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brookegoodman

5-Marx's Comm M. - Google Drive - 0 views

drive.google.com/...0BxWXwwoF4MF-U2xGbnRZYjcwQlU

homework

shared by brookegoodman on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.
  • Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
  • It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
  • village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland.
  • the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms.
  • The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.
  • The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
  • the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
  • The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
  • The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
  • Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
  • The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
  • The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
  • Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune*
  • In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
  • He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.
  • Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
  • Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
  • Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
  • And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
  • Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.
  • But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
  • Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers.
  • Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
  • At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.
  • the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.
  • But every class struggle is a political struggle.
  • a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
  • The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for
  • The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.
  • The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
  • It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
  • Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
brookegoodman

The United Kingdom is too precious to be lost to narrow nationalism | Gordon Brown | Op... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-be-lost-to-narrow-nationalism

Crisis economics

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • If the United Kingdom is to survive, it will have to change fundamentally, so that Scotland does not secede and our regions can once again feel part of it.
  • Recent events are better understood as resulting from the power of competing nationalisms: Brexit nationalism, seeking national independence from Europe; Scottish nationalism; Welsh nationalism; and Irish and Ulster nationalisms. The risk is that “getting Brexit done” is leaving Britain undone and, by destabilising the careful balance between the Irish and British identities in Northern Ireland, threatening the very existence of the United Kingdom.
  • In this respect, last month’s election result seems less like an enthusiastic endorsement of any party than a plea for radical change. The old postwar social contract, based on times when manufacturing, making a product in which you had pride, and mining which kept the nation’s lights on, gave people dignity and respect, is seen as at breaking point, with each of its four pillars approaching collapse.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This widespread and rising dissatisfaction is the context for today’s populist nationalisms. The 19th- and 20th-century nationalism that underpinned anticolonial movements and the breakup of the imperial dynasties was driven by anger at cultural discrimination, political exclusion and the economic exploitation of one ethnic group by another.
  • Nationalism can exploit these injustices but it cannot end them. While the Conservatives are the current beneficiaries of the revolt of the regions, their promise of a northern renaissance will have to mean more than love-bombing the regions with a few infrastructure projects and an airline rescue.
  • Instead, we must deliver a radical alternative to nationalism. It must start with a plan to address economic insecurity. But it must also recognise that, in a multinational state that is asymmetric (83% of its voters lie in one nation) and where financial, political and administrative power is concentrated in just one city far to the south, the outlying nations and regions require new powers of initiative as decision-making centres – which, given our history as a unitary state, would be something akin to a British constitutional revolution.
  • The Treasury should also devolve decisions about the allocation of regional resources to new councils of the north and Midlands, comprising mayors, councillors and MPs. With proper financial backing, whether in research, science, technology, new industries or culture, cities and towns in every region – not just London – could become leaders for the UK, capitals in their own right.
  • In 2020, that means rediscovering the value of empathy and solidarity between nations and regions and the benefits that can flow from cooperation and sharing in pursuit of great causes: from jointly tackling climate change to offering the same floor of rights to universal health, social care and welfare services in every part of the UK.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
Javier E

Law Firms Pay Supreme Court Clerks $400,000 Bonuses. What Are They Buying? - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...preme-court-clerk-bonuses.html

personal relations supreme court bonuses firms

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • “When you clerk for a justice for a year, you come to know how that justice thinks very intimately,” he said. “You know the ins and outs of the justice’s thought processes.”Letting lawyers exploit that relationship raises concerns about fairness, the study said. “Law firms throw money at former clerks for the same reason companies, unions and organized interests hire former government officials as lobbyists: They expect these insiders to influence their previous employers,”
  • What the new study documented, Professor Gillers said, is what everyone knows. “Personal relationships matter,” he said, and businesses try to exploit them.“This is rampant,” he said. “Not only is it rampant, it’s smart. When you get to the Supreme Court, of course, the concern increases, but human nature does not change.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Ideas That Won't Survive the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-america.html

American idea exceptionalism choice values drama hero villain pandemic culture narrative turning point

