WARS
ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
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The horrific racist
massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, has stimulated a
long-overdue national dialogue – and actions – to clarify the meaning of
displaying the Confederate battle flag. It has also drawn attention to the role
of slavery in the history of our nation. If unfree labor, enshrined in our
founding constitution, was one pillar of colonial America, and later the
independent United States, Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham reminds us that our nation was also created
through the slaughter of its indigenous people.
While the
Confederate flag is now, thankfully, in retreat nearly everywhere, our own state
continues to commemorate the massacre and subjugation of the native inhabitants
in its official flag and seal. The ribbon beneath the stereotypical Indian
(above, center – click on it to see a larger image in your browser) says, in
Latin: “By the sword, [our State] seeks a tranquil peace under liberty.” Above
the placid native appears an arm bearing a sword. (Irony is not a strong point
of official iconographers.) Racist images of Native Americans also continue to
be flaunted in countless schools and sports teams – not least the professional
football team in Washington, DC.
It’s no coincidence
that our own nation-building through colonial displacement of natives and
genocide was an early justification among the US supporters of Zionism and
defenders of the state of Israel. Otherwise progressive figures like Louis
Brandeis alluded to this history, approvingly, as a model for building the
Jewish State in Palestine. One-time Liberal Israeli historian Benny Morris cited the US experience as a model in a 2004
interview defending ethnic cleansing: “Even the great American democracy
could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are
cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are
committed in the course of history." Palestinians also well understand
the meaning of this comparison. Above, right, is from a demonstration greeting
Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a 2007 visit to Israel (click on it
to view a larger image).
On a more positive
note, three important Supreme Court decisions this week remind us that good news
can come from unexpected quarters. The upholding of equal marriage rights
illustrates the power – and speed – of broadly-based and aroused public opinion.
The court’s refusal to overturn a key provision of the Affordable Care Act – as
flawed as that measure is –also preserves access to health insurance or millions
of people. Another decision, less well publicized, upheld a key regulation
against housing discrimination.
Why Is
the Flag Still There?
But
as a political symbol, the flag was revived when northern Democrats began to
press for an end to the South’s system of racial oppression. In 1948, the
Dixiecrats revolted against President Harry Truman—who had desegregated the
armed forces and supported anti-lynching bills. The movement began in
Mississippi in February of 1948, with thousands of activists “shouting rebel
yells and waving the Confederate flag,” as the Associated Press reported at the
time. Some actually removed old, mothballed flags from the trunks where they had
until then been gathering dust… Over the next two decades, the flag was waved at
Klan rallies, at White Citizens’ Council meetings, and by those committing
horrifying acts of violence. And despite the growing range of its meanings in
pop culture, as a political symbol, it offered little ambiguity. Georgia
inserted the battle flag into its state flag in 1956. Two years later, South
Carolina made it a crime to desecrate the Confederate flag. And then, on the
centennial of the day South Carolina opened fire on Fort Sumter came in 1961, it
hoisted the battle flag above its Capitol… The flag was created by an army
raised to kill in defense of slavery, revived by a movement that killed in
defense of segregation, and now flaunted by a man who killed nine innocents in
defense of white supremacy. More
War,
Murder and the American Way
Mass
murders have increased fourteenfold in the United States since the 1960s,
sociologist Peter Turchin wrote two and a half years ago, after the Sandy Hook
killings. In his essay, called “Canaries in a Coal Mine,” Turchin made a disturbing
comparison: Mass murderers kill the same way soldiers do, without personal
hatred for their victims but to right some large social wrong… “On the
battlefield,” Turchin wrote, “you are supposed to try to kill a person whom
you’ve never met before. You are not trying to kill this particular person, you
are shooting because he is wearing the enemy uniform. . . . That is to say,” I notedat the time, “the definition and practice of war and
the definition and practice of mass murder have eerie congruencies. Might this
not be the source of the social poison?.” … Dylann Roof had a toxic “cause” — to reclaim the Old South,
to reclaim the country, from an unwelcome human subgroup — but the solidarity in
which he acted wasn’t so much with his fellow racists as with the strategists
and planners of war. Any war. Every war. More
KRUGMAN:
Hooray for Obamacare
Now,
you might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the
object of so much political venom — venom that is, by the way, on full display
in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, with its rants against “interpretive jiggery-pokery.” But what conservatives have
always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and
in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary
Americans’ lives. That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton
health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But
Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative
nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing. More
Supreme
Court upholds far-reaching rules against racial discrimination in
housing
The
Supreme Court on Thursday handed a rare victory to civil-rights advocates,
endorsing a broad interpretation of a landmark 1960s-era law that forbids racial
discrimination in housing. In a 5-4 decision that at times recalled the rhetoric
of the liberal Warren court, Justice Anthony Kennedy and the court's liberal
justices agreed that the 1968 Fair Housing Act covers discrimination regardless
of whether it was caused by intentional and blatant racial bias. The lawsuit
challenged the construction of low-income housing predominantly in inner-city
minority neighborhoods in Dallas rather than in white suburbs. The justices said
that under the law, discrimination can be shown even when there is no overt bias
but when statistics prove that a particular practice or policy has had a
“disparate impact” on minorities. More
Celebration
Day at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? A Debate on Who Benefits from the
TPP
Big
business just won its top priority for this U.S. Congress. If this deal—if the
vote today ultimately leads to adoption of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we
know, with some high degree of certainty, what’s going to happen. We’re going to
lose many more jobs in the United States. We’re going to have real downward
pressure on wages and an increase, an ongoing increase, in the huge problem of
inequality. We’re going to see huge empowerment for Big Pharma and its ability
to charge monopoly prices in all the TPP countries, the developing countries but
also in the United States. And we’re going to see the creation and expansion of
a special system that gives corporations the right to sue governments directly
if those governments take action that the companies say infringe on their
expected profits. More
Our two Senators and all
House members voted against TPP – but the measure passed with nea- unanimous
Republican votes, plus enough Democratic defectors.
