The Road Not Taken

Having been trained in theology as well as philosophy, I have over the years followed the evolution of our various religious institutions and their leaders -- many of the latter having been friends and colleagues. What has been saddening to watch has been the general decline in relevance to the modern world of nearly all of them and a regression in one form or another to a fundamentalism that tends to enshrine the worst barbarities of the ancient world or comparable developments within their various traditions along the way.

In a word, the best hearts and minds have departed modern religions and the remnant within them are a mixed bag of the well-meaning, knaves, scam artists, and dangerous haters. One cannot predict next what evil consequence will next emerge from this oily mix -- terrorism, both independent and state mobilized, repressive modes of discrimination targeted at minorities, social and ethnic, hateful messages to followers to engage in combat with the modern world.

One of the saddest and most abortive of moves that I have followed in this matrix was the suppression of the progressive reforms initiated iin 1962 by Pope John 23 at the Second Vatican Council -- and key spokespersons for same such as John Courtney Murray SJ noted legal philosopher ordered to halt publishing in this field, Hans Kung noted Swiss theologian who introduced the present Pope Benedict to his first teaching job, but who were then thrust aside by John Paul 2 and the present Pope. What these latter two have done to the church -- with a benevolent face -- has been to put in place only moral and political conservatives more bent on outlawing abortion than ending capital punishment or providing for the poor of several continents. Yes, this church does some good works, but it too often de facto opposes governmental efforts essential to help those in need -- a Covenant House program in the U.S. can only care for approximately 10% of the young people who are in dire need to the point that they have run away or been forced out of horrendous homes. Serious government interventions and supports are vital to the remaining 90%. To illustrate: the recent execution of Stanley Williams in California was emblematic of a generation of young minority kids who took to the streets because there were no other viable options open to them -- education, training for jobs, a future in which a young person could marry and raise a family.

It is saddening, then, to read of the Catholic Church in America that it is 'cutting back' on compensation to the children traumatized by the abuses by its priests!

Boston Archdiocese Halves Offers in Open Abuse Cases
By NEELA BANERJEE
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston offered far
smaller monetary awards than in the first settlement and
established a more rigorous burden of proof for accusers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/national/31priest.html?th&emc=th

...................................................................

A number of my friends departed the Catholic church where they were originally serving as priests and nuns. They, and many others, have warned of the evils resulting from this church's insistence on celibacy, its discrimination against women (both in service roles to the church and among its laity), its resistance to contraception in an era of AIDS and drastic overpopulation in third world countries, its resistance to liberation theology's efforts to bring social justice to the Latin American countries -- which has left that field open to the secularists -- Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva (Brazil), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia) and, yes, Fidel Castro in Cuba.

An institution that should have and could have been in the forefront of social and economic reforms has lagged behind and become either irrelevant in Europe, destructive of children and their families in the U.S., or a counter reform force in the countries now breaking loose from its traditions in dramatic fashion in Latin America. How sad it is that this 'Christian' institution has fallen on such evil days.
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]

Investing Advice from Yale

I happened to catch an interview with Yale's David Svensen on WNYC (where one can probably pick up a transcript) who over the past 20 years has built Yale's endowment from $1.3 billion to $15+ billion at an average rate of 16+% each year. He has brought out a new book for
personal investors in which he condemns the usual retirement trap of mutual funds administered by profit-making 'financial advisors' -- which he points out have a losing record -- and recommends two non-profits -- TIAA:

http://www.tiaa-cref.org/ which has done well by us academics and others fortunate enough to plug in or the non-profit Vanguard Fund:

http://www.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/CorporatePortal

These two funds have other advantages in the no tax until retirement domain as well as no fees. They offer flexibility in switching from one category to another of general investments as the markets and one's approach to retirement warrants.

He book is called Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investing:

http://ww8.shrewd.com/cgi-bin/q.cgi?isbn=0743228383

What he had to say made much sense. And the idiot representing mutual funds waffled and sounded panicked. The double problem according to Svenson is that investors don't have a balanced port folio which he recommends -- something like 30% equities as I recall, 15% overseas, 15% real estate, 30 percent conservative things -- BUT NOT mutual funds which only make money for your advisor at a lower rate than simply indexing.

I have mentioned that both of my daughters have lucked into TIAA which they can now use for life -- one with a semester managing the computer center briefly at Barnard after she graduated which had been her scholarship job and the other with a brief internship at NASA.

Hopefully this may help some who have been stranded with their 401k's in the wrong stuff. He says that the other problem is that individuals tend to chase the rising things which are peaking often and dumping the things that have dropped at just the wrong moment when they may rise
again, thus churning themselves into losses rather than gains.

Good luck! Hope this advice does not come too late. Remember those 'advisors' are taking a cut and it is in their interests to churn your stocks or whatever for their own profit. I learned from my broker father not to believe either investment counselors or the street wisdom, unless it was very inside dope about something about the dive (Frist getting out of his health care stock, Benno Schmidt out of Edison, and Martha Stewart taking advice to dump something that got her into jail for a stretch -- where many an insider belongs much more than she.

P.S. Columbia might want to pick up his earlier book directed to portfolio managers.

P.P.S. He also pointed out that the mutual funds that advertise their profits are the ones that happened to make them -- not the ones that died -- and also points out that the future will not necessarily resemble the pasts being boasted. Ninety-six percent of these funds have returns below indexing (across the board with stocks) and not counting fees all too often hidden in the vast pages of conditions.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Prospects for Peace in the Middle East?

"Thus the prospect that Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, will either rise to power in the Palestinian elections on January 25 or will come close is fully consistent with the regional trend. The Bush administration’s campaign to encourage democratic elections in the Arab world is also Islamizing it." (Excerpt from Americans for Peace Now):

http://israeloncampuscoalition.org/aboutus/members/apn.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

One must bear in mind that various of the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East -- Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq(?), etc. -- have blocked popular efforts to establish Islamic fundamentalist regimes. Our present administration seems to have been oblivious to the likely outcomes of its stirring of the pot over there? How can one identify 'enemies' in such a mixed and muddled situation? Ed Kent
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Revenge American Style

The disinclination of Arnold Schwarzenegger (now repudiated as a hero by his native Austria) to grant clemency to Stanley (Tookie) Williams this holiday season is emblematic of what one hopes may become the end of an era in America's "cruel and unusual" penal practices.

Under the standards operative up until about 3 decades ago when politicians rediscovered executing persons as a hot button issue to win elections, rehabilitation of criminals was a widespread if not universal goal of the American criminal justice. Such it still is in most civilized countries. When the aim of a criminal justice system is rehabilitation, clemency or amnesty for _some_ criminals operates in both sentencing decisions and treatment of those incarcerated who can be offered treatment for addictions, job training and/or study opportunities leading to productive lives.

