With Brothers Like This
April 19th, 2010 § 11 Comments
This Memorial eve, culture in Israel took a turn to the right. Highly respected, mainstream crossover, “Mizrahi” artist, Amir Bennayun, has written a song that can only described as messianic hateful state incitement and propaganda. Here it is in all its disgusting glory [lyrics below limited by my translation]:
I Am Your Brother
Keynes is Back
April 19th, 2010 § 3 Comments
I am reading Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abellas hagiographic account of the rise of the RAND Corporation in which he shows how ideas that originated with its mathematicians have by virtue of its proximity to power come to dominate such diverse disciplines as political science, international relations, philosophy, sociology, (even religious studies!) and economics (NB: for more on the subject, don’t miss Adam Curtis’s classic film The Trap). Prominent among them are systems analysis, game theory, and rational choice theory. The latter gave us everything from the arms race to the recent financial collapse. In his review of Robert Skidelsky’s Keynes: The Return of the Master, the new biography of John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Stiglitz writes:
We should be clear about this: economic theory never provided much support for these free-market views. Theories of imperfect and asymmetric information in markets had undermined every one of the ‘efficient market’ doctrines, even before they became fashionable in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Bruce Greenwald and I had explained that Adam Smith’s hand was not in fact invisible: it wasn’t there. Sanford Grossman and I had explained that if markets were as efficient in transmitting information as the free marketeers claimed, no one would have any incentive to gather and process it. Free marketeers, and the special interests that benefited from their doctrines, paid little attention to these inconvenient truths.
While economists who criticised the ruling free-market paradigm often still employed, as a matter of convenience, simple models of ‘rational’ expectations (that is, they assumed that individuals ‘rationally’ used all the information that they had available), they departed from the ruling paradigm in assuming that different individuals had access to different information. Their aim was to show that the standard paradigm was no longer valid when there was even this seemingly small and obviously reasonable change in assumptions. They showed, for instance, that unfettered markets were not efficient, and could be characterised by persistent unemployment. But if the economy behaves so poorly when such small realistic changes are made to the paradigm, what could we expect if we added further elements of realism, such as bouts of irrational optimism and pessimism, the ‘panics and manias’ that break out repeatedly in markets all over the world?
Joseph Stiglitz on Media Matters with Bob McChesney
Joseph Stiglitz on BookTV, interviewed by Lori Wallach of Public Citizen.
The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 16.04.2010
April 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
In Bil’in, the army remembers Bassem Abu Rahmeh by escalating to rubber bullets and live ammunition. A big ceremony was held with Fatah and the Fatah Youth marching band:
Mustafa fends off Islamic republic in Turkey
April 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Atatürk and rakı, a scene undermined by current ruling AK Party. (Image from harbigazete.com)
A 62 year old Turkish acquaintance of mine recently informed me that he had erected an empire and was now going by the title İmparator Mustafa.
The empire currently extends from Mustafa’s ground-level apartment in the seaside town of Fethiye in southwest Turkey to the three rental apartments he has just constructed above it. The creation of novel territorial entities has apparently been necessitated by Mustafa’s conviction that, prior to the rise to power of the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development (AK) Party, Turkish girls roamed the streets in bikinis.
In order to construct the apartments, Mustafa tore down the restaurant he had operated since the 1970s but that had in recent years failed to subsidize his daily consumption of rakı, the national alcoholic beverage, serving instead as a forum for Mustafa to spout political wisdom to the gang of loyal companions that arrived each night with bags of sunflower seeds and beer. His attempts to seduce European tourists with a misspelled banner advertising the “Ottoman Fantazy Kebab”—the distinguishing characteristic of which was that it was cooked on a cast-iron contraption Mustafa swore was an Ottoman army relic—proved fruitless, and the novelty was discontinued after one too many wooden chairs had been sacrificed to maintain the kebab oven’s flame.
Diversity dead-end: Inclusiveness without accountability
April 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
by Robert Jensen
After a recent talk on racism and other illegitimate hierarchies at a diversity conference in Dallas, I received a letter from one of the people who had attended that asked “why you feel it necessary to perpetuate and even exacerbate the divisiveness of language when addressing a group of people assembled to learn how to live better together and be more accepting of differences?” He suggested that by being so sharply critical, I was part of the problem not the solution.
