Everyone should read this article from the Nation - ESPECIALLY today!

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050718&s=schwenninger

[getmeouttahere]

1. Thanks for posting this....

and I LOVE your screen name!

www.handsoffvenezuela.org

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

2. Thanks!

:thumbsup:

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

3. !

:kick:

[bloom]

4. Some clips...

"At worst, Islamic jihadism is a regional problem--in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. But as Gilles Kepel and other experts on Islamism have argued, even in the case of the Middle East, bin Laden-inspired groups have been remarkably unsuccessful in shaking any government (except for Afghanistan in the 1990s) or in galvanizing the Muslim masses into action. And they would have been even less successful had it not been for counterproductive American actions, especially the war in Iraq. It is not a coincidence that the governments that feel most vulnerable to Islamic jihadism are those that have had a close association with the United States, or on whose soil the United States has left the heaviest footprint....

The region, of course, does need democratic and economic reform, and Arabs are frustrated by Washington's support for authoritarian governments. But this does not mean that the lack of democracy is the principal cause--or that an American push for democratization is the principal cure--of terrorism and Islamic jihadism. In an exhaustive study, political scientist Robert Pape has concluded--correctly, in my view--that occupation is the single biggest cause of suicidal terrorism worldwide. And as Afshin Molavi of the New America Foundation has documented, what the people of the region want most is jobs and economic opportunity--understandably so, since unemployment runs as high as 25 percent in many Arab countries and even higher among the two-thirds of the population under 35....

In exhorting liberals to support occupation and nation-building in Iraq, Friedman perhaps unwittingly revealed the emptiness of the neoliberal hawk worldview: Liberalism from this point forward would be defined not by new programs to strengthen America at home but by noble activism abroad. The neoliberal agenda, in fact, has stood the traditional relationship between foreign policy and domestic society on its head. Traditionally, the overarching purpose of American foreign policy has been to shape a world order favorable to the American democratic way of life. But now our foreign policy ambitions are to define our domestic society, not vice versa. Thus in the view of many neoliberals, it is perfectly reasonable to spend more than $200 billion and to send young men and women to die in Iraq but unthinkable for budgetary reasons to commit even a smaller sum to rural or urban redevelopment at home...."
----

Are people calling neoconservatives "neoliberals" now. That's a good way to get everyone to hate the word "liberal".

[bloom]

5. This is what I've wondering about these days...

What is sensible global policy and what direction do the politicians of both parties want to take it? I don't think they want to include us in the conversation.


"In the 1990s the Clinton Administration embarked on a revolutionary agenda to liberalize the world's financial and trading system, an effort that continued until the world financial crisis of 1997-98. As seen by the Clintonites, it was thinkable to change decades of economic practice in East Asia in a few short years, but not at all thinkable to design economic policies that would insure rising wages and economic security in both developed and emerging economies. Globalization, we were told, was a natural and immutable force, and domestic society must bend to the demands of globalization, not vice versa.

Put together, this mix of neoliberal activism abroad and inaction at home has created a very unhealthy Democratic Party agenda, offering rank-and-file Democrats fantasies about American greatness and nobility while forcing them to accept ever more economic insecurity and lower wages. But what if middle-class prosperity--jobs, rising wages, economic security--is intimately connected to global stability, as Franklin Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes believed? Then what happens to the great liberal project globally? It gets overrun by rising disaffection at home and greater extremism abroad--which is exactly what is beginning to occur today.

...The lessons that Roosevelt and other progressives drew from the twenty-year crisis suggests a role for the United States much different from the one being pursued by the Bush Administration and proposed by the neoliberals: less one of warrior and preacher/proselytizer and more one of architect and builder, less one of imperial cop and more one of community leader or board chairperson."

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

6. Thanks, Bloom!

:thumbsup:

[Just Me]

9. That last quote characterizes roles I can fully embrace.

Why aren't we pursuing the role of builders and community leaders rather than pushing the same ole' brutal imperialistic exploitations that tear this world apart?

Why?

Hasn't history proven time and time again that the economic and violent terrorization of the oppressed by imperialists ALWAYS leads to the exacerbation of human suffering and is ALWAYS doomed to fail?

I am sick of the profiteering, powercrats screwing people. Why aren't they pressed to pursue a higher, more construction role to serve this best interests of the many rather than a few?

[bloom]

10. yeah

I've been reading "Collapse" by J. Diamond and so you get to thinking about what people in societies did or didn't do. Some societies have worked with a bottom-up approach and some with a top-down approach - but they need people with long term goals that are sustainable.

It seems to me that we are taught cooperation - but then people in our culture are rewarded for greed and profits at other's expense.

I think the only way to think long term is to think of the world as a community. But I think the people in charge - and this is born out by the PNAC documents - want to do what will benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us in this country and at the expense of everyone in the world. I think they will continue until someone stops them.

I think some people in the US assume we will be taken care of - as if these people represent us. I don't think so.

I think the PNAC people assume that there will a calamity and so they want to get on top of it (for their own wellbeing). But then they are making it all worse - for the rest of us and ultimately - I think - for themselves and their own future families.

[enough]

7. Will words like these ever be heard?

snip>

The overarching goal of a progressive foreign policy therefore must be to reconnect the United States to the world by working with others to build a more durable international system. The first element of such a policy must be to recognize that the world has outgrown American power, and that the maintenance of international peace and stability must be a shared goal and burden, not an American "right" or prerogative. If anything, the cost of the Iraq War and America's mounting international debt should put an end, once and for all, to the illusion that American power can sustain a unipolar world and that we can afford both our unipolar aspirations and a decent liberal society at home. We must therefore bring America's international pretensions back into line with our domestic needs and priorities. That means we should welcome and indeed encourage a multipolar world as the best way to share the burden of international order-keeping.

snip>

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

8. I don't know - I've been waiting.