Had Williams been facing death during that earlier era, the doubts about his guilt in committing murders for which he was convicted and/or recognition of the effective role he had assumed in prison in persuading young Americans NOT to enter gang life (such as he had done when at 17 he had become the co-founder of the notorious Crips gang) might well have made a grant of clemency the opportunity for him to continue his constructive efforts even while serving out a life sentence in a California prison.

But what has happened to American justice during recent decades is a regression backwards into frontier cries for revenge (directed at innocent and guilty alike) that now trump clemency as a supplementary instrument of punishment. Retributivism, dating back to the cruel religion of the ancient Babylonians and enshrined in their notorious lex talionis ("an eye for an eye . . .") has become the media's and, thus, the ambitious politician's route to success. I recall all too well when former 'New Deal liberal' Ed Koch startled all with his decision to break away from a pack of competitors in a democratic primary for the NYC mayoralty by announcing that he supported reinstitution of the death penalty. It worked. Koch tried the same strategy in a Democratic primary race for Governor against Mario Cuomo (anti death penalty) and it did _not_ work. However, Cuomo, who had held the death penalty at bay with his vetoes, was in turn displaced by George Pataki who campaigned for and reinstituted the death penalty in NY -- now fortunately put on hold by legislative blockage despite Pataki's efforts last week to appeal to public emotions again by calling for the death penalty for killers of police. He was apparently held in check and obliged to accept the alternative of life without parole.

I had been aware of the historical evolution of this American horror in the face of increasing international rejection of capital punishment -- I had, myself, 'flip flopped' back in the 1970s when a former student had invited me to speak to an Amnesty International conference on the death penalty which she was organizing and which had obliged me for the first time to examine in depth both the history and the implications of execution -- particularly in the U.S. where we seemed then to be replacing lynchings with executions. During the first half of the 20th century some 3,000 minorities and new immigrants (the latter about 1/3 of the total) were lynched. During the second half of the 20th century to the present the percentage sentenced and executed was more than 50% for African Americans and other minorities -- particularly if the victim was a Caucasian!

We have seen our Supreme Court endorse prosecutions and sentencing in capital cases which it recognized to be prejudiced. McCleskey v. Kemp 481 U.S. 279 (1987) admitted that capital punishment was manifestly unequally imposed on poor minorities who had murdered whites -- but said such was fine so long as only the guilty were executed. More recently the Court has only gradually raised the age of those executed from no minimum -- an horrendous picture postcard rendition of a 14-year-old African American boy sitting terrified in an electric chair and about to be fried well done haunts anyone who see it in Langston Hughes' 1962 History of the NAACP. A decade or so ago the Court spared a 15-year old African American girl, raising the minimum age to 16. And most recently increaed it to 18 (Roper v. Simmons, 2005). We still have some juveniles living on death rows, but presumably they will now be removed. Had Roper been in place a few years earlier, the execution of a possibly innocent young African American not granted clemency by George W. Bush while governor of Texas would not have occurred. Bush, as governor of the state of Texas one year presided over the half the executions (37 or 74) in the U.S. Texas is notorious for its crude violations of basic rights of the accused:

http://www.commondreams.org/views/061700-102.htm

With DNA evidence, available in only a few of the crimes of murder, now proving the innocence of increasing numbers on our death rows, both our courts, and public at large, if not our legislators, are showing signs of uneasiness with the continuing barbarity of legalized state murders.

I am at the moment preparing a review for an excellent book that I have just finished reading, Mercy on Trial by Austin Sarat (Princeton University Press, 2005), which uses the 4 pardons and grants of clemency to the 167 remaining on Illinois death rows by Governor George Ryan in his last days in office, January 10, 2003, as a lens for examining the shift from rehabilitative justice to revenge in our American penal practices. Ryan, subsequently, himself, prosecuted and imprisoned for earlier corruption in office, had been distressed by the numbers of errors in capital sentencing and based his clemency on the imperfections of a legal system which could not protect innocents from execution. Sarat's low key study lays out in grim detail the long saga of American 'cowboy' justice.

Americans are all too vulnerable to popular appeals for revenge directed at real or supposed 'enemies'. Fifty years after European countries had stopped the horrific practice of executing suspected witches, we started burning and drowning them in Salem, Massachusetts, a state now without the death penalty! With the end of slavery lynching became our brutal practice for acting out racial hatreds, supplemented by refusal to prosecute or convict Caucasian murderers of African Americans until far too late in the 20th century. Legal executions (or unpunished killings by police and others) have replaced our previous brutal revenge modalities. Murders of African Americans are virtually exempt from the death penalty. But poor African Americans -- charged even falsely with murderers of 'Caucasians' -- are many times over at risk of execution in our death penalty states -- both north and south. And we are still executing persons known to be disabled by extreme retardation and/or mental illnesses.

We know too much now to allow such practices to continue -- or to allow ambitious politicians to play on our crudest of human emotions -- revenge -- to win election to offices for which they are thereby manifestly unfit! This is why I could not vote for Freddie Ferrer who ran for Mayor of NYC this past autumn.

http://agendagap.blogspot.com/2005/10/freddy-flip-flops-on-death-penalty.html
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

One of Our Best Lost to U.S.

Courts Criticize Judges' Handling of Asylum Cases
By ADAM LIPTAK
Federal appeals court judges have repeatedly criticized immigration judges for what they call a pattern of biased and incoherent decisions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/national/26immigration.html?th&emc=th

..................

We certainly have seen this pattern in Brooklyn where refugees have been cruelly imprisoned in our own indigenous gulag where a jailer -- later prosecuted for torture at Abu Graib -- was notoriously ensconced and brutal tactics were directed against escapees from their home countries, not criminals.

One of the families that fled the United States after its refugee application was rejected was that of Neemarie Alam. Nee, while granted a temporary reprieve in response to our CUNY appeals through our 2 NY Senators and her Congressman and Charles Rangel, took (as a 20-year-old) her at risk family to Canada where they have been accepted. Our loss is two trained doctors, one of whom had completed her boards, two American citizens, Nee's younger brother and sister, and Nee, who was then doing pre-medical studies with us. She misses pizza and Rock for which she developed the tastes at Stuyvesant High School -- she was horrified by the 9/11 attack near there.

Nee has now resumed her studies in Toronto.

Lest there be any doubts about the outrages being committed against our best potential allies against terror in this country, I append the report by Paul Moses, also a list advisor along with Nee, on torture in Brooklyn:

The author, Paul Moses, is a BC professor, Pulitzer prize winner. This is quite interesting.

