quote from It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis

"But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word 'Fascism' and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty."

University of Virginia to offer free online courses

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/morning_call/2012/07/university-of-virginia-to-offer-free.html?ana=RSS&s=article_search

The University of Virginia    announced on Tuesday that it plans to offer free online courses a month after its president was fired briefly in part for her perceived hesitation to embrace online education, WJLA.com reported.

Online platform Coursera said that U.Va. is among 12 institutions that plan to offer the free, non-credit courses through its Internet-based learning system. The school and Coursera said they had worked for several months to reach the deal, which involves no exchange of funds.

Lawmakers Condemn Michele Bachmann’s Claim of an Islamist Plot

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/lawmakers-condemn-michele-bachmann-s-claim-of-an-islamist-plot/

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

Representative Michele Bachmann’s recent claim that Islamists have infiltrated the highest levels of the federal government drew strong condemnation on Wednesday from her colleagues in Congress.

A handful of Republican lawmakers led by Ms. Bachmann of Minnesota sent letters on June 13 to five federal agencies demanding investigations of a conspiracy to influence American foreign policy to favor the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes.

A letter to the State Department singled out Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, prompting an impassioned defense on the Senate floor on Wednesday from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

“These sinister accusations rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family, none of which have been shown to harm or threaten the United States in any way,” Mr. McCain said. “These attacks have no logic, no basis, and no merit and they need to stop. They need to stop now.”

Citing a report by Frank J. Gaffney Jr., the president of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative policy group based in Washington, the lawmakers said Ms. Abedin’s mother, brother and late father had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist movement whose members recently gained power in Egypt.

“Her position affords her routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, before listing several instances where the State Department and Mrs. Clinton took actions “that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”

“We believe these actions and policies are deeply problematic,” the lawmakers wrote. “They may even pose security risks for this nation, its people and its interests.”

Ms. Abedin, 37, was born in Michigan and began working for Mrs. Clinton in 1996 when she was first lady. She stayed by Mrs. Clinton’s side in the Senate and during her 2008 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and is now her deputy chief of staff. A Muslim, she is married to former Representative Anthony Weiner, who is Jewish. Mr. Weiner resigned from Congress last year after he admitted to sending inappropriate photos of himself to women on Twitter. The couple have a 6-month-old son, Jordan.

Mr. McCain said he had known Ms. Abedin for more than a decade and considers her a friend.

“Put simply, Huma represents what is best about America,” he said.

The accusations, he added later, were an affront to all Americans. “When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it.”

The lawmakers sent similar letters based on the policy group’s report to the inspectors general in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The letters were also signed by Representatives Trent Franks of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Tom Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.

Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and a Muslim, requested evidence from Ms. Bachmann to back her claim. Her response, he wrote in a letter to Ms. Bachmann, “simply rehashes claims that have existed for years on anti-Muslim websites and contains no reliable information that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the U.S. government.”

Ms. Bachmann responded Wednesday afternoon saying that the letters were “unfortunately being distorted.”

“The intention of the letters was to outline the serious national security concerns I had and ask for answers to questions regarding the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical group’s access to top Obama administration officials.”

[…]

The Key Feature of Contemporary Capitalism

"This is why the key feature of contemporary capitalism is not only the hegemony, but also the (relative) autonomy of financial capital:  it may seem like the banks are just engaging in speculation, shuffling numbers here and there, and nobody is exploited, since exploitation happens in "real" production. But why did we have to give billions of dollars to the banks in 2008 and 2009?  Because, without a functioning banking system, the entire (capitalist) economy collapses.  Banks should thus also count as privatized commons:  insofar as private banks control the flow of investments and thus represent, for individual companies, the universal dimension of social capital, their profit is really a rent we pay for their role as universal mediator.  This is why state or other forms of social control over banks and collective capital in general (like pension funds) are crucial in taking a first step towards the social control of commons.  Apropos the reproach that such control is economically inefficient, we should recall not only those cases in which social control was very effective (this was, for example, how Malaysia avoided crisis in the late 1990s), but also the obvious fact that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered precisely by the failure of the banking system."
--Less Than Nothing, p. 247

The Conscience of a Liberal

Paul Krugman

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/finance-capitalism/

JULY 17, 2012, 6:18 PM

Finance Capitalism

One more point about this whole business of "attacking capitalism": to the extent that Obama is attacking anything other than Mitt Romney, he's questioning a system in which the financial sector has grown to an unprecedented share of the economy (pdf):

[…]

So we're hearing a lot of people -- including some alleged progressives -- declaring that you can't criticize the way we've run our economy for the past 30 years. Why not? The metastasizing finance sector eventually led us into the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression; that seems reason enough to question the model.

And bear in mind that Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal financial reform. It seems to me that in the wake of the global financial crisis, that -- not Obama's very mild reformism -- is the radical position.

Presentations by Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek

European University at St Petersburg

http://www.eu.spb.ru/en/index/news/4912-presentationmladendolarslavojiek

Department of Political Science and Sociology and Chair of Democratic Theory present presentations by Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek in which scientists will share their reflections on the current science and society and will discuss them with the leading Russian critical intellectuals

August 22 

17.00—19.00 Mladen Dolar (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Van Eyck Academy, Netherlands): WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS AN ATOM

20.00 – Screening of a film by the art-group “Chto Delat”, “The Russian Forest”.

August 23

16.00–19.00 – Slavoj Žižek (Birckbeck University, UK, Society for Theoretical psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, Slovenia): WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF POST-IDEOLOGY

19.30-21.30 IS THERE A REASON IN HISTORY? STATE AND REVOLUTION TODAY. Panel discussion.

Participants: Artemy Magun, Alexey Penzin, Alexander Skidan, Oxana Timofeeva, Dmitry Vilensky (all – group “Chto Delat”), Keti Chukhrov (SCCA, Moscow), Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek.

The European University at Saint-Petersburg: Gagarinskaya 3.
Tel. (7-812) 386-7633
A free pre-reservation is required ( sociopol@eu.spb.ru).

The Act as "Bartleby" Inactivity

Quote from Living in the End Times, pp. 400-401:

"rather than actively resisting power, the Bartleby gesture of 'preferring not to' suspends the subject's libidinal investment in it -- the subject stops dreaming about power. To put it in mockingly Stalinist terms, emancipatory struggle begins with the ruthless work of self-censorship and auto-critique -- not of reality, but of one's own dreams.
   The best way to grasp the core of the obsessive attitude is through the notion of false activity: you think you are active, but your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive. Do we not encounter something akin to this false activity in the typical strategy of the obsessive neurotic, who becomes frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening (in a tense group situation, the obsessive talks continually, cracks jokes, etc., in order to ward off that awkward moment of silence in which the underlying tension would become unbearable)? The 'Bartleby act' is violent precisely insofar as it entails refusing this obsessive activity -- in it, not only do violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), so too do act and inactivity (here the most radical act is to do nothing).
[...]
   If theology is again emerging as a point of reference for radical politics, it is so not by way of supplying a divine 'big Other' who would guarantee the final success of our endeavors, but, on the contrary,
as a token of our radical freedom in having no big Other to rely on."