Gates, the CIA, and the Consequences of a Clandestine Legacy

Roger Morris writes a special report on the CIA in a three part investigation for the Asia Times. Here’s an excerpt:
The new US secretary of defense travels the American world, to Kabul and Baghdad in particular, where he frets about Tehran – only to find himself confronting the consequences of the misdeeds of his younger [...]

Retreat of the Male

Eric Hobsbawm writes in the London Review of Books:
The family is a subject on which, for obvious reasons, there is no shortage of public or private views. Google records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170 million under ‘war’. All governments have tried to encourage or discourage procreation and passed [...]

Globalisation and Particularism in the Work of José Saramago

Below is an excerpt from Christopher Rollason’s paper, Globalisation and Particularism in the Work of José Saramago: the Symbolism of the Shopping-Mall in A Caverna.
The veteran historian Eric Hobsbawm has defined globalisation as a phenomenon having three main aspects – technical (“the abolition of space and time”), economic (“the abolition of trade barriers and liberalisation [...]

Semco: A Worker Managed Business

Ricardo Semler has established a business deeply based on worker’s participation in management, that has rapidly and steadily grown for the nearly a decade and a half, despite its home country, Brazil’s, economic tremmors.
Lawrence M. Fisher writes in Strategy + Business:
Semco’s 3,000 employees set their own work hours and pay levels. Subordinates hire and [...]

The Barbarism of the Intellect

Emanuel L. Paparella writes in Ovi:
The attempt to divorce mythos (the imaginative) from logos (the rational) is as old as Plato’s Republic. The risk of that intellectual operation is that one ends up in rationalism, what Vico dubs “the barbarism of the intellect,” pure reason rationalizing what ought never to be rationalized. C.S. Lewis’s Till [...]

Ukrainian Government Mired in Gridlock

The Power and Interest News Report writes:
Two months into a constitutional crisis, the Ukrainian government seems to be on pause and has yet to emerge from the gridlock. Alternating periods of tenuous quiet and spikes of scandal have been followed by a flurry of response and re-posturing; the debacle now appears to be a multi-headed [...]

Freud and Lacan

Below is an excerpt of the chapter entitled Freud and Lacan, by Louis Althusser, and translated from French by Ben Brewster:
To my knowledge, the nineteenth century saw the birth of two or three children that were not expected: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. ‘Natural’ children, in the sense that
nature offends customs, principles, morality and good breeding: [...]

The Realities of Microlending

Robert Pollin writes in Counterpunch:
How effective is micro credit as a poverty-fighting tool? In 1976, Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, launched the pioneering institution in the field, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The industry’s growth has been explosive since Grameen opened its doors. According to a recent story in The Economist, “there [...]

The Injustices of Merit

Chris Horner writes in Think:
‘The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun’ –Tony Blair
What would a fair society look like? ‘New Labour’ thinks it has the answer: it’s “meritocracy”. This is the vision of a society in which the highest rewards go to those who deserve them, unhindered [...]

The Middle Classes Have Discovered They’ve Been Duped by the Super-Rich

Madeleine Bunting writes in Comment is Free:
Never have so many of us appeared so well-off yet felt so poor – and we used to believe obscene wealth was victimless.
Public opinion can sometimes shift suddenly, and a new consensus emerge with striking force as familiar details are re-ordered, rather as a kaleidoscope makes a new [...]