> In other words, he has finally come around to the
> position that his father has held all along without setting his foot
> in a war zone in Iraq.
Eh? Parenti never supported the Terror War. The ideal case (meaning, least loss of life) would have been, the US left after 2003, the UN sends in neutral peacekeepers, Iraq elects a government, peacekeepers leave. If Iraqis wanted a civil war after that, it would be their problem. But we don't live in such a world.
> Christian Parenti may have
> hung around with the crowd who make a living getting grants from
> philanthropists and running NGOs for too long for his own good. That
> crowd always try to convince you that out of ashes of any American
> war can a phoenix of the Marshall Plan and the Works Progress
> Administration rise. It's better to make a living like his father, a
> splendid Marxist businessman, who manages to extract $4,000 per
> speaking engagement out of activists who invite him.
Calm down. You're an underemployed academic, just like me, living in a decaying Empire which is terminating our jobs. That's no reason to assemble yet another circular firing squad and take potshots at Parenti, one of the finer journalists out there, who's done good work on the ground in Iraq. Speaking engagement funds come mostly from university endowments, which are financed by rich people.
> Failing that, it's better to take a regular college teaching job than
> pursue unreliable grants and fellowships
Jobs? *What* jobs? Do you know how hard it is to get a college job right now? I've been on the market for five miserable years, each worse than the next, and I haven't even gotten a *final interview* yet. It's not lack of qualifications - I have four years of teaching experience, I translated "Negative Dialectics", I have a book published on video culture etc. There are no jobs out there.
-- DRR