HARD KNOCKS

Justice is not served at Brooklyn's 'Abu Ghraib'


BY PAUL MOSES
Paul Moses, a former city editor at Newsday, teaches journalism at
Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

September 21, 2004

When Muslim immigrants were swept off the streets of New York after the 9/11 terrorist attack and brought to the federal prison on the Brooklyn waterfront, the first sight they saw was a T-shirt imprinted with an American flag and the words, "These colors don't run."

The T-shirt, taped to a wall, was smudged with blood because the detainees were evidently slammed into it as they were welcomed into federal custody. From then on, guards routinely knocked prisoners' heads into the walls at the Metropolitan Detention Center, according to a
report by the Justice Department's inspector general. When the inspector general sent investigators, staff members at the prison claimed that prisoners' heads never even touched the walls and denied that the flag T-shirt was taped to the wall.

But there was one problem: "Numerous videotapes showing that staff members routinely pressed detainees into walls, regularly instructed detainees to place their heads against walls, and directed the detainees to face the T-shirt prominently displayed for months," the inspector
general reported last December. The dozens of detainees - who were never charged with crimes and whose only offense was overstaying visas - were credible, the report found. Many of the guards weren't.

If the internal report and the violence exhibited on these videotapes were not enough to stir high-level Justice Department officials to prosecute the guards, then the specter of their own employees desecrating the flag on company time ought to have goaded them into it.
But when the inspector general brought his findings to the Justice Department's civil rights division and U.S. Attorney Roslyn Mauskopf in Brooklyn, they declined to press charges.

A court case earlier this month showed that the decision not to prosecute the lesser violence at the Brooklyn prison sent the wrong message to military personnel involved in the embarrassing torture scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Sgt. Gary Pittman, the Marine who was convicted Sept. 2 of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, had been a guard at the Brooklyn prison. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, a fellow Marine testified during the recent trial that when he confronted Pittman about kneeing
and kicking two Iraqi prisoners, Pittman responded that the inmates needed to be treated the same way as prisoners in New York.

Although the Brooklyn prison abuse differs in many respects from what occurred at Abu Ghraib, there is a common thread: Photos confirm both. There is also a key difference: Videotapes of the abuse in Brooklyn remain secret, at the Justice Department's insistence.

Last month, a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn ordered the Justice Department to turn the videotapes over to the detainees' lawyer, Nancy Chang of the Center for Constitutional Rights, for use in a civil suit. But the tapes are still being kept secret from the public under terms of
a restrictive court order the Justice Department has insisted upon.

This is the same sort of protective order that kept the public from knowing for so long about serial sex abusers in the priesthood. Now, the beneficiaries are Justice Department officials who want to keep Americans from seeing just how poor a job they are doing of protecting
civil liberties.

During the inspector general's probe, prison officials in Brooklyn repeatedly told the investigators that the videotapes - which were made to protect prisoners from the guards but which still showed a portion of the abuse - no longer existed. The investigators later chanced on scores of tapes made by prison staff members, sometimes depicting those who had
denied knowledge of assaults in the act. As the inspector general noted, obviously the abuse was worse when the camera was off.

Even so, the Justice Department has yet to hold its own employees to the same standard of truth it has required of Martha Stewart, who was convicted of lying to federal investigators.

One reason given for the decision not to pursue charges is that the detainees preferred to be deported rather than wait in federal custody to testify. After what they were put through, it's hard to imagine they'd voluntarily spend an extra minute in a federal prison.

In any case, their lawyer says they are now willing to return to testify. Dan Dunne, spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said the agency is continuing to build a disciplinary case against the guards and that it's possible it could again be referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

But it's time for these videotapes to be made public, bloodied flag and all. Then it could truly be said, "These colors don't run" - from the truth.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Republican Smear Tactics?

George Herbert Walker Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988 with a racist smear campaign centered around Willie Horton, intimating his opponent was soft on crime.

George W. Bush (with the assistance of the Swift Boat cabal) ran a similar smear campaign against John Kerry centered on Saddam Hussein who had nothing to do with 9/11, but alleging that Kerry was soft ("flip-flopping") on terrorism. Needless to say these smears had nothing to do with the truth -- but they worked by exploiting the anxieties of what some have called "democratic populism."

With our media largely dominated by such Republican smear tactics -- Clear Channel radio stations (1,200+), Fox News, the Washington Times, NY Post and such and a long list of Scaife funded think tanks, one wonders what will be the next line of attack, come 2006 and beyond? Too damned many pols have discovered that the way to win is to create and then exploit popular fears and the above mentioned 'entertainment' vehicles are obsessed with ratings all too conducive to exploiting fear.

Those of us who point out the facts are at a marked disadvantage in that popular fears and anxieties are so easy to exploit. And those who know the facts are ready targets for reductive ad hominem attacks -- "liberal media," "elitist academics," etc. DeTocqueville had it right. Tyranny of the majority is a characteristic American scenario. Where will they strike next? We have been conned twice now. Will the public awake -- or are we on an irreversible downward slope which will leave this nation a bankrupt outcast, despised by so many who once admired American democracy?

Hopefully they will only be able to fool some of the people next time?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Some Would Call It Treason?

None Dare Call It Treason:

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/526

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I think we have been there and seen it all before -- the concerted attacks on the 'academic elite' sponsored by such as the John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s. At least that attack was redirected from the pre-WW2 targeted enemies -- Catholics and Jews -- by their earlier prototypes -- the America Firsters, corporate types and others such as our American hero, Charles A. Lindbergh, who greatly admired Hitler and urged us -- until December 7, 1941 -- to let him do his thing.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Professors' Politics Draw Lawmakers Into the Fray
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are examining whether the political climate at 18 state-run schools requires legislation to ban bias.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/national/25bias.html?th&emc=th

..................

Officials Want to Expand Review of Domestic Spying
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Congressional officials want to investigate the disclosure that the National Security Agency had gained access to some of the country's main telephone arteries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/politics/25wiretap.html?th&emc=th

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I suppose such wanna be authoritarians are part of the human political game. It is sad to see it crop up periodically in the U.S. But that is what free speech is all about. Check them out -- there are many more web sources for each of the above. I have previously commented on the David Horowitz hits which I find equally despicable.

Needless to say teachers who plumb contemporary social/political/economic matters have faced a long history of charges -- "zealot" in the instance of the man whom we honor this day and corrupter of youth and proponent of impiety towards the gods by Socrates. There were some real hazards for those who challenged the established orders in those days. Fortunately we Americans are protected by a Constitution in which free speech and due process are enshrined.

But beware those who periodically would sabotage those protections of human rights in democratic societies. They are always lurking at the gates and will do whatever they can -- fair or foul -- to worm their way to power.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Our Neo Leviathan?

