December 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
A hard core of Republican senators demanded ideological concessions from autoworkers, blaming the front-line manufacturing workers —whom John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, repeatedly called “the best in the world” during their campaign for the White House— for America’s embattled automakers’ financial hardships. The bloc included all 8 senators from the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, where foreign automakers, like Toyota and Hyundai, have spent billions to build factories that have led to the creation of thousands of jobs in those states.
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December 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets. An open banking transparency network would reduce the motivation for wrongdoing and privilege more reliable sources of information, creating confidence and motivating sound market dynamics.
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December 6, 2008 :: Webb Tisch :: No Comment Yet
The “Big 3″ automakers, based in Detroit, are, again, on the verge of collapse. There is much speculation about whether they should be or will be bailed out, whether they should enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and restructure, whether they will be allowed to “fail” and vanish from the marketplace altogether. No one seems to be discussing the main problem: they are too big, they are too expensive, they are obsessed with command-and-control processes, and their only sales policy seems to be planned obsolescence.
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December 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Distrust is not a mood or emotional state, it is not a reaction to misfortune; it is a doctrine, and there is a diverse and dispersed sect of believers who propagate it with passion. This sect is comprised of people who openly proclaim their faith in distrust, as a cosmology or a lifestyle choice, a poisonous logic against which little can be done, because its power is rooted in the total decisiveness of its community of believers about living systematically in a state of distrust, trusting until the last in there being no more intelligent way to live.
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November 29, 2008 :: Webb Tisch :: One Comment
E pluribus unum: of the many, one. We often forget the meaning of this legacy. We often conveniently slip into ignorance about the aspirational nature of the American political system. American democracy was designed to be everything that feudal monarchies, whether they included parliamentary processes or not, could not be, or had refused to be. It was designed to be a system in which authority was distributed across as wide a swath of the social landscape as possible, in order that fewer people suffer injustice, and that no one suffer injustice without recourse.
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November 23, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The media are ablaze with speculation about whether President-elect Obama will be able to “control the Clintons”, whether his stature is so monumental and secure, after an admittedly meteoric rise, that the vanquished senator from New York will devotedly voice his foreign policy and look good doing it, whether the White House will be infiltrated by “re-treads” from the Clinton years, whether the socialist bailouts of George W. Bush’s own red October are enough to give Obama a pass on the anti-supply-side dictates of a potentially necessary “new New Deal”.
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November 20, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
Cable news yesterday and today’s newspapers are full of references to the embarrassment Detroit’s “big three” automakers’ chief executives occasioned by flying to DC in 3 separate private jets to ask for a $25 billion “bailout” bridge loan. Pleading poverty while showing off the extravagance of one’s expenditures is poor form, no matter what the season, but it clearly displays a lack of awareness of how much the economic culture of the nation has changed.
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November 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
I have long felt, as so many Americans do, a profound emotional attachment to the ideals we always speak of when we talk about our founding revolution, our enlightened democracy, our progress toward a freer and more just world. And I have always aspired to see those ideals put on display, not just by an historic moment, but by the collective awareness of millions of impassioned American citizens. This moment in history is a sea change in our collective mindset, and a victory for all Americans.
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November 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The confluence of viciously hard economic times and an election that has stoked tensions over social and political conservative values and their place in our future course, pushing ideology to the side —even as vastly divergent approaches to multiple crises play out in the national political discourse—, has illuminated a dark corner of institutional conservatism: the empathy deficit. The struggle of conservative ideologues and politicos to be relevant in the present economic unraveling is tied to a rhetorical habit of demonizing the Other, i.e. the underprivileged, the alien, the non-institutional, the marginalized.
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November 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Any individual, be they low-level election officials, state governors, or non-state actors, who participates in an effort to deprive legitimately registered or entitled-to-be-registered voters of their vote, should be prosecuted. The denial of Constitutional rights is not just a civil liberties issue, not simply a matter of accidental incompetence, and when it involves the actual election process, it is an assault on the government of the United States, which is ultimately supposed to be led by the will of the voter.
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October 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Sen. John McCain may be scrambling to save his political life. Of course, until the American people vote, it remains true he might win and become the next president of the United States. But the Branchflower report has just found his vice-presidential candidate guilty of abusing her office as Alaska governor, and he has just had to scold his own supporters for espousing racist and paranoid views which his campaign had at least implicitly sought to smear Obama with. His standing in the polls has fallen dramatically —as of today, RCP’s daily tracking poll average projects 313 Electoral College votes going to Obama, 158 to McCain, with 67 “toss up”—, and conservative luminaries are weighing in on his weakness as a candidate.
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October 12, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
American schools have been many things over the centuries: the world’s first true universal public education system, a decentralized municipal forum for sincere ambition and hopeful good efforts, indoctrination channels, oases of political correctness, the envy of the world in science and math, edge-leaders in social progress, the root-structure of the most vibrant university culture in the world, and now, largely insufficient, as competing with the world’s best.
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October 9, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Since Sunday, when the McCain-Palin campaign consciously opted to “go negative”, attacking Obama as having “poor judgment” and “palling around with terrorists”, rallies for Sen. McCain’s candidacy have been marred by what appear to be increasingly hot racial tensions. A spokesman for the campaign has told Café Sentido they “do not play the race card”, but observers have questioned whether there is a conscious effort being made to spark racial or ethnic biases and instill fear in the electorate about Sen. Obama’s background or personal associations.
