An American Fusion: Recent Comments

Comment on Puerto Rico: The Oldest Colony on Earth

ronald fernandez — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:01:59 GMT

Thank you,

Cuidate,
Ronnie

Comment on Puerto Rico: The Oldest Colony on Earth

DCorales — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:15:17 GMT

P.R. The oldest colony on earth is an excellent article that gives more insight into our political and social history. I which this information was researched and thought in colleges and universities in P.R. Thanks for sharing this knowledge.

Comment on Obscene and Immoral: The "Fast Tracking" of Illegal Immigrants in Postville, Iowa

arturo fernandez — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:07:10 GMT

zeezil, you're hopeless.

Comment on Obscene and Immoral: The "Fast Tracking" of Illegal Immigrants in Postville, Iowa

zeezil — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:31:09 GMT

What to do with illegal aliens? How about just enforcing our existing immigration laws...arrest, incarceration and DEPORTATION! Si se puede!!!

Comment on Marx, Simmel and the China Price

john — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:53:14 GMT

Marx was clearly on target advising workers of all countries to unite - as T. Jefferson said, "a merchant has no nation" and so the fightback must also be international. If it is beneficial for capital to have no borders, why not the same for people? Class analysis comes in handy for anyone who can't guess the answer.

On demand: even if we accept that "demand for the object creates value," it has become increasingly possible to create demand by media manipulation, as citizens have been transformed into passive consumers who do not conceive of themselves as historical players.

This last point is well-illustrated by your comment about "either one of our Presidential candidates," as if there were only two. At least two other candidates that I know of (McKinney and Nader) object to the "systemic brutality" you so well describe. But as long as we passively accept only mass murderers as our candidates, just as we are "compelled" by "the real world" to passively accept the wage slavery that produces our goods, we will get more and more of the same.

"Their silence is also our own" only if we are complicit with those who are silent. Here's citizen Nader: "Free trade sloganeering has been a means to hide corporate efforts to evade labor and environmental standards and, with the support of dictatorial regimes, to exploit workers throughout the world. Trade policies should be based on 'pulling standards' up around the world, not on 'pulling down' our standards. Labor, joined by environmentalists and human rights advocates, should make clear the differences between the corporate managed trade and what is truly 'fair trade' that provides decent protections for workers and the environment."

Comment on Katherine Howard, Herman Kahn, Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton

section9 — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:47:57 GMT

Deterrence worked in the 1950's and Sixties with the Soviet Union and China precisely because their rulers, up to and including the addled Mao Zedong, were rational people with a sense of limits.

The problem with thermonuclear weapons always was who possessed them, not the bombs themselves.

Ahmadhi-Nejad of Iran threatens the entire population of the State of Israel with national extermination. An individual like him needs to be deterred. That's the function of thermonuclear weapons. They kill. If you don't like that fact, go shake your fist at God.

Hillary Clinton and Condi Rice are entirely sane. I suspect Ahmadhi-Nejad is, as well, but it's nice to make sure.

Let's remember, it's a .45 caliber world. Let's not subject it to .38 caliber reasoning.

Comment on Max Weber and the War in Iraq

Doc — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:23:40 GMT

Dr. Fernandez:
Weber would have a "living laboratory" in the United States today, as would your old mentors at the New School. Funny (or not) how human minds will accept a "version of reality" that is known to be based on blatant lies and continue to function without protest. It says a great deal about how much political power is NOT in the hands of the educated. It also says that we are natural cognitive misers.

Ron Suskind, who wrote "The One Percent Doctrine" and former CIA director George Tenet in his new book, both confirm that the Bush admin pressed both the FBI the CIA for "intel" linking 9/11 to Iraq.

In a rare display of integrity the CIA (then under Tenet- a New York Democrat) told the admin that they could not find such proof. Yet, according to Suskind, Dick Cheney appeared one day at a morning briefing and stated that prior to 9/11 Atta had a meeting with Iraqi reps in Prague.

George Tenet, who would have been the most informed man in the world at the time - still could NOT confirm the meeting. Yet the White House went public with the story which seemingly came out of nowhere.

The Bush administration also manufactured intellegence about WMDs and when those were not found, the administration said we were in Iraq to "free the people". 5 years later - "mission not accomplished".

There seems to be overwhelming consensus among writers and other educated-types that the current administration has lied to us repeatedly about Iraq over the last 5 years, yet there seems to be no powers-that-be coalescing to investigate this. I suppose if you repeat a lie over and over to the people, the people will give up on trying to find the truth.

Doc

Comment on Max Weber and the War in Iraq

Andrew Erick — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:31:15 GMT

This global destabilization as a result of the Iraqi conflict really is a troubling thing. Al-Qaeda was, from the perspective of Steve Hewitt, author of "The British War on Terror", certainly endangered by NATO's operations in Afghanistan; but with the sustainable international recruitment of insurgents catalyzed by the invasion of Iraq, you are left with this manifold dilemma. You spoke of counterterrorism operations acting contrary to their goals, in that they, in the form of the occupation, have perpetuated recruitment, and jeopardized the acquisition of Human Intelligence (HUMINT). For my part, I look to the effect on one aspect of international relations; the conflict has divided NATO into participant and non-participant camps, somewhat neutralizing the efficacy of the alliance in the post-Soviet era. Our NATO allies have redundant mutual self-defence pacts with eachother (eg, the Western European Union), and, if so subjugated in the American fashion, may quickly "jump on board" behind European solidarity and destroy American multilateral defense entirely!
Destablilize the cockpit of the world? Yes. Isolate and defeat the "peace-keepers of the world"? Perhaps.

Comment on Georg Simmel and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Doc — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:56:36 GMT

Dr. Fernandez. It is tragedy and irony that humans can only mentally deconstruct the value of green paper only under the worst possible circumstances. The most recent example occured during Katrina when victims of the hurricane began to confiscate items from a flooded out walmart while police helped them do so. To be sure, this was not a riot or a looting, but a tacit breach of reality.

People who bet on the failure of the market should be careful what they wish for. When money becomes defined as irrelevant it is quickly socially deconstructed. People lose thier "god" and master and the chains are broken. Then they agree to take what they want or need...including housing.

Beneath the "reality" of money lies the mystery of gold. Gold, from the old English word geolo (yellow), is the 16th rarest element found on Earth. It can not be used in the manufacture of weapons. It has no nutritional value. It can not be used for much besides jewelry and dental work.

So why is the malleable metal so lauded if not for it's symbolic value?

S.C.