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • what might die after Covid-19 is the myth that we are the best country on earth, a belief common even among the poor, the marginal, the precariat, who must believe in their own Americanness if
  • Is it too much to hope that the forced isolation of many Americans, and the forced labor of others, might compel radical acts of self-reflection, self-assessment and, eventually, solidarity?
  • we have a choice: Will we accept a world of division and scarcity, where we must fight over insufficient resources and opportunities, or imagine a future when our society is measured by how well it takes care of the ill, the poor, the aged and the different?
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • As a writer, I know that such a choice exists in the middle of a story. It is the turning point. A hero — in this case, the American body politic, not to mention the president — is faced with a crucial decision that will reveal who he or she fundamentally is.
  • We are not yet at the halfway point of our drama. We have barely made it to the end of the first act, when we slowly awaken to the threat coming our way and realize we must take some kind of action. That action, for now, is simply doing what we must to fight off Covid-19 and survive as a country, weakened but alive.
  • The halfway point comes only when the hero meets a worthy opponent — not one who is weak or marginal or different, but someone or something that is truly monstrous. Covid-19, however terrible, is only a movie villain.
  • Our real enemy does not come from the outside, but from within. Our real enemy is not the virus but our response to the virus — a response that has been degraded and deformed by the structural inequalities of our society.
  • America has a history of settler colonization and capitalism that ruthlessly exploited natural resources and people, typically the poor, the migratory, the black and the brown.
  • That history manifests today in our impulse to hoard, knowing that we live in an economy of self-reliance and scarcity; in our dependence on the cheap labor of women and racial minorities; and in our lack of sufficient systems of health care, welfare, universal basic income and education to take care of the neediest among us.
  • What this crisis has revealed is that, while almost all of us can become vulnerable — even corporations and the wealthy — our government prioritizes the protection of the least vulnerable.
  • If this was a classic Hollywood narrative, the exceptionally American superhero, reluctant and wavering in the first act, would make the right choice at this turning point. The evil Covid-19 would be conquered, and order would be restored to a society that would look just as it did before the villain emerged.
  • But if our society looks the same after the defeat of Covid-19, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. We can expect a sequel, and not just one sequel, but many, until we reach the finale: climate catastrophe
  • amid the bumbling, there are signs of hope and courage: laborers striking over their exploitation; people donating masks, money and time; medical workers and patients expressing outrage over our gutted health care system; a Navy captain sacrificing his career to protect his sailors; even strangers saying hello to other strangers on the street
Javier E

Is Capitalism Racist? | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...is-capitalism-racist

capitalism white supremacy economic history

shared by Javier E on 24 May 20 - No Cached
  • “Capitalism and Slavery,” published in 1944 by Eric Williams, a young historian who later became the first Prime Minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago. The book, which argued for the centrality of slavery to the rise of capitalism, was largely ignored for half a century; now its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship.
  • Large-scale Southern slaveholders are today understood as experts in such business practices as harsh, ever-increasing production quotas for workers and the creation of sophisticated credit instruments. Rather than representing an alternative system to industrial capitalism, American plantations enabled its development, providing the textile mills of Manchester and Birmingham with cotton to be spun into cloth by the new British working class
  • “There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”
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  • The new history of slavery seeks to obliterate the economic and moral distinction between slavery and capitalism, and between the South and the North, by showing them to have been all part of a single system
  • Critics of the new history of slavery chastise it for downplaying developments like Britain’s abolition of slavery in its colonies and the American Civil War, and for overstating slavery’s importance to the growth of the early American economy, even if the plantation was a particularly ruthless business enterprise.
  • The arguments about slavery imply larger arguments about America.
  • for some the national enterprise can still be seen as a slow and often interrupted progression toward a more just and democratic society; for others, it amounts to a set of variations on racial hierarchy and economic exploitation.
  • At least among respectable academic historians, the days of triumphant historical accounts of the greatness of the United States are long past.
  • Once slavery is positioned as the foundational institution of American capitalism, the country’s subsequent history can be depicted as an extension of this basic dynamic.
  • This is what Walter Johnson does in his new book, “The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States” (Basic)
  • Johnson’s guiding concept is “racial capitalism”: racism as a technique for exploiting black people and for fomenting the hostility of working-class whites toward blacks, so as to enable white capitalists to extract value from everyone else.
  • “The history of racial capitalism, it must be emphasized, is a history of wages as well as whips, of factories as well as plantations, of whiteness as well as blackness, of ‘freedom’ as well as slavery.”
  • For his purposes, St. Louis is a case study in the pervasiveness and the longevity of racism outside the formal boundaries of slavery.
  • A parade of men (most of them, in Johnson’s telling, closely connected to St. Louis) who were long presented to schoolchildren as the heroes of American history are revealed to be anything but.
  • “The Broken Heart of America” is a history populated by good guys and bad guys—many more of the latter.
  • Johnson doesn’t hesitate to use terms that didn’t exist at the time to describe the motivations of historical actors: “genocide,” “settler colonialism,” “ethnic cleansing”—terms given a honed edge by being relieved of historical specificity.
  • Johnson’s propensity for pasting condemnatory labels on his characters displays a concern that, without his firm guidance, readers may not draw the proper conclusions from the material he is presenting.
  • He is disinclined to describe any situation as ambiguous
  • In the craft of history, tendentiousness is an ever-present temptation; Johnson is as insistently moralizing in his way as previous generations of romantic, heroic historians of the West were in theirs
  • A story centered on a transhistorical force of oppression—spotlighting St. Louis as the capital of racial capitalism—offers an all-encompassing explanation but doesn’t leave much room for racism untethered from capitalism or capitalism untethered from racism
  • Johnson, impatient with such particularity, always goes both smaller, in the sense of depicting St. Louis as a fulcrum of history, and bigger, in the sense of making racial capitalism an eternal, all-powerful force, floating free of any specific time or place.
  • Other scholars have found different ways of explaining the same parlous present-day conditions in distressed black neighborhoods
  • Reading “The Broken Heart of America” inevitably prompts the question of how what’s broken might be repaired. Does a politically charged history come with a politics for the here and now?
  • Today, Johnson writes, “I have never been to a more amazing, hopeful place in my life.” Underlying his stated optimism is an implicit conviction that it wouldn’t do much good to look for help from the larger society; the victims of oppression must find a way forward by themselves.
  • deflating and deriding the progress it has made in the past and the promise it might hold for the future invites the hazards of defeatism. It distracts from the kinds of economic, educational, and criminal-justice reforms that mainstream progressives hope to enact. These are the tools we have at hand. It would be a shame not to use them
  • Javier E on 24 May 20
     
