"The struggle to make visible the violences of identity may be even more urgent today,

in an era when the dominant discourse, especially in North America and Europe, proclaims race, gender, and class hierarchies to have been overcome. Yes, there were regrettable social hierarchies, the story goes, there was slavery and Jim Crow laws, there was generalized subordination of women under patriarchy, repression and genocide of native populations, the oppression of workers in factories and sweatshops - but since all that is now past, society must be "identity blind." A black man in the White House is posed as the ultimate confirmation of this discourse. The mandate of feminism, antiracist activism, workers struggles, and other identity politics are over, according to this view, and the social divisions of identity are only perpetuated by those who continue to speak of them. That is how those who promote consciousness of social inequalties along identity lines are cast as creating class, race, gender, and other identity divisions. And as a result we are increasingly facing paradoxical forms of "color-blind" racism, "gender-blind" sexism, "class-blind" class oppression, and so forth. [4]

-Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri in Commonwealth (2009) p. 327-8

"In our reading of the revolutionary projects in each of the identity domains we find three common tasks.

The first is to reveal the violence of identity as property and thereby in some sense reappropriate that identity. The "primal sense" of African American identity in this respect, for example, might be considered Aunt Hester's scream: Frederick Douglass recounts in his autobiography how slave identity and blackness in general are rooted for him in the terror of hearing his aunt's cries as she is whipped by the master. [3] Recognizing the fact of blackness, as W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon also testify in autobiographical accounts, is a discovery not just of difference but also and primarily of collective subordination and violence. And yet the violence of identity is largely invisible, especially to those not subject to it, making it all the time more difficult to contest. This is one meaning of Du Bois's famous claim that a veil cordons off the subordinated from the view of dominant society. They are mysteriously hidden from sight, invisible, even when they are the ones who in broad daylight clean the houses, care for the children, produce the goods, and in general sustain the lives of the dominant. An initial task of insubordination, then, which is the most widespread from of identity politics today, requires attacking this invisibility, tearing down or rising above the veil, and revealing the structures of hierarchy that run throughout society.

-Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri in Commonwealth (2009) p. 327

Jeffrey Sachs - Criticisms

One of Sachs' strongest critics is William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University. Easterly reproached The End of Poverty in his review for The Washington Post, and Easterly's 2006 book White Man's Burden is an even more thorough rebuttal of Sachs' argument that poor countries are stuck in a "poverty trap" from which there is no escape, except by massively scaled-up foreign aid. Easterly presents statistical evidence that he claims proves that many emerging markets attained their higher status without large amounts of foreign aid as Sachs proposes.^[10] This point is also echoed by the economist Dambisa Moyo who points out that when Sachs was her lecturer at Harvard it was he himself who taught that "the path to long-term development would only be achieved through private sector involvement and free market solutions".^[11] She continues "Perhaps what I had not gleaned at that time was that Mr. Sachs' development approach was made for countries such as Russia, Poland and Bolivia, whereas the aid- dependency approach, with no accompanying job creation, was reserved for Africa."^[11]

Another Sachs critic is Amir Attaran, a scientist and lawyer and currently the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development at the University of Ottawa. Sachs and Attaran have worked closely as colleagues, including coauthoring a famous study in The Lancet documenting the dearth of foreign aid money to fight HIV/AIDS in the 1990s, which led to the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. However, Sachs and Attaran part company in their opinion of the Millennium Development Goals, and Attaran argued in a paper published in PLoS Medicine and an editorial in the New York Times that the United Nations has misled people by setting specific, but immeasurable, targets for the MDG's (for example, to reduce maternal mortality or malaria).^[12] Sachs dismissed that view in a reply to PLoS Medicine by saying that only a handful of the MDG's are immeasurable, but Attaran then cited the United Nations' own data analysis (which the UN subsequently blocked from public access) showing that progress on a very large majority of the MDG's is never measured.^[13]

Sachs has also been criticized by leftists for having an overly neoliberal perspective on the economy. Nancy Holmstrom and Richard Smith pointed out that, in advising implementation of his shock therapy on the collapsing Soviet Union, Sachs "supposed the transition to capitalism would be a natural, virtually automatic economic process: start by abandoning state planning, free up prices, promote private competition with state-owned industry, and sell off state industry as fast as possible…". They go on to cite the drastic decreases in industrial output over the ensuing years, a nearly halving of the country's GDP and of personal incomes, a doubling of the suicide rate, and a skyrocketing unemployment rate.^[14] The Lancet ^[15] has recently reported that rapid privatization of the Soviet Union caused a 12.8% death rate increase among males in just two years,^[16] a claim that The Economist attributed to alcoholism, though The Lancet article attributed the rise in alcoholism to changes in the economy.^[17] Canadian activist Naomi Klein argues in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism that Sachs' Bolivian "success" is not true. In her analysis, the radical reforms pushed by Sachs were neither democratically agreed upon nor achieved without violent state repression and left the majority of Bolivians in worse circumstances.^[18]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs

Colbert: Tip/Wag - Waterboarding & Canada's History

A former CIA operative admits to lying about the effectiveness of waterboarding, and The Beaver changes its name to Canada's History. (04:50)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Tip/Wag - Waterboarding & Canada's History
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Weblog of Dawud Walid

http://dawudwalid.wordpress.com/

Cornel West on "Marxist Views of African American Oppression"

I shall begin by making some basic distinctions between Marxist thought as a monocausal, unilinear philosophy of history that accurately predicts historical outcomes; Marxism it is exemplified in diverse "actually existing" Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Poland and so forth; and Marxist theory as a methodological orientation toward the understanding of social and historical realities. Needless to say, I readily reject Marxist thought as a monocausal, unilinear, predictive science of history or a homogeneous, teleological narrative of past and present events. Such infantile Marxism has been subjected to persuasive criticism by Karl Popper, John Plamenatz, John Dewey and Raymond Aron from outside the Marxist tradition, and by members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse), Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramci from within. I also reject, although not without sympathy for, the undemocratic regimes that regiment and dominate their peoples in the name of Marxism. As a democratic and libertarian socialist, I find these regimes morally repugnant, yet I wish to stress that detailed historical analysis of why they evolved as they have is required if we are to grasp their tragic predicament. Such analysis does not excuse the atrocities committed, yet it does give us a realistic sense of what these regimes have been up against.

