Who does the financing and what is financed have always been key questions in the evolution and behavior of American capitalism. Historically, powerful financial institutions in the United States have tended to follow a strategy of profiting from the capital development of the country. But over the past 25 years, “sophisticated” financial players (investment banks, the major money center banks, hedge funds, and Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs)—all implicitly backed by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury—have come to dominate financial decision-making and, in turn, the American economy.[1] The essence of their recently acquired power was in their ability to create and finance enormous quantities of new debt through the manufacture of “innovative” financial instruments. As a consequence, financial profits as a percentage of U.S. corporate profits grew from a low of 12% in 1984 to 37.6% in 2007, with non-productive debt supplanting the financing of sound business investment.[2]
|
With Mugabe’s re-election being met with international rejection after he went it alone in the polls, he knows that he needs the MDC. He seems to perceive the growing need to pacify the growing regional and international concerns by entering into talks with the MDC. In the past he has used such talks to buy time, and he could pull the same stunt once again. However, the circumstances have changed now that the regional support he used to enjoy has shifted to sympathy for his opponents. Tsvangirai is currently riding on a crest of international sympathy for his cause and condemnation for Mugabe, as was the case soon after the first round of polling in March. Tsvangirai and his MDC seem to be of the idea that a transitional government mandated to create favorable conditions for the holding of a free and fair election. The Anglican Communion, the world’s third largest grouping of Christians after the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches, is on the brink of disintegration. The battle that pits liberal modernizers against Evangelical conservatives is fast dissolving the fabric underpinning Anglicanism, threatening a permanent breakup. Anglican Christianity needs a new direction if another schism is to be averted. On July 17, Telos author Matthias Küntzel is the guest on the Voices on Antisemitism Program at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. His podcast can be heard here. Telos Press Publishing is proud to have published Matthias’s volume Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, available for purchase here. Aniruddha Chowdhury’s essay on Walter Benjamin appeared in Telos 143. Nellie Bowles, a Telos intern, asks him some questions. The so-called value of tolerance too is reduced to an unjustifiable, arbitrary attitude if it is held from the standpoint of a multicultural liberalism conceived in the terms of a values discourse rather than in those of a discourse of reason. It is the standpoint that is at issue, rather than tolerance itself; tolerance, like the historically evolved conception of justice, is arguably rational to the core. Its conceptual heritage lies in the work of Locke and Kant, and forms part of the rational basis of modern liberal democracies; as advocated by these thinkers, tolerance is not merely a value, but a rational value, what Aristotle and Plato called a virtue. By “rational basis,” I mean this: tolerance is a condition for dialogue. The capacity to allow for beliefs or proposals that may run against the grain of one’s expectations or preferences is a sine qua non for coming to any kind of agreement or understanding. Therefore, if rationality has a normative and social significance, the virtue of tolerance must play an important role in its realization. |
   |
|||
|
Privacy Policy · Data Protection Copyright © 2025 Telos Press Publishing · All Rights Reserved |
||||