    A scholar depicts white supremacy as the economic engine of American history.
Javier E

Winning Through Attrition - by Lawrence Freedman - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...winning-through-attrition

attrition ukraine russia 2022 analysis stalemate

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • while wars of attrition may open with a stalemate and lack the dash and drama of those of manoeuvre they can still lead to victory. This may be because they create the conditions for a return to manoeuvre warfare or it may be because the losing side recognises that its position can only get worse and needs to find a way out
  • Moreover there are different ways of fighting an attritional war, and some strategies can be more effective than others.
  • The word ‘attrition’ derives from a Latin word for rubbing away which came to refer to repressing a vice
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • its original – theological - English meaning as a lesser form of repentance that had a worldly instead of a spiritual motive, lacking the sincerity of true contrition
  • something second-best
  • Attrition was therefore established as a form of warfare to avoid, as second best to beating the enemy in a decisive battle. Exhausting an enemy through constant sniping, skirmishing and harassment took time, and increasingly made victory dependent less on the conduct of military operations and more on the underlying economic and social resilience of the nation. In addition, the process worked both ways. One’s own forces also faced attrition, turning war into a contest of endurance.
  • inflicting attrition on your opponent can be a sensible precursor to battle
  • Instead of rushing an attack, exploiting surprise, it might make more sense to opt for a more methodical approach, taking out enemy capabilities and undermining morale, before embarking on an offensive – what the Americans call ‘preparing the battlefield’.
  • In these circumstances, wider economic and social resilience will matter, as both sides try to produce more equipment and ammunition and find more personnel to make up losses. Once one side falters in this effort then they might lose as a result of unrest at home or a progressive inability to fight effectively
  • Attrition is not just a question of which side is suffering most but also who is best able to regenerate their combat capabilities.
  • we can note some of this war’s fundamental asymmetries that continue to shape its conduct:
  • First Russia has identified Ukraine’s dependence on external support as its greatest vulnerability and has been looking for ways to undermine this support, largely by aggravating the economic crises facing the West
  • Two conclusions emerge from these asymmetries
  • The second conclusion is that conditions on the ground should increasingly favour Ukraine because of the quality of the systems now entering service and the effectiveness with which they are being used
  • Ukraine is having to follow a strategy that works round its weaknesses while exploiting those of Russia. This was dubbed back in May as ‘corrosion’ by General Mick Ryan. Ukraine, he noted, has sought to hollow out ‘the Russian physical, moral, and intellectual capacity to fight and win in Ukraine, both on the battlefield, and in the global information environment.’
  • The problem with attrition is that it does not force a decision on the enemy. It works by persuading enemy forces and their political leadership that their position is untenable and likely to get worse. So long as they believe that they are only facing temporary difficulties and can turn the situation around, or at least must show that they have put up a decent fight before folding, then the war will continue
  • It is easy to understand why Ukraine feels that it has no choice but to carry on fighting and why it is now confident that it is slowly taking the initiative.
  • Moscow appears to wish to incorporate seized territory into Russia, for which they are preparing some dubious procedures that will impress nobody but themselves. Deep down for Moscow the war may now be all about denying NATO the satisfaction of a Ukrainian victory and saving Putin’s face
  • There is nonetheless something increasingly desperate about Russian rhetoric and behaviour. The Russian military position is deteriorating and the West’s backing for Ukraine has yet to slacken. The trends therefore favour Ukraine. At some Putin and his cronies will have to work out how long they can continue to pretend that they have a credible path to victory.
Javier E

