August 21, 2014

Patrick Cockburn, How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate

Think of the new “caliphate” of the Islamic State, formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's gift to the world (with a helping hand from the Saudis and other financiers of extremism in the Persian Gulf). How strange that they get so little credit for its rise, for the fact that the outlines of the Middle East, as set up by Europe’s colonial powers in the wake of World War I, are being swept aside in a tide of blood.

Had George and Dick not decided on their “cakewalk” in Iraq, had they not raised the specter of nuclear destruction and claimed that Saddam Hussein’s regime was somehow linked to al-Qaeda and so to the 9/11 attacks, had they not sent tens of thousands of American troops into a burning, looted Baghdad (“stuff happens”), disbanded the Iraqi army, built military bases all over that country, and generally indulged their geopolitical fantasies about dominating the oil heartlands of the planet for eternity, ISIS would have been an unlikely possibility, no matter the ethnic and religious tensions in the region. They essentially launched the drive that broke state power there and created the kind of vacuum that a movement like ISIS was so horrifically well suited to fill.


http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175884/tomgram%3A_patrick_cockburn%2C_how_to_ensure_a_thriving_caliphate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tomdispatch%2FesUU+%28TomDispatch%3A+The+latest+Tomgram%29


This has an interesting slant in that the author thinks the U.S. is both opposing and supporting ISIS. That we are opposing them in Iraq and at the same time supporting them in Syria by supporting the opposition a large part of which, according to the author, is ISIS.

August 19, 2014

Events from Ferguson explain why we are weak

Summary: Events in Ferguson display some of the problems plaguing the Republic — our unresolved racial conflicts, sclerotic governing institutions, and most importantly our weakness as citizens. Decades of propaganda have erased from our minds our history of successful collective action, and replaced it with a mostly false belief in markets and individuals. It’s left us as atomized consumers, incapable of effectively becoming leaders and followers and so governing ourselves. It makes us sheep. We can do better.



http://fabiusmaximus.com/2014/08/19/ferguson-michael-brown-riots-causes-70969/

August 18, 2014

The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race

Ferguson is not just about systemic racism — it's about class warfare and how America's poor are held back, says Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Will the recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice, or will it be a minor footnote in some future grad student’s thesis on Civil Unrest in the Early Twenty-First Century?

You probably have heard of the Kent State shootings: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University. During those 13 seconds of gunfire, four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The shock and outcry resulted in a nationwide strike of 4 million students that closed more than 450 campuses. Five days after the shooting, 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C. And the nation’s youth was energetically mobilized to end the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and mindless faith in the political establishment.

You probably haven’t heard of the Jackson State shootings.

On May 14th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything. That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole, erasing it from the national memory.

http://time.com/3132635/ferguson-coming-race-war-class-warfare/

August 17, 2014

How Money Warps U.S. Foreign Policy

The key divide on America’s role in the world is no longer between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between elites and everyone else.

On Sunday, when Hillary Clinton used an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg to take pointedly more hawkish stances than President Obama on Syria, Iran, and Gaza, observers chalked it up to her presidential ambitions. As one Democratic operative told Politico, Clinton’s advisors are “good poll readers.” On Tuesday, when Rand Paul declined to oppose U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, commentators interpreted it the same way.

The assumption that hawkishness is politically smart is deeply ingrained in the media’s coverage of the 2016 presidential race. But it’s bizarre. Because in both parties, the polling data is overwhelming: Americans think U.S. foreign policy is too hawkish already. Foreign policy has always been more elite-driven, and more insulated from public opinion, than domestic policy. But today’s elite-mass gap is the largest in decades. And regardless of your foreign-policy perspective, that’s a problem for American democracy.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/how-money-warps-us-foreign-policy/376035/?single_page=true

August 16, 2014

Will the Ferguson protest force development of African-American leaders?

Summary: The Ferguson protests lacked leadership, and so quickly devolved into counter-productive riots. It’s a common problem. Will future protests nurture a new generation of leaders?

.

Peasants’ protests are a commonplace in history, such as The Great Rising of 1381. The lack of competent leadership distinguishes peasants’ protests from effective means of social change.

Some peasants’ protests are just mobs. Emergent leadership is a rare gift.

Some peasants’ protests have leaders, but not competent ones. Wat Tyler led The Great Rising, bringing his horde to London. King Richard met with Tyler, courteously listened to the peasants’ complaints, thanked him for coming, and killed him. Competent emergent leadership is an extraordinarily rare gift.

August 15, 2014

Tomgram: Matthew Harwood, One Nation Under SWAT

Think of it as a different kind of blowback. Even when you fight wars in countries thousands of miles distant, they still have an eerie way of making the long trip home.

Take the latest news from Bergen County, New Jersey, one of the richest counties in the country. Its sheriff’s department is getting two mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs -- 15 tons of protective equipment -- for a song from the Pentagon. And there’s nothing special in that. The Pentagon has handed out 600 of them for nothing since 2013, with plenty more to come. They’re surplus equipment, mostly from our recent wars, and perhaps they will indeed prove handy for a sheriff fretting about insurgent IEDs (roadside bombs) in New Jersey or elsewhere in the country. When it comes to the up-armoring and militarization of America’s police forces, this is completely run-of-the-mill stuff.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175881/tomgram%3A_matthew_harwood%2C_one_nation_under_swat/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tomdispatch%2FesUU+%28TomDispatch%3A+The+latest+Tomgram%29

August 13, 2014

US Military Fail: Long Asian Land Wars a Route to Disaster since 1963

By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch.com

The United States has been at war — major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions — nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions.

Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again.

So here are five straightforward lessons — none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country — that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:

http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/military-asian-disaster.html

August 7, 2014

Collective Punishment & Butchering Babies is Self-Defense?

Israeli “self defense” is NOT what is going on, even though there is relentless 24/7 US mainstream media propaganda to camouflage the ruthless unleashing of the Israeli/US-paid-for mass killing war machine.

In "Eyeless in Gaza" Jonathan Cook calls out Netanyahu’s protests of waging a “necessary” war of self-defense against rockets and tunnels. He writes:

Cook contends that what the Netanyahu regime is up to is the serious opposite of self-defense.


It seems Netanyahu wanted to end a strategic threat: not Hamas rockets or tunnels, but the establishment of a unity government between Hamas and its long-time rivals Fatah. Palestinian unity risked reviving pressure on him to negotiate, or face a renewed and more credible Palestinian campaign for statehood at the United Nations.

http://www.correntewire.com/collective_punishment_butchering_babies_is_self_defense

August 4, 2014

Proposition 1: How to Swindle the Middle Class

By Cathy Stripe Lester

On August 5, Michigan taxpayers will be asked to vote on Proposition 1, which is being presented in commercials as a way to “help small businesses and create 15,000 new jobs … without raising taxes!”

If that sounds like a conjuring trick, it is – smoke’n’mirrors, my friends. And if you try to look behind the curtain, it becomes very, very confusing, as if the proponents of Prop 1 don’t want anyone to notice what it actually does.

Firstly it takes control of one segment of local tax bases. Takes it away from local cities and townships, and gives it to the state. Secondly, it is going to be a huge tax break for big companies in the long run, and shift even more tax burden onto working families.

http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/proposition-swindle-middle.html

August 4, 2014

The Hateful Likud Charter Calls for Destruction of Any Palestinian State

By Jonathan Weiler

Since virtually every comment on Hamas in American media includes the assertion that the group’s Charter rejects Israel’s right to exist, it’s worth noting the following from the Likud Platform of 1999:

a. “The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.”

b. “Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel.
The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem”

http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/charter-destruction-palestinian.html