The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

 
Click below to link to the Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism blog  

http://histomatist.blogspot.com/

Markin comment:

While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items promoted it is not clear to me that this British-centered blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.

Of late (2014) the site of necessity had taken to publicizing more activist events particularly around the struggle to defend the Palestinian people in Gaza against the Zionist onslaught. That is to be commented. However, in the main, this site continues to promote the endless conferences on socialism, Marxism, and Trotskyism that apparently are catnip to those on the left in Britain all the while touting the latest mythical "left" labor leader who is willing to speak anywhere to the left of the Milibrands. I continue to stand willing with the original comment above about "stealing" material from the site though.      

Additional Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

***********

In Honor Of The 65th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of The Chinese Revolution (1927) – Comrade Lui’s Problem  

Click on link below to read on-line all of Leon Trotsky's book, Problems Of The Chinese Revolution


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm


Markin comment (repost from 2012 just change the year date as noted in the title above):

 

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the early 1970s to put a time frame on the period I am talking about, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here long now although I should point out that he, Ludwig, to use his old time party name which he insisted that I call him for memory’s sake (I never did get his real first name although after he died somebody mentioned the name Peter), had started his political career right around World War I in Poland at the time of  great revolutionary ferment in Europe after the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in the wake of the slaughter in World War I.

In those days before they were murdered by the reaction in Germany where they were exiled (abetted by the old time German Social-Democratic leadership) that party was run by Rosa Luxemburg and her paramour Leo Jogiches. There was an old saying in the Communist movement of the 1920s and 1930s (before Stalin in the late 1930s virtually liquated the whole operation to placate his temporary partner, Hitler, in his/their designs on Poland) that the German party might have been the biggest (after the Soviet Union’s) in the Communist International but the Polish party was the best. So Ludwig came to his credentials with an impressive pedigree. Naturally he was a stalwart Communist rank and filer under the Pilsudski dictatorship from the mid-1920s forward, was torn apart by the failure of the German Communist Party to stop Hitler in his tracks when there was still time to do so in the early 1930s, and drifted (after flirting with the exiled Bukarinites, the rights in the Russian party and CI) toward the small but energetic Trotskyist group in the mid-1930s when to do meant to be hounded like a dog by both the Stalinist and Hitler-ite police apparatuses. So when you saw a guy like Ludwig, whether you agreed with his politics or not (and many times I did not), you knew you were in the presence of a real revolutionary and not some armchair dilettante.              

So you, young and wet behind the ears with very slim revolutionary credentials if rather more élan, you listened and thought through many of his comments. The one I think is germane today and which continues to drive me some forty years later was the importance of the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution (in his case that of the second revolution in the mid-1920s) and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had barely escaped ahead of Hitler’s police that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

What struck Ludwig from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth of that day (so we of the generation of ’68 had forbears whether we acknowledged them or not), on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism. (The confessional literature of American ex-Stalinists, Trotskyists, and even-left Social Democrats is replete with “errand child gone wrong but now wiser” language most of it barely readable for any useful political purpose, or polemic).

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position that China is today still hanging by a thread as a workers’ state (deformed in our language, deformed from its inception since the Chinese working-class decimated and cowered by the reaction in the second revolution in the 1920s) have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states in the late 1980s and early 1990s, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day.

In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution as tenaciously as in his time old Ludwig defended the gains of the Soviet Union in the interests of the world’s working classes and oppressed.

*******
Comrade Liu’s Problem

(Nobody in the Chinese Communist Party, the party that he was finally to come to see represented his political perspectives ever knew him as anybody other than Comrade Lui and so we will stick with that name, although later investigation found that he was the first son of a rich Shang-hai merchant family whose name was Ki Zhou but Comrade Lui will do for our purposes here.)

(I will use the old time Chinese language usages here in the interest of some kind of historical accuracy although everybody by now should be aware that for the past several decades there have been almost universal spelling and phonetic changes when Chinese turns to English.) 

