Link of the Week (as opposed to the Weakest Link):
In an American Prospect article, “Business as Usury,” Thomas Geoghegan writes: “Had we protected the poor and the weak, the problems of our mighty banks might not be so great. Why don’t we have a ‘National Usury Act’? Why, in the party of William Jennings Bryan, is there no one demanding an interest cap on our Visa cards and our MasterCards?. . . We may be the first society since the Code of Hammurabi to be operating with no law against usury at all.” Can the last sentence possibly be true? Full story »
Part one in a series.
Listen to the victim, abused by the system
The basis is racist, you know that we must face this
In 1991 Pop Will Eat Itself produced one of the most damning comments on racism in society in the history of popular music. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” was specifically aimed at anti-immigrant racism in Europe, but over the past 17 years it’s been impossible for me to hear the song without mapping its penetrating, undeniable truth onto our American context. Our black auslanders aren’t recent arrivals (although many of our brown ones are), but they nonetheless remain social, political, economic and cultural outsiders, and whatever progress they may have made in the several hundred years since they first arrived in shackles, only a fool can believe that the basis is no longer racist.
I said some time back, as the presidential election lurched into overdrive, that the heavy racist stuff was coming. Full story »
by Michael Tracey
“O hateful error, melancholy’s child!
Why dost thou show, to the apt thoughts of men,
The things that are not?”
- (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ib, 67)
Then something strange happened. In 2002, a friend of mine Mike Sandrock, a sports writer for the Boulder Daily Camera, was in Paris and met a young American who it quickly became clear, after Mike had mentioned he was from Boulder, was extremely interested in JonBenet and in me.
After Mike had returned he received an email from this man, who used the email handle “De-cember25 1996,” signed the mail with the letter “D” and wrote that he very much wanted to communicate with me. Full story »
