Stories about Thinking Politically.
Albert responds to R. Burke's critique of Parecon (Participatory Economics)
On its border with Mexico, America is ripping children from their parents’ arms.
“Populism” is a magical word. Its mysterious power unites the Erdogan and Putin governments, Latin American leftists like Evo Morales and the late Hugo Chavez, the resurgent Right in Europe and the United States, Hungarian and Polish anti-communist parties, Podemos, the Eurocommunism of the tragic Syriza, the revitalizers of social democracy Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn – all under the same umbrella.
Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behind
Silenced and cut off from the outside world, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the last six years with no access to sunlight, fresh air, or proper medical treatment. Furthermore, last March President Lenin Moreno’s Ecuadorian government cut his access to the internet, phone calls and even visitors and journalists. For a man who has already been confined to the embassy for so long, these restrictions are particularly harsh.
The basic problem we have with parecon as advocated by Michael Albert is that we think he proposes blueprints for society without attempting to provide anything empirical to back up his claims. Whenever a criticism is raised, Albert’s response is to assert the beauty and elegance of his model, or to claim he has already considered this or that objection, so why are we being so critical? Of course, since the model is not functioning in the actual world, there is no evidence to falsify it, and Albert can always double down on its elegance in his ideal mindscape.
In 1920, Eugene Victor Debs ran for president from a cell in the federal prison in Atlanta for a speech opposing World War 1 that he gave 100 years ago – on June 18, 1918. Despite his imprisonment, Debs received 913,664 votes – 3.4 percent of the total.
In his speech, the Socialist Party leader told a packed crowd at a park in Canton, Ohio: “You need to know that you are good for something more than slavery and cannon fodder.”
Alamance County District Attorney Pat Nadolski filed criminal charges against 12 people who voted while they were ineligible because they were on probation or parole. Eight of them are black in a county where African Americans make up only 19 percent of the population. (Image is a still from this video.)