Angels and demons: exposing the dark side of Victoria's Secret | Documentary | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-dark-side-of-victorias-secret

sexism exploitation fashion pornography culture social media

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Tyrnauer sees Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch as kind of proto-Instagrams, promoting an unattainable body image and FOMO. “The mall was the Instagram 1.0.
  • It was the anesthetizing fantasy machine that we all participated in and took over our lives and was manipulating us every step of the way along those tile floors and making us buy things we didn’t need. There’s nothing wrong with shopping, but how giant companies exploited consumers and workers is a story worth paying attention to.”
Javier E

America Needs a New Way to Measure Poverty - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674878

comprich poor community comparison poverty disadvantages race policies

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Income is one vital indicator of well-being, but it is not the only one: Things like health outcomes and social mobility matter too.
  • we should shift our focus from poverty to disadvantage. Disadvantage is a more useful term than poverty because we aren’t just talking about income—we’re trying to capture the complexity of a person’s life chances being hindered by multiple circumstances
  • Disadvantage is more accurate because it implies an injustice. People are being held back—unfairly.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Thanks to social-science research, we now know that children’s life chances are profoundly affected by their context—not only income and family circumstances but also their community—more so than by their genetic profile or the medical care they receive.
  • With this in mind, we created what we call the Index of Deep Disadvantage, which reflects two traditional measures of income (the poverty rate and the “deep poverty rate,” meaning those with incomes below half the poverty line), two markers of health (birth weight and life expectancy), and the rate of social mobility for children who grow up in low-income families. We used this index to rank the roughly 3,100 counties in the United States along with the 500 most populous cities.
  • Immediately, the rankings revealed a stark geographical pattern.
  • the most disadvantaged places on our index were primarily rural
  • Though some of these were majority white, most were majority Black or Hispanic.
  • these places resembled, well, colonies—internal colonies within the U.S.
  • Considerable poverty exists in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. But in our apples-to-apples comparison, none of those cities ranked among even the 600 most disadvantaged places in the nation
  • The only cities on that list were a relatively small number of industrial municipalities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester.
  • Those living in the 200 most disadvantaged places on our index were just as likely to have major difficulties paying for housing as those in America’s 500 largest cities.
  • The places that our index identified as the 200 most disadvantaged are concentrated in three regions—Appalachia, South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt.
  • hese places share a history of intensive resource extraction and human exploitation not seen to the same degree elsewhere in the United States
  • In each place, this economic pattern emerged (or, in the case of the Cotton Belt, fully flourished) in the late 19th or early 20th century. In each place, one industry came to dominate the economy, a pattern that held, broadly, until the 1960s, when King Cotton, King Tobacco, King Coal, and South Texas agriculture, would bow to the twin forces of automation and global competition.
  • many places with large Native American populations ranked among the most disadvantaged in the nation
  • While visiting many of the nation’s most disadvantaged places, we set out to build on this work through historical research, ethnographic observations, and in-depth interviews.
  • For generations, the appearance of towns in South Texas followed a pattern of social hierarchy: sturdy wood-frame houses, paved streets, and enclosed sewers in the white neighborhoods; shacks, dirt roads, and privies in the Mexican parts of town. Forced to migrate to find work during the off-season, generations of Mexican American children lost their right to a decent education. Even today, adult-illiteracy rates in these places are among the highest in the nation.
  • in Leflore County, Mississippi, for example, Black residents told us that violence was the No. 1 problem they face. The rate of death due to interpersonal violence there was nearly four times the national average, and well above that of Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago
  • Throughout these regions, we saw the same themes emerge again and again—unequal schooling, the collapse of social infrastructure, violence, entrenched public corruption, and structural racism embedded in government programs.
  • Overall, poverty rates in these places are very low, babies are born healthy, people live to a ripe old age, and a low-income child usually has a similar chance of making it into the middle class as any other kid.
  • er they were forcibly relocated onto land mostly inhospitable to human habit
  • hey have enjoyed the lowest rates of violent crime, income inequality, and public corruption in the nation. These counties are unusually rich in social capital: Residents are connected to one another through volunteerism, membership in civic organizations, and participation in other community activities.
  • Counties that rank among those of greatest advantage began as agricultural communities with modestly sized farms, many originally secured through the 1862 Homestead Act that made landownership widely available. Many of these places have built on this history of broad-based wealth by making significant investments in schools, which has contributed to high graduation and college enrollment rates over generations.
  • One cannot fully understand the benefits enjoyed in America’s most advantaged places without considering the historic (and ongoing) exploitation of migrant labor that has gone on in them, mostly drawn from the U.S. border regions.
  • these communities have been more successful than most in preventing poverty, promoting health, and ensuring a level playing field for their children.
  • The upper Midwest is also overwhelmingly white. When we examined the relationship between whiteness and rank on the index, we found that a higher percentage of white residents is a significant predictor of a place’s rank, which is not at all surprising when one considers that the good schools and the good jobs have long been bestowed liberally on whites while being denied to Hispanic and Black Americans.
  • What makes the communities that are most advantaged unique is their histories as places of broad-based wealth. How different would conditions be in other parts of the country had they followed a similar, equitable course?
  • The lesson is that people seem to thrive—not always in high salaries but in health and life chances—when inequality is low; when landownership is widespread; when social connection is high; and when corruption and violence are rare.
  • The social leveling that is characteristic of communities in the upper Midwest is more than just a quaint cultural feature. It is the foundation of a community’s well-being. Until these regions’ virtues are shared nationwide, poverty and disadvantage will continue to haunt America.
Javier E

Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations - 0 views

www.noahpinion.blog/...ns-dont-get-rich-by-plundering

imperialism exploitation international economics politics history growth wealth national investment

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • One idea that I often encounter in the world of economic discussion, and which annoys me greatly, is that nations get rich by looting other nations.
  • This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunkin
  • it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The first thing to notice is that in the past, no country was rich.
  • even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago:
  • If you account for increasing population and look at total GDP, the increase is even more dramatic.
  • What this means is that whatever today’s rich countries did to get rich, they weren’t doing it in 1820.
  • Imperialism is very old — the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and many other empires all pillaged and plundered plenty of wealth. But despite all of that plunder, no country in the world was getting particularly rich, by modern standards, until the latter half of the 20th century.
  • Think about all the imperial plunder that was happening in 1820. The U.S. had 1.7 million slaves and was in the process of taking land from Native Americans. Latin American countries had slavery, as well as other slavery-like labor systems for their indigenous peoples. European empires were already exploiting overseas colonies.
  • But despite all this plunder and extraction of resources and labor, Americans and Europeans were extremely poor by modern standards.
  • With no antibiotics, vaccines, or water treatment, even rich people suffered constantly from all sorts of horrible diseases. They didn’t have cars or trains or airplanes to take them around. Their food was meager and far less varied than ours today. Their living space was much smaller, with little privacy or personal space. Their clothes were shabby and fell apart quickly.
  • At night their houses were dark, and without air conditioning they had trouble escaping the summer heat. They had to carry water from place to place, and even rich people pooped in outhouses or chamberpots. Everyone had bedbugs. Most water supplies were carried from place to place by hand.
  • They were plundering as hard as they could, but it wasn’t making them rich.
  • although Africa, Latin America, and Asia were closer to Europe in terms of living standards back then, they were all very, very poor by modern standards.
Javier E

Opinion | Yes, Nikki Haley, the Civil War Was About Slavery - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...haley-civil-war-slavery.html

civil war US slavery causes economics politics history

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery
  • it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?
  • The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • there’s little reason to enserf or enslave a worker (not quite the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is abundant and land is scarce, so that the amount that worker could earn if he ran away barely exceeds the cost of subsistence.
  • But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to pin workers in place, so they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what workers can produce — strictly speaking, their marginal product — and the cost of keeping them alive.
  • Yet serfdom wasn’t reimposed, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. One thought, however, is that holding people captive in order to steal the fruits of their labor isn’t easy.
  • In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages didn’t always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom
  • serfdom in the West had more or less withered away by around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners didn’t need to worry that their tenants and workers would leave in search of lower rents or higher wages.
  • But the Black Death caused populations to crash and wages to soar. In fact, for a while, real wages in Britain reached a level they wouldn’t regain until around 1870:
  • Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of U.S. levels on the eve of the Civil War:
  • Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”
  • Notice that Australia — another land-abundant, labor-scarce nation — more or less matched America; elsewhere, workers earned much less.
  • Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs
  • landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.
  • again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.
  • Because U.S. slavery was race-based, however, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves made more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places
  • Black people in the North were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.
  • As such, slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth.
  • Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth
  • Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded east, and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.
  • But Northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories
  • This wasn’t as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating slaveholders’ property, rather than in effect waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, it’s to voters’ credit that they did find slavery repugnant.
  • And this posed a problem for the South
  • Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies.
  • This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have grown increasingly frantic over the ability of women to travel to states where abortion rights remain; it’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if it can.
  • For a long time, the South actually did manage to exercise that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States away from the South to the North:
  • So did immigration, with very few immigrants moving to slave states.And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.
  • So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom
  • And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.
Javier E

