| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
 Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:02 pm Post subject: Gambling Activists |
 |
|
WELCOME!
Gambling Activists:
| Quote: | Evers, Charles: (1922 - ) Civil rights activist and leader of voter registration drive in the 1950s. Born in Decatur, Mississippi, Evers served in the U.S. military during WWII and attended Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University). After college, Evers openly opposed the State's blatant forms of Jim Crow racism and discrimination. His activism made him a natural choice to lead the drive for voter registration in the early 1950s. Threats and attempts on his life persuaded him to leave Mississippi for Chicago in 1956, where he made money working for a time in the "numbers racket" and as a tavern owner. After his brother's assassination in 1963, Evers returned to Mississippi to take over his dead brother's position as field secretary for the NAACP. In that job, Evers organized boycotts of white businesses and stepped up the drive to register black voters. In 1969, he made history when he was elected the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, a biracial community. He served three terms as mayor, and he ran serious but unsuccessful campaigns for governor and U. S. Senator.
This Encyclopedia Biography was written by Cynthia Weeden, a teacher at Hope High School in Missouri.
Evers, Medgar Wiley: (1925-1963) Civil rights activist and protest leader born in 1925 near Decatur, Mississippi, where he lived until serving in the U.S. military during WWII. After the war, Medgar graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration from the historically black Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University) in Mississippi. Moving to the all-black community of Mound Bayou in the Yazoo/Mississippi Delta, where he sold insurance for a living, Evers established local chapters of the NAACP. Committed to using peaceful but direct action means to resist Jim Crow, he organized boycotts of gasoline stations that barred blacks from their restrooms. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers applied for admission to the Law School of the University of Mississippi. Although he was denied admission, his efforts brought him into the national spotlight. Evers then moved to Jackson, the State's capital, to serve as the first field secretary for NAACP chapters in Mississippi. Over the next several years, Evers conducted mass meetings, sit-ins at lunch counters, a boycott of city merchants who discriminated against blacks, and other forms of mass action. As the State's leading advocate for civil rights, Evers persuaded James Meredith, an African American, to seek admittance into the University of Mississippi in 1962. Meredith was eventually accepted, but riots ensued on the college campus, leaving four people dead. (From The History of Jim Crow website) |
The Times They Are A-Changin'
CD Audio
| Quote: | Only a Pawn in their Game
By the inimitable Bob Dylan
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood.
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain.
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoof beats pound in his brain.
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught.
They lowered him down as a king.
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2192#2192
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 11:08 am; edited 16 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 12:21 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Venezuela steers a new course
As oil profits fund a social revolution, President Hugo Chavez picks a fight with his country's biggest customer - the United States
By Katherine Ellison
January, 2006
| Quote: | ... At the Summit of the Americas in early November, he sought to bury a measure Bush has favored, telling a cheering crowd of some 40,000: "Each of us brought a shovel, a gravedigger's shovel, because [this] is the tomb of the Free Trade Area of the Americas." (Before Thanksgiving, he sought to slight Bush by offering discounted heating oil to the poor in a few U.S. cities through his state-run oil company's U.S. subsidiary, Citgo).
In addition, high-ranking Bush administration officials suggest that Chavez is funneling support to radical movements elsewhere in Latin America, particularly in Colombia and Bolivia. They point to Chavez's recent purchase of 100,000 Russian AK-47s. Venezuelan officials say they are for use by civilian militias to defend against a U.S. invasion.
Oil is another U.S. concern - though perhaps not to the degree Chavez likes to suggest. In 2004, Venezuela was the fourth-ranking oil exporter to the United States, sending approximately 1.3 million barrels a day, or about 8 percent of the total U.S. supply. Chavez has promised increase shipments to oil-thirsty China, but building a pipeline through Panama for trans-Pacific shipments could take several years and considerable expense. A more immediate concern, with ramifications for U.S. oil customers, is that Venezuela's state-run energy company is, by many accounts, going to seed because money that normally would have been reinvested in it has gone instead to Chavez's social programs.
For now, the U.S. "Empire" is the only geographically feasible market for Chavez's exports. But oil remains his trump card as he keeps up his enthusiastic spending in the months before this year's election. And while the new constitution limits him to just one more presidential term, he says he has no plans to retire before 2023. (-- p. 67) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2407#2407
Last edited by editor on Wed Oct 07, 2009 11:33 am; edited 8 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 9:39 am Post subject: |
|
|
Ernest Che Guevera
The Motorcycle Diaries
Notes on a Latin American Journey
Paperback
| Quote: | Entendamonos
so we understand each other
This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and covergent dreams.
In nine months of a man's life he can think a lot of things, from the loftiest meditations on philosophy to the most desperate longing for a bowl of soup - in total accord with the state of his stomach. And if, at the same time, he's somewhat of an adventurer, he might live through episodes of interest to other people and his haphazard record might read something like these notes.