In the fall of 1918, the year Comrade Liu entered Peking University held many portents for the brash young man who refused to discuss his family origins other than that he had come like virtually every young student in the post- revolutionary period (the first revolution of 1911-12 which dispose of the dynasty like some much dirty linen and with about as much effort as throwing such material in the laundry) from some wealth and that he was seriously attracted to the anarchists and bookish intellectuals who held sway there in the wake of World War I.

Like many of the young of most modern generations who  came up in some measure of privilege, came up in Comrade Lui’s case in the stifling atmosphere of old China the breath of fresh air provided by the university was both exhilarating and filled with many doubts about the old ways, about the way that he grew up. And so like more than a few young first generation intellectuals he gravitated to those ideas which were farthest away from his home life, from his strident worker bee youth studying to make university life. That over he breathed in the new ideas, and no ideas hit newly liberated students harder than the ideas of anarchism, at least as understood by those so liberated.

Comrade Liu like many others was first influenced by that old Russian dog, Prince Kropotkin, and his eclectic communal ideas, his idea of oneness of the whole universe which had a certain Zen-like attraction to those born into the stratified old Chinese ways (including, as has been noted, the tremendous efforts to make sure the first son succeeded at the expense of younger brothers. Daughters did not even enter the picture), and his basically moralistic way to transform society. That held many attentions for a while but if anything universal came out the First World War it was that  the younger generations were looking to break-out of the old ways and so they were looking for more activist ways to change society. Comrade Liu with others formed a semi-secret group of like-minded individuals bent on action to make a new anarchist-derived world. They called themselves the Black Flag Front. That is the state of affairs as the May Fourth Movement hit all Chinese students, from anarchists to extreme nationalists, like a storm.   

Comrade Liu and his comrades in the Black Flag Front while then not in the leadership of the student movement having just started to finish their first year’s studies participated fully when that big day came. This was the action they were looking for, the chance to create that more equalitarian society they were discussing in their rooms. Here is a little of what the movement itself was attempting to do which forms the background for most of what Comrade did until that time in the mid-1920s when he moved away from the Black Flag Front and began to toy a little with Communism.    

On the morning of May 4, 1919, student representatives from thirteen different local universities met in Beijing and drafted five resolutions:

1.    to oppose the granting of Shandong to the Japanese under former German concessions.

2.    to draw awareness of China's precarious position to the masses in China.

3.    to recommend a large-scale gathering in Beijing.

4.    to promote the creation of a Beijing student union.

5.    to hold a demonstration that afternoon in protest to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

On the afternoon of May 4 over 3,000 students of Peking University and other schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "Do away with the 'Twenty-One Demands'", and "Don't sign the Versailles Treaty". They voiced their anger at the Allied betrayal of China, denounced the government's spineless inability to protect Chinese interests, and called for a boycott of Japanese products. Demonstrators insisted on the resignation of three Chinese officials they accused of being collaborators with the Japanese. After burning the residence of one of these officials and beating his servants, student protesters were arrested, jailed, and severely beaten.^[4]

The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike and in the larger cities across China, students, patriotic merchants, and workers joined protests. The demonstrators skillfully appealed to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the country. From early June, workers and businessmen in Shanghai also went on strike as the center of the movement shifted from Beijing to Shanghai. Chancellors from thirteen universities arranged for the release of student prisoners, and Peking University's Cai Yuanpei resigned in protest. Newspapers, magazines, citizen societies, and chambers of commerce offered support for the students. Merchants threatened to withhold tax payments if China's government remained obstinate.^[5] In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers nearly devastated the entire Chinese economy.^[4] Under intense public pressure, the Beiyang government released the arrested students and dismissed Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu. Chinese representatives in Paris refused to sign on the peace treaty: the May Fourth Movement won an initial victory which was primarily symbolic: Japan for the moment retained control of the Shandong Peninsula and the islands in the Pacific. Even the partial success of the movement exhibited the ability of China's social classes across the country to successfully collaborate given proper motivation and leadership.

