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avivajazz  jazzaviva

Corporatism - 0 views

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    Critics of capitalism often argue that any form of capitalism would eventually devolve into corporatism, due to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. A permutation of this term is corporate globalism. John Ralston Saul argues that most Western societies are best described as corporatist states, run by a small elite of professional and interest groups, that exclude political participation from the citizenry. Corporatism has been supported from various proponents, including: absolutists, conservatives, fascists, progressives, reactionaries, socialists and theologians. In the United States, economic corporatism involving capital-labour cooperation was influential in the New Deal economic program of the United States in the 1930s as well as in Fordism and Keynesianism.[36] In the post-World War II reconstruction period in Europe, corporatism was favoured by Christian democrats, national conservatives, and social democrats in opposition to liberal capitalism.[37] This type of corporatism faded but revived again in the 1960s and 1970s as "neo-corporatism" in response to the new economic threat of stagflation.[38] Neo-corporatism favoured economic tripartism which involved strong and centralized labour unions, employers' unions, and governments that cooperated as "social partners" to negotiate and manage a national economy.[39]
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Many Eyes : Information Visualization for Socio-Political Understanding - 1 views

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    Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. The magic is when an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. Information visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data. We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

DiscoverTheNetworks.org | Right-Wing 'Guide' to the Political Left - 0 views

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    Stark raving mad, this website trembles in fear at evil communists like Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, who wants to balance excesses of asset-owning, elite investors with needs of wage-earning peasants!
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Civil Society: Democratic Principles and Practices | Int'l Journal of Not-for-Profit Law - 0 views

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    Liberal democracy ,and even republican self-governance, have always depended on beliefs and civic virtues which the liberal state itself is constitutionally unable to nourish or enforce -- and which big-corporate employment and consumer marketing, quite as much big-government social engineering, does a lot to undermine.
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    Entire Issue. Article titles: UN & Civil Society; Civil Society & Media Freedom; Religion in it's Place; Women, Civil Society, & NGOs in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan; Lazarus Rising: Civil Society & Sierra Leone's Rise from the Grave; Framing Democracy: Civil Society & Civic Movements in Eastern Europe; American Creed: Philanthropy & Rise of Civil Society (1700-1865), etc.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

The Bipartisan Debt Deal Fact Sheet: A "Victory" For The Republicans, The Democrats And... - 0 views

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    White House Spin on Cave-In: In Securing this Bipartisan Deal, the President Rejected Proposals that Would Have Placed the Sole Burden of Deficit Reduction on Low-Income or Middle-Class Families: The President stood firmly against proposals that would have placed the sole burden of deficit reduction on lower-income and middle-class families. This includes not only proposals in the House Republican Budget that would have undermined the core commitments of Medicare to our seniors and forced tens of millions of low-income Americans to go without health insurance, but also enforcement mechanisms that would have forced automatic cuts to low-income programs. The enforcement mechanism in the deal exempts Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare benefits, unemployment insurance, programs for low-income families, and civilian and military retirement.
ken meece

Think Again: God - By Karen Armstrong | Foreign Policy - 1 views

  • An inadequate understanding of God that reduces “him” to an idol in our own image who gives our likes and dislikes sacred sanction is the worst form of spiritual tyranny. Such arrogance has led to atrocities like the Crusades. The rise of secularism in government was meant to check this tendency, but secularism itself has created new demons now inflicting themselves on the world.
  • In the West, secularism has been a success, essential to the modern economy and political system, but it was achieved gradually over the course of nearly 300 years, allowing new ideas of governance time to filter down to all levels of society. But in other parts of the world, secularization has occurred far too rapidly and has been resented by large sectors of the population,
  • Shiism had for centuries separated religion from politics as a matter of sacred principle, and Khomeini’s insistence that a cleric should become head of state was an extraordinary innovation.
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  • In the same spirit, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, began his movement by translating the social message of the Koran into a modern idiom, founding clinics, hospitals, trade unions, schools, and factories that gave workers insurance, holidays, and good working conditions. In other words, he aimed to bring the masses to modernity in an Islamic setting. The Brotherhood’s resulting popularity was threatening to Egypt’s secular government, which could not provide these services.
  • John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have invoked faith as a shared experience that binds the country together -- an approach that recognizes the communal power of spirituality without making any pretense to divine right.
  • it is not God or religion but violence itself -- inherent in human nature -- that breeds violence. As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule
  • "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones.
  • In recent Gallup polling conducted in 35 Muslim countries, only 7 percent of those questioned thought that the September 11 attacks were justified. Their reasons were entirely political.
  • Fundamentalism is not conservative. Rather, it is highly innovative -- even heretical -- because it always develops in response to a perceived crisis. In their anxiety, some fundamentalists distort the tradition they are trying to defend.
  • All fundamentalism -- whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim -- is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation.
  • The Bible and the Koran may have prohibited usury, but over the centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims all found ways of getting around this restriction and produced thriving economies. It is one of the great ironies of religious history that Christianity, whose founder taught that it was impossible to serve both God and mammon, should have produced the cultural environment that, as Max Weber suggested in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was integral to modern capitalism.
  • the religious critique of excessive greed is far from irrelevant. Although not opposed to business, the major faith traditions have tried to counterbalance some of the abuses of capitalism. Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, by means of yoga and other disciplines, try to moderate the aggressive acquisitiveness of the human psyche. The three monotheistic faiths have inveighed against the injustice of unevenly distributed wealth
  • Religion is not simply a matter of subscribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a more humane humanity.
  • in their rebellion against the modern ethos, fundamentalists tend to overemphasize traditional gender roles. Unfortunately, frontal assaults on this patriarchal trend have often proven counterproductive.
  • But their reading of scripture is unprecedentedly literal. Before the modern period, few understood the first chapter of Genesis as an exact account of the origins of life; until the 17th century, theologians insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, it must be interpreted allegorically.
  • Ironically, it was the empirical emphasis of modern science that encouraged many to regard God and religious language as fact rather than symbol, thus forcing religion into an overly rational, dogmatic, and alien literalism.
  • What has alienated many Muslims from the democratic ideal is not their religion but Western governments’ support of autocratic rulers, such as the Iranian shahs, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, who have denied people basic human and democratic rights.
  • a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God should be the source of legislation.
  • A fatwa is not universally binding like a papal edict; rather, it simply expresses the opinion of the mufti who issues it. Muslims can choose which fatwas they adopt and thus participate in a flexible free market of religious thought, just as Americans can choose which church they attend.
  • Religion should be studied with the same academic impartiality and accuracy as the economy, politics, and social customs of a region, so that we learn how religion interacts with political tension, what is counterproductive, and how to avoid giving unnecessary offense.
  • In the Middle East, overly aggressive secularization has sometimes backfired, making the religious establishment more conservative, or even radical.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Failure of a Democratic-Capitalist Alliance? - 0 views

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    "The baseness, hypocrisy and corruption of these twin political agencies of Wall Street and the ruling class cannot be expressed in words.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Conservatives Are Waging a War on Empathy -- We Can't Let Them Win - 0 views

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    Conservatives are trying to redefine empathy as irrational personal feeling. In fact, empathy is the basis of our democracy and must be defended.
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