And so, the coin was thrown in the air, turning many times, landing sometimes heads and other times tails. Man, the measure of all things, speaks here through my mouth and narrates in my own language that which my eyes have seen. It is likely that out of 10 possible heads I have seen only one true tail, or vice versa. In fact it's probable, and there are no excuses, for these lips can only describe what these eyes actually see. Is it that our whole vision was never quite complete, that it was too transient or not always well-informed? Were we too uncompromising in our judgments? Okay, but this is how the typewriter interpreted those fleeting impulses raising my fingers to the keys, and those impulses have now died. Moreover, no one can be held responsible for them. (Thus begins one of the great revolutionary texts of the modern era). |
Astonishingly, dangerously selfish, misguided view typical of a privileged, educated 20-something epitomized in this excerpt from the diary's endnotes:
| Quote: | | Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba. Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole individual, to the absolute benefit of the community. But even when all this is understood today, even when these things I am saying are comprehended, and even when everyone is willing to think a little about the present, about the past, and about what the future should be, changing the manner of thinking requires profound internal changes and helping bring about profound external changes, primarily social. (From Speech to Medical Students Aug. 20, 1960 in the appendix at p. 171) |
| Quote: | | Editor's Note: Creating a new human being, Che? Someone else tried that not long ago with some pretty devastating consequences. How tolerant would this new regime be to opposition? How soon would executions become somehow 'necessary' for the good of the collective? ... An otherwise beautifully written account of a bad camping experience. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2549#2549
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 13, 2009 12:10 pm; edited 7 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 5:34 pm Post subject: |
|
|
This Land Was Made for You and Me
The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie
Hardcover
By Elizabeth Partridge
| Quote: | With the radio show (at KVFD with cousin Jack Guthrie and Maxine Crissman Lefty Lou from Ole Mizzou) a firm commitment, Woody sent for Mary (his first wife). Her parents didn't trust Woody and begged her not to go. She had never been out of Texas, had never ridden on a train. But Mary didn't care what her parents thought. Hadn't Woody made it on the radio? She couldn't wait to get to California and start a new life. Excited and scared, she bundled up two-year-old Teeny and the new baby, Sue, and got on a train headed for California.
... They moved in with Woody's cousin Amalee, her husband, and their little children. The house was jammed full of Guthries day and night. Mary and Amalee became good friends, often starting a pot of beans in the morning and taking the kids to the beach and the zoo. In the evenings they made popcorn and stayed up late, playing poker and drinking red wine. Mary was thrilled to be in California. It was green and lush and Woody was on his way to being big, maybe really big, like Will Rogers. Mary figured she was out of the Dust Bowl for good. (From the chapter entitled, California and Lefty Lou, p. 63) |
Woody on then 19-year-old Bob Dylan:
| Quote: | | Woody called Dylan simply "the boy," and often asked the Gleasons if he would be showing up on Sunday. "That boy's got a voice. Maybe he won't make it with his writing, but he can sing it. He can really sing it." (From Windblown Seeds at p. 194) |
Woody's words to live by:
| Quote: | | I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that ... Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight these kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down or rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. (From script for opening broadcast of WNEW radio show on 12/3/44)) |
The preferred account:
Bound for Glory
Paperback
By Woody Guthrie
Illustrated by the author
Not as good as Bound for Glory but good:
Seeds of Man
Paperback
By Woody Guthrie
Terrific documentary:
Woodie Guthrie: Hard travelin'
VHS
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2601#2601
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 11:43 am; edited 14 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2007 3:59 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Blood Oil
Could a bunch of Nigerian militants in speedboats bring about a U.S. recession? Blowing up facilities and taking hostages, they are wreaking havoc on the oil production of America's fifth-largest supplier. Deep in the Niger-delta swamps, the author meets the nightmarish result of four decades of corruption.
By Sebastian Junger
February, 2007
| Quote: | This is why oil is so valuable: one tank of gas from a typical SUV has the energy equivalent of more than 60,000 man-hours of work - roughly 100 men working around the clock for nearly a month. That is the power that the American consumer can access for about $60 at the gasoline pump. * If gasoline were a person we would be paying 10 cents an hour for his labor. Easily accessible reserves are running dry, though, which means that the industry must develop increasingly ingenious - and costly - techniques for getting at the oil. Deepwater drilling, for example, now happens so far offshore that rigs can no longer be anchored to the seabed; they must be held in place by an array of propellers, each the size of a two-car garage. The cost of deepwater drilling is close to twice that in shallow water.
... Added to these technological problems is the fact that - as if by some divine prank - most of the world's oil reserves happen to be in politically unstable parts of the world. (The alternative theory is that oil exploitation tends to de-stabilize underdeveloped countries.) Because of the financial risks involved, oil reserves in politically stable countries have more value, per barrel, than oil in politically unstable countries. As we speak, the value of Nigerian oil - as a function of the capital investment that must be risked to produce it - is in steady decline.
That is MEND's trump card. It has several times threatened to shut down all Nigerian oil production, but it's possible MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Nigerian Delta) doesn't quite dare, because of the chance it will provoke a military retaliation it wouldn't survive[/b]. By the same token, the Nigerian military has threatened to sweep the delta with overwhelming force, but it doesn't know whether that might force MEND to carry out one devastating counterstrike - taking out the Bonny Island Liquefied Natural Gas facility with a shoulder-fired rocket, for example. An act of sabotage on this scale could drive Shell and the other oil companies from Nigeria for good, completely wiping out the national (U.S.) economy. One major company, Willbros, has already discontinued operations in Nigeria because of the security threat.
... Short-term market predictions are a fool's game."
The Oil Shock Wave panel wasn't so sure. It found that a complete shut-in that coincided with another event - a terrorist attack in the Persian Gulf or even an exceptionally harsh winter, for example - could trigger a major recession. Furthermore, there seemed to be no good options for dealing with it. Opening up the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve - some 700 million barrels of oil in underground salt caverns along the Gulf Coast - would lower oil prices for the whole world without providing a long-term solution. Begging Saudi Arabia for more oil could compromise the United States politically and damage our long-term interests in the region. And sending the U.S. military into the Niger delta would be politically risky and possibly unfeasible, given American commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That did not stop the U.S. government from authorizing a joint training exercise with the Nigerian military in 2004. It was reported to have been focused on "water combat." (-- pgs. 121-122) |
* Compare the figures above with the following:
| Quote: | ... The Nigerian constitution stipulates that just under 50 per cent of national oil revenue must be distributed to state and local governments and that additional 13 per cent must go to the nine oil-producing states of the Niger delta. Last year that amounted to almost $6 billion for the nine delta states - plenty, it would seem, to take care of basic social services. The problem, however, is that the money goes to the governors' officers and then simply disappears ...