Certainly the efforts here by the students and the actions of the members of Black Flag did not point directly to a new society but the thrill of political activity, mixing with other groups and programs and also recruiting a small number of the most militant students (especially from those arrested and jailed by the government) gave rise to great expectations of things to come. It was during this period that Comrade Liu decided to devote his life to the struggle, a decision that he held to until the end of his life.     

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – Are You Feeling Safer Now?

 

Syria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate

Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama—after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.  The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).

It was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad’s enemies while politely informing his regime of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters is that it be at war, always and forever.  More

 

I despised Saddam’s police state, but U.S. wars set the stage for the Islamic State.

I’m mourning not just those who have died over the past decade, but for a country that I haven’t been able to recognize for a very long time… Until 1990, I never heard a mosque call for prayer. I almost never saw a woman covering her hair with a hijab. My mom wore make-up, skirts, blouses with shoulder pads and Bermuda shorts. She never covered her hair… I despised Saddam, but I don’t think an extremist group like the Islamic State would exist under his rule. Even if Saddam had gone crazy and killed a bunch of people, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the number who have died since he was overthrown. I see a civil war coming, and an Iraq divided into states… Sometimes, I watch old YouTube videos that show the way Iraq used to be. But the Iraq I loved and was proud of — the country I lived in before 1990 — doesn’t exist anymore. And I don’t see that changing in my lifetime.  More

How Many Wars is the US Fighting?

The White House spent much of last week trying to figure out if the word "war" was the right one to describe its military actions against the Islamic State… The problem is that our traditional definition of "war" is outdated, and so is our imagination of what war means.  World War II was the last time Congress officially declared war. Since then, the conflicts we've called "wars" — from Vietnam through to the second Iraq War — have actually been congressional "authorizations of military force." And more recently, beginning with the War Powers Act of 1973, presidential war powers have expanded so much that, according to the Congressional Research Service, it's no longer clear whether a president requires congressional authorization at all… So how many wars is the US fighting right now? Somewhere between zero and 134.   More

 

OBAMA'S LATEST WAR BREAKS THE LAW

…the New York Times reported [3] that “senior Obama administration officials said on Tuesday that the airstrikes against the Islamic State – carried out in Syria without seeking the permission of the Syrian government or the United Nations Security Council – were legal because they were done in defense of Iraq.” The same report said that “Iraq had a valid right of self-defense against the Islamic State because the militant group was attacking Iraq from its havens in Syria, and the Syrian government had failed to suppress that threat.” … The right of “self-defense” under international law exists as the single, narrow exception to the [UN] Charter’s overarching prohibition of the threat or use of force… The crises in Iraq and Syria are appropriately addressed not by the United States alone, which, by virtue of its military and intelligence policies, supported the conditions in which ISIS was created and proliferated [7], but by the world community acting through the UN Security Council.   More

 

Syria Vote Isn't Last Word From Congress On War

As far as Congress is concerned, President Barack Obama's Mideast war strategy isn't in the clear yet.

The president got what he wanted this past week when the House and Senate overwhelmingly approved arming and training moderate Syrian rebels to fight Islamic State militants. But the go-ahead is good for less than three months. And many lawmakers want a say over the rest of a plan featuring more than 1,600 U.S. military advisers in Iraq and airstrikes expanding into Syria… A showdown looms when lawmakers return to the Capitol after midterm elections — and no one knows yet how it's going to play out. Permission to prepare vetted Syrian opposition units as a ground force to complement U.S. airstrikes expires Dec. 11, at which point the training effort won't even have begun. American military leaders say the operation needs up to five months to get off the ground. Authorization for the training program is also included in a version of this year's defense policy bill, but its passage is not guaranteed… Conservatives such as Paul and liberal Democrats including Reps. Barbara Lee of Texas and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts cited the legal case in voting "no" on the Syrian training mission. Foreign policy centrists who supported intervention are joining the push for a broader authorization.  More

 

The audacity of air strikes and secret deals: just making Isis grow stronger?

