I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third — ["Treason!" cried the Speaker] — may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.
Suspicion is a virtue as long as its object is the public good, and as long as it stays within proper bounds. ... Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.
Patrick Henry (29 May 1736 – 6 June 1799) was a prominent figure in the American Revolution, known and remembered primarily for his stirring oratory.
The Founding Fathers were strong advocates of republican values, particularly Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, which required men to put civic duty ahead of their personal desires. Men had a civic duty to be prepared and willing to fight for the rights and liberties of their countrymen and countrywomen. John Adams, writing to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, agreed with some classical Greek and Roman thinkers in that "Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." He continued:
"There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society."
Ice Age Soon? http://youtu.be/UuYTcnN7TQk
An Unlikely but Relevant Risk - The Solar Killshot: http://youtu.be/X0KJ_dxp170
TODAY's LINKS:
Disappearing Sunspots: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/...
WUWT Sun Article: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/09...
Ulysses Solar Data: http://ut-images.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-...
A huge copper mine planned for the U.S. state of Arizona is causing deep divisions.
Supporters say it will create thousands of much-needed jobs.
However, environmentalists say it will scar the landscape and create excess pollution.
other POV on policy
By John Weeks
Not the closest of friends it would appear. Outgoing President Herbert Hoover and president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, driving to the inauguration, 4 March 1933.
On a cold day in March 1933, Americans heard their new president tell
them things they hardly expected from one of the country's richest men,
Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. …
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.
[Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933]
"Practices of the unscrupulous money changers", "falsity of material wealth", "an end to…selfish wrongdoing" - one of America's 1% shoveling out a real load of rhetorical rubbish, right?
Fancy phrases to cover the real agenda, saving US capitalism from itself, right? All those so-called progressive reforms of the New Deal resulted from a split within the bourgeoisie and had nothing to do with the people, right?
In these dark days of misery-inducing budget cuts and venal politicians it is difficult for most Americans to believe that it was ever otherwise. Perhaps even more difficult to believe is that our country was once quite different because of what the 99% could and did do, not because of bickering and rivalry within the 1%.
FDR became president on March 4, 1933, riding the rising wave of the 99%, not the fear-driven and grudging reformism of part of the US capitalist class, and he surfed that wave politically until war broke out in late 1941 (see chart). FDR's current detractors, as well as many of his contemporaries, will provide you with a litany of his political sins in an attempt to convince people that a progressive American was a naïve illusion.
FDR Rides the Union Tide, 1930-1941 Union membership and person days lost to strikes (both in millions)
Union statistics and strike days from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics.
For example, they tell us that Roosevelt was a failure in reviving the economy, because in 1940 on the eve of the war, the unemployment rate remained at almost fifteen percent. The detractors usually fail to add that the rate had been 25 percent in 1933. Unemployment declined because during 1933-1940 the US economy grew at an annual average of almost eight percent per year, its fastest peace time growth in the twentieth century or so far in the twenty-first (and that includes the 3.5 percent decline in 1938).
A judgment about whether on not FDR "saved capitalism" depends on your assessment of whether it faced impending demise. This accusation or compliment on FDR's policies tends to go hand in hand with the suggestion that he made it into the White House only because part of the capital class wanted him there.
If the chart does not create some doubt about that enlightened-faction-of-the-bourgeoisie argument, it is worth recalling that FDR had hardly warmed the seat in the Oval Office before the 1% Americans set in motion a plot to remove him. This coup was no nutty conspiracy by fringe right-wingers, and may have had as its moving spirit Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush (father of one president and grandfather of another).
The coup-organizers planned to depose Roosevelt, have him declared unfit for office due to poor health, and replaced by retired Marine Corp general Smedley Butler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler). Rather to the bad luck of these US Bonapartists, the general turned out to be a patriot. In one of those twists of history you could not make up, Butler's blew the whistle on the coup before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which would later devote itself to a quite different type of investigation. Rumor has it that FDR gave the coup-sters the choice of prosecution or abandoning their reactionary fight against the New Deal (Listen to a detailed description of the coup on the BBC program originally aired in July 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml, and read about it at http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2007/240707fascistcoup.htm).
