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Sunday, August 15, 2004 |
EPI: "New Economic Policy Institute research released today shows seven European countries have surpassed the United States' productivity levels with fewer working hours and lower poverty rates. This report is a preview of the international comparisons chapter in the forthcoming EPI book, The State of Working America 2004/2005, a comprehensive review of the U.S. labor market and living standards."
6:33:40 PM 
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"Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present themselves as movements against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts. These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long U.S. tradition of projects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe and the savagery of the 'uncivilized' world. The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous era, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have also continuously been oriented (in different times and different regions more or less overtly) toward a project of white supremacy and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imagined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem.
These common characterizations of fundamentalisms as a return to a premodern or traditional world and its social values, however, obscure more than they illuminate. In fact, fundamentalist visions of a return to the past are generally based on historical illusions. The purity and wholesomeness of the stable, nuclear heterosexual family heralded by Christian fundamentalists, for example, never existed in the United States. The 'traditional family' that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The 'return to the traditional family' of the Christian fundamentalists
is not backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order."
From Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Harvard University Press. Text or pdf.
4:28:57 PM
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Click thumbnail.
More quotes. How did I find this link? By gaggling. Try the yes option for 'Feelin' lucky?'. It's an ideal solution for when you feel like a (b)loggerhead and are desperate for good links. I found this one there too.
Have some fun with Dubya (Thanks De Ware).
11:12:06 AM
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