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May 6, 2008
 It really doesn't make sense for election officials to allow party crossover voting in primaries. Perhaps in a perfect world where nobody "cheated" by voting strategically for the candidate they'd most like to oppose in the other party, then increased primary turnout might have a positive effect on a party's chances in the general election. Maybe. But I suspect the practice of allowing crossover voting has its origins in some sort of fuzzy feel-good politics of inclusion with little attention to its practical ramifications. It's an anachronistic practice that should be stopped.
Continue reading "Hard Core Republicans for Clinton"...
May 1, 2008
By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
 We have to recognize that in the Imperial New World Order (INWO), with the Soviet Union gone, and an aggressive and highly militarized United States projecting its great power across the globe, destabilizing and devastating in all its major areas of operation in the alleged interest of liberation and stability, a revised set of principles should be discernible. Most of these are hardly new, but even more audaciously than in the past they translate power relationships into affirmations of rights or the denial of these very same rights, with the ensuing double standards applicable pretty much across the board. The real-world significance of these INWO principles thus depends on three factors: (a) whether Washington affirms them for itself (and directly or by implication for its close allies, clients and hangers-on); (b) whether Washington denies them to its enemies; and (c) whether Washington doesn't care one way or the other.
Continue reading "Principles of the Imperial New World Order"...
April 30, 2008
 Somebody should explain to corporate media bloviators that the United Church of Christ is mainstream — more mainstream, in fact, than they are. Formerly known as "the pilgrims", the early church in America is perhaps more responsible for the political ideas and practices embodied in the U.S. Constitution than any other group. The Presbyterians (my family's affiliation), with their highly decentralized polity, might come close. These establishment WASPs, however, are a dying breed, almost never heard from anymore. Easy targets.
Continue reading "The Lynching of Jeremiah Wright"...
April 27, 2008
 OK — food prices are rising fast, not least here in the U.S. Various countries around the world are stockpiling and rationing staples. Lots of people go hungry. So the establishment paper of record, the Washington Post, publishes a Sunday morning front page feature. Nowhere in it, however, does the word "population" appear. I'm not sure whether this reflects garden-variety stupidity or complete brain-washing against arguments about limits to growth, but either way it's perfectly representative of the impoverished intellectual life in our imperial capital.
April 18, 2008
 Even in minute quantities, bad bacteria do terrible things to my gut. I'm like a human 'bad bacteria geiger counter'. It's due to my iron over-load disease — lots of food makes me really, really sick. Years ago I gave up eating canned tuna because it always made me sick, and I figured that the reason must be because in big fleets they've got dead tuna in their nets, sometimes for days, that don't get processed properly on a factory ship. OK for regular people, but not for me. Recently, however, I had a craving for a tuna sandwich so, by chance, I picked up a can of American Tuna brand pole and line caught Albacore. To my astonishment and delight I did not get sick (and I've eaten several more cans since), and I'm pretty sure I know why: this tuna is really fresh. And it tastes somewhat sweet. Add just a little organic mayo, and salt and pepper, and spread on a couple slices of toasted Rye. A great sandwich. Even better, the same except open-face with a slice of organic tomato and a slice of organic cheese under the broiler for a classic tuna melt. Available at Whole Foods.
April 17, 2008
 Last week, Sean-Paul Kelley, a friend of EP and long-time EP Podcast listener, who's an editor at The Agonist, asked me if I would be interested in having a public exchange of letters debating the wisdom of Western encouragement of Tibetan separatists. "There's a lot more to it than just sticking a thumb in China's eyes," he wrote. Our debate was scheduled to start this Wednesday — due to a delay I jumped the gun (sorry). And since I had gone to the trouble of dredging up a bunch of material about Tibet I wanted to share some of that, and also a few other thoughts I'd not originally intended to include. As composed here my thoughts are not, perhaps, expressed in the limpid prose warranted by a more formal exercise in logical argument, but that's OK. Now we're on, I'm going first and Sean-Paul's reply will be added below with whatever exchange ensues. This graph has been updated but the following content is as originally posted. (Photo credit Phil Borger, for fair use.)