(Ijaw priest, President) Owei lives in the great, seething slum of Bundu-Waterside, on the outskirts of Port Harcourt. Bundu-Waterside is a community built literally atop garbage and mud. High tide and raw sewage continually threaten to rise up over the thresholds of its thousand of plank-and-corrugated-iron shacks. People are packed into Bundu-Waterside with such desperate ingenuity that almost every human activity - cooking, fighting, eating, sleeping, defecating - seems to be observable from almost everywhere at any given moment. (-- p. 118-119) |
| Quote: | | ... The costs of fully protecting the delicate delta ecology are almost incalculable. Once the militants participate in illegalities, however, the Nigerian government can dismiss the entire movement ... Further complicating the issue is that much of the oil pollution in the creeks is from sloppy bunkering operations - which villagers then use as a basis for further claims of environmental damage to the delta. Shell recently appealed a decision by the Nigerian courts that ordered it to pay $1.5 billion to the Ijaw people in compensation for environmental damage to the delta. Under the current system, everyone involved in the oil business - from corrupt government officials to the militants themselves - makes vastly more money than he would in a transparent economy. And the bunkered oil isn't lost to the market; it simply becomes an additional tax borne by the oil companies for doing business in Nigeria. (-- p. 120) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2753#2753
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 11:50 am; edited 9 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 11:28 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Gambling for Gold:
The Poker Face of Wall Street
Hardcover
By Aaron Brown
| Quote: | Hedge your bets against currency devaluation.
BUY real GOLD.
|
| Quote: | Why would someone take risk without getting compensated by increased expected value? One such occasion is when that risk operates in the opposite direction of your larger risks. If your country's government is unstable, for example, holding gold coins could be a good idea. The price of gold goes up and down, but if the country collapses into anarchy you may find that all your other assets are worthless, at which time the gold coins will skyrocket in value.
... Risk also attracts, motivates, and creates opportunities for the best people. Suppose you just landed in a strange country where you did not know the language or have maps. You do have 550 men, but they're not really under your command. You sort of hijacked the expedition, and the guy who organized it has sent an army of 1,400 men after you. Meanwhile, you're facing one of the greatest empires on earth, with 240,000 fighting men. You'd like to conquer them.
In this situation, of course, you keep maximum strategic flexibility and look for ways to reduce your risk. Unless your name is Hernando Cortes. In that case, you burn your boats. Why? Because things seemed too easy with all your resources? Because you were cold? No, because it eliminates dissension and focuses everyone on the main goal. No doubt hundreds of conquistador wannabes ordered boats burned and were laughed at or killed by their men. Others probably were pushed back to the beach and regretted bitterly the loss of the option to retreat. But the assumption of extra risk worked for Cortes, and in less dramatic ways for many others. (From Chapter 10, Utility Belt, at p. 323) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2820#2820
Last edited by editor on Mon Oct 12, 2009 10:03 am; edited 8 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:16 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Staying Alive
Real Poems for Unreal Times
Paperback
Edited by Bloodaxe founder Neil Astley
| Quote: | The One Twenty Pub
The bomb is primed to go off at one twenty.
A time-check: one sixteen.
There's still a chance for some to join
the pub's ranks, for others to drop out.
The terrorist watches from across the street.
Distance will shield him
from the impact of what he sees:
A woman, turquoise jacket on her shoulder,
enters; a man with sunglasses departs.
Youths in tee-shirts loiter without intent.
One seventeen and four seconds.
The scrawny motorcyclist, revving up
to leave, won't believe his luck;
but the tall man steps straight in.
One seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, over there with the walkman
- now the bus has cut her off.
One eighteen exactly.
Was she stupid enough to head inside?
Or wasn't she? We'll know before long,
when the dead are carried out.
It's one nineteen.
Nothing much to report
until a muddled barfly hesitates,
fumbles with his pockets, and, like
a blasted fool, stumbles back
at one nineteen and fifty seconds
to retrieve his goddamn cap.
One twenty
How time drags when...
Any moment now.
Not yet.
Yes.
Yes,
there
it
goes.
Wislawa Szymborska
version from the Polish by Dennis O'Driscoll
(-- pgs. 134-135) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3031#3031
Last edited by editor on Sun Mar 30, 2008 2:12 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 1:00 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Impossible Odds:
New York Times Magazine
Poetry of Protest
The consequences of reading García Lorca in Tehran
By Zarah Ghahramani as told to Robert Hillman
Dec. 2/07
| Quote: | In my native Iran, choosing the wrong heroes can have frightening consequences. I chose my first hero (not counting my adored father) a decade ago when I was a university student in Tehran, studying Spanish. My teacher put before us a book of verse by the poet Federico García Lorca, who was killed by nationalist soldiers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Even reading his poems of dire prediction, I was thrilled by his bravery, facing life and its torments with no balm other than words. I remember the experience of reading one of his poems, "The Weeping." A sympathy for my fellow men and women, no more than a seed before I read it, grew shoots above the soil by the time I finished.
Tehran was enjoying a mild Prague Spring in the late '90s when I first read García Lorca. After 18 years of repressive rule by a government of puritanical priests, a liberal reformist, Mohammad Khatami, was elected president of Iran. Khatami's reforms were wishy-washy by the standards of Iran's serious radicals (a little more freedom of speech, nothing extravagant), but I welcomed them like the new dawn. When the reforms were swept aside by the puritans, who remained as powerful as ever, I raised my voice in the street along with thousands of other student protesters. I believed I was keeping faith with Garcia Lorca, and also with the great poets Saadi and Hafez of long-ago Persia, who honored love and liberty. My friends and I sat on the steps of the library chattering like happy children as we planned new protests. With so many joyful on our side, it was impossible to believe that those who despised happiness could ever prevail over us...