Calls for diversity and inclusiveness from people with privilege (such as a white man with a professional job living in the United States) are meaningful only when we are willing to address the systems and structures of power in which inequality and discrimination are rooted. But because such a critique strikes many people as too radical, crafting a response to those who want to avoid that analysis is crucial to the struggle for progressive social change. Below is my letter to him.
Bomb Power: The Rise of the National Security State
April 18th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Garry Wills discusses his important new book Bomb Power.
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes historian, critic, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills for a discussion his new book, Bomb Power. Wills recalls his formative influences including his Catholic faith and education; William Buckley and the editors of The National Review; the Vietnam War protests; and the Civil Rights movement. He compares Obama to past presidents and explains why his support turned to criticism. He analyzes the impact of the atomic bomb on the U.S. constitutional system arguing that its development created a national security state characterized by an enlargement of Presidential power at the expense of other branches of government.
Ecuadorian Huaorani photographs by Amelia Opalinska
April 17th, 2010 § 1 Comment
For more than half a century, indigenous Huaoranis in the Amazonian region of Ecuador have been courted by exploitative entities, ranging from evangelical Christian missionaries who dropped cooking pots on them from helicopters in the 1950s to international oil companies who today facilitate their acquisition of DVD players.
Below is a series of photographs of Huaorani villages by Amelia Opalinska, taken during our hitchhiking trip through Ecuador last year. My essay “Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadorian Elections” chronicles our interactions with various indigenous groups in the context of the national elections held on April 26, 2009, and with one of the participants in a Huaorani massacre of members of a tribe existing in voluntary isolation.
Click on each of the photos below to view a larger image.
Don’t Forget Bassem Abu Rahmeh
April 17th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Today is the first year’s anniversary of Bassem Abu Rahmeh’s Death. I didn’t know Bassem, but I watched him die. It was only a few months after the Gaza massacre. Nobody cared for a dead Palestinian. Two weeks later I started going to Bil’in. I’ve been going every week ever since. I’ve met people I’ve come to care about. I’ve met Bassem’s friends, who welcome me in their home with a smile and embrace. His family, who have been shot and jailed. His fiance- a beautiful Israeli activist- whom I’ve come to love like a sister. I care about their life and I see them hurt.
Burying Bassem Abu Rahmeh
A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon an article in the Ha’aretz website, that unsurprisingly never showed up in the English version (I’ve written before about Ha’aretz double standards, when it comes to its international audience). It was titled “The Military Attorney Won’t Investigate the Death of a Demonstrator of IDF Fire in Bil’in a Year Ago”.
In Memoriam: Bassem Abu Rahma
April 16th, 2010 § 2 Comments
It does not devalue the lives or the deaths of white or Western heroes to say that we live in a racist world that refuses to know the names of heroes like Bassem Abu Rahma, that our world honors heroes with the resources to get on a jet-plane, that it honors less heroes that can never afford a jet-plane. A year ago the Israeli army murdered Bassem Abu Rahma for defending his land in Bilin. Remember him.
Secretary Gates, Colombia, and Paying Your Client States
April 16th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Another broken promise: Secretary Gates promotes US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement as a way to "reward" the Uribe government. Photo from Flickr user ZenaShots.
When asked in a Presidential debate why he opposed the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Barack Obama framed his concerns with Colombia’s deplorable human rights record. Now that he is President and the labor movement is far more inconsequential, these concerns have evidently withered away. Yesterday, Secretary of Defense and Bush Administration carry-over Robert Gates was in Bogota expounding on the need to pay off America’s client state. As the Los Angeles Times reports:
Defense Department officials have favored the pact as a way to reward Colombia for its successful effort at beating back drug trafficking and the country’s insurgency…
“Colombia’s success against terrorists and narco-traffickers does offer a lot of opportunities for them to share their expertise,” Gates said. “We certainly would like to see . . . other countries take advantage of Colombia’s strengths.”
Yes, Colombia has done a smashing job of fighting people like this. Meanwhile, the United States Labor Education in the Americas Project informs us that Colombia remains the most dangerous place in the world for union organizers. More trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia in the last six years than the rest of the world combined. As for those advances in human rights Gates mentions in the Times report, Colombia still has an impunity rate of 96% in the more than 2,700 worker’s-rights related murders that have been perpetrated in the last twenty years. Perhaps Amnesty International put it best when they reported on the threats facing human rights activists in the country: “Such hostility has been fomented by the Government, which appears to perceive human rights and security as mutually exclusive.”