In his principal writings Thomas Hobbes granted absolute powers to the sovereign, whether king or parliament. The British model in theory still maintains such absolute powers vested in the "Queen acting in Parliament." However, the Brits by custom and tradition, and the Founding Fathers pondering our own Constitution, have placed limits ("checks and balances") upon our executives -- president, prime minister, governor, mayor whatever.

Thus, it looks to be beyond his legitimate powers that George W. Bush has been straying with his defiance of laws -- both international and Constitutional. The caveat here is that such excesses are based on the most dangerous of precedents. While reading for review Austin Sarat's book on judicial clemency (Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution, Princeton University Press, 2005), I happened upon a direct reference to what anyone who is familiar with Hitler's rise to power knows all too well -- his use of emergency powers to take control of Germany and thereby the launching of the horrors of both WW2 and the Holocaust.

To run to the appropriate quote, Carl Schmitt, prominent legal theorist for both the Weimar Republic and for the Nazis in power, put it: "[The sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception." Per Sarat's comment, "Schmitt . . . understood the exception in relation to a state of emergency, a situation of economic and political crisis that imperils the state and would require, for resolution, the suspension of regular law."

Presumably this is not the text that Bush and his defenders have had in mind to justify his violations of law, but the parallel is there to be developed and those who are now critics of Bush's illegal acts, such as David Gergen, advisor to four presidents, and many a legal authority, are now warning Bush -- and us -- that he has gone too far -- far too far beyond the proper limits of the rule of law!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Ideology versus Pragmatism?

I happen to be a pragmatist both in the everyday sense of the word meaning that we should solve problems in practical ways and in the philosophic influences that shaped my own values. I did my undergraduate thesis on John Dewey's philosophy with which I was mightily impressed both with his sense that all persons are potential geniuses in their own ways so that education should be directed to finding and unlocking that genius and with his insight that 'democracy and education' are inextricably linked. Neither can exist without the other.

I also derived my sense of justice from William James' notion that the best outcome of things is to try to "satisfy at all times as many demands as we can." Justice as respect for persons meant for me listening to claims and demands and then trying to satisfy them unless they conflicted with other equally valid claims or vital public interests.

I recall getting a book to review (I forget by whom -- not Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology) during the Kennedy years which claimed that the U.S. was a nation free of ideology -- ideology being the term invented by Marx to chastise corrupt bourgeois allocation of public resources by wealthy partisans according to their own selfish interests. It is with some distress, then, that I see the term, ideology, lightly tossed around these days with its arbitrary and generally ad hominem ascriptions of "right" or "left" to opponents. Such ascriptions do not begin explorations of the social or public interests. They simply end deliberation with accusations hurled back and forth across stages, podia, TV screens. The upshot is the loss of candid exploration of basic facts and searches for solutions to problems to be discovered thereby -- pollution, global warming, energy and other resource depletions, exploding populations, exploding weapons directed at enemies with their inevitable harms both to the attackers and to those attacked (all too often innocent bystanders -- that vile euphemism, "collateral damage").

I see this mentality being absorbed by some of my students who are bound in by the confines of a party line on this or that issue -- gay marriage, abortion, war and peace, whatever. I encourage my students to do in depth critical research into issues of concern to them. This generally permits breakthroughs for them from the superficial platitudes that too often distort this or that problematic matter. However, the blinders of the ideological labels belie critical thinking on issues of vital concern to our future generations. I assume what we are seeing is a hangover from the Cold War with some of its warriors still hunting for new enemies now that their old ones have been vanquished. Needless to say xenophobia -- fear of strangers -- is extremely dangerous in a time when WMD or lesser weapons are, indeed, all too readily at hand for those bent on doing harm to others. One of my summer jobs engaged me as an assistant to a blaster and I know how easily one can blow up almost anything with maximum harm to any in the vicinity. Those bent on waging ideological battles, say against Muslim fundamentalism with a political fundamentalism of their own, are begging for trouble down the line.

Such is not the way to peace and good will in this season of rebirth. What do you think?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Iraq Election Defeats Bush

The report below is more or less what I am hearing from all sources commenting on the Iraq election -- presumably a disaster for the Bush administration and hopefully not too much of one for those who will constitute the new Iraq(s). The transition from colonial domination is manifestly not an easy one -- particularly when corporate interests such as oil are lurking in the vicinity to support collaborative brutal leaders -- Hussein in Iraq all those years, the Shah in Iran, and the host of Europeans in Latin America from which the indigenous there seem to be breaking loose one by one. The one good thing about Iraq has been that it has distracted the one tracked mentality of the Bush administration from peoples breaking loose elsewhere. May we not further compound the damage now by trying to impose one of our boys there now. And hopefully neither violent chaos nor new dictators will emerge in Iraq. It looks, however, as though we had best get our people out of there before all hell breaks loose. Ed Kent

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Subject: [wvns] Iraq Election Spells Total Defeat for US
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 16:09:04 -0000
From: World View
Reply-To: wvns-owner@yahoogroups.com
To: wvns@yahoogroups.com

"The election, billed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair, as the birth of a new
Iraqi state may in fact prove to be its funeral."


Iraq Election Spells Total Defeat for US
By PATRICK COCKBURN
in Baghdad
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyunderground

Iraq is disintegrating. The first results from the parliamentary election last week show that the country is dividing up between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.

The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces.

The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-western secular democracy in a united Iraq. Islamic fundamentalist movements are ever more powerful in both the Sunni and Shia communities. "In two-and-a-half years Bush has
succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq," said Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator.

The success of the United Arab Alliance, the coalition of Shia religious parties, has been far greater than expected according to preliminary results from last Thursday's election. It won 58 per cent of the vote in Baghdad, while Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister whom Tony Blair has strongly supported, got only 14 per cent of the vote. In the second city of Iraq, Basra, 77 per cent of voters supported the Alliance and only 11 per cent Mr Allawi.

The election was portrayed by President George W. Bush as a sign of success for US policies in Iraq, but in fact means the triumph of America's enemies inside and outside the country. Iran will be pleased that the Shia religious parties whom it has supported, often for decades, have become the strongest political force.

Ironically Bush is more than ever dependent within Iraq on the goodwill of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for all his maverick reputation. It is the allies of Iran who are growing in influence by the day and have now triumphed in the election. The US will hope that Tehran will be satisfied with this. Iran may be happier with a weakened Iraq in which it is a predominant influence rather than see the country entirely break up.

Another victor in the election is the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr whose Mehdi Army militia fought fierce battles with US troops last year. The US military said at the time it intended "to kill or capture him." Mr Bush cited the recapture of the holy city of Najaf
from the Mehdi Army in August 2004 as an important success for the US army. Al-Sadr will now be one of the most influential leaders within the coalition.