I didn't know it at the time, but I was only one of hundreds of student protesters detained that day. Our demonstrations had exhausted the patience of the hard-liners in the regime, and the police had been let off the leash. "Downtown" meant a tiny cell in Evin prison زندان اوین, in North Tehran, and "a few questions" meant protracted torture. I found it difficult to believe that my cheerful protests could have roused my interrogators to such violence. Bruised black by fists and boots, my shoulders and arms livid with lash welts, my scalp left bare and bleeding after my hair was shorn....
After 29 days of interrogation, friends on the outside were able to secure my freedom. The danger of rearrest compelled me to leave my country, and I now live far from Iran... If I'd have known what the interrogators of Evin could do to me, I'd have kept my mouth shut. García Lorca knew exactly what to expect from the people who hated him but kept speaking out. I understand that now. (-- p. 86) |
Federico García Lorca
Selected Verse
Revised Bilingual Edition
Edited lovingly by Christopher Maurer
| Quote: | CASIDA II
Del llanto
He cerradfo mi balcón
porque no quiero oir el llanto,
pero por detras de los girses muros
no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.
Hay muy pocos ángeles que canten,
hay muy pocos perros que ladren,
mil violines caben en la palma de mi mano.
Pero el llanto es un perro immenso,
el llanto es un ángel immenso,
el llanto es un violin immenso,
las lágrimas amordazan al viento,
y no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.
II Qasida of the Weeping
Translated by Catherine Brown)
I have closed off my balcony,
for I do not want to hear the weeping.
But out there, beyond gray walls,
nothing is heard but the weeping.
There are very few angels who sing.
There are very few dogs who bark.
A thousand violins fit in the palm of my hand.
But the weeping is an enormous dog,
the weeping is an enormous angel,
the weeping is an enormous violin,
tears have muzzled the wind,
and nothing is heard but the weeping.
(-- pgs. 294-295) |
A word about Lorca:
| Quote: | | Federico García Lorca is always - no matter what he is writing about - an elegiac poet. He looks beyond the "here and now" and sees what is present as a symbol of what is absent. No matter where one opens his work, its theme is the impossible: the melancholy conviction that all of us have certain indefinable longings that cannot be satisfied by anything around. Robert Bly (101) got it exactly right: Lorca is a poet of desire. He is always saying "what he wants, what he desires, what barren women desire, what water desires, what gypsies desire, what a bull desires just before he dies, what brothers and sisters desire." Lorca's powers of metaphor push desire even further, into the world of plants, insects, and inanimate things. In his poems, all of life is driven by some sort of undefined pain or longing. To him, the essence of poetry is mystery. And "mystery" means that language can only point at, and never adequately name, what is is that we want. What Lorca's poetry tells us is that none of us can say what we want, and none of us would be happy if we attained it. (From the Introduction, p. i) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3580#3580
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 9:44 am; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 1:37 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
The New York Times Magazine
Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
Just a few years ago, America's hold on global power seemed unshakable. But a lot has changed while we've been in Iraq - and the next president is going to be dealing with not only a triumphant China and a re-tooled Europe but also the quiet rise of the second world.
By Parag Khanna, a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation.
Jan. 27/08
The Second World:
Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
Hardcover
| Quote: | ... Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialsim; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America's armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and "asymmetric" weapons like suicide bombers. America's unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial counter-movements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, ...
... So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing - and losing - in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules - their own rules - without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.
The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will set the planetary stakes of the new global game. ... What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.
... While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe's, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn't educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want - like the International Monetary Fund - while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings - consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas - let alone when it's not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region's answer to America's Apec.
The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world's "Middle Kingdom" to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America's own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chavez's Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China's spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product - and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning america down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example. ...
The Big Three are the ultimate "Frenemies." Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell's 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others' terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America's backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe's southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China's growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call "the second world." ...
The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are mor ethan just "emerging markets." If you include China, they hold a majority of the world's foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economy's most important new consumer markets and thus gengines of global growth - not replacing the United States but not dependent on it either. I.P.O.s from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 per cent of the voume raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countries' rising importance in corporate finance - even after you subtract China. ...
Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic, strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the United States, the EU or China has a strong influence on what others in its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the world's balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will. ... (emphasis added)
What is more, many second-world countries are confident enough to form anti-imperial belts of their own, building trade, technology and diplomatic axes across the (second) world from Brazil to Libya to Iran to Russia. Indeed, Russia has stealthily moved into position to construct Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, putting it firmly in the Chinese camp on the Iran issue, while also offering nuclear reactors to Libya and arms to Venezuela and Indonesia. Second-world countries also increasingly use sovereign-wealth funds (often financed by oil) worth trillions of dollars to throw their weight around, even bullying first-world corporations and markets. ... The second world's first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary. ...
We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them - always. (-- pgs. 36-65) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3686#3686
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 11:03 am; edited 9 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 8:49 am Post subject: |
|
|
This England
Magazine Subscription
Don't Let Europe Rule Britannia
A non-political campaign sponsored byThis England, Cheltenham, Glos., GL50 1HT
Autumn, 2007
| Quote: | The Golden Thread of British Freedom
It’s the golden thread of freedom, that makes Great Britain great,
It’s the sure hand of friendship, when you first come to our gate,
It’s the voice that bids you welcome, when you travel here in need,
It’s the help that gets you settled, that you might sow your seed,
The ease in which you go to work, put food upon your plate,
It’s the golden thread of fairness, makes this Great Britain great!
Every child that’s born within, to first see light of day,
Recipient of that golden strand, come whatever may,
Be he black or brown or yellow, pink or slightly red,
He’s equal to the other one, he’s got his golden thread.
His future opens up for him, he can reach and touch the sky,
Not everybody makes it, but all are urged to try.
Not everything is perfect, to be fair, it must be said,
It’s being about what’s British, again that golden thread.