Members of Congress – and the public – who care about a sustainable peace in the Middle East, the wise use of American tax dollars and the balance of power between our branches of government must not stand by as idle accomplices to President Obama’s increased air strikes and weapons deals in Syria. US-led air strikes make recruiting exponentially easier for the Islamic State (Isis) and other extremist movements without actually making America any safer. And selling weapons to state and non-state actors in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East only aids and abets insurgent movements. Insurgent groups, it seems, have found a reliable source for armaments in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency… But there are other options. The US could avoid repeating its past mistakes in Iraq by deemphasizing its military focus and admitting that air strikes and drone strikes won’t work to effect regional change. A strategy focused on political reconciliation, regional cooperation, arms embargoes and humanitarian aid that finally meets the basic needs of a war-ravaged nation is the only plan that could bring lasting security and political stability.  More

 

Why Americans’ support for bombing ISIS may not last

Trends in opinion on wars in the past half-century suggest that the American public can quite quickly begin to suffer from war fatigue. The Gallup poll has asked a relatively consistent question about wars going back to Korea in 1950. The question, in various forms, asks: “Do you think the United States made a mistake sending troops to __ or not?”  In the early stages of each war — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — large numbers said troop deployments were not a mistake. But over time, without fail, those numbers reversed with majorities or near-majorities saying each conflict was a mistake… Support for the Iraq war increased six points within days of Saddam Hussein’s capture on Dec. 13, 2003. In those early stages of the war, majorities considered it worth the effort. But within two months of his capture, opinions were split, with 48 percent saying it was worth it and 50 percent saying it wasn’t.  In late March 2004, a convoy of U.S. military contractors was ambushed and killed in Fallujah and their bodies were burned and dragged through the streets. Public opinion went south on the war in Post-ABC polls within months of that attack, never to return to majority support.  More

 

U.S. -- Strikes on Islamic State, Khorasan in Syria first step of a years-long campaign

U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria are likely to last “for years,” a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday, as the United States began to assess the impact of three waves of aerial assaults launched in the early morning hours that targeted both Islamic State installations in eastern Syria and facilities housing a shadowy al Qaida group further west… “You are seeing the beginning of a sustained campaign, and strikes like this in the future can be expected,” said Army Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The operational pace, the tempo of this thing, will be dictated by the facts on the ground and what the targets on the ground mean.” Asked how long the effort to “degrade and eventually destroy” the Islamic State could take, Mayville replied, “I would think of it in terms of years.”  More

 

White House won’t estimate cost of ISIS war

Pressed on that point Monday, press secretary Josh Earnest wouldn't give a ballpark figure for how much the administration expected military operations to cost.  “I don’t have an estimate on that,” Earnest said. “I know that we’re interested in having an open dialogue with Congress to ensure that our military has the resources necessary to carry out the mission that the president has laid out.” So far, the administration has relied on the Overseas Contingency Operations budget to pay for operations against the terrorist group. The White House had previously requested a cut in that pool — from $85 billion to $58.6 billion — for the next fiscal year, but lawmakers decided instead to keep funding at current levels in the temporary budget measure passed last week.   More

The war on ISIS already has a winner: The defense industry

It’s far too soon to tell how the American escalation in the sprawling, complex mess unfolding in Iraq and Syria will play out. But this much is clear: As our military machine hums into a higher gear, it will produce some winners in the defense industry.  New fights mean new stuff, after all. And following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan—and the belt-tightening at the Pentagon imposed by steep budget cuts—military suppliers are lining up to meet a suddenly restored need for their wares. Presenting his vision for expanding the confrontation with the terrorist group ISIS in a speech to the nation on Wednesday night, President Obama outlined a program of intensified airstrikes designed to keep American troops away from the danger on the ground. So defense analysts are pointing to a pair of sure-bet paydays from the new campaign: for those making and maintaining the aircraft, manned and unmanned, that will swarm the skies over the region, and for those producing the missiles and munitions that will arm them.   More

