false dichotomy

Maxwell A Cameron

May 30, 2006 04:45 PM

Neither Humala nor García fits comfortably within Castañeda's dichotomy. García has sought to portray himself as a social democrat and an advocate of "responsible change." Foreign and local investors embrace him as the best candidate to retain Peru's pro-market, export-oriented economic model while pursuing reformist social policies. Yet APRA is the very embodiment of populism: it is a multi-class party led by a paternalistic leader who offers redistributive reforms in return for votes.

Humala is nowhere near as radical as Chávez. Nor does he have Morales's democratic credentials. His programme is unmistakably social democratic. It is called "the great transformation", in deference to Karl Polanyi, not Karl Marx. It proposes the development of internal markets, greater access to credit, support for agriculture, a renegotiation of the free trade agreement, food self-sufficiency, and the renegotiation of tax holidays or special royalty exemptions for foreign investors.

The programmatic differences between APRA and the UPP are so minimal that each side accuses the other of plagiarism

4. Which Note readers are smart enough to have pre-ordered "Applebee's America : How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community"? LINK

According to the group's Web site, Unity08 defines "crucial issues" facing the United States as: "global terrorism, our national debt, our dependence on foreign oil, the emergence of India and China as strategic competitors and/or allies, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, the corruption of Washington's lobbying system, the education of our young, the health care of all, and the disappearance of the American Dream for so many of our people." By contrast, the group considers "gun control, abortion and gay marriage" to be "important issues, worthy of debate and discussion in a free society, but not issues that should dominate or even crowd our national agenda."

Per the New York Observer's Niall Stanage, there's speculation from those close to Mayor Michael Bloomberg that he might consider making an '08 run as an independent.

The List: The World’s Water Crises

If oil was the resource of the 20th century, then the 21st century belongs to water. The lack of clean water and basic sanitation already curbs world economic growth by $556 billion a year, according the World Health Organization. FP looks at four countries struggling to quench their thirst.

Entering the Debate on Terrorism ... experience in government ... post-9/11 conference for law enforcement, defense, intelligence agencies ... ill-advised policies suggest ulterior motives ... unintended effects

The Phantom War ... trillions of dollars spent ... pre-9/11 hawks for Iraq war ... post-9/11 turning of the tide ... the juggernaut of the War on Terror ... framing the questions determines the answers ... hijacking the Madisonian system of government ... "red-teaming" exercises produce hopeless scenarios ... the real accomplishment of al Qaeda

False Leads ... loss of civil rights ... diversion of resources ... arrests and detainment of Middle Easterners ... no trace of any sleeper cells in the US ... irony of port-ownership flap

U.S. Power and Neo-Imperialism ... triggering event ... post-Cold War power ... manipulating the American public ... historical precedent in communist fear ... parallels to the War on Terror

Escaping the "War on Terror" Trap ... know your enemy ... cool the rhetoric ... Iran ... hope in changed leadership ... the emporer's clothes ... fear of speaking the truth ... the nuclear question ... finding the tipping point toward sane policy

"Since you're worried about the country becoming too anxious, too aroused for too long, why not advise the media not to keep showing the pictures of the planes knocking down the towers every day, several times a day? Psychology teaches us that the more people see things like that, especially if they're catastrophic, the more they think they're more likely than they are, which keeps the whole country on tenterhooks." And the answer I was given was, "Yes, we thought of that. In fact, we recommended it. And that recommendation was rejected by the highest political echelon." That gave me the notion that there were ulterior motives that were driving the operation of this so-called War on Terror that were not simply to stop another attack against the United States.

Exporting Pollution

We send it to Europe; they send it to Asia. But what happens when China starts sending more our way?

Dust and pollution travel great distances via systems called "warm conveyor belts," says Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric pollution expert at the University of Wisconsin. Conveyor belts occur when cold air contacts warm air, driving the warmer air—and any pollution it's carrying—upwards. Pollution and dust can also travel with passing storms, circling the globe on the jet stream 15 km up, until gravity or countervailing weather systems force them to descend. In 2001, satellites tracked a monster cloud of Gobi dust, which produced hazy skies across China and dumped 52,500 tons of particulate matter—the equivalent weight of 290 Boeing 747s—throughout the US.

