The American myth about entrepreneurs is dying, Eric Garland, Eric Garland Blog, May 20, 2014
America used to have a myth that it supported and honored entrepreneurs. I was certainly raised with it. My father owns a farm store, my mother ran a pie shop, my sister has a dance school, my Italian grandparents had their own bakeries, et cetera. I always thought that owning your own business was not only possible, it was preferable, somehow more noble than working in the boiler room of someone else’s company. I am an American, and it wasn’t until I arrived in Paris that I realized that this was a myth which had not been internalized by everybody, everywhere. In France, I was forced to confront the notion that some people saw small business as being a petty, money grubbing merchant who could not survive in the larger, more important world of state institutions and major businesses. Quite a shock, really.
Yet this is a myth I still cherish and here’s why: small businesses tend to produce the greatest job growth. Huge companies are more dominant in an industry, but small companies are the most likely to grow and create a new position with wealth, a tax base, a market for other businesses and all that good stuff. Yet our policies are making the world more friendly to the big and more hostile to the small. There was a guy who wrote about this a lot in the 18th century: Adam Smith. In his Wealth of Nations, he saw large businesses protected by the government as unjust and inferior to smaller businesses with accountability to their neighbors. His theory was called capitalism and we have gotten away from it in recent years.
Americans need to Answer: When Will Palestinians get their Fourth of July? Juan Cole, Informed Comment, July 4, 2014
All human beings are created equal, the founders of the United States believed.
That means that Palestinians, as human beings, are also created equal. The text says “all.”
Moreover, the Palestinians by virtue of being “men” (i.e. human beings) have been endowed by God with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Palestinians do not have any of these rights, whether God wants them to or not. They were successively ethnically cleansed from their homeland of Palestine by militant Jewish settlers. (There were no Jews in Palestine to speak of as recently as 1800; Bonaparte found about 3,000 I think; Palestine was inhabited by Muslim and Christian Palestinians and as late as 1939 the British mandatory authorities envisaged a Palestinian state in 1949). Some 750,000 were expelled with no compensation and their land and property usurped in 1948. More tens of thousands were displaced in 1967. Their numbers have grown. Some 20 percent of Israel is remnants of the original Palestinian inhabitants, some 1.6 million persons. They are second class citizens in many ways.
Don’t call it “Independence Day”, Eric Wycoff Williams, Salon, July 4, 2014
Recently, liberals and conservatives alike were outraged by the revelation that the National Security Agency, under the auspices of the Patriot Act, were collecting phone records and data on millions of citizens. The thought of the government recording their intimate calls outraged their sensibilities and sparked a national debate. Likewise, following an outcry from angry travelers, changes have been introduced to curb post-9/11 Transportation Security Administration practices that allow airport security to aggressively search, screen and frisk flight passengers.
This is what one may call “white people problems.”
For, you see, young black boys and black men in the Bronx and Brooklyn are stopped and frisked by police while walking to McDonald’s. They are criminalized and stigmatized — seen as suspicious and treated without respect. This culture is so deeply embedded that both police and citizens alike regard Skittles as a deadly weapon when held in a black boy’s hand.