 

Syrian rebels angry that strikes hit al Qaida but not Assad

Anti-government media activists and rebel commanders gave a mixed assessment of U.S.-led airstrikes in northern Syria on Tuesday…  But the greatest damage, they said, may be to the Free Syrian Army, the moderate rebel faction that enjoyed U.S. support for years. By focusing exclusively on Islamic State insurgents and al Qaida figures associated with the Khorasan unit of the Nusra Front, and bypassing installations associated with the government of President Bashar Assad, the airstrikes infuriated anti-regime Syrians and hurt the standing of moderate rebel groups that are receiving arms and cash as part of a covert CIA operation based in the Turkish border city of Reyhanli.  More

 

Demise of group backing moderate Syria rebels is a warning for U.S.

Two years after the Obama administration granted it a rare license to raise money for Syrian rebels, a Washington-based opposition nonprofit group that tried to help the United States build a moderate fighting force is defunct. The Syrian Support Group quietly shut down last month, another casualty of the murky battleground conditions, lack of resources and infighting that have doomed every U.S.-backed attempt at creating a viable opposition partner… Now, some U.S. officials speak dismissively of the group and seek to disassociate themselves from it. But for years they enjoyed cozy ties with the Syrian-American activists. In 2012, the Treasury Department granted a sought-after license that made it the only U.S. group authorized to collect money for the rebels… The Obama administration’s effort to work with the Free Syrian Army, which in truth is less an army than a loosely affiliated band of militias, was similarly unsuccessful. It didn’t take long for the rebels to complain publicly that promised U.S. assistance wasn’t arriving; they also begged in vain for heavier weapons and Western air support.  Their cause wasn’t helped by Free Syrian Army units being caught repeatedly coordinating with the Nusra Front.   More

 

Bombing Syria

Syria cannot join the anti-ISIS coalition even though Syria has been fighting ISIS for over two years. Obama’s reason is that the Syrian government has “no legitimacy.” But Obama’s “coalition” of Gulf states are composed of totalitarian dictatorships that, in comparison, make Syria look like the bastion of democracy… Obama’s “coalition of the willing” is largely a mirage, since it’s composed of Gulf state monarchies that are completely dependent on U.S. aid, supplying these dictatorships with enough fire power to protect them from their own citizens, who would otherwise topple their “royalty” in minutes… To complicate matters more, there are large sections of support in the Gulf states for groups like ISIS, since these governments give institutional support to religious institutions that hold an extremist interpretation of Islam… The U.S. politicians understand that the intended outcome of funding the Syrian rebels is regime change, while they tell the American public that ISIS is the only target. The real agenda is quite simple: keeping the Middle East under U.S. control by any means necessary.  More

 

Why Syria is the Gordian knot of Obama’s anti-ISIL campaign

The Syrian opposition remains notoriously fragmented and undependable. Obama did not name a militia or organization with which to partner because even after three and a half years of vetting rebel groups, the U.S. has yet to identify a credible ally…    Last year the U.S. tried to unite Western-friendly militias under a supreme military command, but that effort proved a debacle… Fixing the deep-seated political breakdown of which ISIL’s rise is one symptom is beyond Obama’s capability. Ten years of nation-building by more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq failed to create a new stability, and today’s challenge of failing statehood extends way beyond Iraq. Bombing is envisaged as a Band-Aid solution to the region’s problems. But the wounds run deep and wide.  More

 

2-minute Video: 

HOW DOES THIS END? 35 Military Interventions since 1980 and Terrorism Grows

 