Millions of working class Americans took to the streets in the early 1930, demanding change. They were the ones that took Roosevelt to the White House, not a faction of the capitalists. Did those Americans get any pay-back for their efforts? Let's start with the following:
14 August 1935, FDR signs the Social Security Act for the 99%, not for the 1%.
I can recall canvassing in 1962 for a progressive making a serious challenge for the governorship of Texas, Don Yarborough, who came within twenty thousand votes of beating John Connally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Yarborough). With trepidation I went into an extremely modest house in the rural environs of Austin having little hope of finding votes for a progressive. There lived a rural proletarian family (aka "poor white trash" or "cedar choppers") with two photographs on the wall. They were, I was told, the two greatest Americans of their lifetime, "Franklin D" and "Jimmy" (the latter, James Allred, was the most progressive governor of Texas in the twentieth century, more so than the better known Ann Richards, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Allred).
FDR, Texas Governor Jimmy Allred and Congressman Lyndon Johnson, May 1937. The reader might image what the right wingers said about Jimmy's surname. He was governor for two 2 year terms 1935-39.
The central political problem in the United States today is not the strength of financial capital, but the weakness of the labor movement. In the early 1930s the American labor movement went from insular craft based weakness to broadly-based inclusive unionism, without the legal protection of the NLRA that its militancy would force through Congress.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt won election as the thirty-second president of the United States over the bitter opposition of US capital. Any major capitalist that supported him in 1932 had with few exceptions abandoned him soon after. While campaigning for re-election in October 1936, FDR told his audience in the old Madison Square Garden,
Listen to FDR's 1993 Inaugural Address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inauguration_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt
-
Perchlorate is an environmental pollutant primarily associated with
releases by defense contractors, military operations and aerospace
programs, as it is a key ingredient in rocket fuel.
Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third — ["Treason!" cried the Speaker] — may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.
Suspicion is a virtue as long as its object is the public good, and as long as it stays within proper bounds. ... Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.
Patrick Henry (29 May 1736 – 6 June 1799) was a prominent figure in the American Revolution, known and remembered primarily for his stirring oratory.
The Founding Fathers were strong advocates of republican values, particularly Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, which required men to put civic duty ahead of their personal desires. Men had a civic duty to be prepared and willing to fight for the rights and liberties of their countrymen and countrywomen. John Adams, writing to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, agreed with some classical Greek and Roman thinkers in that "Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." He continued:
"There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society."
Published on Mar 5, 2013
The REAL Climate Changer: http://youtu.be/_yy3YJBOw_oIce Age Soon? http://youtu.be/UuYTcnN7TQk
An Unlikely but Relevant Risk - The Solar Killshot: http://youtu.be/X0KJ_dxp170
TODAY's LINKS:
Disappearing Sunspots: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/...
WUWT Sun Article: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/09...
Ulysses Solar Data: http://ut-images.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-...
Published on Mar 5, 2013
Greg Palast: Congress should extend Voting Rights Act to all states before Supreme Court overturns it
Published on Mar 5, 2013
Jame Boyce: New book exposes relationship between environmental degradation and inequality of wealth and power
Published on Mar 4, 2013
In Egypt, violent clashes have
continued in the city of Port Said. A football riot there last year
left 74 Cairo fans dead, and after the trials of the alleged
perpetrators, the government has struggled to maintain order. Now what
some locals see as a heavy-handed police crackdown is adding to the
city's tensions. Al Jazeera's Anita McNaught reports from Port Said.
Published on Mar 4, 2013
A public inquiry into whether
British soldiers committed crimes in Iraq nine years ago is due to start
shortly. The investigation will determine whether UK troops killed
civilians. Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee reports from London.
Supporters say it will create thousands of much-needed jobs.