Continue reading "An Exchange of Letters Regarding Tibet"...
 Just a quick word about this — I only watched the first five minutes or so, so it wouldn't be fair for me to condemn the entire proceedings — I'm glad to see the Huffington Post and elsewhere filled with vitriolic criticism of ABC for practicing fake journalism. From the few minutes I watched I knew it would be a waste of time. Loaded questions. Trivia. Sensationalism. Grandstanding by Clinton (assuming Obama gets the nod and Clinton offers to campaign for him his response should be "please don't trouble yourself until I call back"). Almost torture to watch. ABC: you should be ashamed! Peter Jennings would never have countenanced such a travesty...
April 15, 2008
 People who used to know him say that John McCain used to talk to himself regularly, at night, when alone in his Senate office. This is, indirectly, from disaffected former staff, and he treats many of his staff like crap, so take it with a grain of salt. I suspect, nevertheless, that it's true. In any case, McCain's recent gaffes on who are Sunni and who Shia don't seem to me trivial. Reviewing the tapes, what I see is an old guy who's already lost a few of his marbles — I'd expect to see continued deterioration over the next, say, four years. Unless, maybe, a medical review proved his mental fitness. There's that, and his cancer, too, which makes me wonder: why won't the McCain campaign release his most recent medical reports?
 What I object to about Hillary's vainglorious race isn't that she might win (she has a snowball's chance in hell), nor that she'll damage Obama for the general election (he'll be fine — ultimately the damage will be self-inflicted, from people's revulsion with her tactics), but that she's putting the general election on hold for months and months longer than necessary. Instead of a real debate over health care, now, a real debate over Iraq, now, a real debate (as Obama hinted at the other day) over the Bush junta's criminal conduct, now, and all the rest of it, we get to see her swilling shots for votes in Bronko's restaurant and lounge in Crown Point, Indiana. Pardon me, but politics in this country has not yet reached the lows of "reality tee-vee". We've all got better things to do than wait for Hillary to bow out: the Democratic establishment should take charge and give her a swift kick in the ass!
April 10, 2008
 It used to be, Olympic events were a prime grazing ground for spies. Recruiting, counter-espionage, jumping through the hoops: a darn good time was had by all. What role the Olympic Committee played in this remains unknown. With the end of the Cold War, however, clandestine Olympic activities went into the deep freeze. Until now. What's up, I want to know, with Tibet and China?
Continue reading "Tibetan Splendor"...
March 24, 2008
 A friend of mine, a long time critic of the Iraq War, recently asked a young junior officer now stationed in Iraq for his opinion of the situation. He shared the officer's response with me, which is worth reading. It is a little naive about our intention to leave but that probably reflects what the junior officer is told by his seniors — army leaders may well be touting this line for reasons of "morale". (Slightly edited for spelling, punctuation, and content.)
Continue reading "The God-Damned Infantry"...
March 19, 2008
How the Beltway Debates an Issue
By Werther*
 It has long since come to universal notice that Time and Newsweek, the Coke and Pepsi of weekly print journalism, have slid to the level of what were once considered lowbrow publications like People and Entertainment Weekly. Needless to say, these latter two journals threaten to assume the Darwinian niche previously occupied by the lamented Weekly World News. So where does a reader of more elevated tastes seek enlightenment?
Continue reading "For God's Sake, Don't Mention the War!"...
March 17, 2008
 Much of the debate over FISA (see, for example, this interesting essay by Julian Sanchez) misses the point. Trying to frame the problem in purely constitutional, Fourth Amendment terms puts a round peg in a square hole, unduly elevating the mindset of the Framers into a quasi-religion. Let's face it: in the most generous of interpretations one cannot fairly describe the Framers as modern thinkers. To oversimplify, their primary concern had to do with reconciling competing limited (self-absorbed, often irrational) interests whereas ours has more to do with controlling the agglomeration of full-spectrum (usually rational), predatory ones, while also facilitating government's role as a positive — perhaps even progressive — agent of change. The procedural balance we choose to strike involves entirely different considerations.