U.S. Turns Up the Heat on Turkey Over Islamic State

A North Atlantic Treaty Organization member that is home to a large American air base, Turkey has been conspicuously absent as a U.S.-led military coalition including Gulf Arab countries conducted a series of airstrikes on the radical Sunni group in neighboring Syria this week. At minimum, U.S. officials say, Mr. Obama wants Mr. Erdogan to do more to stop the flow of foreign fighters in and out of Turkey. "We have made a clear declaration of political will against the Islamic State," a senior Turkish official said on Thursday. "We are discussing political and military cooperation, but the question is how we commit."  The official added that Turkey would decide the scope of cooperation based on its own security concerns and not based on international pressure… Next week, Turkey's parliament will debate the renewal of current authorizations to use force in both Syria and Iraq. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has pledged to expand the scope and content of the resolutions, but didn't elaborate on the specifics.  More

 

Deal With Saudis Paved Way for Syrian Airstrikes

Officials on both sides say the partnership could help rebuild trust between longtime allies whose relations have been deeply strained over the U.S.'s response to the Arab Spring uprisings and Mr. Obama's outreach to Saudi rival Iran. It was also a sign the Saudis might take on a greater security role in the region, something the U.S. has long pressed for.  Reaching that agreement, however, took months of behind-the-scenes work by the U.S. and Arab leaders, who agreed on the need to cooperate against Islamic State, but not how or when. The process gave the Saudis leverage to extract a fresh U.S. commitment to beef up training for rebels fighting Mr. Assad, whose demise the Saudis still see as a top priority.  More

 

THE OTHER BEHEADERS

In recent months IS has carried out hundreds, possibly thousands, of executions, mostly by gunfire rather than beheading and typically without a trial of any kind. Saudi Arabia is far less trigger- or sword-happy. Still, in the space of just 18 days during the month of August, the kingdom beheaded some 22 people, according to human-rights advocates… Some Saudi critics fear that the sudden upsurge represents a response by the religious establishment to the challenge from IS. Perhaps it is an attempt to prove to the most conservative Saudis that the kingdom remains a truer “Islamic” state than any other. Others see it as part of a broader policy to assert government control amid signs of growing discontent among the bored Saudi young, including a drift into unbelief.    More

 

What Arab Partners Will Get in Return for Strikes on Syria
Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia can hope to shift attention away from the criticism for their attitude to Islamist extremism. Over the years, they have been charged not only with supporting radical Islamists in Syria, but also with allowing their religious elites to propagate a version of Islam that is open to easy manipulation at the hands of radical jihadist recruiters. Both countries will also hope that weakening the radical Islamists of IS will help moderate elements of the Syrian opposition regain the initiative against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Some among the elites of Riyadh and Doha might even be hoping Washington will realise the threat of IS will never be extinguished while Bashar al-Assad’s regime remains in place – and that Obama will see the job is finished.  More

 

FAREED ZAKARIA: The fight against the Islamic State must include Iran

If President Obama truly wants to degrade and destroy the Islamic State, he must find a way to collaborate with Iran — the one great power in the Middle East with which the United States is still at odds. Engagement with Iran — while hard and complicated — would be a strategic game-changer, with benefits spreading from Iraq to Syria to Afghanistan… The United States has some influence with the Iraqi government, but Iran has far more. The Shiite religious parties that today run the country have been funded by Iran for decades. Their leaders lived in Tehran and Damascus during their long exiles from Saddam Hussein’s regime. When Washington sought to remove the previous prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, Iran provided the push that made it happen. If the goal is to get the Iraqi government to share more power with the Sunnis, Iran’s help would be invaluable, perhaps vital. In Syria, Washington’s strategy is incoherent. It seeks to destroy the Islamic State there and attack Jabhat al-Nusra and the Khorasan group but somehow not strengthen these groups’ principal rival, the Bashar al-Assad regime. This is impossible.  More

To Get Rich is Glorious”?