Together We Stand, Divided We Fall - Clive Crook - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...264446

Obama politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • I criticize Obama's failure to seize the center ground of U.S. politics. This was partly a choice, in my view -- reflecting the fact that (unlike Bill Clinton) he's a progressive and not a centrist by instinct. But it was partly also a reaction to the determination of the GOP in Congress to defeat his every initiative. Ezra Klein says the Republicans' give-no-quarter strategy worked; similarly, E.J. Dionne says Democrats were more willing to compromise than the GOP. I agree with both points: When I criticize Obama, it's not because I think the GOP is blameless, but rather for the reverse: Obama failed to exploit the opportunity that the Republicans' intransigence afforded him. Yes, his opponents were reckless and unreasonable. Yes, they were moving abruptly to the right. Tactically speaking, that was Obama's chance. But to make the most of it, he had to plant his flag in the center the GOP was vacating. Instead, after Scott Brown, even after the midterms, he let Democrats in Congress get on with it and tacked left -- repeatedly casting his disagreement with the Republicans as a contest between his own (not especially popular) progressive vision and their militantly conservative vision, rather than between the commonsense pragmatism the country longs for and the other side's unreasoning extremism. That was the contrast he could and should have underscored. When I say he blew it, that's what I mean.
Javier E

Origins of C.I.A.'s Not-So-Secret Drone War in Pakistan - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ret-drone-war-in-pakistan.html

history war drone US pakistan torture

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.
  • Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
  • The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare. The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.
  • A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct.
  • John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority. “When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ ” he said, “I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’ “It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the C.I.A. to kill were quickly swept side.
grayton downing

Islamist Rebels' Gains in Syria Create Dilemma for U.S. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ria-create-dilemma-for-us.html

syria gains dilemma US culture crisis

shared by grayton downing on 28 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries and head a court that applies Islamic law. Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.
  • Syrian officials recognize that the United States is worried that it has few natural allies in the armed opposition and have tried to exploit that with a public campaign to convince, or frighten, Washington into staying out of the fight
  • The religious agenda of the combatants sets them apart from many civilian activists,
Javier E

Deficit Hawks Down - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rugman-deficit-hawks-down.html

deficit budget federal economics

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse.
  • Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.
  • First, they have cried wolf too many times. They’ve spent three years warning of imminent crisi
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • It should have been obvious that the deficit would come down as the economy recovered. But this point was hard to get across until deficit reduction started appearing in the data.
  • Now it has — and reasonable forecasts, like those of Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs, suggest that the federal deficit will be below 3 percent of G.D.P., a not very scary number, by 2015.
  • the third reason the deficit scolds have lost influence: the contrary doctrine, the claim that we need to practice fiscal austerity even in a depressed economy, has failed decisively in practice.
  • Consider, in particular, the case of Britain. In 2010, when the new government of Prime Minister David Cameron turned to austerity policies, it received fulsome praise from many people on this side of the Atlantic. For example, the late David Broder urged President Obama to “do a Cameron”; he particularly commended Mr. Cameron for “brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.” Sure enough, the sudden, severe medicine cut short Britain’s economic recovery, and threw the nation back into recession.
  • there was also clearly a lot of bad faith involved, as the scolds tried to exploit an economic (not fiscal) crisis on behalf of a political agenda that had nothing to do with deficits. And the growing transparency of that agenda is the fourth reason the deficit scolds have lost their clout.
James Flanagan

Chinese hackers outed themselves by logging into their personal Facebook accounts - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...eir-personal-facebook-accounts

shared by James Flanagan on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Mandiant, the U.S. firm contracted to investigate cyberattacks against U.S. corporations, says it was able to track an extensive hacking campaign back to the Chinese military in part by exploiting China’s own Web restrictions.
  • China’s “Great Firewall” blocks Web access to, among other things, Facebook and Twitter. People in China can get around the firewall, and very Web-savvy Chinese often do, by using something called VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks. But Chinese hackers already have access to what is presumably an extremely sophisticated VPN: the very servers they use for their foreign hacking.
  • according to Mandiant, some of the hackers got lazy. “The easiest way for them to log into Facebook and Twitter is directly from their attack infrastructure,” the company’s report explains. “Once noticed, this is an effective way to discover their real identities.” When the hacker uses the “attack” servers to log in to Twitter or Facebook, he or she unintentionally links the espionage servers with specific Facebook and Twitter accounts — in other words, with specific human beings.
Javier E

