked to death to be safe is absolutely possible; my grocery does it with regularity and I cook it rare with regularity, without problems following. So is it reasonable that people in places where the merchants or those they buy from are not as ethical should have to maybe choose between enjoying their meals, or surviving them, just so that somebody else be slimy without undue interference? With how ever much charm, the author of this piece answers that question with a resounding "yes", and shows why Libertarianism is, as I've said, not about the promotion of personal freedom so much as it is about the promotion of personal irresponsibility.
thinkahol *

Sounds of Resistance are Growing Join Americans Fed Up With Big Finance Americans Acr... - 0 views

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    Are you tired of big banks making record profits, paying giant executive salaries and bonuses and then cooking the books so they avoid paying taxes?  We are.  And, we are responding.  Join us.On April 15 in Union Square Park in New York City at 11:00 AM we are holding a "Sounds of Resistance Concert" and protest against the big corporate banks that have undermined the U.S. economy and displaced families from their homes. Big Finance has taken more than a trillion from the Department of Treasury and Federal Reserve to pay for their casino gambling on Wall Street but they are still forcing people out of their homes, not lending to small businesses and choking the economy.The concert will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with special guests Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. Chris Hedges will speak about the growing culture of resistance. Other performers and speakers are invited.The protest will include a picket of the Union Square Bank of America - a major culprit in the great rip off of the American taxpayer.This concert and protest are part of the effort to build the urgently needed movement to shift power to the people and away from concentrated capital interests.                                        
thinkahol *

Green Is the New Red -- Book Trailer on Vimeo - 0 views

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    Will Potter's new book, "Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege," is available now from City Lights Books. To find out more and order, please visit greenisthenewred.com/​blog/​book.
thinkahol *

The Xtremes: Subversive Recipes for Catastrophic Times | Common Dreams - 0 views

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    "In just a few short months, we've witnessed people power in action. From the Middle East to the Midwest, movements have risen up to overturn tired dogma and challenge entrenched power. Many of us were inspired by these events. And many of us were surprised. Perhaps we were growing skeptical that people power could still work. Maybe we had forgotten a vital fact about our world: that bold citizens, united around a common mission, can still come together to create major change against enormous odds." - 350.org (April 7, 2011) "Even when people are willing to take action in concert to redistribute the pie, whether by Gandhian mobilization or use of force, this may resonate falsely, for the pie is disintegrating. Its recipe and ingredients are obsolete. And freedom attained in harsh austerity, characterized by intense competition for food, will be doubtful or of little comfort." - Jan Lundberg ("Social Justice Activists Must Take Into Account Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Transformation")
thinkahol *

Lifting the Veil: Obama and the Failure of Capitalist Democracy {Full Film} -... - 0 views

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    This film explores the historical role of the Democratic Party as the "graveyard of social movements", the massive influence of corporate finance in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth in the United States, the continuity and escalation of neocon policies under Obama, the insufficiency of mere voting as a path to reform, and differing conceptions of democracy itself.  Original interview footage derives from Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Albert, John Stauber (PR Watch), Sharon Smith (Historian), William I. Robinson (Editor, Critical Globalization Studies), Morris Berman (Author, Dark Ages America), and famed black panther Larry Pinkney. 
thinkahol *

The Elite Are Trembling in Their Boots - 0 views

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    As of October 15, 2011, the movement protesting banks that wrecked our economy for profit can now claim the "too big to fail" title from their targets. Once dismissed as a ragtag fringe group of rabble-rousers, Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to 82 countries and 950 cities worldwide in just a month. In Europe, millions protested corporate/financial corruption of Democracy. And in America, Occupy Wall Street solidarity encampments continue in cities as big as Chicago, and as small as Jackson, Mississippi.
thinkahol *

Glenn Greenwald: With Liberty and Justice for Some | Dylan Ratigan - 0 views

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    How did America come to accept having two classes of citizens?  When did America give up on the dream of fairness for all? Last night after the television show, I got the chance to sit down with Glenn Greenwald to discuss his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Unfairness in America is nothing new.  In fact, it is perfectly acceptable in this culture for us to admire those who we see as becoming successful and powerful by creating value.  At the same time, Americans accept unfairness with one explicit caveat: that each of us has the chance to be one of those people - that each of us has the opportunity to become successful. What Americans are rejecting now is not wealth disparity, but the corrupt and unethical way so much of the money in this country is now being made, with our government, more often than not, simply looking the other way. Well, Americans are saying "no more" to our government explicitly agreeing to legalize and codify that destructive behavior, protecting powerful political and financial elites while prosecuting ordinary Americans over trivial offenses. We are beginning to see a rejection of this unfairness at Occupy Wall Street and other national reform-based movements.  
thinkahol *