However, environmentalists say it will scar the landscape and create excess pollution.
other POV on policy
Economics for the 99% A Day for the 99%: 4 March 1933
Monday, 04 March 2013 08:05
Not the closest of friends it would appear. Outgoing President Herbert Hoover and president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, driving to the inauguration, 4 March 1933.
Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. …
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.
[Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933]
"Practices of the unscrupulous money changers", "falsity of material wealth", "an end to…selfish wrongdoing" - one of America's 1% shoveling out a real load of rhetorical rubbish, right?
Fancy phrases to cover the real agenda, saving US capitalism from itself, right? All those so-called progressive reforms of the New Deal resulted from a split within the bourgeoisie and had nothing to do with the people, right?
In these dark days of misery-inducing budget cuts and venal politicians it is difficult for most Americans to believe that it was ever otherwise. Perhaps even more difficult to believe is that our country was once quite different because of what the 99% could and did do, not because of bickering and rivalry within the 1%.
FDR became president on March 4, 1933, riding the rising wave of the 99%, not the fear-driven and grudging reformism of part of the US capitalist class, and he surfed that wave politically until war broke out in late 1941 (see chart). FDR's current detractors, as well as many of his contemporaries, will provide you with a litany of his political sins in an attempt to convince people that a progressive American was a naïve illusion.
FDR Rides the Union Tide, 1930-1941 Union membership and person days lost to strikes (both in millions)
Union statistics and strike days from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics.
For example, they tell us that Roosevelt was a failure in reviving the economy, because in 1940 on the eve of the war, the unemployment rate remained at almost fifteen percent. The detractors usually fail to add that the rate had been 25 percent in 1933. Unemployment declined because during 1933-1940 the US economy grew at an annual average of almost eight percent per year, its fastest peace time growth in the twentieth century or so far in the twenty-first (and that includes the 3.5 percent decline in 1938).
A judgment about whether on not FDR "saved capitalism" depends on your assessment of whether it faced impending demise. This accusation or compliment on FDR's policies tends to go hand in hand with the suggestion that he made it into the White House only because part of the capital class wanted him there.
If the chart does not create some doubt about that enlightened-faction-of-the-bourgeoisie argument, it is worth recalling that FDR had hardly warmed the seat in the Oval Office before the 1% Americans set in motion a plot to remove him. This coup was no nutty conspiracy by fringe right-wingers, and may have had as its moving spirit Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush (father of one president and grandfather of another).
The coup-organizers planned to depose Roosevelt, have him declared unfit for office due to poor health, and replaced by retired Marine Corp general Smedley Butler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler). Rather to the bad luck of these US Bonapartists, the general turned out to be a patriot. In one of those twists of history you could not make up, Butler's blew the whistle on the coup before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which would later devote itself to a quite different type of investigation. Rumor has it that FDR gave the coup-sters the choice of prosecution or abandoning their reactionary fight against the New Deal (Listen to a detailed description of the coup on the BBC program originally aired in July 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml, and read about it at http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2007/240707fascistcoup.htm).
Millions of working class Americans took to the streets in the early 1930, demanding change. They were the ones that took Roosevelt to the White House, not a faction of the capitalists. Did those Americans get any pay-back for their efforts? Let's start with the following:
- unemployment compensation, which hardly existed before 1933;
- retirement pensions indexed to the inflation, the most important anti-poverty program in the history of the United States;
- strict regulation of the financial sector that prevented a banking crisis in the United States for the next fifty years (i.e., until it was amended in the late 1970s);
- public works programs employing millions, part of which brought electricity to America's rural poor (hear Woody Guthrie sing "Roll on Colombia" about the Grand Coolee Dam, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sH6CcsTafw); and
- legal protection of organized labor, facilitating the almost continuous growth from less than 4 million workers in 1935 when the National Labor Relations Act passed, to 21 million in 1980 when membership peaked (now down to about ten million).