All the parties which did well in the election have strength only within their own community. The Shia coalition succeeded because the Shia make up 60 per cent of Iraqis, but won almost no votes among the Kurds or Sunni each of whom is about 20 per cent of the population.
The Sunni and the Kurdish parties won no support outside their own communities.

The highly-regarded US ambassador in Baghdad, Zilmay Khalilzad, sounded almost despairing yesterday as he reviewed the results of the election. "It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities," he said. 'But for Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian co-operaton."

The election also means a decisive switch from a secular Iraq to a country in which, outside Kurdistan, religious law will be paramount. Mr Allawi, who ran a well-financed campaign with slick television advertising, was the main secular hope but this did not translate into
votes. The other main non-religious candidate Ahmed Chalabi received less than one per cent of the vote in Baghdad and will be lucky to win a single seat in the new 275-member Council of Representatives.

"People underestimate how religious Iraq has become," said one Iraqi observer. He added: "Iran is really a secular society with a religious leadership, but Iraq will be a religious society with a religious leadership." Already most girls leaving schools in Baghdad wear
headscarves. Women's rights in cases of divorce and inheritance are being eroded.

Sunni Arab leaders were aghast yesterday at the electoral triumph of the Shia, claiming fraud. Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni Arab alliance, the Iraqi Accordance Front, said that if the electoral commission did not respond to their complaints "we will demand that the elections be held again in Baghdad."

Mr Allawi's Iraqi National List also protested. Ibrahim al-Janabi, a party official, said: "The elections commission is not independent. It is influenced by political parties and by the government."

But while there was probably some fraud and intimidation the results of the election mirror the way in which the Shia majority in Iraq are systematically taking over the levers of power. They already control the Ministry of the Interior with 110,000 police and paramilitary units. Most of the troops in the 80,000 strong army being trained by the US army are Shia.

Mr Khalilzad said yesterday that "you can't have someone who is regarded as sectarian, for example as minister of the interior." This is a not so-veiled criticism of the present minister, Bayan Jabr, a leading member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shia party. He is accused of running death squads and torture centres whose victims are Sunni Arabs.

But it is unlikely that the Shia religious parties and their militias will tolerate any roll back in their power. "They feel their day has come," said Mr Attiyah. For six months they have ruled Iraq in an alliance with the Kurds. The Kurdish leaders are not very happy with
the way this government has worked saying that Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister, has broken cooperation agreements.

The Kurds, supported by the US, will now try to dilute Shia control of government by bringing in Sunni ministers and Mr Allawi. But one Kurdish leader said: "We have a strategic alliance with the Shia religious parties we would be unwise to break." The Shia will also be
averse to giving powerful posts to politicians like Mr Allawi who have done so poorly at the polls.

The elections are also unlikely to see a diminution in armed resistance to the US by the Sunni community. Insurgent groups have made clear that they see winning seats in parliament as the opening of another front. The US is trying to conciliate the Sunni by the release of 24 top Baathist leaders without charges.But the main demand of the Sunni resistance is a time table for a US withdrawal without which they are unlikely to agree a ceasefire ­ even if they had the unity to negotiate such an agreement.

The new constitution in Iraq, overwhelmingly approved in a referendum on October 15 , already creates two super-regions, one Kurdish and the other Shia, which will have quasi-independence. Local law will be superior to national law. They will own newly discovered oil reserves. They will have their own armed forces. They envisage an Iraq which will be a loose confederation rather than a unified state.

The break up of Iraq has been brought closer by last week's election. The great majority of people who went to the polls voted as Shia, Sunni or Kurds. The forces pulling Iraq apart are stronger than those holding it together. The election, billed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair, as the birth of a new Iraqi state may in fact prove to be its funeral.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

The Foxes in Our Hen House?

I started working at a most propitious time for social bonding -- after WW2 when the veterans had returned to enjoy the GI Bill which for the first time gave wide access for blue collar workers to a higher education. The social exchanges were many and two way. We students with privileged educations (I was one on scholarships) interacted with workers in summer jobs -- in construction, factories, the oil fields of Texas, wherever. The Civil rights era was just beginning, too, with Eisenhower's directive for "affirmative action" in our military where minorities had more than proved themselves.

Working with buddies in this way one learned how hard physical work can be on one's body. I was most fortunate not to be killed once by a heavy barrel from a crane which just missed two of us. During a day taken off from a factory job to apply for a fellowship, the guy who replaced me was killed by a fork truck. Just after I left my job as a heavy freight porter at the Oxford station (the Brits had not yet broken down their class barriers so that a university student was an oddity at such a job) two of my mates were blown away by the midnight express.

But another hazard of such jobs was injury. I lost track of mine along the way -- painful but minor, but I saw and heard of others who were badly crippled by physical injuries or simply the wear and tear on bodies. Several of our hard working building staff here in Morningside Heights -- one a college grad -- have developed bad backs in their 50s. Backs seem to be the first things to give way with even relatively mild physical labor.

All of this is written to support the NYC transit workers now on strike who are trying to protect their next generation of workers from exploitation by our super rich now living in their multiple homes with lowered taxes and a supercilious attitude towards their 'hired help'. We have been rushing back into the PAST when taxes for the wealthy were nil and the worker who did not come in Sunday was advised not to bother to come in Monday and thereafter. Can you believe Bloomberg seeking a $25,000 penalty with each day doubling for each striker? Peanuts, I guess, for him.

I saw the remnants of these attitudes when I encountered the lingering generation of super wealthy in several of my summer jobs -- one tutoring Rebecca Harkness's two lovely young daughters in Watch Hill, RI, where I watched (not Mrs. Harkness's) some of the pretentious folks' scorn for their Republican President and our war hero, Eisenhower. I see the same scorn for those giving their lives in Iraq emanating from Washington which has ordered those returning coffins to be kept out of sight. I wish the Iraqis the best, but it for them to get themselves together without our continuing interference and for us to redirect some of our more than half a trillion dollars a year military budget back to people who actually work for a living.

The transit workers deserve respect. They have kept our systems running in the face of the total lack of security either for our subways or busses which are prime terrorist targets. They go deaf from the noise -- this is what a hearing expert explained was a cause of my hearing loss back when the subways were breaking down and we passengers were riding with the windows open. He advised ear plugs which I still wear regularly when I enter the system. And I smelled the burning bodies at the World Trade Center each time we rode past Chambers Street for the next 6 weeks after 9/11. Imagine how they felt with such constant reminders of the losses to so many families of working New Yorkers -- now scorned?

I find our multi billionaires -- "Mike" Bloomberg and his attacks on the transit workers -- morally obscene. And Pataki obviously could not care less about NYC.

