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Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
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  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Paul Street's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/paulstreet
Bio:         Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois.&nbs... (More)

All Street Blogs

"If 'Totalitarianism' Has Any Meaning"

By Paul Street at Mar 26, 2007


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Readers interested in the United States' splendid commitment to freedom should consult Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcars's remarkable book Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy (Paradigm, 2006).  It contains some very useful and learned reflections on the juvenile nature of the claim that Washington seeks democracy in the Middle East . 
Forget the invasion of Iraq (opposed by the preponderant majority of the “liberated” Iraqis, curiously enough) for a moment. Focus just on a widely neglected topic - the  United States ' continuing and longstanding close relationship with Saudi Arabia. On page 38 of Perilous Power, Achcar makes the following statement in response to a question from Chomsky about trade unionism in Saudi Arabia :  
“Oh, [a labor movement] is unimaginable in the Saudi kingdom. It's the most repressive kind of state. If ‘totalitarianism' has any meaning, that's totalitarianism there. Any attempt at organizing anything challenging the powers that be is repressed in the most terrible way.  In the Saudi kingdom, people risk their lives and physical integrity for things that you would consider as trivial.  It's a country where you have special police whipping people found in the street at the time of prayer.  It's a society under total control...And that is a major ally of the United States and the single Muslim state that is courted by all the Western countries, because of its oil wealth.  The United States knows that this very oppressive structure is the only guarantee that exists for the stability of the Saudi kingdom, and it also guarantees that the kingdom needs U.S. protection...I think Western public opinion, U.S. public opinion in particular, remains in a state of ignorance about that.  People don't realize who the staunchest ally of the United States in the Middle East really is and what it means.”
When Barack Obama worries that the Iraq fiasco will “become an excuse of us to ignore misery or human rights violations or genocide” in other nations, he mentions Darfur (Goldberg, p. 33) but not Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. friend that happens to possess the largest oil reserves in the world. When John Edwards accuses the U.S. of only “yapping” about democracy beyond Iraq - where he seems to think the U.S. has acted nobly ("we've done our part," he says), he too cites Darfur, not Saudi Arabia . 
But, of course.
“How anybody can talk about democracy promotion by the United States with a straight face,” Chomsky says in Perilous Power, “is very hard to understand.  Just in the same period as Bush's pronouncement about democracy promotion,” Chomsky observes, “ Washington supported a military coup in Venezuela [in April of 2002] to overthrow the elected government.  They had to back down because of the uproar in Latin America , which actually takes democracy more or less seriously” (Chomsky and Achcar, Perilous Power, p. 49).
Which reminds me: Obama dedicates a paragraph of his imperialist campaign book The Audacity of Hope to his disagreement with “left-leaning populists” like Venezuela 's Hugo Chavez.” According to Obama, such misguided actors wrongly think that developing nations “should resist America 's efforts to expand its hegemony” and – imagine! -  “follow their own path to development.”  Such dysfunctional “reject[ion] [of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy” will only worsen the situation of the global poor, Obama writes, conveniently ignoring a preponderance of evidence of showing that the imposition of the “free market” corporate-neoliberal “Washington Consensus” has deepened poverty across the world in recent decades (Obama, Audacity of Hope, pp. 315-316). 
Obama is right to argue that the United States retains enormous responsibility for healing  Iraq .  Like other leading Democrats, however, he will not question the dominant U.S. doctrinal claim that “We Are Good” by acknowledging the United States ' central responsibility for causing Iraq 's misery.  Neither he nor other leading Democrats will admit the  United States' moral obligation to pay reparations for the crimes it has committed in Iraq .  The top Democrats will naturally never acknowledge the dark petro-imperialist objectives that lay behind Orwellian “democracy” rhetoric regarding criminal United States policies within and beyond Iraq...
(The above is pasted in from the latest issue of my Empire and Inequality Report, which can be obtained by writing me at paulstreet99@yahoo.com)
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re Zinn

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 28, 2007 13:05 PM

thanks ..for link , link is being stalled, check it up later..

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Person

I don't know them

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 28, 2007 07:01 AM

I don't know anyone who equates race and class; for what it's worth I think the two hiearchies (and other ones) are caught up in relations of dialectical inseperability. They condition and inform each other. I don't know any people who think they profit from the american wars...and I don't want to.

By the way, check out Howard Zinn's excellent commentary on how ending the current criminal war in Iraq is going to be about citizens, not politicians...including Democratic politicians - with their recent lame congressional timetable bills.

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Person

opportunistic politicians

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 27, 2007 21:27 PM

paul, most people are aware of the atrocities committed against our arab brothers for the conquest of oil. they close their eys shut because they believe that they profit from the american wars.. when i think canadian taxes are often diverted to war efforts, I kinda understand why citizen get pissed .. as for getting pissed, I do..