E-Notes: American Exceptionalism… Exposed - 0 views

www.fpri.org/...ll.americanexceptionalism.html

exceptionalism US history culture values ideology religion foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • exceptionalism, a concept that is not sui generis, not very old, and not even American in conception, has come to serve as code for the American Civil Religion that dare not speak its name.
  • far from believing their nation to be an exception to the rules of nature governing other men and nations, they both hoped their example would transform the whole world and feared that a lack of republican virtue would doom their experiment. In neither case would Americans stand apart from the rest of the human race.
  • the principal reason to banish the term from historical discourse is that the icky, polysyllabic, Latinate moniker did not even exist until the mid-20th century! No Puritan colonist, no founding Patriot, no Civil War statesman, no 19th century poet, pastor, or propagandist employed the word.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is “nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths.”[1] If it means that the U.S.A. was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the U.S.A. is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations—that (as Bismarck reportedly quipped) “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America”—then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall (“thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”) or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American Exceptionalism means that its power, values, and “indispensable” status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals, and allies alike are sure to push back.
  • he concluded that “these distortions should not blind us to the valid elements in the theory of exceptionalism.... America represents, as I have stressed above, the naked embodiment of the most dynamic elements of modern Western history
  • it was probably just a matter of time before somebody turned the Stalinist term of derision into a patriotic badge of honor and ait stamped it over all of American history. As it happened, that somebody was Max Lerner, a former editor of The Nation turned Cold War liberal and author of the one-thousand page America as a Civilization (1957).
  • Exceptionalism dovetailed perfectly with a new orthodoxy among political scientists that extolled what Harvard professor Louis Hartz called America’s Liberal Tradition.
  • the idea of an America set apart by Providence and endowed with a special mission to reform (not to say redeem) the whole human race dovetailed perfectly with the political rhetoric needed to rally Americans to lead the Free World in what amounted to a “holy war” against “godless Communism.”
  • Those were the years when the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” became a civilizational motto
  • how come computerized word-searches show that references to American Exceptionalism exploded—literally from hundreds to tens of thousands—only after the Cold War was over?
  • Those were the years when presidential rhetoric became steeped in what sociologist Robert Bellah called “God-Talk,”
  • the Cold War was over, globalization and multiculturalism were the new trends, and American identity got contested as never before. What made exceptionalist rhetoric ubiquitous was the fact it was now contested
  • the myth of American Exceptionalism, ironically inspired by Roman Catholics and Marxists, entered our lexicon as historical gloss for the campaign to persuade a skeptical, war-weary people that global commitments such as the UN, Truman Doctrine, and NATO were not really a break with tradition, but a fulfillment of the nation’s hoariest, holiest calling.
  • As early as 1630, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop implored his people ‘to Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.’”[12] I took for granted that my teachers and textbooks were right when they traced our national identity back to the Puritans beginning with Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity. Composed on board the ship Arbella bound for the New World, it seemed the elegant spiritual companion to the Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact.
  • he borrowed a New Testament image when he imagined New England as a city on a hill called to inspire the whole human race by its example.
  • the dogged literary excavations of historian Richard Gamble have now exposed it as myth. It turns out that Winthrop’s manuscript, far from serving as keynote address of the American pageant, was either unknown or forgotten until it turned up in the family archives in 1809. Donated to the New York Historical Society, it slept for another three decades before publication in a Massachusetts collection of colonial documents in 1838
  • The famous “City on a Hill” passage appears in the Sermon on the Mount as one in a list of metaphors Jesus uses to describe his disciples. He speaks of them as the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill, and a lamp not hidden under a bushel. The passage served as text for many a sermon preached by colonial divines, not least Jonathan Edwards. But those pastors were quoting the Bible to make theological points to Christian audiences; none was quoting Winthrop to make political points to American audiences. What has been lost “in the fierce crossfire of the battle to define the American identity,” Gamble writes, is “the story not of how the metaphor helped make America what it is today but the story of how America helped make the metaphor what it never was.”
  • not even the Puritans were “impelled by a unique or exceptional American impulse. On the contrary, they were products of European education, European culture, European piety, and they were engaged in a great European quarrel.
  • Americans have always been tempted to think that because they live in God’s Country they must be God’s Elect. Such faith has its uses, for instance to motivate a free and disparate people to rally and sacrifice in times of crisis. But it verges on idolatry from the standpoint of Biblical religion and—if exploited for partisan purposes—verges on heresy from the standpoint of civil religion.
rachelramirez