Continue reading "Privacy and Control"...
March 15, 2008
 Motormouth Matthews got lathered up yesterday about the Wright "controversy." As did Joe Scarborough. The story got some play on network news — it's fair to assume it was all over right-wing talk radio. Well, Wright's expression of "God-damn America" was over the top, but shouldn't be taken out of context, either. What the guy's been saying sounds reasonable to me: Far from being a beacon of justice and democratic process the U.S. acts the bully, to its own disadvantaged at home (today that includes the "middle class") and to everybody else overseas. He could well have gone on to argue that the U.S. is habitually run by war criminals; I haven't seen such a quote yet though if he'd said it, despite his having said it, it would nevertheless be true.
Continue reading "Knee-Jerk Reactions"...
March 11, 2008
 Quite a few EP regulars have written in recently to ask whether the current upset in the financial markets marks the start of our economic collapse. Who knows? My guess would be no, despite the outstanding trillions of dollars worth of mystery derivatives and other, as yet unaddressed financial time-bombs. At the same time, I hasten to point out that the larger part of America's troubles have to do with job exports. Unemployment can't reasonably be seen as a by-product of financial heartburn. Nor can the drop in the value of the dollar. The basic structural problem remains that the U.S. buys more abroad than it sells, a situation that cannot persist indefinitely.
Continue reading "Pigeon Trials"...
March 9, 2008
How the War Party Prevails
By Werther*
 Readers of these screeds will have noticed that we have been maintaining a discreet silence of late. The news, such as it is, has concentrated heavily on the presidential horse race: who, when the day after the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November dawns, will occupy the glittering alabaster throne of the American imperator? We, who have been scoffing at political hacks since Sherman Adams donned his Vicuna coat, have declined to be drawn into this unseemly business. The course of empire makes its way; to comment is tautological.
Continue reading "Cuckoo in the Nest"...
March 6, 2008
 Yesterday's Washington Post headline read "Clinton Beats Obama in Texas and Ohio." The New York Times' beguiling headline concurred, "Big Wins for Clinton in Texas and Ohio." Most mainstream media covered Tuesday's elections by flatly declaring that Clinton won Texas, with only a few then noting as a qualifier that actually many Texas delegates remained to be apportioned. The fact is — and it is a true fact — Clinton has not yet won Texas. If the papers of record and others absolutely had to have had an early headline, to be accurate it should have said something like this: "Texas Still Too Close To Call."
Continue reading "And Just Another Word About Texas"...
March 5, 2008
 There's no doubt that Hillary Clinton knocked Obama back on his heels the past ten days or so, going negative. (Note, while going negative in the immediate run-up to an election is almost always effective, over a longer run there are serious potential drawbacks as voters get fed up and get a chance to weigh charges and counter-charges.) Interestingly, watching MSNBC coverage last night, most commentators got it. Hillary seized the initiative. She's the one throwing punches. Obama failed to quell the doubts she'd raised. He reacted defensively. Worse, when MSNBC interviewed Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, his attitude was that they would take the high road, turning the other cheek, so to speak. Perhaps the Obama campaign is looking past the convention, trying to maintain party unity, or avoid blame for an increasingly divisive split. This is the wrong strategy. In a fracas voters look for signs of agility more than they do good manners. At a minimum the Obama campaign must deliver tit-for-tat if they want the nomination.
Continue reading "Going Negative"...
March 2, 2008
 I believe that eventually humans will be able to create some kind of artificial computer based intelligent consciousness. The word "artificial" then becoming open to interpretation. But to imagine such a creation being the product of binary computations — to be honest — intuitively doesn't feel right. No matter how many or how fast I doubt binary code calculations scale into a person. Analog, though, might be different. So it's interesting to note that some quantum computer researchers are headed in an analog direction; I wonder how long it'll be before the labs attempt to produce a conscious machine?
