In 1974, I brought a lawsuit against the psychiatrist, the Bishop and the District Superintendent for violating my right of privacy. Ten years later, when their lawyers could no longer hide behind legal machinations, the case finally came before the Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. It was here especially that the defendants tried to hide their violation of my civil right of privacy behind their “religious freedom.”

Religious freedom should be about self-empowerment, not gaining power over others. One person’s religious or civil freedom should not require another person’s subjugation.   Freedom to be and to become and to belong are DNA in every human being, and should be honored by every religion and government—in Indiana and Arkansas and Iraq and everywhere else.

Communism only lasted 70 years in the first nation to have it, and killed tens of millions with purely man made famines and extreme repression. Libertarianism and its influence on US conservatism takes the greatest share of blame for extreme economic inequality, the Great Recession, and most financial elite crime waves of the past 30 years.

The bipolar superpower dynamic also contributed to greater political authoritarianism in much of the post-colonial Third World. Left-wing nationalist regimes, in the face of Western economic blockades, subversion and outright invasion, adopted garrison state cultures and developed closer ties with the Soviet bloc.

In a sense these were both victories for the United States. The US government arguably has a conscious interest in promoting this kind of authoritarianism. From the standpoint of the American ruling elite, it was far preferable to have the anti-American Third World dominated by authoritarian regimes subject to discipline by the white male three-piece-suited bureaucrats in Moscow (the kind of people Nixon and Kissinger were quite sympatico with), than a liberal anti-American regime providing the demonstration effect of successful economic development outside the global capitalist system.

slam was arguably evolving past its cultural authoritarianism earlier than Christianity. At its height, the medieval Islamic civilization was far more liberal and forward-looking than Christian Europe at the same time.

First: to visit the area and make no effort to meet with Abbas or to visit Palestinian territory makes the statement that in the effort to ensure his support for Israel is unquestionable, he is ignoring the state and nature of the other population that makes up the complex equation of the area. The most crucial issues of the area are not Israeli issues, but Israeli and Palestinian issues, and can only be resolved by some form of collaborative diplomacy between the two.

Second, the statement that culture somehow has anything to do with the economic success of Israel versus the impoverished status of the Palestinians, is not only indicative of bigotry towards the Palestinians, but also towards Jews. The age-old trope that Jews are just good with money has been used against the Jewish people since time immemorial, it seems.

The greatest privilege of the powerful is to be ignorant of the dynamics of power that surround them, and Romney has just made it clear that he does not understand this. These are delicate times, with unrest on the rise in the West Bank and Gaza, the spectre of war with Iran looming, and the very immediate danger of spillover conflict from Syria.

I think the case that I make is that democracy requires capitalism. Capitalism doesn't necessarily require democracy. I've been putting together some data on the top 10 performing non-democratic states in the world and the top 10 democratic states in the world, looking at their growth figures, per capita GDP and other sorts of metrics.