From the
New Yorker's "Online Only" content:
David Remnick talks with Barack Obama at the American Magazine Conference in Phoenix.
"The biggest problem we have in our politics, and our campaigns press this upon candidates, is to lie about the choices that have to be made. And to obfuscate and to fudge. And so by the time the person arrives there people are already set up for disappointment...
"People don't want hard choices. Everybody's all happy and feel-good, until you actually say to them, Well, you know what? Actually, if we have a real energy plan it's going to cost something. There's not a magic energy store where we can buy a new gadget; we're going to have to invest and make some tough decisions. But I do think the American people respond better to that conversation than we give them credit for, and it's not tried often enough."
Read the whole article.
posted by Matt Borondy at 10/30/2006 08:41:00 PM
"Chernobyl showed us how dangerous is modern civilization's 'cult of force.' How glaring are the imperfections of this reliance on power and coercion above all else. How dangerous our modern worldviews are to us ourselves. How humanitarian man is lagging behind technological man." -Svetlana Alexievich-
For her latest book, "Voices of Chernobyl," Svetlana Alexievich interviewed five hundred survivors of the 1986 catastrophe that took place when the seemingly unreal happened, a nuclear reactor accident that spewed radioactive chaos into the small and politically troubled Chernobyl. In this interview with Ana Lucic of the Center for Book Culture, Alexievich discusses the reality of the situation (versus the mainstream media coverage) as well as the ramifications of the "cult of force" on people who were as much the victims of political strife as of a scientific disaster.
Read the interview.
posted by Alexandra at 10/25/2006 09:08:00 PM
On ZNet, Portland anarchist Kristian Williams discusses her book
American Methods, which "deals with the US government's use of torture, starting with an analysis of the Abu Ghraib scandal," and claims that "careful reading shows how the torture at Abu Ghraib, and similar abuses elsewhere, came as a predictable consequence of policy decisions made a couple years earlier."
She continues, "In
American Methods, I push the analysis further, and argue that the policy decisions characterizing the War on Terror actually fit pretty neatly in a much longer historical arc of US imperialism. But the sad fact is, the American public as a whole is almost completely unaware of that history."
Read
the whole story.
posted by Matt Borondy at 10/18/2006 04:57:00 PM
Bill Moyers and Scott Fogdall have a piece about the future of the Internet on
TomPaine.com.
"The Bush majority on the FCC has bowed to the interests of the big cable and telephone companies to strip away, or undo, the Internet's basic DNA of openness and non-discrimination. When some members of Congress set out to restore network neutrality, they were thwarted by the industry's high spending lobbyists. This happened according to the standard practices of a rented Congress--with little public awareness and scarce attention from the press. There had been a similar blackout 10 years ago, when, in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress carved up our media landscape. They drove a dagger in the heart of radio, triggered a wave of consolidation that let the big media companies get bigger, and gave away to rich corporations--for free--public airwaves worth billions."
[More...]Note:
Bill Moyers is hosting "The Net At Risk," a documentary special airing tomorrow on PBS.
posted by Matt Borondy at 10/17/2006 11:03:00 AM
Time is running
a clip from Barack Obama's new memoir,
The Audacity of Hope. The excerpt mainly deals with Obama's view of religion as it relates to politics:
"What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God's will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all." [
More...]
See also:
BarackObama.com
posted by Matt Borondy at 10/16/2006 02:54:00 PM 