PLUTOCRACY, ENDLESS WAR and A DESTROYED PLANET

The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing a Bigger Slice of the Income Pie - They're Taking All Of It

…the wealthy are capturing more and more of the overall income growth during each expansion period. Notice the sharp drop in the bottom 90 percent's share of growth starting with the 1982-1990 period — thanks, Reaganomics! Not only that, but the bottom 90 percent actually saw their real income drop between 2009 and 2012.  More

 

America’s Deranged Security Agenda

HOW OBAMA AND CONGRESS BLEW IT ON CLIMATE AND WAR

Using his executive authority Monday and Tuesday, President Obama took two steps to combat dangerous forces that threaten the country…  While Obama’s notice to Congress of the escalation cited two congressional Authorizations to Use Military Force — the 2001 Afghan AUMF and the 2002 Iraq AUMF, AUMFs so old that a majority in each house of Congress was not there to vote on them – most experts deem that justification, particularly to cover Syrian bombing, dubious. Ultimately, the president is waging war on his own executive authority… While Mother Nature may not be making YouTube videos showing vicious beheadings of people, climate change is causing death and misery and extensive damage already. Even in the U.S… And yet, Obama has not used his executive authority to protect this country against the ongoing impact of climate change with nearly the scope or audacity he has used to fight terrorists who threaten our access to more fossil fuel resources.  More

 

Climate Crisis? That's Not News

If over 300,000 people march in New York City to demand action on climate change, does it make a sound? Not if you're watching the Sunday morning network chat shows.  The September 21 People's Climate March lived up to its billing as the largest climate change march ever, drawing a massive crowd to focus world attention to the climate emergency. Similar events happened in other major cities around the world. But the highest-profile discussion shows in the corporate media--ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday and Face the Nation on CBS--either did not know it was happening or didn't think it was important.   More

 

AMERICA OUT OF WHACK

Instead of promoting equality, public policy has left millions locked into lives of restricted opportunity while bestowing the benefits of growth on the very few. We know this and yet we let it continue. On Sept. 18, the Federal Reserve announced what sounded like good news: in the United States, “the net worth of households and nonprofits rose by $1.4 trillion to $81.5 trillion during the second quarter of 2014. The value of directly and indirectly held corporate equities increased $1.0 trillion and the value of real estate expanded $230 billion.”  Taking a somewhat longer view, the Fed reported that since 2000, household wealth in the United States has grown by $37 trillion — from $44.45 trillion to $81.49 trillion at the end of the second quarter of this year, but these spectacular gains in wealth are mostly benefiting upper-income Americans. Not only has the wealth of the very rich doubled since 2000, but corporate revenues are at record levels. From 2000 to the present, quarterly corporate after-tax profits have risen from $529 billion to $1.5 trillion. On an annual basis, growth was from $2.1 trillion to $6 trillion in annual after-tax profits. In 2013, according to Goldman Sachs, corporate profits rose five times faster than wages…  In 2001, what had been a slow decline in the share of total national income going to labor took a sharp downward turn that became a precipitous fall.    More

PAUL KRUGMAN: The Show-Off Society

…why had the elite moved away from the ostentation of the past? Because it could no longer afford to live that way. The large yacht, Fortune tells us, “has foundered in the sea of progressive taxation.” But that sea has since receded. Giant yachts and enormous houses have made a comeback. In fact, in places like Greenwich, Conn., some of the “outsize mansions” Fortune described as relics of the past have been replaced with even bigger mansions.  And there’s no mystery about what happened to the good-old days of elite restraint. Just follow the money. Extreme income inequality and low taxes at the top are back. For example, in 1955 the 400 highest-earning Americans paid more than half their incomes in federal taxes, but these days that figure is less than a fifth. And the return of lightly taxed great wealth has, inevitably, brought a return to Gilded Age ostentation… Human nature being what it is, it’s silly to expect humility from a highly privileged elite. So if you think our society needs more humility, you should support policies that would reduce the elite’s privileges.   More

 

WHY WE MARCH: Stepping Forth for a Planet in Peril

We don’t march because there’s any guarantee it will work. If you were a betting person, perhaps you’d say we have only modest hope of beating the financial might of the oil and gas barons and the governments in their thrall. It’s obviously too late to stop global warming entirely, but not too late to slow it down -- and it’s not too late, either, to simply pay witness to what we’re losing, a world of great beauty and complexity and stability that has nurtured humanity for thousands of years.  There’s a world to march for -- and a future, too. The only real question is why anyone wouldn’t march.  More

 

CHRIS HEDGES: The Coming Climate Revolt

We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible… The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton administration… If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole… If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution.   More

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – Are You Feeling Safer Now?

