I am happy to annouce that my friend Yolanda Carrington has her new blog up.

I wish I hadn’t been compelled to write them… and I wish they hadn’t been this true. This one for Memorial Day. Memory ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Guardian Unlimited ran a story today about the Haditha massacre. It called the Marines who slaughtered two dozen civilians “rogues.” The bad apple defense is back.

If you put Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha and I in a room together, we could probably identify with each other around our military experience, but we would agree on little else I’m afraid. If you accept the linear continuum model of political orientation (which I don’t, but at least it’s well known), then Murtha is center-right, and I am crimson-left.

That’s precisely why this accolade I am about to write to his integrity can be taken seriously.

By Carole Pateman

Democracy is at war with the renting of human beings, not with private property. David Ellerman

During the 1990s a number of political philosophers turned their attention to the concept of self-ownership. Much of the discussion is critical of libertarianism, [1] a political theory that goes hand-in-hand with neo-liberal economic doctrines, and global policies of structural adjustment and privatization. Attracta Ingram’s A Political Theory of Rights (1994) and G. A. Cohen’s Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995) are devoted to such criticism (and I shall focus much of my argument on their books). The consensus among most participants in the debate is that self-ownership is merely a way of talking about autonomy, but Ingram and Cohen go against the tide by arguing that the idea is inimical to autonomy and that an alternative is needed.

The last sentence in my first book, Hideous Dream, is, “You are certainly entitled to your opinion.”

It was mostly a memoir about the 1994 US invasion of Haiti, so I had no trouble really defending my own account of it, since I was there, it was about what I did there, I used notes I had taken there, and I knew pretty much what I was talking about.
The reference, however, was an ironic one, based on my experience — having been to Haiti then and having returned numerous times — of how many people were willing to offer up an opinion about Haiti when they obviously knew next to nothing about it, and could not likely point ot it on a map.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why there is not a national campaign to have CNN jettison Lou Dobbs, the racist demagogue who is leading a national charge to make undocumented workers the Jews of the Amerikan Reich. I’ve been waiting… and waiting… and waiting…

Nothing.

If we ever wanted a clear and current example of the utter uselessness of the Democratic Party, and why we need to just go ahead and build a party for leftists, oppressed nationalities, women and sexual minorities, this is it. General Michael V. Hayden was the architect of a clearly illegal effort to spy on millions of people without probable cause of anything, and he now represents the final push by the Department of Defense to consolidated its unitary control over intelligence. Nothing this administration has done smacks more of nascent fascism except the roundups and detentions of the unaccused.

…constructed as hierarchy.

Before everyone jumps on the latest catastrophist bandwagon, fueled by the wishful thinking that a Euro-denominated oil bourse will crash the empire, please read Engdahl’s linked article that patiently explains why this is horseshit… and that the Iranian oil bourse is NOT going to lead to the nuclear annihilation of Iran by the US. It’s a difficult read, but I still suggest people pick up Michael Hudson’s “Superimperialism,” actually study it, and learn how finance capital works now, instead of relying on these half-baked theories. I was one of the devotees of this tendency until I read Hudson’s book, and the other recommendation is Peter Gowan’s “The Global Gamble.” Leftish laziness, occasional anti-intellectualism, and our own lack of good finance-capital brainware can easily lead us to misapprehend how global capitalism now actually works. These deficiencies cannot be overcome with hit-and-run scholarship and impressionistic theory, which leave us prey to this kind of Chicken-Little-ism.