14 August 1935, FDR signs the Social Security Act for the 99%, not for the 1%.
I can recall canvassing in 1962 for a progressive making a serious challenge for the governorship of Texas, Don Yarborough, who came within twenty thousand votes of beating John Connally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Yarborough). With trepidation I went into an extremely modest house in the rural environs of Austin having little hope of finding votes for a progressive. There lived a rural proletarian family (aka "poor white trash" or "cedar choppers") with two photographs on the wall. They were, I was told, the two greatest Americans of their lifetime, "Franklin D" and "Jimmy" (the latter, James Allred, was the most progressive governor of Texas in the twentieth century, more so than the better known Ann Richards, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Allred).
FDR, Texas Governor Jimmy Allred and Congressman Lyndon Johnson, May 1937. The reader might image what the right wingers said about Jimmy's surname. He was governor for two 2 year terms 1935-39.
The central political problem in the United States today is not the strength of financial capital, but the weakness of the labor movement. In the early 1930s the American labor movement went from insular craft based weakness to broadly-based inclusive unionism, without the legal protection of the NLRA that its militancy would force through Congress.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt won election as the thirty-second president of the United States over the bitter opposition of US capital. Any major capitalist that supported him in 1932 had with few exceptions abandoned him soon after. While campaigning for re-election in October 1936, FDR told his audience in the old Madison Square Garden,
…[In the 1920s] this Nation was afflicted
with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. Powerful
influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its
doctrine that government is best which is most indifferent.
It took them over thirty years, but restore such a government those
"powerful influences" have. They did it by weakening, then crushing the
core of progressive politics, the labor movement. Therein lies a
lesson for all progressives.Listen to FDR's 1993 Inaugural Address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inauguration_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt
Posted: 04 Mar 2013 04:58 PM PST
4 March 2013
-
Perchlorate is an environmental pollutant primarily associated with
releases by defense contractors, military operations and aerospace
programs, as it is a key ingredient in rocket fuel.
It
is now found in virtually all humans tested, and it is continually
making its way up the food chain through ground and drinking water, into
feed and edible plants, animals products, milk and breast milk -
contaminating conventional and organically grown food, alike.
It is now distributed widely throughout North America.
It is now distributed widely throughout North America.
Last Week on Jadaliyya
 |
Last Week on Jadaliyya (Feb 25-Mar 3)
Jadaliyya Editors
This
is a selection of what you might have missed on Jadaliyya last week. It
also includes a list of the most read articles and roundups.
Progressively, we will be featuring more content on our "Last Week on
Jadaliyya" series.
Most Read Last Week on Jadaliyya
Death of the Dissertation?
The Legal Framework of Second Class Citizenship
Representation and the Egyptian Black Bloc: The Siren Song of Orientalism?
32 by Sahar Mandour
GCC and the Sacred Right to Punish
The Disappearing Frontiers of US Homeland Security: Mapping the Transit of Security across the US and Israel
What was at Stake at Brooklyn College?
Sexual Violence Against Women and the Increasing Frequency of Gang Rape in Tahrir Square and its Environs
Muzaffar Al-Nawwab: In the Old Tavern
Herstory Repeats Itself
Death of the Dissertation?
The Legal Framework of Second Class Citizenship
Representation and the Egyptian Black Bloc: The Siren Song of Orientalism?
32 by Sahar Mandour
GCC and the Sacred Right to Punish
The Disappearing Frontiers of US Homeland Security: Mapping the Transit of Security across the US and Israel
What was at Stake at Brooklyn College?