Hopefully this transit strike will wake up Americans to the fact that we are facing hard and harder times ahead and had better clean out of our political offices the greedies who are manipulating our economic system in their own corrupt interest. Such types are always going to be with us, but it is time that we got such foxes out of the hen house!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Some Thoughts on the Transit Strike in NYC

Needless to say the transit strike is disrupting the lives of many of us in NYC. Many of us don't bother to own cars, as our public transport is cheap and convenient and we can rent easily for longer distance things.

However, NYC is one of the last strongholds of decency so far as compensation of workers is concerned in this country with the Walmartization of labor following upon the export of manufacturing jobs elsewhere that began in the 1970s and of white collar jobs currently picking up speed. The TWU is battling against the forces of greed that would end respect for workers not only here in NYC.

The split in America is widening between those of us who have lucked out with safe jobs, real estate and stock market investments, and those who are increasingly being left stranded with no or minimal jobs and prospects. They say that social mobility is a thing of the past in this country. And I was particularly hit by the figure in the NY Times last week that 82% of those applying for low interest federal loans in the Gulf area to rebuild their homes were being turned down for bad credit. I know too many of my own students -- some of the best -- who through no fault of their own have been facing bankruptcy before they have even been able to graduate from college. I hate to think what is happening to the mere high school grad or dropout who is being drained by the credit vultures who have no compunctions about hoisting interest rates on cards merely because they figure they have their victims hooked. It has happened to us whenever we happen to have run up a large balance (a wedding or whatever) so I know how very crooked they are. Never again Chase, MBNA, Bank One who played this game -- the first two sponsored by two of my academic institutions (Yale and Columbia cards offered respectively).

The split between poverty and wealth is expanding and I admire the transit workers putting themselves on the line against the array of billionaires -- our now suddenly nastier Mayor and the Scaifes funding the right wing think tanks, spinning the slogans and hot button issues to con the public into voting against its own best interests. I hear the slogans echoed back by those who should know better -- well educated classmates, academics, and others -- or are they just going along for the ride?

Fortunately I set up a list so that I can be in touch with my students to whom I will send a copy of this. They and my children and grand children are being terribly cheated by the huge debts being built up for them to spend the rest of their lives paying off and their environment being risked by those who would deny the hazards of global warming, the energy crunch, and pollution that kills. The U.S. should be taking the lead in facing and resolving these problems. Instead it has become the rogue nation which is earning the contempt of the rest of the world. I never imagined that I might be ashamed to be an American. But scarcely a day goes by when I do not learn of another cheating scheme directed at those unable to defend their interests -- here and abroad. Tell us about the results in Montreal and in Hong Kong, dear apologists. At least the transit workers are putting their lives on the line (and those of their families) and saying "NO MORE!"

They certainly have my admiration and support. May more of us become engaged in the realities of our present world!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Iraq Election Bad News for Bush?

Religious Groups Take Early Lead in Iraqi Ballots
By EDWARD WONG

Early voting results indicated that religious groups, particularly the main Shiite coalition, had taken a commanding lead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/international/middleeast/20iraq.html?th&emc=th

..................

For those who have been following the subtexts on the Iraq situation the election results look to be bad news for Bush -- either a tilt towards an Islamic republic allied with Iran or civil war if the factions cannot get it together. With Bush in general disarray in the face of multiple charges heading towards him and major Republican leaders, we may be seeing g-d knows what panic buttons being hit by our less than brilliant Yalie who seems only good at names -- and fist and hand-shaking. Ed

--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy) -- Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Dumbing Down the Kids?

Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds
By SAM DILLON
The average American college graduate's literacy in English
declined significantly over the past decade, the test
showed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/education/16literacy.html?th&emc=th

.............................................................

I have to admit as a college teacher that I see much less book and newspaper reading going on by the current generation of students than any I have known. I don't know whether this is due to other sources of information -- the web -- or simply distractions along the lines of MTV and the junk TV stuff that is watched in place of settling down with a good book. But the upshot is a general dumbing down -- lack of knowledge of the most basic things of which my generation was fully aware -- significant events in history to basic things happening around the world.

Such a dumbing down -- and that is what it is -- does not bode well for American democracy. We are not producing the replacement generation of skilled performers that are needed to fuel a society and to keep it from wasting its resources on scams of an infinite variety of kinds, e.g. the construction of kinds of expensive military equipment not needed in this post Cold War era, but which only enrich those who produce them and the representatives in their states who lobby for the same. The ways in which the U.S. leads the world -- military budget larger than the rest of the world's combined, highest percentage of those imprisoned (1/4 of the world's total with 1/20 of its population), massive trade imbalances and budget deficits, etc., etc. spell deep trouble for our future when our house of cards comes tumbling down.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Lest We Forget -- Slavery in the North

[Lest We forget, the Underground Railroad by which Quakers smuggled slaves out of our Southern States, had to get them to Canada, where slavery had been ended de facto by 1803. In the North abuses of slaves were as gross as in the South until the Civil War -- and thereafter prejudices forced African Americans out of skilled trades well into the 20th Century. Ed Kent]

************************************************************************

The City Life
A Convenient Amnesia About Slavery

By BRENT STAPLES
Published: December 15, 2005

Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.

The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking "Slavery in New York," which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.

New York's central position in the slave trade was partially exposed back in 1991, when workers excavating for an office tower in Lower Manhattan uncovered a long-forgotten burial ground that may have originally spread for as much as a mile. It served as the final resting place for thousands of enslaved New Yorkers.

Among the bodies exhumed and examined, about 40 percent were of children under the age of 15; the most common cause of death was malnutrition. Some enslaved mothers appear to have committed infanticide, rather than bringing their children into what was clearly a hellish environment. Adults typically died of hard labor, dumped into their graves by owners who simply went out and bought more slaves.

Slavery was no less brutal in New York than in the South - and just as pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York households owned human beings. The free human labor that ran the city's most gracious homes also helped to build its early infrastructure and supplied the muscle needed by the beef, grain and shipping interests, which forestalled emancipation until 1827 - making New York among the last Northern states to abolish slavery.

Judging from the videotaped responses of visitors to the historical society, people who thought they knew New York's history well have been badly shaken to learn about the depth and breadth of human bondage in the city. As one distraught patron put it, "The ground we touch, every institution, is affected by slavery."

Historians who had expected to find early 18th century slavemasters agonizing over the moral questions associated with slavery were surprised in a different way. One researcher said the record before the Revolutionary War contained not a single scrap of paper to support the notion of guilt among the slaveholding classes.