Yet you resolve to kill us, with your bombs on train and bus,
What misdeeds have we done to you, that you repay us thus?
You claim you’re disadvantaged, by, the colour of your skin
Bit it’s you that’s chosen conflict, the enemy within.
You’ve had all we can give you, and some a great deal more,
But for those who come behind you, you have slammed the British door.
You force us now to tighten up, to take a tougher stance,
When you bite the hand that feeds you, there is no second chance,
And yet the golden thread weaves on, try to cut it as you might,
It’s what makes this Britain great, and we’ll not give up the fight.
Charles Kielty (-- p. 67) |
Yes, and:
Rumpole and the Golden Thread
Audio Cassettes
By Sir John Mortimer, quite an activist
himself by all accounts.
| Quote: | This duty on the prosecution was famously referred to as the 'golden thread' in the criminal law by Lord Sankey LC in Woolmington v DPP [1935] AC 462:
Throughout the web of the English criminal law one golden thread is always to be seen - that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner's guilt subject to what I have already said as to the defence of insanity and subject also to any statutory exception... (From ever helpful Wikipedia) |
The Guardian
The golden thread that runs through our history
Liberty, tolerance, fair play - these are the core values of Britishness
By Gordon Brown
July 8/04
| Quote: | For there is indeed is a golden thread that runs through British history of the individual standing firm for freedom and liberty against tyranny and the arbitrary use of power. It runs from that long-ago day in Runnymede in 1215 to the Bill of Rights in 1689 to not just one, but four Great Reform Acts in less than 100 years. And the great tradition of British liberty has, first and foremost, been rooted in the protection of the individual against the arbitrary power of first the monarch and then the state.
It is because different ethnic groups came to live together in one small island that we first made a virtue of tolerance, welcoming and included successive waves of settlers - from Saxons and Normans to Huguenots and Jews and Asians and African-Caribbeans - and recognising plural identities.
And I would suggest that out of that toleration came a belief in religious and political freedom - illustrated best by Adam Nicolson's story of the creation of the King James Bible: different denominations coming together in committee to create a symbol of unity for the whole nation.
Liberty meant not just tolerance for minorities but a deeply rooted belief - illustrated early in our history by trial by jury - in the freedom of the individual under the law and in the liberty of the common people rooted in constantly evolving English common law. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3825#3825
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 10:05 am; edited 4 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 11:41 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Impossible Odds:
Deadeye Dick
Paperback
By Kurt Vonnegut
| Quote: | His way up the stairs to the hotel proper was blocked by a Haitian painter, who had fallen asleep while waiting for a tourist, any tourist, to come back from a night on the town. He had garish pictures of Adam and Eve and the serpent, and of Haitian village life, with all the people with their hands in their pockets, since the artist couldn't draw hands very well, and so on, lining the staircase on either side.
Felix did not disturb him. He stepped over him very respectfully. If Felix had seemed to kick him intentionally, Felix would have been in very serious trouble. This is no ordinary colonial situation down here. Haiti as a nation was born out of the only successful slave revolt in all of human history. Imagine that. In no other instance have slaves overwhelmed their masters, begun to govern themselves and to deal on their own with other nations, and repelled foreigners who felt that natural law required them to be slaves again.
So, as we had been warned when we bought the hotel here, any white or lightly colored person who struck or even menaced a Haitian in a manner suggesting a master-and-slave relationship would find himself in prison.
This was understandable. (From Chapter 15, pgs. 118-119) |
Yes, and then again in Chapter 20:
| Quote: | Bernard Ketcham, our resident shyster here at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, says that Haitian refugees should follow the precedent set by white people, and simply discover Florida or Virginia or Massachusetts or whatever. They could come ashore, and start converting people to voodooism.
"It's a widely accepted principle," he says, "that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: 'We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it...'" (-- p. 169) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3892#3892
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 10:07 am; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:39 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Fidel’s Heir
The influence of Hugo Chávez
By Jon Lee Anderson
June 23/08
| Quote: | ... In May, 2007, Chávez ordered the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of measures that Chávez had taken to increase Venezuela’s share of oil revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were paying royalties of one per cent of the oil’s value.) Most of the oil companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms; ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.
ExxonMobil had been pumping as many as a hundred and twenty thousand barrels a day out of La Faja. Seeking compensation, the company secured injunctions from judges in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands that froze up to twelve billion dollars in overseas assets of Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or P.D.V.S.A. Chávez, decrying “imperialist aggression,” threatened to cut off all oil sales to the United States. Analysts estimate that if he should ever make good on that threat the price, which has already risen vertiginously, would spiral even farther upward. (A London court later overturned the British injunction, in what was seen as a major victory for Chávez, but the legal fight continues. ExxonMobil will not say publicly how much it asked for, except that the sum is “multiple billions of dollars.”) ... (emphasis added)
Five years ago, Chávez took direct control of the state oil company, P.D.V.S.A., after sitting out a two-month strike by its union. He fired more than eighteen thousand employees, replacing many of them with his supporters. Since then, he has used P.D.V.S.A.’s revenues to fund his most revolutionary schemes, which include the so-called missions to Venezuela’s poor. Rafael Ramírez, the P.D.V.S.A. chief, told me that Chávez intended to use P.D.V.S.A. as the vehicle for transforming Venezuela from an “oil sultanate to a productive society within a socialist framework.” Like a state within a state, the oil company has begun to replicate or supersede many of the functions of the national government. New P.D.V.S.A. branches oversee everything from agriculture to shipping, construction, and food distribution. “The plan is to make P.D.V.S.A. like Gazprom,” Ramírez told me, referring to the Russian energy giant, “but with a social role.” ...