David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules - The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallSt... - 0 views

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    Just a few months ago, I wrote a piece for Adbusters that started with a conversation I'd had with an Egyptian activist friend named Dina: All these years," she said, "we've been organizing marches, rallies… And if only 45 people show up, you're depressed, if you get 300, you're happy. Then one day, 200,000 people show up. And you're incredulous: on some level, even though you didn't realize it, you'd given up thinking that you could actually win. As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads across America, and even the world, I am suddenly beginning to understand a little of how she felt.
vianinja

Is American politics Tribal? - 0 views

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    The first thing that you should know about the American political movement is that you're going to be focused on two major things
D. Wayne Moore

The Torch Has Been Passed... - 0 views

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    Obama's reelection was viewed as an affirmation that American politics, and indeed, America itself, has changed forever.
Arabica Robusta

Populism and the enchanted world of 'moderate politics' | openDemocracy - 1 views

  • I essentially question the epistemological flaws surrounding the uses of the notion: when is it safe to call a politician, a political party or movement ‘populist’?
  • The stakes are high because to label someone as ‘populist’ is to imply that s/he is somehow a potential or real enemy of representative democracy. My critic refers to the ‘pernicious effects’ of populism which underlines the notion’s very negative connotation. Let me here reply to Catherine Fieschi’s major criticisms.
  • Cas Mudde, one of the major specialists on the subject, concedes that populism is a ‘thin-centred ideology’.
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  • According to Michael Freeden’s ‘morphological analysis’, an ideology has its own ‘ineliminable’ core of values exercising control, with logically and culturally adjacent concepts that are further connected to peripheral concepts.
  • To point out that populism does not have the depth and sophistication of a political ideology is in no way an attempt to suggest that this is a ‘wishy-washy’ notion, even less to ‘to discourage analysts’, let alone ‘to bamboozle democrats’ as Catherine Fieschi alleges. No, it simply means testing the epistemological merits of the notion in order to reveal its heuristic limits.
  • In the 1930s, millions marched behind the banners of Fascism and Communism. Today, no one would die for a populist cause. Populism is no ideology simply because it offers no positive worldview. It is just a means to an end, a device to appeal to the masses.
  • Think for a moment: aren’t those amorphous policies of ‘mainstream’ parties responsible for their rising unpopularity and their decreasing credibility? Why should political scientists uncritically use the media clichés about ‘reasonable moderates’ opposing ‘undemocratic radicals/populists’?
  • It is a fact that populists thrive on ‘wounded’ democracies. But ‘wounded’ democracies are imperfectly run polities, where economic inequalities are dire, and where the elites have often broken their promises. Thus let’s not forget who provoked the ‘democratic fracture’ in the first place. Why do some political scientists seem oblivious to the fact that the ‘moderates’ who let down their electorates are mainly responsible for their own demise?
  • Again, the task of the political scientist should not be to condone or condemn this state of affairs, but to try to understand why people feel so disenfranchised. Consequently, the researcher should tackle and discuss the policies which make those populations suffer. Unfortunately, this is not something which most political scientists seem in the least concerned about. ‘Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand’ said Spinoza. Before looking down on the disoriented and angry voters who fall for the demagogues or dismissing all ‘radicals’ as undisputed ‘populists’, it would indeed be worth pausing for a moment to understand how those agents feel and to ask what they want. Political scientists should also wonder why more and more ‘moderate’ voters no longer believe in the enchanted world of ‘moderate politics’.
Bakari Chavanu

toledoblade.com -- - 0 views

  • He believes our economic system has lost its way after decades of perversion by greedy politicians in Washington and money-minded fatcats on Wall Street and in corporate America.
  • And as the great American dream slipped further from the middle class, more consumers relied on credit cards and loans to catch it, and a system based on people buying what they need became one in which people buy what they want but often cannot afford.
  • Perhaps the film's most powerful statement is Moore's claim that 1 percent of the richest Americans own 95 percent of our nation's wealth.
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  • Capitalism: A Love Story contends that such a movement has already begun. Families being evicted from their homes by bank foreclosures refuse to leave, the film shows, even when law enforcement shows up. A successful workers' strike in Chicago proved that the power to overcome corporate greed and mishandling still rests with the people.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      This may be a hopeful way to look at it, but I really doubt it. Most people don't have a clue about what to do. There's very little or effective organized resistance.
  • The film isn't so much Moore piling on our battered, bruised capitalism as it is loaded commentary on what got us here. The evidence is damning, and thought-provoking to those who will give the film a chance.
  • Perhaps Capitalism: A Love Story will be the impetus we need for wholesale change. Or if change is too ambitious, given our circumstances, the film should at least spark meaningful dialogue and rigorous debate, something Moore supporters and detractors alike should welcome.
Bakari Chavanu

