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struggle4progress
struggle4progress's Journal
struggle4progress's Journal
July 26, 2013
Here's a DU thread from mid-June, based on one of Declan's pieces
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023024565
Nadler denied Declan's version of events, which was based on a thoroughly dishonest partial reading of a hearing transcript:
Jerrold Nadler Does Not Think the NSA Can Listen to U.S. Phone Calls
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023027901
The website's parent company retracted the story:
Congressman denies report claiming NSA can listen to calls without warrants
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014510665
Declan McCullagh has a history of making stuff up
Here's a DU thread from mid-June, based on one of Declan's pieces
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023024565
Nadler denied Declan's version of events, which was based on a thoroughly dishonest partial reading of a hearing transcript:
Jerrold Nadler Does Not Think the NSA Can Listen to U.S. Phone Calls
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023027901
The website's parent company retracted the story:
Congressman denies report claiming NSA can listen to calls without warrants
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014510665
July 21, 2013
It's captioned "Former President Jimmy Carter steps to the podium to discuss US election reform at the Carter Center, Wednesday, July 17, 2013, in Atlanta. Carter gave the keynote remarks Wednesday along with Ambassador Janez Lenarcic of the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. The organization is presenting its final report for improving the US electoral process. (AP photo / David Goldman)"
The photo is Carter, rising at the Carter Center, to talk about unchecked political contributions
http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/AS7ZKRL9vadooU4b.zofzw--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTYyODtweW9mZj0wO3E9ODU7dz05NjA-/It's captioned "Former President Jimmy Carter steps to the podium to discuss US election reform at the Carter Center, Wednesday, July 17, 2013, in Atlanta. Carter gave the keynote remarks Wednesday along with Ambassador Janez Lenarcic of the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. The organization is presenting its final report for improving the US electoral process. (AP photo / David Goldman)"
Carter: Unchecked contributions 'legal bribery'
RAY HENRY July 17, 2013
ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday that unchecked political contributions are "legal bribery of candidates" and denounced a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made possible unlimited spending by outside groups, including corporations and labor unions ...
He said the U.S. Supreme Court made a "very stupid" decision by removing limits on independent campaign spending by businesses and labor unions, which the court found was a constitutionally protected form of political speech. The Democrat said that he and his Republican opponents used public financing to run their general election campaigns in 1976 and 1980 ...
"I would say that it's almost impossible for a candidate, like I was back in those early days or others even, to be considered seriously as a candidate to represent the Democratic or Republican parties as nominee if you can't raise $100 million or $200 million from contributors, many of whom know that they are making an investment in how they are going to be treated by the winner after the election is over," Carter said.
Carter said that while elections in the United States once set an example for the world, the country's reputation diminished in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in a Florida vote recount, effectively deciding the election in favor of Republican George W. Bush. He also criticized GOP-led state legislatures for changing polling hours in ways that Carter said were meant to frustrate likely Democratic voters ...
http://news.yahoo.com/carter-unchecked-contributions-legal-bribery-165226324.html
RAY HENRY July 17, 2013
ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday that unchecked political contributions are "legal bribery of candidates" and denounced a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made possible unlimited spending by outside groups, including corporations and labor unions ...
He said the U.S. Supreme Court made a "very stupid" decision by removing limits on independent campaign spending by businesses and labor unions, which the court found was a constitutionally protected form of political speech. The Democrat said that he and his Republican opponents used public financing to run their general election campaigns in 1976 and 1980 ...
"I would say that it's almost impossible for a candidate, like I was back in those early days or others even, to be considered seriously as a candidate to represent the Democratic or Republican parties as nominee if you can't raise $100 million or $200 million from contributors, many of whom know that they are making an investment in how they are going to be treated by the winner after the election is over," Carter said.
Carter said that while elections in the United States once set an example for the world, the country's reputation diminished in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in a Florida vote recount, effectively deciding the election in favor of Republican George W. Bush. He also criticized GOP-led state legislatures for changing polling hours in ways that Carter said were meant to frustrate likely Democratic voters ...
http://news.yahoo.com/carter-unchecked-contributions-legal-bribery-165226324.html
July 21, 2013
What have they done to the rain?
July 21, 2013
Cotton Mill Colic
July 21, 2013
Waiting for a train
all around the water tank
waiting for a train
a thousand miles away from home
sleeping in the rain
I walked up to a brakeman
just to give him a line of talk
he said "if you got money boy
I'll see that you don't walk"
I haven't got a nickel
not a penny can I show
"Get off! get off! you railroad bum"
and slammed the boxcar door ...
July 21, 2013
Vietnam Blues
... o god if you can hear my prayer now
please help my brothers over in vietnam
o god if you can hear my prayer now
please help my brothers over in vietnam
the poor boys fightin
killin and hidin all in holes,
maybe killin their own brother
they do not know ...
July 21, 2013
They call us the workin class
I was workin in a factory
on the edge of town
the company moved to Mexico
they closed the factory down
my next door neighbor
he got a PhD
now he's in the unemployment line
standin next to me ...
July 20, 2013
Hard tack, come again no more
let us close our game of poker
take our tin cups in our hand
as we all stand by the cook's tent door
as dried monies of hard crackers
are handed to each man
o! hard tack! come again no more!
tis the song, the sigh of the hungry
hard tack! hard tack! come again no more!
many days you have lingered
upon our stomachs sore.
o! hard tack! come again no more! ...