According to an Argonne National Laboratory study, in 1999 Chinese power plants and metal smelting facilities emitted 536 tons of mercury, half of it in its elemental form. Any divalent ions leaving Asian smokestacks typically fall locally, but for the elemental variety, the right weather conditions could allow it to travel over the Pacific. At any point, it could oxidize into its divalent form and come to earth along with rain.

The lost man of the Right

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Toward the end of the decade Burnham argued with Leon Trotsky himself as to the nature of the Soviet State. Trotsky categorized Stalin's regime as a "workers state" that required unconditional support of socialists. Burnham saw in the Soviet Union the consolidation of power by a "new class" of managers, bureaucrats and the Red Army. By 1941 he had rejected socialism and published The Managerial Revolution.

Burnham extended his analysis of the "new class" to the rest of the West, seeing in National Socialism, Communism and the New Deal manifestations of the same phenomena: the seizure of cultural, economic and political power by a managerial class. In the United States this managerial class grew with the centralization and expansion of power in the executive branch, as well as the growth of the corporation as the dominant economic unit.

It became essential reading in business schools for its proposition that the scale and size of mass society made rule by the owner/entrepreneurial class, whose ideology was classical liberalism, impossible. Though wildly off in some specific predictions, the substantive trends in politics and business that it identified proved prophetic, and the book influenced thinkers on all sides of the political spectrum: John Kenneth Galbraith and John Maynard Keynes on the left, and Robert Nisbet, Samuel Francis and Irving Kristol on the right. Burnham's own thesis about the rise of the managerial class gave him little comfort as he saw in it a threat to liberty, the protection of which remained his essential concern.

In The Machievellians, Defenders of Freedom (1943) Burnham formulated a rational, scientific view of politics. Burnham promoted a tradition of political thought that assumed that men were primarily self-interested and that power was always obtained, exercised and maintained (by force or fraud) by elite minorities. The ideologies of these elites are not rational or verifiable but serve to justify, maintain and expand the power of the elite that espouses them. Burnham wrote:

The Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power . . . the primary object, in practice of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege . . . No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leader nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power... Only power restrains power. . . . When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident.

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS

The Real Cabal
by Samuel Francis

Between the time of President Bush’s factually flawed “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in 2002 and the “end” of the war with Iraq last spring,

purpose was not so much to “deconstruct” and “expose” the neocons as to define them as the real conservative opposition, the legitimate (though deplorable and vicious) “right” against which the polemics and political struggle of the left should be directed. The reason the left prefers the neocon “right” to a paleo alternative is, quite simply, that the neocons are essentially of the left themselves and, thus, provide a fake opposition against which the rest of the left can shadowbox and thereby perpetuate its own political and cultural hegemony unchallenged by any authentic right.

The “Straussians” soon began to displace such perennial demons of the left as Wall Street banks, oil companies, white supremacists, and fundamentalist Christians as the ultimate source of political evil, and one almost expected the witch hunters of the Southern Poverty Law Center to start profiling them.

The portrayal of the neocons in general and the Straussians in particular as the brains behind the American right became obvious in an article by William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune (May 15), in which he wrote that “The radical neoconservatives, who appeared in the 1960s, are the first seriously intelligent movement of the American right since the 19th century” and “the main intellectual influence on the neoconservatives has been the philosopher Leo Strauss.” Both statements are simply wrong.

Mr. Pfaff might have glanced at George Nash’s Conservative Intellectual Movement in Ameri

Neoconservatism emerges from three originally separate movements, among which the Straussians are one. The other two are the liberal-to-left mainstream intellectu-als of the 1950’s, most of whom were at one time known as “consensus liberals,” and the Social Democrats of the Sidney Hook stripe, who actually contributed most of the anticommunism of the neo-cons.

