A People’s Guide to the Health Care Bill
March 22nd, 2010 § 6 Comments
It’s socialism! It’s historic! Actually, it’s neither but the pundits have to call it something if they’re going to spend all day talking about it. So what should we know about the health care “reforms” that Obama and the Democratic Congress have just passed? For a quick rundown of the talking points and the unsurprisingly differing facts, consider this PDF. But to really consider the impact of this bill, let’s start with this editorial from The Socialist Worker appropriately entitled “Worse Than Nothing At All”:
In spite of the hysterical complaints of Republicans, the truth is that the health care measure House Democratic leaders hope to ram through this weekend is a disaster in the making for working people and a massive giveaway to the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex.
It will “mandate” people to buy policies from private insurers, without any guarantees of affordable premiums or adequate coverage. It won’t have a “public option.” It will slash spending and benefits for the federal government’s Medicare program by $500 billion. It will impose a tax in some form on employer-provided insurance–supposedly aimed at expensive “Cadillac” plans, but in reality affecting any insurance that has decent benefits.
The article continues to lay out how the twenty million Americans promised coverage under this bill are really getting a hollow promise that disguises the tremendous bonanza this legislation offers to the health care industry and opportunistic conservatives keen on using this to lay siege to women’s rights. Which brings us to our next point.
On Re-presenting the ‘Terrorist’
March 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In a series of interviews by the Talking Dog, lawyers for Bagram and Guantanamo detainees have been discussing why they do what they do; namely, represent clients who the government has and continues to maintain are ‘terrorists.’ In the most recent of these interviews, Ellen Lubell, co-counsel for Abdul Aziz Naji, tells us what’s at stake for her in detainee representation and why such work must continue to be done.
Seven Years in Iraq and Counting
March 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Ahmed Habib
On March 20, 2003, at approximately 5:30 in the early hours of the morning, just at that time where the sun settles into its daytime position over the skies of Baghdad, American jet fighters unleashed indiscriminate firepower over the beautiful city.
Amidst a house filled with resilient spirits, Laila cowered for cover with her neighbours and family. As a twenty year old university student, the Baghdad native had already been through two wars, and a genocidal sanctions regime that limited her childhood to an existence of deprivation and fear.
“This time, it was different, the explosions were so big, we all thought we were going to die,” Laila, a pseudonym used out of fear for her safety, says over a tired phone connection seven years later.
Tens of thousands of kilometres away, activists huddled around a television set, with their heads in their hands, and watched a glorified play by play of death narrated by indifferent talking heads.
“Those are people dying under those bombs, and we couldn’t do anything to stop them,” said Firas from a Toronto apartment, to the backdrop of free flowing tears.
In the lead up to that day, millions of people took to the streets to oppose the impending war, to no avail. Since then, over a million Iraqis have lost their lives, more than five million have been displaced, and countless lives have been destroyed.
The Undue Influence of the Israel Lobby
March 20th, 2010 § 3 Comments
by Jeffrey Blankfort
Despite the repeated humiliations suffered during his recent visit to Israel, US Vice President Joe Biden continued to grovel publicly to his Israeli hosts. Yet, according to Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s most widely read newspaper, Biden had privately complained to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s behavior was “starting to get dangerous for us.” “What you’re doing here,” he reportedly said, “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.” That Biden made such a statement has been denied by the White House, but it follows closely an earlier memorandum sent by General Petraeus to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his testimony before a US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
In his prepared statement, Petraeus depicted the Israeli-Arab conflict as the first “cross cutting challenge to security and stability” in the CENTCOM area of responsibility [AOR]. “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR.”
Treading in an area where few members of the US military have dared to go before, Petraeus observed that “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.” It should be noted that neither the New York Times’s Elizabeth Bumiller nor the Washington Post’s Anne Flaherty included any reference to these comments by Petraeus in their coverage of his testimony.
A Serious Man
March 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
If you are going to inflict a sophomoric joke on the greatest living writer, you must make sure that you have rehearsed it well. Otherwise you’ll get the reaction that Geoff Dyer got from J.M. Coetzee. (via Thomas Jones)
Berlusconi mistook statuette of Milan’s Duomo for monument in Africa
March 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
(Image from Reuters Oddly Enough blog.)
An Italian friend recently used a scene he had witnessed in a crowded piazza in the San Lorenzo neighborhood of Rome to explain the current political leadership of Italy. According to my friend, his usual Saturday night consumption of beer in said piazza had been interrupted when a Moroccan began breaking bottles and threatening bystanders with the jagged edges before eventually being toppled by other Moroccans.
What was most disturbing about the scene in my friend’s view was that the Moroccan had not been toppled by Italians, who had failed to react. When I asked my friend why the man’s nationality was central to the event, he protested that the real issue was why the Italian nation was senza palle—“without balls”—a deficiency that enabled fascist politicians to install themselves in power. My suggestion that perceptions of national weakness were also conducive to fascist takeovers was met with the response that brief ethnic takeovers of Roman piazzas were merely indicative of a larger pattern of territorial conquest, something Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had confirmed with the following quote in a June 2009 article in Corriere della Sera: “Some people want a multicolored and multiethnic society. We do not share this opinion.”
Sam Bahour on Shahid Alam
March 20th, 2010 § 4 Comments
We are publishing a series of reviews and responses to PULSE contributor M. Shahid Alam’s latest work, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism. I would recommend this clear-sighted book to any student of the origins and trajectory of Zionism. Here, Sam Bahour describes his own provocative engagement with Israeli Exceptionalism.
Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism peels the onion of Zionism to reveal how deeply flawed this ideology was and is and how it has become a destabilizing factor which puts people of the region — and arguably beyond — in serious jeopardy.
Israeli Exceptionalism is not only a must read, it is a must-think-about book. To add intellectual spice, every chapter starts with a few quotes of prominent individuals related to the topic at hand. Reading these quotes alone speak volumes of the human tragedy that Zionism evokes.
Žižek on Avatar
March 19th, 2010 § 26 Comments
Here’s something Slavoj Žižek and I have in common. We’ve both seen Avatar. I was not totally bewitched by it, maybe because balancing a pair of 3-D spectacles on top of another set of glasses while sitting two meters from the screen, tilting my head at a 30-degree angle in order to see it, detracted a bit from the visual experience. But still, Avatar was excellent: a sledgehammer of an assault on American corporate imperialism, the exo-skeleton clad high-explosive-wielding security forces a straightforward proxy for the American Army, engaged in a murderous resource grab.
Dud dialog and slightly heavy-handed (the never-to-be-obtained mineral named Unobtanium)? Sure, fine. But the plot’s lack of subtlety wasn’t the point, not amidst its political content, presented alongside stunning visuals: hallucinogenically colorful flora, chunks of mountains phantasmagorically floating in a thick fog, and blooms of shimmering jellyfish-like spirit-seeds that alight on the protagonist, Jake Sully, blessing him, and eventually anointing him. Their presence prevents the Na’vi—Hebrew for prophet—princess from shooting him dead with a bow and arrow. The Na’vi are humanoid blue creatures living in a pre-lapsarian relationship with their planet, capable of connecting to the biosphere and its fauna through their hair. They link directly to Aywa, the earth-goddess, a direct analog for James Lovelock’s Gaia. “We have nothing they need,” says Jake, bemoaning the inability of the corporate mercantilists to make an exchange to get the Na’vi out from the tree in which they make their home. Indeed: “You are so stupid!” the Na’vi princess lashes into Sully. Fair enough. They had already destroyed their planet—earth in 2154—and what could be dumber than to destroy your home and render it unlivable? Can an ecological criticism of corporate imperialism be more powerful than to simultaneously highlight its genetic avariciousness and its viral nature, destroying the world that birthed it?
Yassin-Kassab on PalFest: ‘It’s time to write back’
March 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Robin Yassin-Kassab is a PULSE coeditor and author of The Road From Damascus. Last year he was a featured participant at the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), recently featured here. You can find some pieces about his experiences while travelling with the roadshow here and here. I recently asked Yassin-Kassab to reflect on Palfest again, this time almost one year after his participation.
Robin Yassin-Kassab in Palestine, beside Mahmoud Darwish, the late national poet.
Palfest has three sets of benefits: for the foreign writers involved, for the Palestinians living under occupation, and for the wider world which is too often starved of information (as opposed to propaganda) on Palestine.
For me personally, the benefits were enormous. Palfest was by far the greatest opportunity I’ve been offered since my novel was published. For a start, I was able to spend a week sharing fascinating and sometimes extremely emotional experiences with an international group of writers accomplished in a wide range of genres. These included Michael Palin, best-selling crime writer Henning Mankell, renowned American novelist Claire Messud, and two-time winner of Canada’s most prestigious literary award, M. G. Vassanji. I also had the honour of meeting Palestinian writers, academics and intellectuals, both residents in Palestine (such as Raja Shehadeh) and those who live abroad (such as Suheir Hammad). I was able to visit refugee camps and villages in the West Bank, to briefly taste the enwalled and humiliated existence of Palestinians in Hebron/al-Khalil, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. Students and shopkeepers taught me more about resistance than I’d previously known, as did Israeli dissidents. Of course, I already knew a lot about Palestine; seeing it with your own eyes, being hassled at borders and checkpoints, having guns and cameras pointed at you – this is something else.
Israel and the lobby against the US: A Perfect Storm in Washington
March 18th, 2010 § 18 Comments
UPDATE: CNN viewer responses below
A perfect storm is brewing in Washington today. Gen. Petraeus has given many mainstream commentators cover with his comments about Israel’s actions endangering US lives around the world. It is no longer only our good friends at Mondoweiss.net: everyone from Joe Klein (Time), Roger Cohen (New York Times), Glenn Greenwald (Salon), Andrew Bacevich (Salon), Col. Pat Lang, John Mearsheimer (LRB), Jim Lobe (IPS), Stephen Walt (CNN), to Robert Dreyfuss (The Nation) is talking about it. Juan Cole has also abandoned his overly cautious approach take on the Israel lobby’s chief media doberman: Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg. Meanwhile, the left is once again proving its irrelevance. Instead of covering the issue seriously Democracy Now! for example focused on the obligatory diplomatic niceties to dismiss the whole issue. (You can picture DN covering Caesar’s assassination and dimissing all of Mark Antony’s concerns because he called Brutus and the conspirators ‘honourable men’).
But here is the true indicator of the changing winds in Washington: even CNN is talking about it! (To be fair to Rick Sanchez, he did some courageous reporting even during the Gaza conflict, giving platform to our friend Diana Buttu to debunk Zionist hasbara).