Chávez began our conversation by asking, “Tell us, why didn’t Saddam put up more of a fight when the Yankees invaded?” Before I could reply, General Rangel said that the Americans had successfully degraded Iraq’s air-defense system in the run-up to the war. Chávez looked at me for confirmation, and when I agreed he smiled, and said that, just in case the Americans were thinking of doing anything similar to Venezuela, he had bought an air-defense system from Belarus. (In the past four years, Venezuela has spent four billion dollars on foreign arms purchases, mostly from Russia.) The Belarusian system probably wasn’t the most sophisticated in the world, Chávez said, but it was what Venezuela could get: “We do what we can to defend ourselves.” ...
Since 2001, Cuba has received shipments of subsidized Venezuelan oil, estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, in exchange for the services of thousands of Cuban teachers, sports instructors, and doctors, who work in Venezuela’s slums and rural areas. Thousands of Venezuelans are studying in Cuba, and more than a hundred thousand Venezuelans with eye problems have been sent to Cuba for specialized medical treatment. In 2004, Chávez and Castro signed a sweeping trade deal that eliminated tariffs between their countries, and simultaneously committed themselves to Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, which means “dawn” in Spanish. ALBA is intended to counter the “neoliberal” trading bloc envisaged under the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Bolivia, Nicaragua, and the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica have since joined ALBA.) Chávez has become Cuba’s primary benefactor while positioning himself as the inheritor of Fidel’s mantle. ...
Venezuela outspends the United States in foreign aid to the rest of Latin America by a factor of at least five. Last year, U.S. aid amounted to $1.6 billion, a third of which went to Colombia, mainly to fund Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication program administered by the U.S. security contractor DynCorp. Chávez, meanwhile, pledged $8.8 billion for the region. This included subsidized oil for Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia; the purchase of public debt in Argentina; and development projects in Haiti. (Chávez has, in addition, provided discounted heating oil to poor Americans through Citgo, the Venzuelan state oil company’s U.S. subsidiary.)
There is also evidence that Chávez has fostered a relationship with the Colombian Marxist guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. The FARC operates along Venezuela’s border with Colombia and holds hundreds of hostages—civilians, soldiers, and politicians—in secret camps. Chávez has, at times, publicly distanced himself from the FARC, most recently last week, but the group’s espousal of Bolivarian ideals, and its strategic position, appears to have tempted him into seeing the organization as a means, if only by proxy, of confronting the U.S.; Colombia is one of America’s closest allies in the region. ...
The summit (in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where some twenty Latin-American leaders were gathering to address the crisis between Colombia and Venezuela) began the next morning, in a convention center set among the resort hotels and casinos on Santo Domingo’s seafront.
... The session seemed close to breaking down. Then Chávez spoke. He began by telling stories, goading the others and drawing them in. In the nineties, he said, he had been accused of giving arms to Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales, who was then a cocalero activist and a congressman, and to another indigenous Bolivian leader, Felipe Quispe. Chávez said to Morales, “Evo—I think Quispe’s even more radical than you.” Morales smiled modestly.
Chávez said he found ironic the accusation that he was providing three hundred million dollars to the FARC, since he had recently financed a three-hundred-million-dollar gas pipeline for Colombia—he and Uribe had attended the groundbreaking together. Chávez looked across at Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, whose populist, left-of-center government is supportive of his. “Witness the infamy that was invented that I had sent suitcases full of dollars to Cristina.” (Last August, a Venezuelan-American businessman travelling to Buenos Aires was found to be carrying eight hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash in his suitcase. Although Chávez has denied it, the widespread assumption is that he was secretly financing Kirchner’s Presidential campaign.) “And now it’s suitcases in the jungle!”
By now, many of the leaders were laughing. Chávez had created an atmosphere of entente cordiale, and momentarily blunted Uribe’s charges against him. “I could have sent plenty of rifles to the FARC,” Chávez said. “I could have sent them plenty of dollars—I will not do it, ever.” ... (--- pgs. 46-57) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3929#3929
Last edited by editor on Wed Oct 07, 2009 11:35 am; edited 5 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 9:10 am Post subject: |
|
|
The Second World
Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
Hardcover
By Parag Khanna
| Quote: | | ... Latin America could still become a solidly second-world region due to weighty economies like those of Brazil and Mexico, vast oil and gas resources, and proximity to the importing behemoth that is the United States. In inaugurating South America's visa-free zone, Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim declared, "Integration is an imperative because in a world of large blocs, we will be stronger if we are united." If the proposed South American Community of Nations (SACN) evolves coherently, the continent will soon negotiate on far better terms with the first world. (footnotes omitted) (From Chapter 14, The New Rules of the Game, pgs. 130-131) |
| Quote: | Gas is cheaper than water in Venezuela. Given the models of successful oil funds from Alaska to Norway to Kazakhstan, Chávez could easily have developed a permanent fund to redistribute oil profits, with the least getting the most, and everyone getting something. In less than a decade, the fraction of Venezuela's population that lives on less than two dollars a day, currently a majority, could have been reduced to virtually nil. But whereas in Kazakhstan property rights have been speread widely and oil wealth has been used to spur private enterprise, Chávez's notion of "Bolivarian socialism" retains an ironclad emphasis on state control. Peasant cooperatives violently seized from wealthy landholders cannot be privately owned; labor unions have been eliminated. Chávez appeared to be doing everything right with his misiónes: subsidized loans, agricultural credits, food distribution networks, and collectives. people produce for a single consumer - the government - whose payroll has inflated to over three million people. Chávez uses oil fondos the same way every other Latin country has, to serve political ends more than to actually mitigate inequality.
Chávez's heart may be in the right place, but his spending of oil wealth resembles a crack addiction: He needs more and more to maintain his high. The government has simultaneously quadrupled the internal and external debt, while hospitals have crumbled, their managers fired fro voting against him in a 2004 referendum. Price controls have made meat scarce. Chávez scored points when the Caracas mayor seized an exclusive golf course to build housing for the poor, but urban squalor persists as ever. Despite over $20 billion in annual oil revenue, per capita GDP is at best half the level of 1954. ...