Paul Gottfried pointed out in what was probably the most sensible and accurate discussion of the Straussians this year (in the American Conservative in June), both Kristols took from Strauss what they wanted and cannot, in any serious sense, be described as his “disciples.”

Dr. Gottfried writes, Strauss “aims his fire at ‘historicism,’ the belief that historical circumstances determine values” and attacks several major figures in European intellectual history known as conservatives, including Edmund Burke. The attack on “historicism” is intended to reject the Burkean appeal to tradition and to insist, instead, on classical natural law and the universal ethical absolutes it contains.

It was, after all, from supposed universal natural rights that the slogan of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” derived, and the Straussian adulation of Abraham Lincoln follows precisely from Lincoln’s regurgitation of such Jacobin bromides.

but Jewishness (not necessarily the same as Judaism) has been at least as significant a factor in the shaping of the neoconservative mind as Roman Catholicism was in shaping the Old Right mind of National Review in the 1950’s.

Yet it would be a serious error to see neoconservatism as a purely Jewish phenomenon. The presence within it of such non-Jews as Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, Penn Kemble, and many others makes that clear enough, but so does the very success of the neocon movement. It did not succeed simply because a tiny “cabal” of Jews maneuvered themselves into positions of power. It succeeded because it performed certain functions and services for the non-Jewish conservatives and liberals who helped to push it and to give it credibility as a part of the American right.

For the right, the main service neoconservatives performed was to lend it a certain respectability that the right generally lacked—not only through academic and literary credentials but in the general tone they adopted, a tone that contributes to William Pfaf f’s sad delusion that the neoconservatives “are the first seriously intelligent movement of the American right since the 19th century.” Of course, it never dawned on the conservatives who welcomed them as allies, and soon as leaders, that the “respectability” the neocons brought them was one defined and conferred by the dominant left and therefore made it impossible for the right to challenge the left at all. Come to think of it, maybe the neocons are smarter than most on the Old Right after all.

And that is precisely the main function neoconservatism provides for the left—to serve as a political formula for preserving the New Deal-Great Society regime, even as the real conservatism began to rip it apart intellectually and to win political battles against it with Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan. The rise of neoconservatism has ensured that the liberal hegemony that should by now have been dismantled still thrives. There are zillions of non-Jews—blacks, Hispanics, and many, many non-Jewish whites—who have vested interests in making sure that hegemony is not endangered. Perhaps the most remarkable development in American political life in the late 20th century was that a small brigade of neoconservatives enabled them to preserve it.

The Other Side of Modernism," Samuel Francis

What the American Right must do to keep this Presidency from imploding

By Charles Lewis

3. It is not "corporate America" that deserves our bashing, but multinationals, including traitorous American-based corporations who have armed the likes of China, with a pass and perks from whatever party's administration happens to be in power. "Corporate America" is a leftist slur depicting capitalism as evil.

It is amazing how neolibs no longer condemn the still very active communist imperialism (China, Russia, North Korea, Latin America, elsewhere) or Islamist imperialism (Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, others) - only our own supposed quest to spread the American system worldwide (would that this were the extent of our worries).

7. Iraq is no "war for oil." If W cared about oil for American companies, he would have railroaded through ANWR as he railroaded through CAFTA, and gas would not be $3 or so a gallon with no end in site to the carnage. Iraq - as it is being carefully contorted - is a war for the humiliation of America, a war for the destruction of our credibility, a war to strengthen the UN's grip on us.

Charles Lewis is a published author with nine textbooks about to be released by Beacon University Press.

he lied when he said we found none, lied to protect his bosses in the One World movement - at the UN and elsewhere. Ask David Gaubatz, John Shaw, Richard Miniter, and others whose proof was suppressed by this "Surrogate Democrat" administration.