 

Syria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate

Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama—after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.  The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).

It was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad’s enemies while politely informing his regime of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters is that it be at war, always and forever.  More

 

I despised Saddam’s police state, but U.S. wars set the stage for the Islamic State.

I’m mourning not just those who have died over the past decade, but for a country that I haven’t been able to recognize for a very long time… Until 1990, I never heard a mosque call for prayer. I almost never saw a woman covering her hair with a hijab. My mom wore make-up, skirts, blouses with shoulder pads and Bermuda shorts. She never covered her hair… I despised Saddam, but I don’t think an extremist group like the Islamic State would exist under his rule. Even if Saddam had gone crazy and killed a bunch of people, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the number who have died since he was overthrown. I see a civil war coming, and an Iraq divided into states… Sometimes, I watch old YouTube videos that show the way Iraq used to be. But the Iraq I loved and was proud of — the country I lived in before 1990 — doesn’t exist anymore. And I don’t see that changing in my lifetime.  More

How Many Wars is the US Fighting?

The White House spent much of last week trying to figure out if the word "war" was the right one to describe its military actions against the Islamic State… The problem is that our traditional definition of "war" is outdated, and so is our imagination of what war means.  World War II was the last time Congress officially declared war. Since then, the conflicts we've called "wars" — from Vietnam through to the second Iraq War — have actually been congressional "authorizations of military force." And more recently, beginning with the War Powers Act of 1973, presidential war powers have expanded so much that, according to the Congressional Research Service, it's no longer clear whether a president requires congressional authorization at all… So how many wars is the US fighting right now? Somewhere between zero and 134.   More

Instilling Hope in Gaza: The Legacy of Dr. Eyad el Sarraj

 The Gaza Mental Health Foundation presents:

A Memorial Tribute

Tuesday, October 28, 2014 at 7 PM

First Parish in Cambridge, Harvard Square (corner of Mass Ave and Church Street)

Featuring:

• NOAM CHOMSKY, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• JESS GHANNAM, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences at the University of California at San Francisco
• SARA ROY, Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
• NANCY MURRAY, Co-founder, Gaza Mental Health Foundation , Gaza Mental Health Foundation
• BILL SLAUGHTER, President, Gaza Mental Health Foundation

 

Dr. Eyad el Sarraj (1943-2013) was the first psychiatrist in the Gaza Strip and a renowned campaigner for peace with justice who recognized the vital connection between mental health and human rights. The founder in 1990 of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), he received the first human rights award given by the US Physicians for Human Rights, among many other international honors. His courage, decency, independence of mind, and vision of a better world made him a beacon of moral conscience and hope for those Israelis seeking peace with Palestinians and Palestinians struggling with both the occupation and their own ruinous political divisions.

 

Nearly a year after his death on December 17, 2013, “Instilling Hope in Gaza” will examine the conditions in the Gaza Strip that shaped his life and work, how the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme is today forging ahead with his work, and what more can be done to build on his legacy in the years ahead.

 

Suggested donation at the door: $10 - or more! Funds will support the work of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.

 

Host: The Middle East Education Group at First Parish Cambridge. Co-sponsors: American Friends Service Committee - New England Region, Boston Coalition  for Palestinian Rights, Grassroots International, Harvard School of Public Health, Jewish Voice for Peace - Boston, Physicians for Human Rights, United for Justice with Peace.

United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today.
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