Taking on the United States is like picking a fight with a bully, but Chávez realizes that bargaining between the United States and any Latin American country will never be on equal terms unless the latter has a strong outside patron. He thus loudly plays his "China card," threatening to cut off the flow of oil to the United States (while indeed slowly redirecting it to China) and selling ownership of refineries in the United States in order to invest in Asian ones. China ... now provides half of Venezuela's total foreign investment, has sold him tankers to ship Venezuelan oil fifteen thousand miles across the Pacific, and drilled rigs to boost his exploration capacity. ... China has also offered to send workers to Veneauela to help build thousands of homes, a fiberoptic communications network, and an irrigation system.
By sowing transatlantic disarray, Chávez also has a "Europe card" to play. Europe is still Venezuela's largest investor in both energy and services, and though EU monitors issued a scathing critique of the 2005 election, European countries, particularly Spain, have generally sympathized with Chávez's agenda of greater autonomy from the United States and are predisposed toward his rhetoric of poverty redemption. ... (From Chapter 16, Venezuela: Bolivar's Revenge, pgs. 139-142) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4052#4052
Last edited by editor on Wed Dec 17, 2008 1:47 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 1:46 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Loaded Dice:
The New Yorker
Mgazine Subscription
The Financial Page
Equal Before Mammon
By James Surowiecki
Sept. 15/08
| Quote: | She was an ordinary middle-class mom who, despite fierce criticism, succeeded in a male-dominated profession. She challenged the local establishment and became a national figure, earning herself a spot as a featured speaker at her party's recent Convention. But she wasn't the governor of Alaska. She was a woman named Lilly Ledbetter, a former middle manager at a Goodyear plant in Alabama, who appeared at the Democratic Convention to give a human face to the slogan "Equal pay for equal work."
Ledbetter's unlikely journey to center stage began in the late nineteen-nineties, when she received an anonymous note revealing the salaries of her fellow-managers, all of whom were men. Although Ledbetter did the same job as her colleagues, and had more seniority than some of them, they were all being paid considerably more than she was. Ledbetter sued, under the Civil Rights Act, and proved that her lower pay was the result of discrimination early in her career, the effects of which had never been remedied. But victory was short-lived; the verdict was overturned on appeal, and then the Supreme Court ruled against her. The Court did not deny that Ledbetter had been discriminated against. However, according to the Civil Rights Act, Ledbetter's lawsuit had to be filed within a hundred and eighty days, and the Court ruled that the clock started ticking with the first act of discrimination, almost two decades before Ledbetter found out what was going on.
Ledbetter was out of luck. But the Court did leave open a possibility for others like her: if Congress wanted a more realistic time frame for lawsuits, all it had to do was change the law. And so, acting with surprising dispatch, that's precisely what Congress tried to do. Last year, the House passed a bill, named after Ledbetter, that essentially did away with the statute of limitations on pay discrimination, and the Senate was set to do the same until Republicans filibustered it to death.
Protecting workers from discrimination is a fairly uncontroversial idea. So opponents of the bill, who include John McCain, insisted that, while they're in favor of equal pay, the new law would unleash a flood of frivolous litigation. That's a familiar excuse, and in this case a threadbare one. There would likely be more lawsuits if the bill was passed--the point, after all, was to allow more people to sue--but there was no reason to expect a deluge, since, before the Court's decision, it's probable that most potential litigants had assumed a less stringent interpretation of the time limit anyway. And giving workers more time to sue makes sense, because pay discrimination usually takes a while to become evident, and, insofar as raises and bonuses are based on initial salaries, its effects never go away.
Other opponents of the bill depict it as a stalking horse for the idea of "comparable worth" (also known as "pay equity"), which would require the government to shrink the current gender wage gap by insuring that workers in female-dominated professions receive pay similar to that of workers in male-dominated professions, as long as they're doing work of "similar value." To have the government, rather than the market, set wages and decide what kinds of work are comparable to others is indeed a poor idea. But the Lilly Ledbetter bill has nothing to do with comparable worth. It's about closing a loophole that has enabled employers to get away with active discrimination. Comparable worth would require the government to enforce equal pay for different jobs. But Ledbetter just wanted what she was entitled to--equal pay for the same job.
Does the Ledbetter bill matter? It's true that active discrimination is rarer these days than it once was. But, contrary to what much economic work would predict, racial and sex discrimination is still a powerful force in the job market. Decades ago, the economist Gary Becker showed that "taste-based" discrimination (pure prejudice) could not survive in a truly competitive talent market, because unprejudiced companies would outperform prejudiced ones by hiring smart women and minorities. Yet the introduction of blind auditions at major symphony orchestras, starting in the seventies, has increased by fifty per cent the likelihood of female performers' advancing--a clear sign that, for decades, orchestras had made bad talent decisions because of their prejudice without being punished. More striking, recent work by Kerwin Charles and Jonathan Guryan, of the University of Chicago, shows that, under certain reasonable conditions, market competition will not necessarily eradicate discrimination. That may be why, they suggest, the gap between black and white wages is widest in the most prejudiced parts of the U.S.--precisely what you'd expect if businessmen could discriminate and get away with it.
Of course, just because the market can't prevent discrimination doesn't mean the government should. And so there is a principled argument against the Ledbetter bill: namely, that Lilly Ledbetter was an adult; that if she didn't think she was being paid fairly she was free to ask for more money or to leave; and that government interference with the idea of what constitutes fair pay is likely to cause more problems than it's worth. Unlike the current opposition to the bill, this is an honest position to take. But it's also, for good reasons, a profoundly unpopular one, which is why few Republicans have voiced it. Instead, opponents of the bill have acted like McCain, proclaiming their support for fair pay while doing their best to insure that workers have a hard time getting it. Maybe it's time for them to give Americans some straight talk and unveil a new slogan: "Unequal pay for equal work." It may not be catchy, but at least it's honest. (--p. 34) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4062#4062 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 3:18 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Gambles at Law:
He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again - Hamlet, Act I, Scene II.