'Islamic State' Turning Into a Guerrilla Army, Top General Warns - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...la-army-top-general-warns.html

ISIS army politics US crisis policy

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • ‘Islamic State’ Turning Into a Guerrilla Army, Top General Warns
  • The capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq is now under assault. But ISIS isn’t going anywhere. Instead, the terror group is beginning to rebrand itself from a “caliphate” to an insurgency
  • It could well mean that there will be no “lasting defeat” of ISIS, even if it loses control of Iraq’s second-largest city, despite Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s claim of such a victory just four days ago
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Fighting that insurgency cost as much as $2 trillion, according to one estimate, and the lives of nearly 5,000 American troops
  • And it likely would fall to nascent Iraqi fighters, who just two years ago ditched their weapons and uniforms in Mosul, to repel ISIS and launch a counterinsurgency.
  • Volesky warned that such attacks in liberated areas are one reason the U.S. is advising the Iraqi and Kurdish forces charged with liberating Mosul to move deliberately. Fas
  • But there are alternatives. Al Qaeda, for example, has embraced local Sunnis, not terrorized them, allowing the group to return to areas and recruit members.
  • But that timetable could shift. In the last week, ISIS has lost a number of key cities in a matter of days. And in those battles, the group appears to be on the defensive before abandoning territory altogether. Most notably, ISIS lost the Syrian city of
  • After its defeat, ISIS said the promised apocalyptic battle would come at a later, unspecified date.
  • A series of attacks last week killed at least 55 people in Baghdad. And in July, at least 324 people died when a truck bomb struck a popular shopping area in central Baghdad, the deadliest attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.
  • But after two years of brutal reign, ISIS may not be able to attract Sunnis to its insurgency. Not after the terror group that robbed their cities, beheaded their citizens, and made crimes of smoking, shaving, and playing music.
  • Iraqi and Kurdish forces are now as far as 20 miles outside Mosul’s city center. The U.S. military has said the operation could last anywhere from weeks to months.
  • And it is possible that ISIS, in taking credit for bombings, is exploiting the frustration of other groups seeking to upend the current Iraqi government.
  • Or just as likely, the U.S. military is wrong. After all, last year, U.S. commanders forecasted an ISIS expansion in Libya, which instead flailed
Javier E

The Conservative Intellectual Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ative-intellectual-crisis.html

conservative conservatism intellectual crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • I feel very lucky to have entered the conservative movement when I did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I was working at National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. The role models in front of us were people like Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Russell Kirk and Midge Decter.
  • These people wrote about politics, but they also wrote about a lot of other things: history, literature, sociology, theology and life in general. There was a sharp distinction then between being conservative, which was admired, and being a Republican, which was considered sort of cheesy.
  • The Buckley-era establishment self-confidently enforced intellectual and moral standards. It rebuffed the nativists like the John Birch Society, the apocalyptic polemicists who popped up with the New Right, and they exiled conspiracy-mongers and anti-Semites
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The older writers knew that being cultured and urbane wasn’t a sign of elitism. Culture was the tool they used for social mobility. T.S. Eliot was cheap and sophisticated argument was free.
  • The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party.
  • First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise
  • Today’s dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment.
  • conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.
  • an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism
  • Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump.
  • Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.
  • Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else.
  • The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community.
  • recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party.
  • Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics
  • Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.
  • As conservatism has become a propagandistic, partisan movement it has become less vibrant, less creative and less effective.
  • That leads to the third big change. Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.
  • For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good
  • Trump demagogy filled the void.
  • This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound.
  • Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great
  • It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex.
  • Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).
  • A Trump defeat could cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth.
  • It was good to be a young conservative back in my day. It’s great to be one right now.
drewmangan1

London's City Faces a Post-Brexit Dilemma - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...post-brexit-dilemma-1477603209

crisis politics economics

shared by drewmangan1 on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • No industry cluster has better exploited the European Union’s single market than financial institutions in the City of London.
  • There are doubts whether this is achievable. “The EU has no incentive to create a hybrid model for the U.K. that allows it to protect the integrity of its financial-services trade with the EU from the outside,” said Mr. Rahman. “Whatever regime is created will be less beneficial [to the U.K.] than the status quo.”
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