July 4 isn’t for chest-thumping

I celebrated the Fourth by going to a baseball game, which was followed by fireworks. Seemed like a good, all-American...

Our chronic cronyism — and corr...

We Americans, former Reagan White House budget director David Stockman told a reporter last week, “no longer have a democracy.” Instead, Stockman charged, we have “crony capitalism,” a system that’s rigging the economy to benefit the powerful few — at everyone else’s expense.

Last week brought still more evidence on how revoltingly raw this rigging has become. Wall Street and Corporate America, new data detail, have some incredibly thoughtful cronies who sit in some incredibly important places.

The false dichotomy

“You are with us, or you are against us.” Yin and Yang. Right and Wrong.

It is easy, and seductive, to view the world as a set of binary decisions, ideas, and events each, mutually opposed and antithetical to each other. Such a simplistic view, however, is detrimental to understanding history in general and the unfolding events in the Middle East specifically. To continue to engage in such a world view is dangerous in the extreme, as history has often highlighted. Instead, what needs to occur is an understanding of the precedents to this week’s uprisings and the reactions which could move democracy, social issues, human rights and freedom forward throughout the Middle East.