February 29, 2008
 Due to all the small problems that have been cropping up with EP's Movable Type installation I thought I'd better have an experienced Movable Type programmer take a look. As it turns out, the installation is more code that's grafted onto the MT base than it is code integrated with it. And evidently fixing small things here cause new problems there. Viz. (for as long as you can see it) the test post below, which despite being deleted through the MT interface nevertheless persists on the site. Or at the moment EP's search function not working. And this morning I almost couldn't post the podcast! Problems... What's required is essentially a rewrite of the whole thing. Hopefully this will all take place behind the scenes. Once we've got clean code it'll be much more straightforward to continue the upgrade path with MT, and actually possible for the first time (despite earlier expectations) to deploy many of the cool new features that MT has introduced. So please excuse minor glitches while we sort this out.
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May 9, 2008
 Horses have always been with us. At Lascaux. On the Ural steppes. Among the Sumerians, the Scythians, the Chinese… It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the domestication of the horse made civilization possible. And here's a little known fact: horses evolved in North America, were wiped out by the ice age about 8,000 years ago, but not before they crossed the Bering land bridge and spread throughout the rest of the world. When the Spanish reintroduced horses to the New World, they were an indigenous species belatedly coming home. Horses, wild horses, are woven into the texture of the American character. Yet they are terribly endangered, by us. To hear more about this amazing and troubling story I turned to Deanne Stillman, author of Mustang, The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West . It's a powerfully written, very moving book. Deanne was one of the very first guests on EP and it was a great pleasure to talk with her again. Total runtime an hour and seventeen minutes. Tears allowed.
May 2, 2008
 Governments always insist on keeping their practice of torture secret — as well they should, because torture almost never works. And, in fact, it generally has profoundly negative, unintended, practical consequences. While we intuit that torture is wrong, we only know of its futility thanks to a few intrepid researchers who patiently sift the archives. For a sample of what can be known I turned to Dr. Darius Rejali, author most recently of the encyclopedic (and aptly titled) Torture and Democracy. It was kind of Darius to take time to talk with me and I appreciate his wisdom and insight. Total runtime an hour and three minutes. Be educated!
April 25, 2008
 To Peak Oil aficionados (I'm including me here) it may be something of a surprise to learn that not all is doom and gloom, that the catastrophic collapse of civilization as we know it is neither imminent nor inevitable. In fact, we have an amazing, working, macro-scale example of emergent energy independence — right now — in Germany. To get the inside scoop I turned to Dr. Hermann Scheer, a member of the German parliament (Bundestag), and driving force behind German energy innovations. If only we were so lucky as to have an American equivalent of Dr. Scheer! Listen, and don't take "no" for an answer. Total runtime, an hour and five minutes.
April 18, 2008
 By most measures the U.S. has one of the worst health care systems (and most expensive) of any advanced country in the world. Why is that? To try to make some sense of the politics of health care I turned to Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. Thank you, Steffie, for your great determination and leadership! Clearly, a lot of doctors are fed up with their patients (read, clients) being corporations instead of real people. And I think most Americans are fed up with the undue burdens of our system, too. My only prediction here is, the problems will get worse before they get better. Total runtime fifty seven minutes. Listen and think. And next time you see a doctor, push for health care reform!
April 11, 2008
 Few people know as much about the water situation in the U.S. as Dr. Robert J. Glennon. Though I'd take a different tack than he would in knocking heads together I think he's proposed innovative, workable, "market-ish" based ways to rationalize water usage. And I completely agree with him that the problem is how to prevent a crisis from becoming a catastrophe. Total runtime an hour and three minutes. Comments welcome!