The Threats to Sustainable Democracy

The Four Fundamentalisms

By ROBERT JENSEN

The most important words anyone said to me in the weeks immediately after September 11, 2001, came from my friend James Koplin. While acknowledging the significance of that day, he said, simply: "I was in a profound state of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that happened on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like to me."

the so-called "war on terror," which has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen U.S. control over the strategically crucial resources of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges is aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world.

The antidote to fundamentalism is humility, that recognition of just how contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls "an ignorance-based worldview," an approach to world that acknowledges that what we don't know dwarfs what we do know about a complex world.

Economic fundamentalism, synonymous these days with market fundamentalism, presents another grave threat. After fall of the Soviet system, the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question. The dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the United States is not simply that it is the best among competing economic systems, but that it is the only sane and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world.

Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology.

Religious, national, and economic fundamentalisms are dangerous. They are systems of thought -- or, more accurately, systems of non-thought; as Wes Jackson puts it, "fundamentalism takes over where thought leaves off" --

We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naïve return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back from our most dangerous missteps.

What is that path? Tracking the four fundamentalisms, we can see some turns we need to make.

Technologically: We need to stop talking about progress in terms that reflexively glorify faster and more powerful devices, and instead adopt a standard for judging progress based on the real effects on humans and the wider world of which we are a part.

Economically: We need to stop talking about growth in terms of more production and adopt a standard for economic growth and development based on meeting human needs.

Nationally: We need to stop talking about national security and the national interest -- code words for serving the goals of the powerful -- and focus on people's interests in being secure in the basics: food, shelter, education, and communal solidarity.

Religiously: We need to stop trying to pin down God. We can understand God as simply the name we give to that which is beyond our ability to understand, and recognize that the attempt to create rules for how to know God is always a failed project.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

Medicine's Mirage

the source: “Conservatives, Liberals, and Medical Progress” by Daniel Callahan, in The New Atlantis, Fall 2005.

Economists calculate that “progress-driven technological innovation”—both the development of new technologies and the intensified use of older ones—is responsible for up to half of the annual increase in health care expenses. Cer­tain drugs to treat colorectal cancer, for example, can cost up to $161,000 for a 12-week course of treatments, yet the gain can be as little as seven additional months of survival. Society is rightly reluctant to say such added months of life “aren’t worth it,” Callahan acknowledges. But the dollars spent on “expensive medications at the end of life” could be spent instead on “other goods and obligations, including the obligation to provide basic medical care to the poor.”

Meanwhile, says Callahan, there should be “more research and clinical work on the disabilities and frailties of old age,” and more emphasis on long-term care. “In caring for the elderly, we should focus on quality of life, not length of life. . . . At age 75, I do not look for medicine to give me more years, but I do want my remaining years to be good years, with mind and body reasonably intact.”

Synopsis
Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results, from Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. The extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes seems to mock our best efforts to understand the forces that drive development in the world economy. In this groundbreaking book, David Harvey shows how the disciplines of historical geography yield decisive new insights into the workings of global capitalism, and introduces the concept of uneven geographical development as a revelatory perspective on the forces which create economic success or failure.

The re-periodisation of European history achieved in the last few decades is now complete in all but name. The idea of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries as a uniquely formative period for the creation of a European identity no longer surprises academic readers.

Spellbound – the improbable story of English spelling

Tad Brennan, The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate.   Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2005.  Pp. 340.  ISBN 0-19-925626-8.  $45.00.  

The Birth of Europe

Jacques Le Goff École Pratique des Hautes-Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

John Pike of Global Security, a Washington-based intelligence clearinghouse, was less polite in his description of OSP.

“It was created to, as Dean Acheson urged Harry Truman, to scare hell out of the American people by making things a little bit clearer than the truth,” he said.

Lt. Col. Barry E. Venable, a spokesman for the Pentagon, confirmed the creation of the directorate for Iran in both a phone conversation and an email message.

“As the State Department stated in early March (Daily Press Brief, Mar. 3), the U.S. Government is organizing itself better to address what Secretary Rice called ‘one of the great challenges for the United States, a strategic challenge for the United States and for those who desire peace and freedom,’” Venable wrote.