Sexual Violence Against Women and the Increasing Frequency of Gang Rape in Tahrir Square and its Environs
Muzaffar Al-Nawwab: In the Old Tavern
Herstory Repeats Itself
Roundups Last Week on Jadaliyya
Last Week on Jadaliyya (Feb 18- 24)
Egypt Media Roundup (February 25)
O.I.L. Media Roundup (February 26)
Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (February 26)
Syria Media Roundup (February 28)
Maghreb Media Roundup (March 1)
Reports Roundup (March 2)
Jadaliyya Monthly Edition (February 2013)
Syria Monthly Edition on Jadaliyya (February 2013)
Last Week on Jadaliyya (Feb 18- 24)
Egypt Media Roundup (February 25)
O.I.L. Media Roundup (February 26)
Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (February 26)
Syria Media Roundup (February 28)
Maghreb Media Roundup (March 1)
Reports Roundup (March 2)
Jadaliyya Monthly Edition (February 2013)
Syria Monthly Edition on Jadaliyya (February 2013)
All Posts Last Week on Jadaliyya
Click here to access articles
Click here to access articles
- Whatever Happened to Egypt's Democratic Transition?
- Syria Monthly Edition on Jadaliyya (February 2013)
- أطياف الربيع العربي فوق بيروت
- Media on Media Roundup (March 3)
- Jadaliyya Monthly Edition (February 2013)
- Lebanon's Sect Addiction
- The Rising Cost of Electricity in Jordan
- غريب حيفاوي: الفلسطيني لاجئاً في ذاته
- فارس يواكيم في ترجمة كتاب عنف الدكتاتورية لستيفان زفايغ
- What Does Morsi Not Understand About Police Reform?
- Reports Roundup (March 2)
- Global Ban on CS Gas is Needed
- Assarag: Habitat and the Imazighen of Morocco
- Israel: Open Independent Investigation into the Suspicious Death following Interrogation of Palestinian Detainee Arafat Jaradat
- What was at Stake at Brooklyn College?
- Representation and the Egyptian Black Bloc: The Siren Song of Orientalism?
- On the UAE's Decision to Refuse Entry to Professor Kristian Coates
- Maghreb Media Roundup (March 1)
- GCC and the Sacred Right to Punish
- Syria Media Roundup (February 28)
- February Culture
- Muzaffar Al-Nawwab: In the Old Tavern
- "Revolt Against the Sun" by Nazik al-Mala'ika
- Watching Jacob
- Poems from the Maghreb: Introduction and Selections
- Herstory Repeats Itself
- Prison Sketches
- 32 by Sahar Mandour
- The Legal Framework of Second Class Citizenship
- Palestinian Citizens of Israel: Defying the Ongoing Nakba
- سلا، مدينة الحمق والقراصنة
- NEWTON in Focus: Egypt
- Death of the Dissertation?
- Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (February 26)
- غزة بلوز
- O.I.L. Media Roundup (February 26)
- The Disappearing Frontiers of US Homeland Security: Mapping the Transit of Security across the US and Israel
- ثقافة السحل
- US Drones Blow Up Any Hope of Close Ties with Yemenis
- Egypt Media Roundup (February 25)
- Extended Deadline -- Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Arab Studies Journal on "Cultures of Resistance: The Case of Palestine and Beyond"
- Last Week on Jadaliyya (Feb 18- 24)
- قضاة مصر: قدرة تحرك هائلة في خدمة أي وظيفة قضائية؟
Posted: 05 Mar 2013 12:36 AM PST
Once
again, an Indonesian pulp and paper company is clearing the forests of
indigenous communities to replace them with industrial tree plantations.
Once again, villagers are protesting. Once again, the police and
authorities are siding with the company. In 2009, PT Toba Pulp Lestari
announced that it was expanding its pulp and paper operations in [...]
[...]
The choices offered to Americans, for secure a future at all,
The only thing I am afraid of is apathy and silence. At this point
voting only serves to validate our collective ignorance and complicity
to theneedless murder of peaceful innocents both 'here' and 'over there' . EEE's, Education, Enlightenment, Ecology are the remedies for this fatal social pathology of mankind.
The real social diseases, III's, indifference, intolerance, ignorance. I>U=destruction, de-occupy the mainstream news media, The gross breach of public trust lies at the root of mass public deception. As long as OWNERSHIP DETERMINES CONTENT truth will be in peril and for sale by owner........kosmicdebris