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Z

Isn't the difference between

By Anonymous, Anonymous at Mar 27, 2007 20:07 PM

Isn't the difference between race and class being obfuscated at times though. Black does not = working class, white does not = upper class.

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Person

Not pissed...really

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 27, 2007 17:59 PM

cyrano I'm not pissed at Obama (or Hillary or Rudy G or [fill in the blank]) in the slightest (honestly). I have zero left expectation when it comes to bourgeois politics and politicians. The problems are systemic and a lot of what's he's doing makes sense within the prevailing dominant plutocatic winner take white majority incentive structures for people who want to rule.

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Person

the more [lies] of Obama

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 27, 2007 15:04 PM

The more i hear about Obama the more I understand why Street get pissed.. Obama and the right have the hypocrisy of pretending to fight for the poor..

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Person

Saudi Obama follow up

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 27, 2007 10:55 AM

Thanks for sending that URL "Anonymous" (you deserve a name); the Fourth Inernational (Trots) web site is often damn good. Another part of the deal with the Saudis is that they purchase all kinds of goodies (including high-tech military hardware)with their giant mass of surplus petro-capital...so much of which flows to Bond Street and Wall Street. They also help fund the U.S trade and government deficits and help sustain the holy dollar as world reserve currency by pricing their oil in U.S. greenbacks.The British junior partners are naturally wrapped up in all the sickness and corruption that arises. Anyway, any Western state freedom-"exporter" (as if our criminal "elites" possess the commodity to send out in the first place) who is really all juiced up to promote freedom would make the Saudi regime and ruling class top targets. Darth Cheney boogies over there (last January?)to talk to some of his favorite feudal oil sheiks (about helping him stockpile oil and keep oil prices reasonable in support of Washington's crtiminal ME/world domination agenda)...they dine on the severed legs of Iraqi and Palestinian children and nobody that matters in the mainstream calls him on the absurdity of it all when Dick soliloquizes about the freedom-loving nobility of U.S. foreign policy in the ME (and everywhere else). We are noble, we are good. Prole you ain't lying; that's the truth. When I do critical pieces on Obama from the left I get about 10 e-mails generally from African-Americans. Seven say "thank you for helping expose this class enemy and race traitor, opportunist, power accommodator, bourgeois narcissist, etc." but three of the messages say "how dare you criticize a righteous black man who has the courage and audacity to want to run for president." The second group does not engage policy. It is totally focused on identity...pure and simples and makes no bones about it. Now some people in the first group will say that Obama's isn't all that or really "black," but when they say that they don't talk about his skin color or cultural mannerisms or Harvard degree. What they say is that B.O. is too conservative and centrist and "consensus"-oriented and (this is intimately related) deceptive (a frequent accusation is that he doesn't talk straight and is slippery and dishonest...a "bullshit artist") and that all this places him outside (to the right) of "black political opinion." There's basis for that; black-Americans have the leftmost policy positions in the U.S. by and large...something I find unsurprising.

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Obama's book should be

By Prole, Prole at Mar 27, 2007 10:40 AM

Obama's book should be titled "The Audacity of Obama" and illustrates again the complete annihilation of fatuous "identity politics". You can sell American imperialism nowadays if it's  sugarcoated by a 'politically correct' black face or female face. Make no mistake about it, Hilary and Barak are AIPAC's dream ticket. Maybe Obama learned the bipartisan spirit of American hegemony from Colin Powell or Condi but both corporate parties have readily coopted "identity politics" to serve the ends of power. Darfur has become the consensus campaign of choice among oleaginous establishment liberals as their favorite public cause for self-righteous indignation and assumed compassion. It has all the right ingredients, a "failed state", with a hostile, nominally Arab government supporting  "Arab terrorists", Janjaweed,  against African villagers, etc. - no objection from AIPAC-style contributors to this campaign. Ask many of these same calculating candidates and their minions about conditions in Palestine and watch them scurry for cover forgetting all their "yapping" about "misery or human rights violations or genocide". They also have precious little to say about the U.S.'s own terrorist attack on Khartoum in Aug. '98, when the genial "man from Hope" (and here we go again with another one of those kind of phoney "Hope" campaigns, shudder) sent cruise missles into Sudan's only pharmaceutical plant wiping out it's source of anti-malarial vaccine causing untold numbers of future casualties from this virulent disease. There are many other such instances around the world, of course, that many of the Sudan campaigners don't seem much interested in, that the U.S. "retains enormous responsibility for healing" (in more ways than one). But Obama like Hilary and Colin and Condi and their ilk owe their first alleigance to members of their own class. And until there is a return to class-based politics don't expect much to change. Identity-based politics is rapidly becoming part of the problem, a very useful means to  to turn aside "misguided" attempts to "resist expanding America's hegemony".

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Z

If corruption has any

By Anonymous, Anonymous at Mar 26, 2007 15:26 PM

If corruption has any meaning:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/aero-j30.shtml

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