July 20, 2013
The Sons of Molly McGuire
when the wind blows cold at night past the breaker melancholy
if you stand in the dark
with your ears to the wind
you'll hear the sons of molly
deep in the dark of the old mine shaft
you'll smell the smoke and the fire
and the whisper low from the mine below is the ghost of molly mcguire ...
so i'll tell ya boys
alex campbell is my name and no pistol did i fire
but i will fall from the gallows wall
just for being a molly mcguire
and i will die with my head held high
i fought for the men below
those men who work and mine and die down in the black hell below
July 20, 2013
I own several of Mr Hedges' books, and in parts I find them excellent. I do not find them excellent in their entirety, however, and the quote above, from the Theses on Feuerbach, summarizes rather well some of my disappointments with Hedges
Hedges originally trained in seminary and afterwards opted for a career as a war-correspondent. Such work is dangerous, of course, and Hedges himself has discussed in print the curious addiction to excitement and danger that prevented many of his fellow war-reporters from changing careers before their luck fatally changed. His political views, I think, often show limitations plausibly associated with his background: he sometimes exhibits a quasi-religious absolutism, together with a continuing need for the excitement of life-and-death struggles. If he had a poetic temperament, and a good ear for popular moods, such tendencies might have produced a brilliant rhetorician, with the ability to stir people to action. And if his substantial analytical ability were not so derailed by his tendency to absolutism and his craving for excitement, he might have become a substantial commentator on current events
I tend to read Hedges because, from a purely philosophical PoV, I frequently rather agree with him. But here, precisely, is the danger. One of the characteristics of popular culture in America -- I say America, because I really cannot speak of other places -- is that political action is routinely confused with personal opinion: people (for example) claim to "support" something when they mean only that in some vague emotional manner they agree philosophically with the position they think is being discussed, while in reality they do nothing whatsoever material to support any definite political organizing around the issue. That is, as remarked in the Theses on Feuerbach:
This American habit -- of believing we have "supported" something once we stated our opinions about it -- safeguards the status quo, because it ensures that we feel satisfied merely to think and discuss issues without inconveniencing ourselves by any dedication to concrete activity. In accordance with this tendency, we find ourselves arguing about the "meaning" of "news" stories that quote only two words from extensive remarks, or that provide only an incomplete and superficial background to some event -- conditions under which, of course, we actually learn nothing at all about the real world
Hedges at his worst plays into this habit, with "analyses" that are actually mere slogans without much content, such as "Obama's assault on civil liberties is worse than Bush" or "it's just a game, because whether it's Bush or whether it's Obama, Goldman Sachs wins always"
Like many people, Hedges' view of political action does not extend further than -- expressing an opinion. He has no background trying to organize people to do anything for a concrete result, and so his political views are not tethered to any particular reality by any experiment. He wants "to SOLVE the world" and has not sullied himself in the dull and tedious work of trying "to CHANGE it."
Unsurprisingly, he has no strategy beyond "make the power elite terrified of us." And his tactics are completely disconnected from this extraordinarily simplistic strategy: "I wrote Nader's major policy speeches for him in 2008 and voted for Jill Stein in the last election .. as a .. protest vote." But something much more sophisticated than that is needed
"Philosophers have SOLVED the world -- but the real problem is to CHANGE it"
Theses On Feuerbach (1845)I own several of Mr Hedges' books, and in parts I find them excellent. I do not find them excellent in their entirety, however, and the quote above, from the Theses on Feuerbach, summarizes rather well some of my disappointments with Hedges
Hedges originally trained in seminary and afterwards opted for a career as a war-correspondent. Such work is dangerous, of course, and Hedges himself has discussed in print the curious addiction to excitement and danger that prevented many of his fellow war-reporters from changing careers before their luck fatally changed. His political views, I think, often show limitations plausibly associated with his background: he sometimes exhibits a quasi-religious absolutism, together with a continuing need for the excitement of life-and-death struggles. If he had a poetic temperament, and a good ear for popular moods, such tendencies might have produced a brilliant rhetorician, with the ability to stir people to action. And if his substantial analytical ability were not so derailed by his tendency to absolutism and his craving for excitement, he might have become a substantial commentator on current events
I tend to read Hedges because, from a purely philosophical PoV, I frequently rather agree with him. But here, precisely, is the danger. One of the characteristics of popular culture in America -- I say America, because I really cannot speak of other places -- is that political action is routinely confused with personal opinion: people (for example) claim to "support" something when they mean only that in some vague emotional manner they agree philosophically with the position they think is being discussed, while in reality they do nothing whatsoever material to support any definite political organizing around the issue. That is, as remarked in the Theses on Feuerbach:
... reality .. is considered only as the object of contemplation, but not as .. human activity ... Man must prove the truth .. of his thinking in practice ...
This American habit -- of believing we have "supported" something once we stated our opinions about it -- safeguards the status quo, because it ensures that we feel satisfied merely to think and discuss issues without inconveniencing ourselves by any dedication to concrete activity. In accordance with this tendency, we find ourselves arguing about the "meaning" of "news" stories that quote only two words from extensive remarks, or that provide only an incomplete and superficial background to some event -- conditions under which, of course, we actually learn nothing at all about the real world
Hedges at his worst plays into this habit, with "analyses" that are actually mere slogans without much content, such as "Obama's assault on civil liberties is worse than Bush" or "it's just a game, because whether it's Bush or whether it's Obama, Goldman Sachs wins always"
Like many people, Hedges' view of political action does not extend further than -- expressing an opinion. He has no background trying to organize people to do anything for a concrete result, and so his political views are not tethered to any particular reality by any experiment. He wants "to SOLVE the world" and has not sullied himself in the dull and tedious work of trying "to CHANGE it."
Unsurprisingly, he has no strategy beyond "make the power elite terrified of us." And his tactics are completely disconnected from this extraordinarily simplistic strategy: "I wrote Nader's major policy speeches for him in 2008 and voted for Jill Stein in the last election .. as a .. protest vote." But something much more sophisticated than that is needed
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