Despite rejecting Marxist thought as a philosophy of history and Marxism as it has appeared in diverse "actually existing" Communist regimes, I hold that Marxist theory as a methodological orientation remains indispensable - although ultimately inadequate - in grasping distinctive features of African American oppression. As a methodological orientation, Marxist theory requires that we begin from two starting points....

-Cornel West, "Race and Social Theory" in the Cornel West Reader, p. 256

John Gray on Marx

An an analyst of capitalism Marx has few rivals. It was Marx who would understood before anyone else the advance of globalization that would render the national economies of the nineteenth century obsolete and destroy bourgeois life as known in the past. Perhaps only the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, grasped the revolutionary character of capitalism quite as firmly. Marx perceived that capitalism is an economic system that unsettles every aspect of human life. Not only politics and government but also culture and society are continuously transformed under the impact of the anarchic energies of the market. Movements aiming to free up the market while reinstating 'traditional values' dominated much of late twentieth-century politics. While effectively reshaping society to serve the imperatives of the market, politicians such as Thatcher and Blair wanted at the same time to revive the virtues of bourgeois life. Yet, as Marx perceived, the actual effect of the unfettered market is to overturn established social relationships and forms of ethical life - including those of bourgeois societies.

Marx showed how unreal are all visions of marrying the free market to bourgeois values. Far from being utopian, his account of capitalism is a vital corrective to the utopian visions that have distorted politics over the past generation. It is Marx's vision of the alternative to capitalism that is utopian. Though he understood capitalism better than most economists in his day or ours, Marx's conception of communism was dangerously impractical. Central planning was bound to fail: no one can know enough to plan a modern economy and no one is good enough to be entrusted with the power to govern it. Worse, Marx believed that with the arrival of communism the conflicts of values that had existed throughout history would cease, and society could be organized around a single conception of the good life. It was a belief that was to have disastrous consequences, as will be seen when the Soviet experiment in examined in Chapter 2.

John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2008), p. 18-19

Interview with Abdal-Hakim Murad: "“In the traditional Muslim understanding money is gold and silver”

http://erenguevercin.wordpress.com/english/in-the-traditional-muslim-understanding-money-is-gold-and-silver/

Thanks Najeeb!

"With this small place given to looking inward, because the material world is so much with us,

so all-absorbing that the inward things very easily slip away from notice and are in fact not apparent at all, unless one makes an effort to cultivate an acquaintance with them, there is very little room for "la ilaha illa Allah" - There is no deity (in the sense of the One Who commands all one's devotion and obedience and Who is the Authority) except God - because most of us human beings are so absorbed with utterances of "There is no diety [sic] except Man." The call of "Allahu Akbar" - God is the Most Great - cannot be heard amidst the clamor of exclamations over the Most-Greatness of Man. Western man has become so intoxicated with the wonder of his own power and creativity, so enamored of and so utterly bound up with the gadgets and devices he has invented, from which he believes he derives his life and sustenance, that the obvious fact has escaped him that a Power beyond himself gives them these capacities and sustains him, and that the inventions upon which he relies so completely are themselves dependent on that sustaining Power. He imagines that he must be able to see, handle, to measure and to analyze things in order to accept the fact of their existence, yet all the while his spirit as well as his faculties seem to be completely paralyzed in not perceiving that an unmeasurable, unanalyzable Being sustains everything which exists and keeps it functioning...

The capacity to believe in what is beyond man and the material world, to which the Holy Qur'an refers as Al-Ghaib - the Unseen, the hidden or distant things - is a grace from God, I think: the grace of being able to accept the existence of a greater Reality than that which is within the perception of the senses, within analysis and definition by the limited capacities of men. In the West today, such a frame of reference is largely non-existent except in name. Thus, one searching for faith must continually struggle with the disbelief which is rather a cynical and desperate conviction that man is all and everything, that there is nothing beyond, and that even if there should happen to be it hardly matters, combined with a weary disillusionment with life - even with the material pre-occupations which not so long seemed so bright and meaningful - for which it knows of no better remedy than involvement in humanitarian concerns or cultural activities. The West has, in the words of Muhammad Asad, assumed the non-existence of God as a positive fact simple because it cannot prove His existence empirically. As he says in his book, Islam at the Crossroads:*

As the intellectual and social atmosphere of old Rome was utterly utilitarian and anti-religious - in fact if not in open admission - so is the atmosphere of the modern West. Without having a proof against transcendental religion, and without even admitting the need of such a proof, modern Western thought, while tolerating and sometimes even emphasizing religion as a social convention, generally leaves transcendental ethics out of the range of practical considerations. Western civilization does not strictly deny God, but has simply no room and no use for Him in its present intellectual system. It has made a virtue out of an intellectual difficult of man - his inability to grasp the totality of life."

* Arafat Publications, Lahore, Pakistan, 1955.

Marian Kazi, Adhan Over Anatolia: The Diary of an American Muslim, American Trust Publications, Indiana, n.d., p. 18-19

Abdulmutallab Interrogation Explodes Six Central Torture Myths

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2010&base_name=administration_officials_inter