The police are also sweeping up any press or lawyers trying to monitor police activity. The police even arrested Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. The Democracy Now production crew was arrested too.

Glenn Greenwald’s blog has become a clearing house for information. See his posts here, here, and here.

This is how Malcolm spends most of his day.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/MARDIS.html

Economics celebrates the self-interested, calculating individual and the market as a means of realizing individual satisfactions, and this celebration is important in overcoming opposition to extending the sway of the market and, by the same token, undermining community. Economics is not only descriptive; it is not only evaluative; it is at the same time constructive—economists seek to fashion a world in the image of economic theory.

The problem with the idea that economics is purely, or even primarily, a descriptive undertaking is that the apparatus of economics has been shaped by an agenda focused on showing that markets are good for people rather than on discovering how markets actually work. And from this normative perspective has come the constructive agenda. If you believe that economics is or should be about describing the world, then it is a case of the tail wagging the dog. If you believe, as I do, that the normative agenda has been central to economics from well before Adam Smith’s time, then it is more understandable why the apparatus of economics is built on foundations that undermine community. Undermining community is the logical and practical consequence of promoting the market system.

This much is certain: if all we economists cared about was describing the world, we could easily forgo much of the framework that I find problematic. Take one of the most basic tools of economic analysis, demand. If we did not care about drawing conclusions about how well markets work, as distinct from how markets actually work, we could start directly from the demand curve rather than basing demand on choices made by rational, calculating, self-interested individuals. We do not take demand as the starting point because it would then be impossible to argue that—subject to some fine and not so fine print—a system of markets maximizes welfare.

In making this argument, economics relies on value judgments implicit in foundational assumptions about the self-interested individual, about rational calculation, about unlimited wants, and about the nation-state, and it is these assumptions that make community invisible. In arguing for the market, economics legitimizes the destruction of community and thus helps to construct a world in which community struggles for survival.

‘ MR. RUSSERT: . . . do you reserve a right as American president to go back into Iraq, once you have withdrawn, with sizable troops in order to quell any kind of insurrection or civil war? SEN. OBAMA: . . . Now, I always reserve the right for the president — as commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad. So that is true, I think, not just in Iraq, but that’s true in other places. That’s part of my argument with respect to Pakistan. . .’

Note that Obama was simply responding to Russert’s hypothetical, which assumed that the US was already out of Iraq but that in the aftermath, there was “insurrection” or “civil war.” The world that Russert imagined was presumably one in which Iraq had firmed up enough for the US to get out, but then at some later time it developed substantial civil unrest. Russert was presumably attempting to find out if the Democratic candidates were adopting an isolationist position, of getting out and staying out. Obama implied that no, if al-Qaeda came back to Iraq and formed a new base years from now, he would “act” in such a way as to “secure American interests.” He is not an isolationist. Note that he was not specific about how exactly he would act.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free. An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil: only as an apparent good. But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

~ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, ch. 27 (1961).

[From No Comment]

This weekend, the darkness continues to descend in Washington, the powers of the state continue to grow and the mechanisms of accountability rot away unused. Americans are focused on the selection of a new president. Many of them share the naïve assumption that on January 20, 2009, when a new leader takes the oath of office from the south steps of the Capitol Building, the Founders’ constitutional order will once more be set aright and the extra-constitutional excesses of the Bush years will be but a bad memory. But whoever is installed as the new guardian of presidential power will not likely part with many of the rights that Bush claimed and was allowed to use, unchallenged.

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