Amazon.com: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free eBook:... - 0 views

  • Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise.
  • Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect? Charles P. Pierce: I don't know if there's one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.”
  • Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don't notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
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  • To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
  • Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
  • "Idiot America" is great, informative book about concepts we see everyday. Also, many of the 1-star reviews are likely biased because of some of the political and religious topics noted. I think this book is definitely a full, 5-star book.
  • The author notes "The 3 Great Premises: and applies them to many instances in this book: 1. Any theory is valid if it moves units (rating, and making money). 2. Anything can be true if it is said loudly enough. 3. Fact is what enough people believe (the Truth is what you believe).
  • POLITICAL TALK RADIO: One set of rules noted by a professor studying radio discourse: *Never Be Dull *Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity *The American public is stupid; treat them that way *Always ignore the fact and the public record when it's convenient
  • TELEVISION: "Television is an emotional medium. It's entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse."
  • But to someone willing to take the time to read it, this book tells people what practically everyone should know about American politics -- that the American people are being sold a sob story about how experts are an elite that is keeping them from being The Best Damn Nation In The World. (In that regard, one should definitely read "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter -- it's over four decades old, but saw from the very beginning what has come into full bloom now with the barking lunacy of the American Right.)
  • The main problem with this book is this: the people who are likely to read it already know most of the story, and are mostly getting background information, and the people who won't read it are like the six reviewers I mentioned in my intro -- determined to ignore its stories and insights as "bias" because their politics and faith won't let them look outside the cloister.
  • He lays the blame at the feet of various ideology-driven entities, with special attention given to the same corporate-media war cheerleaders who happily passed on Bush's lies about Iraqi weaponry to a somnolent public, and who, in the name of putting "balance" over reality, treat specious creationist nonsense and hard scientific fact as if both had equal validity. Highly recommended!
thinkahol *

David Ray Griffin - Let's Get Empirical - 0 views

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    "David Ray Griffin Debunks Popular Mechanics and other [9/11] debunkers."
Levy Rivers

Marcia G. Yerman: Race, Gender and the Media in the 2008 Elections - 0 views

  • Several themes coalesced over the two-day period. A prominent one was the oft repeated, "Did race trump gender?" Dr. Cynthia Neal-Spence, Associate Professor of Sociology at Spelman College, spoke about the dilemma of the black female. Asking, "Are we as a group more gender conscious or race conscious?" she then suggested "the media coverage had helped black women to choose sides." Despite Obama offering a post-racial approach, she sensed the same "tensions resurfacing that were in place during the suffragette movement." She also saw the media's analyzation as being "racialized."
  • Although feminine for Sarah Palin is an asset, "feminine" attributes in general are considered a negative. "The process of gender," as phrased by Vojdik, is a methodology employed by the Republicans where they "feminize" a male candidate -- to his detriment.
  • Frank Rudy Cooper, Associate Professor of Law at Suffolk University, spelled out that "Obama had to deal with the media representation of black masculinity." He posited that Obama had to be "a unisex president." Despite trying to run a "post-racial campaign, Obama had to be careful avoid "the angry black male" stereotype by not being too aggressive. Cooper explained that in pitting McCain against Obama, the masculine vs. feminine style is emphasized. Obama's empathetic style has been criticized, and as "feminization is a slur," he is forced into a precarious balancing act.
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  • However, Vojdik said, "Those in the media insisted on gendering her candidacy, taking her from the public sphere to the private construction of her identity as a wife and a mother." This was often accomplished through the use of specific language. She gave as examples the terms, "shrill, emasculating, castrating," with oft used analogies of Hillary as "the hectoring mother," or "the wife as ball-buster." Hillary was not male, but she "had failed as a female." On the other hand, Vojdik saw Sarah Palin as seeking to be elected because she was a woman in the "good wife and mother" mode. Projecting herself as stereotypically feminine, albeit a "pit bull with lipstick," she "appeals to the 80's concept of the superwoman." "But," Vojdik asked, "where are the supports for ordinary women?"
  • That concept was illuminated by Anthony E. Varona, Associate Professor of Law at American University. He pointed out why the 2004 Karl Rove election strategy based on the "unease felt by religious and social conservatives" wasn't going to work in 2008. Plainly put, "Things have changed. New media and the blogosphere have made it impossible."
Skeptical Debunker

Ravitch Offers Passionate Defense of America's Public School System - March 2, 2010 - T... - 0 views