By conveniently "forgetting" slavery, Northerners have historically absolved themselves of complicity while heaping blame onto the shoulders of the plantation South. This cultural amnesia will no longer be plausible after the country absorbs the New-York Historical Society's eye-opening exhibition, which vigorously debunks the myth of the "free" North.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Another American Atrocity

Ah-nold looks like a Nazi, sounds like a Nazi, acts like a Nazi -- he has just made the decision to eliminate another member of the inferior races. But don't blame him. He is just trying to become an all-American.

Anyone who knows anything about the U.S. criminal justice system knows that we have been murdering African Americans for some centuries now. First it was rebel and runaway slaves. Then is was the lynchable -- entertainment in which unappreciated Americans could win fame by being pictured with their kids mugging at a lynching on a picture postcard available at your corner pharmacy.

More recently we have been executing African Americans who are indicted, prosecuted, convicted, and executed in numbers obviously massively distorted by prejudices. The Supreme Court even has acknowledged such.

Bottom line. Had Stanley Tookie Williams been convicted of rape-murder, he might have had available DNA evidence proving his innocence. Unfortunately he has only been tried for murders which he denies having committed. Frankly having been a legal philosopher through a number of decades watching this travesty -- capital punishment -- which the civilized world has now eschewed and also watching the murders of so many African American men -- King, Malcolm X, and a host of others whose books I have read and reviewed -- I wish that Ah-nold might have surprised us today. But the surprise would have been for him to have done so.

May Schwarzenegger not get the punishment that he deserves. I trust Williams' denial that he committed the crimes for which he will die. Such has been the American game for several centuries. African Americans are fair targets in Amerika -- for our public entertainment when we kill them off. Shame!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Tyranny of the Majority?

Both Alexis De Tocqueville in Democracy in America and John Stuart Mill in On Liberty noted that the greatest challenge to democracies is defeating majority tyranny over minorities. Lest we over idealize America's history, let us not forget our genocidal takeover from the native inhabitants (the Indian wars) and institutionalization of slavery which even a brutal civil war could not fully overcome.

It is, thus, with foreboding that one reads that Shia militias in Iraq are already imprisoning and torturing Sunnis there -- by some reports in as many as nine secretive prisons and in at least two as disclosed in the following report:

Iraq Prison Raid Finds a New Case of Mistreatment
By EDWARD WONG
A raid of an Iraqi government detention center in Baghdad
turned up more than 600 prisoners packed into a cramped
space, 13 of them requiring hospital treatment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/international/middleeast/12iraq.html?th&emc=th

The upshot here is that George Bush's background studies in democracy as a cheerleader, frat president, and member of Skull and Bones at Yale -- plus Harvard Business School -- may not have filled him in on the fact that democracy is more than a matter of restoring to power the old boys elite in Iraq who will be free to do their free enterprise thing and to create general chaos as the minorities fight for their lives.

Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister
By DEXTER FILKINS
The three front-runners for prime minister of Iraq, once
schoolmates, have very different visions for their
country's future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/international/middleeast/12family.html?th&emc=th

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Chalabi of this threesome of likely winners of control over there in the scheduled election is under indictment in Jordan for making off with several hundred million in a banking scheme dating back to 1993 and is the purveyor of the mos of the misinformation that got us into the Iraq war in the first place. I would not place much confidence in what such produce in the way of minority protections, if in fact placed in office.

And so it goes.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Nursery Education Produces Successful Adults

* Nursery 'boosts child's success' *
Adults who went to nursery as young children are more likely to have success at school and in work, a study suggests.
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/education/4516446.stm

*****************************************************************

Headstart comparative studies initiated more than 3 decades ago indicated that particularly children from culturally deprived backgrounds were twice as likely to become successfully engaged adults as those not so benefited. One of our great American crimes, given that we have pioneered in the techniques of early childhood education, is that we do not (as do some advanced nations) make such educations universally available through a relatively modest, but highly productive over the long run expenditure of funds. The greedies will pay in the end when our stock markets go belly up!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Pyromaniacs?

I happened to hear an interesting paper the other day attempting to figure what beings should have rights? This exploration set my mind running along the usual lines. Aristotle had defined humans as being the distinctively "rational" beings -- not yet possessing rights in his time (enslaving barbarians and conquered Hellenes was the oldest game in town there and wars were thought to be the proper means for achieving 'peace and prosperity').

I pondered a bit the notion of psychopathy, the incapacity to feel empathy for other humans -- yet not a grounds for pleading legal insanity when having committed an egregious crime. Yet how can one morally blame individuals for a condition that they either inherited genetically or acquired through abuse in childhood or both? Is this lack of empathy perhaps even a distinctive human characteristic? Should it be grounds for denying rights, if so widespread amongst our 'clan'?

Then it hit me. We humans are uniquely the only animals that use (and abuse) fire! Perhaps only fire using ones should have rights -- this would get us past the hairy questions raised by Aristotle's criterion of 'rationality' which so many -- from Freud to Marx -- have challenged for its self-deceiving basic flaws.

But then, pressing a bit further, I realized that a fire using animal is all too likely to abuse fire. We humans particularly, let alone our science fiction monsters, seem to get quite a charge out of burning things -- and people! As I write this The Infinite Mind (npr) is running a program on the problem -- children fascinated by fire who set deadly fires.

Looking beyond children, however, adults, too, seem to delight in burning -- recall the Inquisition's auto de fe (act of faith, i.e. burning people) viewed then as an ultimate religious expression (as well as form of public entertainment). We NOW condemn those who practiced this unholy crime against humanity -- and let us not forget that Protestants (e.g. Calvin) sanctioned it as well as of Catholics -- it was a very 'Christian' thing to do -- witches beware!

And what ho! Burning innocent people in large numbers has more recently become one of the significant features of modern warfare. It began in my child's awareness with the fire bombings perpetrated by the Nazis on the nations they were conquering in Europe. Phosphorus is a relatively benign substance if kept where it belongs -- under water. But removed from its watery containment, phosphorous spontaneously ignites. Imagine the plight of Dutch citizens reportedly splattered with phosphorous during the Nazi attack on their country at the beginning of WW2 -- alternately ducking under the waters in a nearby canal and then reigniting when emerging to breath -- what a way to die!

The Nazis -- rather the good Germans -- got their comeuppance, however, down the line when the allies bombed Dresden with fragmentation bombs followed by incendiaries which created a monster fire storm there that killed many thousands swept into its center by hurricane force winds -- or who were asphyxiated by the sudden absorption of oxygen by the flames. And similarly we later blew away Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the ultimate weapon of pyromaniacs -- nuclear bombs -- which followed upon our even more deadly killing games in Tokyo, a city of wood and paper repeatedly fire bombed with the torching of more lives than the totals of the two nuclear targeted cities.

