Right-wing does it better...

In Finnish Parliamentary Election 2007 the right-wing Coalition Party took the historical victory. Now Finland is 70 % white and blue. Right wing promised hope – doesn't we all want just that – whereas Social Democrats painted mere escatologies. Not only better off people, but also the middle class and even the poor voted the right wing candidates. It is said that Parliament represents people. But how is it?
"Income is the one variable that marks the greatest difference between candidates and voters. The 2003 taxable income of the candidates averaged EUR 34,200 - 74 per cent higher than the average income of the voters. The 2007 income of the candidates was EUR 38,000 - 80 per cent higher than the income of the voters. The average income of a voter was EUR 21,000. The EUR 70,000 average income of Coalition Party candidates was three times that of the voters. A Swedish People's Party candidate's average income was EUR 65,000, Centre Party candidates earned on average EUR 52,000." (Source: Statistic Finland)

Are we, too, experiencing the unspoken class divide in Finland? Longer than 15 minutes?

Student Protest in Moscow State

Writes a group of students of the Sociology Department at Moscow State University: "We, a group of students of the Sociology Department at Moscow State University, have asked the department's administration to improve the quality of teaching, stop force-feeding us with ultranationalist propaganda, and ensure acceptable conditions of life and study. . . ."

... In recent years, fifteen recognized scholars have been forced out of the university, including Professor Vladimir Nikolayev, one of the few Russian experts on the Chicago School and translator of Robert Park, Everett Hughes, Alfred Schütz, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman; Professor Elena Kukushkina, a well-known expert on pre-revolutionary Russian sociology; Professors Y.N. Tolstova and O.V. Ivanov, experts in the mathematical modeling of social processes; Professor V.V. Shtcherbina, a leading theorist of organization sociology and consultant to a number of large Russian companies; Professor Andrew Degtyarev, a well-known Russian expert in political sociology and member of the International Sociological Association’s research committees on Political Sociology and Urban and Regional Development; and Professor Helen Shestopal, a well-known social and political psychologist and vice-president of both the International and Russian Political Science Associations.

See more and give your support at http://www.od-group.org/node/114

The Despoiling of the American Mind

The Despoiling of the American Mind
by Peter McLaren

The American mind is a turbulent canister of contradictions:
A blood-splotched Guantanamo prison cell floating delicately on a
lotus pond,
An unkempt bedroom strewn with silk undergarments
Where truth sits in comfortable exile,
A victim of extraordinary rendition stuffed into the drawer of an
adolescent's bed
Covered in locomotive quilting from Pottery Barn Kids,
A space-age panopticon of worldwide "humanitarian" surveillance
That's put the Muslim world on 24-hour suicide watch -- after first
driving it insane,
A dank paternity-ward incubator crammed with the corporate
war-party
Planning genocidal assaults against the next group of evil-doers,
An unexploded cluster bomblet in a Wedgewood Jasper vase,
A Norman Rockwell painting mounted in an overflowing septic tank,
Einstein's brain powering up Dick Cheney's bedside reading lamp,
Jesus's soul recharging the sand-encrusted battery of a disabled
Hummer,
A decomposed rat lying in state on the Lincoln catafalque in the
Capital Rotunda,
Blake's golden string wound into a ball
Lodged in Rove's rectal wall.

Peter McLaren is a political activist and the author and editor of over 40 books, including Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. He teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. His writings have appeared in over twenty languages.

Source: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/mclaren160307.html

Neil Peitsamo / Kari Young

Rock 'n' roll singer Kari Peitsamo (on the left) is Finland's Neil Young, or is it other way round?
Is Neil Young Canada's Kari Peitsamo?
Listen yourself at http://www.myspace.com/karipeitsamo

Download the Enemy

A prominent adult educator and researcher in the field of adult education Michael Newman has established a website for his popular books, which are now downloadable for free from www.michaelnewman.info/, among them his Defining the Enemy, in which he cites Freire quite frequently.