  • No silver bullets. This is the simple premise of Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” which is being brought out this week by Basic Books. Written by one of our nation’s most respected scholars, it has been eagerly awaited. But it has also been, at least in some quarters, anticipated with a certain foreboding, because it was likely to debunk much of the conventional — and some not so conventional — wisdom surrounding education reform. Click Image to Enlarge
  • What of the once-great comprehensive high schools, institutions with history and in some cases a track record of success going back generations? As time moves on, it is fast becoming clear that the new small schools, many with inane themes (how about the School of Peace and Diversity?), can never substitute for a good neighborhood high school, which can become a center of communal life and pride. Ms. Ravitch’s report underscores the fact that the trick is to fix the neighborhood schools beset with problems, not destroy them.
  • It is not only the foundations that Ms. Ravitch blames for the current crisis: government has also failed in the attempt to reform the schools from above, lacking a clear perspective of how schools work on a day-to-day basis. Thus, the major federal initiative, No Child Left Behind, well intentioned as it may have been, ended up damaging the quality of education, not improving it. While the federal government declares schools as “failing” and prescribes sanctions for schools not meeting its goal of “annual yearly progress,” it is the states that are allowed to write and administer the tests. This has led to a culture of ever easier tests and more test preparation rather than real instruction. More ominously, it led to such scandals as the New York State Education Department lowering the “cut scores” that define the line between passing and failing. Ms. Ravitch suggests that the proper roles of the states and federal government have been reversed under NCLB. Maybe the standards for achievement should be set in Washington, which, after all, administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress , and the solutions found at the local level, using the accurate data provided by Washington. Instead of moving in a different direction from the failed NCLB model of the Bush Administration, the Obama administration has adopted and expanded on them.
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  • Teacher-bashing, so in vogue among the “reformers” dominating the national discussion, is rejected by Mrs. Ravitch. How could the unions be responsible for so much failure when, she asks, traditionally, the highest scores in the nation are posted by strong union states such as Massachusetts (best results in the nation) and the lowest scores in the south, where unions are weak or non-existent? The mania for closing “failing” schools also comes under the Ravitch microscope. To her mind, closing schools should be reserved for the “most extreme cases.” Virtually alone among those discussing educational policy, Mrs. Ravitch appreciates the value of schools as neighborhood institutions. To her mind, closing schools “accelerates a sense of transiency and impermanence, while dismissing the values of continuity and tradition, which children, families and communities need as anchors in their lives.”
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    It turns out that "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" is a passionate defense of our nation's public schools, a national treasure that Ms. Ravitch believes is "intimately connected to our concepts of citizenship and democracy and to the promise of American life." She issues a warning against handing over educational policy decisions to private interests, and criticizes misguided government policies that have done more harm than good. Ideas such as choice, utilizing a "business model" structure, accountability based on standardized tests and others, some favored by the left, others by the right are deemed as less, often much less, than advertised. Ms. Ravitch doesn't oppose charters, but rather feels that the structure itself doesn't mandate success. As in conventional schools, there will be good ones and bad ones. But charters must not be allowed to cream off the best students, or avoid taking the most troubled, as has been alleged here in New York City. Here main point, however, is broader. "It is worth reflecting on the wisdom of allowing educational policy to be directed, or one might say, captured by private foundations," Ms. Ravitch notes. She suggests that there is "something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public educational policy to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people." However well intended the effort, the results, in her telling, have not been impressive, in some cases doing more harm than good.
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    According to this CONSERVATIVE and BUSH Assistant Secretary of Education, "No Child Left Behind" is destroying one of the great social "glues" of America - its public school system. Of course, not only Bush and the Republicans are to blame, Democrats went along with NCLB on the "promise" of extra federal funding for implementing it AND supporting American public schools. That was funding that never materialized due to our other great national priority - making corporate cronies rich via the war in Iraq (and hoping to make the oil companies richer there as well, but apparently failing miserably to do so ... so far). NCLB could have been suspended when that happened, but strangely (NOT!) Bush and the Republican controlled Congress conveniently forgot their promise (perhaps because NCLB unfunded was more like no teachers union left un-destroyed!?). More from http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/28/entertainment/la-ca-diane-ravitch28-2010feb28 on this book - Diane Ravitch, probably this nation's most respected historian of education and long one of our most thoughtful educational conservatives, has changed her mind -- and changed it big time. Ravitch's critical guns are still firing, but now they're aimed at the forces of testing, accountability and educational markets, forces for which she was once a leading proponent and strategist. As President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, embrace charter schools and testing, picking up just where, in her opinion, the George W. Bush administration left off, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" may yet inspire a lot of high-level rethinking. The book, titled to echo Jane Jacobs' 1961 demolition of grandiose urban planning schemes, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," has similarly dark warnings and equally grand ambitions. Ravitch -- the author of "Left Back" and other critiques of liberal school reforms, an assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration and a
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