Democracy
Wrecked Again: On the Fast Track of Corporate Authoritarianism
Consistent
with numerous surveys revealing a preponderantly progressive populace in the
U.S. over many years, they show majority support for greater economic equality
and opportunity, increased worker rights, a roll-back of corporate power, and
trade regulation.
The
U.S. economic power elite has a response to such popular sentiments: So what?
Who cares? Public opinion is pitilessly mocked by harshly lopsided socioeconomic
realities and coldly plutocratic politics and policy in the U.S. America is
mired in a New Gilded Age of savage inequality and abject financial
corporatocracy so extreme that the top 1 percent garnered 95 of all U.S. income
gains during Barack Obama’s first administration and owns more 90 percent of the
nation’s wealth along with a probably equivalent portion of the nation’s
“democratically elected” officials. More
America’s
Slave Empire
In
Alabama prisons, as in nearly all such state facilities across the United
States, prisoners do nearly every job, including cooking, cleaning, maintenance,
laundry and staffing the prison barbershop. In the St. Clair prison there is
also a chemical plant, a furniture company and a repair shop for state vehicles.
Other Alabama prisons run printing companies and recycling plants, stamp license
plates, make metal bed frames, operate sand pits and tend fish farms. Only a few
hundred of Alabama’s 26,200 prisoners—the system is designed to hold only 13,130
people—are paid to work; they get 17 to 71 cents an hour. The rest are slaves…
“It says America is what it has always been, America,” said Ray. “It says if you
are poor and black you will be exploited, brutalized and murdered. It says most
of American society, especially white society, is indifferent. It says nothing
has really changed for us since slavery.” More
Why
Don’t More of the Poor Rise Up?
Society
has drastically changed since the high-water mark of the 1930s and 1960s when
collective movements captured the public imagination. Now, there is an
inexorable pressure on individuals to, in effect, fly solo. There is very little
social support for class-based protest – what used to be called solidarity… All
of which brings us back to the question of why there is so little rebellion
against entrenched social and economic injustice. The answer is that those
bearing the most severe costs of inequality are irrelevant to the agenda-setters
in both parties. They are political orphans in the new order. They may have a
voice in urban politics, but on the national scene they no longer fit into the
schema of the left or the right. They are pushed to the periphery except for a
brief moment on Election Day when one party wants their votes counted, and the
other doesn’t. More
*
* * *
GIVE WAR A CHANCE?
We need to recognize
that this is an unprecedented diplomatic effort.
If the two sides
manage to reach a deal by their June 30 deadline, their achievement will go
beyond just preventing a war or blocking Iran’s paths to a bomb. The real
achievement may be that a major international conflict — a conflict that has
brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war in recent years — has
been resolved through a compromise achieved by diplomacy… If Iran and the United
States can reach a détente and avoid getting entangled with each other, this
would be a radical shift from their antagonistic rivalry of the past three
decades. It wouldn’t necessarily be a partnership — much less an alliance — but
their relationship would no longer be characterized by enmity, but rather by a truce. More
What do Iranians
think about their nuclear programme?
A survey carried out by the University of Tehran provided important
insights into the views of the Iranian people. According to the poll taken in
January 2015, 91 percent of Iranians living in Iran view the expansion of the
nuclear infrastructure as important for their country, citing its relevance to
medical science, agriculture, increasing production of electricity, and
strengthening self-sufficiency of the nation. 65 percent of the Iranians polled
believe that production of nuclear weapons is against Islam [a poll taken in 2008 by World Public Opinion had found similar
sentiments], and 78 percent supported the government’s decision during the long
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s not to produce and use chemical weapons against Iraq,
even though Iraq had used on a large scale the same weapons against Iranian
soldiers… Most importantly, 78 percent believed that Iran’s nuclear programme is
only an excuse for the West to pressure their nation. The participants in the
poll appeared to be well-informed: 58 percent were familiar with the Nuclear
Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), whereas polls consistently indicate that only
20-30 percent of American know about the NPT. More
Of weapons programs
in Iran and Israel, and the need for journalists to report on
both
It is noteworthy
that while negotiations over limiting Iran’s enrichment program have taken
center stage in news coverage—and will likely dominate the headlines as a final
agreement is or is not reached at the end of this month—the history of Israel’s
covert nuclear program draws relatively little media attention. Israel has long
maintained a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor directly
denying that it has a nuclear deterrent, and the United States government has
officially taken the same stance, prohibiting its officials from stating that
Israel is a nuclear weapons country. More
Pro-Israel Lobby
Prepares to Battle Obama Over Iran
Since last
month, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has mobilized its members to
press legislators to endorse five principles for a nuclear deal -- principles
that are almost certain not to be reflected in a final agreement. Parallel to
this campaign, major donors to AIPAC and other pro-Israel causes are forming a
new and independent 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, according to fundraisers
and other lobbyists involved in the effort. The new organization will buy TV,
radio and Internet ads targeting lawmakers from both parties who are on the
fence about the nuclear deal, these sources say. Officially, AIPAC is still
reserving judgment on the nuclear deal being ironed out now in Vienna by the
U.S., Iran and five other world powers. But it's clear that the agreement now
being negotiated would be unsatisfactory to AIPAC.. More
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