Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics

Alan Wolfe, Chronicle of Higher Education

To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.

hydrarchist writes:

"The State of Copyright Activism"

Siva Vaidhyanathan

One of the great hopes I had while I researched and wrote Copyrights and Copywrongs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), a cultural history of American copyright, during the late 1990s was that copyright debates might puncture the bubble of public consciousness and become important global policy questions. My wish has come true.

Since 1998 questions about whether the United States has constructed an equitable or effective copyright system frequently appear on the pages of daily newspapers. Activist movements for both stronger and looser copyright systems have grown in volume and furor. And the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in early 2003 that the foundations of American copyright, as expressed in the Constitution, are barely relevant in an age in which both media companies and clever consumers enjoy unprecedented power over the use of works.

"The Bridge"

Stan Goff

WARNING: This commentary may cause anxiety.

The United States government has initiated a chain reaction that it
can no longer control. The stalled vengeance assault on Fallujah is
merely a symptom. So is the uprising triggered by the US closure of
a Shia newspaper in Sadr City, Baghdad, followed by gunning down the
demonstrators who protested (Ah, yes, we don’t even hear about that
when they talk about the latest demon, Muqtada al-Sadr… Memory is so
short.).

"Why We Need a Multilateral Magna Carta"

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

It is becoming increasingly clear that a unilateral or “monarchical” arrangement of the global order — centred on the military, political and economic dictation of the United States — is undesirable and unsustainable.

The crisis of this arrangement presents the opportunity for the proposition of a new global order by the “global aristocracies” — that is to say, the multinational corporations, the supranational institutions and the other dominant nation states.