April 4, 2008
 Among available options, "victory" in Iraq doesn't exist. For an army of occupation perhaps it never did. The smart thing would be to get out as fast as practicably possible — sadly, that doesn't seem to be in the cards. Policy preferences aside, nevertheless, it's helpful to try to understand the political-military dynamic. For that I turned once again to Wayne White, a top middle east analyst, formerly with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. This is his third appearance on EP. I'm very grateful to Wayne for sharing his professional insight and considerable wisdom. He knows the game. Total runtime here of an hour and nineteen minutes. Please redistribute the link liberally.
March 28, 2008
 For decades the Republican Party has used fear to drive religious voters away from the Democrats. The Republicans succeeded so spectacularly that much of the Democratic Party establishment got conditioned to automatically — and wrongly — write off Evangelicals. It's a big part of the reason why Democrats lose elections. To get some perspective on religion in politics I turned to Amy Sullivan, the nation editor at Time magazine and author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap, who is herself an Evangelical Christian. It was very kind of her to talk with me and I greatly appreciate her smarts and her good humor. This is a shorter, 'six-questions' type format conversation. Total runtime thirty nine minutes. Enjoy!
March 21, 2008
 Of all the books on 9/11 Peter Dale Scott's learned The Road To 9/11(University of California Press, 2007) deserves special recognition for situating the events of 9/11 in an intelligible, albeit complicated, context. Unlike other leftist social critics who see a simple narrative in government actions, Peter sees rich textures in what he calls 'the deep state.' An agnostic about what actually happened on 9/11 Peter nevertheless convincingly and powerfully argues that everything is not as it seems. Here, we take up 9/11 as well as larger philosophical themes. Total runtime an hour and sixteen minutes. Enjoy!
March 14, 2008
 Organic food tastes better. It's healthier. It costs a bit more, but surveys show that, counterintuitively, it isn't consumed disproportionately by the affluent. And the most remarkable thing: organic food is increasing its market share relatively quickly. To learn about the current state of the organic agriculture movement and what accounts for its success I turned to Dr. Brian Obach, a committed organic consumer who's been trying to explain social movements for twenty years. As an organic consumer myself I find Brian's insights fascinating and surprisingly relevant to larger questions of progressive political mobilization. Total runtime an hour and fifteen minutes. Enjoy!
March 7, 2008
 Some mistakes you don't get to "do-over." Wiping out a unique fish, the Menhaden, the keystone species of America's Atlantic and Gulf fisheries, amounts to ecocide. And a peculiarly foolish mistake, too — nothing great accrues to any of the grubby perpetrators, or their equally grubby political enablers. Devastation only provides literally chicken-feed to a few. Dr. H. Bruce Franklin, an eminent literary expert and historian of American culture, tells this fish story in an unforgettable way. Please also buy his book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea. Total runtime an hour and eleven minutes. Spread the word!
February 29, 2008
 Protectionism can be a good thing. Protectionism, in fact, is the only way that a developing country can become developed. And, I daresay, it's the only way an industrial country like the U.S. can retain its industrial base and high standard of living in the face of wage arbitrage by large corporations that offshore their operations. Moreover, if, as Dr. Ha-Joon Chang argues, a rational high culture results from industrialization (and not the opposite, as is often wrongly — and racially — assumed) then logically the kind of de-industrialization we're experiencing in the U.S. should corrupt our culture. And that is exactly what I think is happening. Even by design nothing could better suit the vulture capitalist class and their lackeys. For the ammunition you'll need to defeat neo-liberal "free trade" arguments please read Ha-Joon's splendid book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Total runtime here an hour and eleven minutes. Listen and think critically for yourself.
February 22, 2008
 Following my conversation about the Israel Lobby with John Mearsheimer in early January, I thought it would be helpful to take a more detailed look at the neo-cons. So I turned to Jim Lobe, Washington Bureau Chief of the Inter Press Service news agency, a recognized expert on the subject who knows probably almost as much about the neo-cons as they do themselves. Jim explains in a very straight-forward and thoughtful way how the neo-con godlings (my term) are out to create perpetual war. It was kind of Jim to talk with me and I hope we can do it again. Total runtime an hour and thirty one minutes. Enjoy!
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