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September 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
I want to write about hope, about the nature of optimism and how closely linked the quality of imagination is to our ability to conceive of, work for and see through meaningful improvements to the human condition. I want to write about it because it is such a vital commodity in our times, such a spiritual enigma and a challenge to our political systems, but then one glaring fact becomes clear that seems to limit what can be said about hope: that vital spiritual resource does not stand alone, but is linked in every case to human specifics, inseparable from what we seek to apply to it, and so hope is different to all people, even in its most essential manifestations.
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September 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Una ola de misticismo financiero entró en los mercados financieros hace unas décadas, y poco a poco ha ido provocando crisis y revueltos, pero sólo después de haberse contagiado a los políticos de Washington, Londres y Pekín, ha llegado a ser una catástrofe económico in potentia. Matemáticamente, hay que negociar con lo que hay, con recursos finitos, y planificar sistemas de contabilidad que tomen en cuenta que riesgo no es dinero ganado, sino dinero por ganar si todo sale bien. Parece una lógica más que evidente, pero para los místicos de la contabilidad no-finita, se ha convertido en moda anticuada y normativa molesta.
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September 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
El Onze de Setembre, en Catalunya, es un día de luto nacional, cuando se recuerda que en esta fecha en el año 1714, Catalunya perdió sus leyes y su autonomía ancestral, sus usatges, un sistema legal que databa del medioevo tardío. Y en celebrar el día, se celebran valores básicos y la posibilidad de comunidad, de una identidad cultural-política y una soberanía sobre el destino compartido. El once de septiembre, 1973, fue el día trágico en que la nación chilena se vio sumergida de repente en una dictadura militar que usaría el terror, la tortura y el asesinato extra-oficial para “desaparecer” a los disidentes y romper la democracia. Es un día contencioso, porque los golpistas tienen sus seguidores todavía, porque sigue existiendo el mito de una “dictadura suave”.
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September 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Sen. John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was meant to be his answer to the stadium-sized explosion of his rival’s historic address, his moment to demonstrate his own version of leadership. It is now being mocked by political commentators as a ham-fisted attempt at catching the wave. McCain performed rhetorical acrobatics to try to both be like Obama and be like Bush, while supposedly offering something of his own entirely distinct brand of politics. Botched stage-craft was an added drag on the speech’s resonance.
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September 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska accepted the Republican party’s nomination for vice president in at their convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. She said she was looking forward to the “challenge of a tough fight against competent opponents”, but wasted no time getting to the red meat. She said she was joining a ticket that would “serve and defend America”, and that John McCain put the “security of the country that he loves” ahead of his own political fate, reminding the audience that McCain said he “would rather lose an election than lose a war”.
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September 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Howard Dean’s predecessor as chairman of the DNC, has said 2008 will be “the most vicious campaign we have ever faced”. Already shadowy “527 groups” and PACs are running ads and sponsoring the publication of books full of disproven rumor and innuendo, with the openly stated aim of “defeating Barack Obama”. Author Jerome Corsi, who has written a best-selling anti-Obama tome, openly admitted, against the wishes of his publisher, that his book is not intended to be factual, but rather to further the anti-Obama agenda, with the aim of influencing the outcome of the November election.
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August 29, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Over the 4 days of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, media analysts have repeatedly asked where the real ‘red meat’ was? Who would throw the red meat to the delegates hungry for an affirmation of the party’s cause and will to fight? Who will blitz John McCain with attacks and insults. There was, apparently, a resistance to believing that Barack Obama’s message might be real, that he could defend his ideas and take the fight to his opponent without demeaning or smearing him. The speech Obama delivered last night demonstrated with astonishing clarity that the red meat he’s throwing to his audience is not insults or attacks, but a vision of possibility and a call to action in common values.
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August 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
As the US economy goes through one major shock after another —in jobs, stocks, housing, banking, general inflation, food prices and energy—, with economists saying this is the worst economic trauma since the Great Depression and the “dustbowl” of the 1930s, we are still hearing debate about whether we are in recession and whether or not consumer confidence is dropping off for material or psychological reasons. It just might be that the perspective of the average consumer is determined by actual spending ability.
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August 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Everyone is alone in the world, separate from all else, at all times, and never truly capable of saying with certainty that things could be otherwise. This is both a fundamental existential problem and a flawed way of looking at human relationships. It is true: each individual is separated from the world by his or her perceptions, but: there is a reason why human beings cooperate, why we integrate ourselves into larger social fabrics, why we maintain relationships from birth to death, or for as long as possible.
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July 27, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
There are few things more damaging to the right of witnesses and bystanders to contribute to the resolution of a given problem than harboring the assumption that no one involved has anything to contribute. For western and Asian lookers on, viewing the problems of the African continent as outsiders, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by surrendering to the ugly bias of the belief that Africans cannot contribute to the change and development they both need and deserve.
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July 18, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
The former vice president of the United States, Al Gore, yesterday announced an ambitious goal, which he says the nation can meet, of transitioning its entire domestic energy production to clean resources by 2018. The speech marks a major moment in the process of transition to the green technology boom, which will be the next step in the ongoing economic development of the United States and the world. Gore, however, warned that failing to meet the challenge to date means “the United States of America as we know it is at risk”.
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