In Other Words
Hardcover
Alas, the final book of Sir John Mortimer
| Quote: | My first client was a husband longing for a divorce but unable to persuade anyone to commit adultery with his wife. He was reduced to the terrifying expedient of putting on a false moustache and a pair of dark glasses and creeping publicly into his own mobile home, pretending to be his own co-respondent. Regrettably, when this was discovered, he was sent to prison for 'perverting the course of justice.'
It was occasions such as this which led my father to quote A.E. Housman's poem about the strange business of making laws.
'The laws of God, the laws of man"
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
(-- pgs. 31-33) |
Obituary:
The Economist
Sir John Mortimer, barrister and freedom-fighter, died on January 16th, aged 85
Jan. 29/09
| Quote: | Every true-born Englishman knows that the law is an ass. Rules are better honoured in the breach than the observance. Judges are best represented in a chorus line at the D’Oyly Carte. The English constitution is a vague formulation in someone’s head, and that foundation of English liberties, Magna Carta, is best known for banning eel-traps in the Thames. The firm clip of the law is for the other fellow. Behind the furled umbrellas and decorum, Englishmen are anarchists. Or, as John Mortimer liked to think of them, votaries of “my darling” Prince Kropotkin.
Mr Mortimer’s great service to his country was to sum up in one person both the weight of the law and a sharp, rollicking scepticism of it. He was an eminent lawyer, entering chambers in 1948 and becoming, in time, a Queen’s Counsel and a master of the bar. Few excelled him in cross-examination (the art of which, he liked to say, was “not to examine crossly”). Yet the law was only his day job, giving him the money and the material to write novels. At the bar he dressed scruffily, lest anyone take him for a conventional lawyer. He made fun of the “old sweethearts” on the bench, who would pass a death sentence and then go out for buttered muffins. And as for the law itself, “the great stone column of authority which has been dragged by an adulterous, careless, negligent and half-criminal humanity down the ages”,
[it] is a subject which, I may say, never interested me greatly. People in trouble, yes. Bloodstains and handwriting, certainly…Winning over a jury, fascinating. But law! The only honourable way to pass a law exam is to make a few notes on the cuff and take a quick shufti at them during the occasional visit to the bog.
Those words were not exactly his, but those of Horace Rumpole (seen above right, played by Leo McKern), whose adventures at the criminal bar Mr Mortimer tirelessly depicted in books and TV plays from 1975 onwards. He denied that Rumpole was entirely himself. There was much of his barrister-father in him, especially in his habit of quoting poetry to ward off unwelcome conversation, as well as borrowings from colourful colleagues. Rumpole was a cheroots-and-cheap-claret man (“Pommeroy’s claret keeps me astonishingly regular”), where Mr Mortimer favoured cigars and, at the dawn of the writing day, champagne. He often lost his cases, where Mr Mortimer was notably successful. Home for Rumpole was a mansion flat off Gloucester Road, where he lived in a state of miserable, snappish fidelity to Hilda, “She Who Must be Obeyed”. Mr Mortimer graced the well-heeled, pretty Chilterns near Henley-on-Thames, where children, stepchildren, a love-child, two wives called Penelope and the “Mortimer-ettes”, a claque of intelligent, charmed women, paid court to him and he to them.
A golden thread
Where Rumpole and Mr Mortimer fused together was in their sense of how lawyers should behave. Both were freedom-fighters. They refused to prosecute: their role was to defend the individual against the weight and follies of the law. Rumpole, grubbing round the Old Bailey cells with their “perpetual smell of cooking”, refused to let his clients plead guilty while the smallest doubt remained. He liked to quote Lord Sankey’s words on the presumption of innocence, the “single golden thread” that ran through English law.
Mr Mortimer, also tracing that thread, took on the most celebrated free-speech cases of the 1970s, and won them all. Largely thanks to him, the lord chamberlain’s censoring hand was lifted from the theatre. Thanks to him, Englishmen could read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Inside Linda Lovelace”, could see Rupert Bear with an erection in Oz magazine, and could endure a Roman soldier’s tryst with the body of Jesus in Gay News. Mr Mortimer hated pornography. But “Liberty is allowing people to do things you disapprove of.”
He took that conviction into politics, too. It led him to support foxhunting and to resume smoking in old age, just to defy the ban. He played the devil’s advocate on behalf of freedom everywhere, from the Oxford Union to the dinner table. Bishops were a favourite target, rapiered for the “absurdity” of life and the worse absurdity of heaven, which had to resemble “the lounge of a Trusthouse Forte hotel”. People, he thought, should be regularly shocked. Offence “makes society move”.
All this, he admitted, came close to anarchism. Yet at its base was something different. He took up the law, which made all else possible, out of obedience to his father. Clifford Mortimer was blinded when John was 13, yet continued his law practice and his life as though nothing had happened. For his son—as he explained in his play, “A Voyage Round My Father”, in 1971—a career at the bar was an extension of all the other duties he assumed for his demanding, unseeing parent, from tying up the dahlias and trapping earwigs to handing him his boiled egg, or his coat.
He walked with his hand on my arm. A small hand, with loose brown skin. From time to time, I had an urge to pull away from him, to run into the trees and hide…But then his hand would tighten on my sleeve…He was very persistent…
The freedom-fighter defied most laws but not this one, family love. (-- p. 94) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4162#4162 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
FAQ 
Search 
Memberlist 
Usergroups
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