Fast forward to the Viet Nam war. American ingenuity devised an even more deadly fire bomb made of jellied gasoline -- napalm. Dropped in synchronized patterns from on high, these bombs skidded along the ground splattering anything in their paths with blazing gasoline. And so we saw the scenes of war represented by the picture of a fleeing girl whose clothing had been burned off her by napalm -- she survived and emigrated to Amerika.

Napalm may be out, but our ingenious weapons makers have been at it again. Do you remember the "daisy cutters" -- one or more of which we dropped on Afghanistan during the course of our invasion there? These were apparently first used in Viet Nam in 1970, but only emerged in public consciousness more recently when targeted against resistance in Afghanistan. They are ingenious things -- 15,000 pounds of kerosene combined with explosives dropped by parachute close to the ground where a first explosion releases the kerosene and a second ignites it with a mighty blast which kills anything within a square mile, animal, child, woman, soldier. One might call it our ultimate in pyromaniac weapons. It has the advantage of not spreading dangerous radioactivity to compromise invading troops -- as did our gas warfare during WW1.

Most recently we have admitted grudgingly that our newest terror fire weapon was used in our attack on Fallujah -- a new type of phosphorus bomb.
Numbers incinerated there were not determined, but reported graphically by a documentary filmed by an unembedded Italian journalist -- shown in Italy, not here.

Of the above one does not hear much in our own media. One wonders what more such toys our military has at its disposal or under development. I remember when the CIA was testing LSD on my fellow grad students back during Korean War days. I don't, however, recall reports of CIA torture. Possibly we might find more benign ways to get things done? Cutting off heads was considered to be a humane execution procedure in the time of Mary Queen of Scots -- reserved for aristocratic rebels and such -- one's relatives. And, of course, some still prefer the gas chamber as a more humane mode of execution: "Take a deep breath." Increasingly only in Amerika does our public get its jollies out of such things. I recall the picture of a small African American boy sitting horrified in one of Edison's inventions, the electric chair, waiting to be fried well done. I believe it was in the galleys of Langston Hughes' History of the NAACP which I had been sent to review -- also included in a recent NYC museum exhibit of picture postcard representations of U.S. lynchings in the past century which often involved burning to death.

For the record, lest there be any doubts about my own position. I am not a pacifist. I wore a naval officer's uniform briefly while undergoing military training during the Korean war. But I strongly oppose pointless and barbaric killing. Capital punishment is totally unjustified -- a barbaric hang over from the days when reformers were crucified by brutal Roman authorities. I cannot comprehend how anyone claiming religious affiliation can support such barbarity. And similarly most wars are NOT justified -- only defensive ones in extremis!

Needless to say the special horror of 9/11 was the burning bodies of nearly 3,000 innocent people. But how many have we Americans now burned in retaliation? I agree with Livy (who was cited approvingly by Machiavelli in his handbook on wars, The Prince): "A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Chilling Stats

I happened to catch a fragment of Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C. Congressional rep) addressing a human rights conference in Harlem yesterday and citing some really chilling statistics on the prospects for African Americans. She suggested what probably most of us academics already know -- that the ratio of African American women to men getting higher educations is 3/2. However, what really got to me were the incarceration rates -- 1 of 3 of African American men will spend time in jail; 1 in 2 who drop out of high school will spend time in jail. And the devastating unemployment rates for African American men are making it impossible for increasing numbers to be able to afford to marry and raise families.

This is truly heart-rending news and says much about our Darwinian society with its intelligent designer pretensions. Our increasing gap between poverty and wealth -- widest of the developed nations -- truly spells trouble for all of us ahead as well as current suffering for far too many. Needless to say the costs for imprisonment could be much better spent on effective education and training and job provision programs:

http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/statsbrief/cost.html

What do you think?
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Our Grading Monster

Last night I sleepily heard a late night re-run of an WNYC mid-day interview program (which included Queens College's Andrew Hacker) bemoaning the fact that the U.S. is falling far behind in producing the research scientists and mathematicians necessary to fuel our economy, let alone keep up with our global competitors, particularly China and India. One of the commentators observed that our American compulsion to get good grades may be keeping many a talented student from taking the risk of a math or science course in which an 'A' could not be assured.

This would accord with what I assume we are all seeing as one of the basic anxieties of our students -- getting good grades. I recall, myself, knowingly taking a few courses that I knew would probably result in lower grades precisely because the subject matter would be valuable and/or interesting.

Ish! What is our current educational system obsessed with grading doing to our students!!!? I tell my students about Sarah Lawrence College where students were not given grades, only comments on their work, and, thus, did not classify themselves as 'C' students and Oxford where one only took a two week examination at the _end_ of one's three years of college studies. The day-in, day-out harassment with grades looks to be seriously defeating the purposes of higher education, i.e. producing people well educated as individuals and, thereby, a maximally productive and well adjusted society!

Call it what it is -- we have created a grading monster that is sabotaging American education! Certainly there must be a direct connection here with the widespread cheating thing.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Bad News for Americans

Verizon to Halt Pension Outlay for Managers
By KEN BELSON and MATT RICHTEL
Verizon will stop contributing to the pension plan covering
50,000 of its managers and instead offer them 401(k) plans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/business/06verizon.html?th&emc=th

.................................................................

We academics are most fortunate to have a solid, no cost pension plan that allows us to invest by categories as we choose -- TIAA/CREF. I recommend to any who can join it to do so -- both of my daughers are hooked in by the accidents of a brief college job and a NASA internship. But too many Americans are now watching their long-term pensions suddenly disappearing or have made disastrous investment choices on their own. TIAA has safe options and they are among the smartest in getting it done right for no charge. Ed Kent
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp

Smearing Faculty

Under the auspices of this website: http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/
at least two of my colleagues at Brooklyn College -- and apparently several at Columbia -- have been viciously smeared by reports attributed to students (who have never entered their classrooms) and selective out of context quotes -- in some instances from secondary source reading lists as though they were the stated position of the faculty members attacked. To my knowledge none of these attackers has had the decency to check facts with the attackee -- either before or after the assault. Shame! This is not academic behavior -- it is thuggery pure and simple -- or better yet -- verbal terrorism!

Those of us who are well read in the Nazi era are all too aware of this ad hominem/red herring attack mode. We also saw it manifested by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Free speech there is, but those who employ such tactics should check with their lawyers as to the laws of slander and libel. Certainly all of us of whatever political persuasion should condemn this kind of attack for what it is -- an ugly resurgence of the worst horrors that we experienced during the 20th Century.

Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it and those who do have an obligation to tell things are they are. We philosophers have long been at the job of showing up the 'sophists' for the games they play. This is a most dirty one and should be condemned roundly by all of us alerted to it.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp