A few questions about a sign on a train platform in New Jersey
December 8th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Photo: Belén Fernández. CLICK TO ENLARGE
- If the front lines of terror are located in the U.S., why are the emergency personnel responding to the TRAIN BOMBING wearing outfits labeled “POLICIA”?
- Why at every airport security line is there not a television screen replaying footage of the second airplane crashing into the World Trade Center, with the caption “PLANE CRASHING INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER”?
- Alternatively, why at every airport security line is there not a television screen replaying footage of the second airplane crashing into the World Trade Center, with the caption “AL QAEDA ALSO WANTS TO OCCUPY WALL STREET”?
A Passport Of The Country Without A Post Office
December 8th, 2011 § 16 Comments
by Huma Dar
Passport to The Country Without A Post Office
I met Shahid between noon and one pm, in the Lipman Room of Barrows Hall, almost exactly thirteen years ago, on December 3, 1998. He’d come to recite from The Country Without A Post Office (1997) for the Lunch Poems Reading Series at UC Berkeley. His jokes, tinged with a very particular Kashmiri black humor — irreverent, risqué, ridiculous – mirrored my family’s wacky one. All that heartache about Kashmir, finding not many kindred souls around, found solace in Shahid’s scriptured lament, “After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan.”
A brigadier says, The boys of Kashmir break so quickly, we make their bodies sing, on the rack, till no song is left to sing.Deconstructing Thomas Friedman: Book review by IPS
December 7th, 2011 § 1 Comment
From yesterday’s review of my book by Sandra Siagian for Inter Press Service:
NEW YORK, Dec 6, 2011 (IPS) – A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neoliberal views, accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed judgments on issues ranging from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Deconstructing one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, Belen Fernandez’s “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work” presents a comprehensive overview of the man – and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner – she describes as “characterised by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality”.
Fernandez, 29, admits that prior to 2009 she wasn’t too familiar with the work of the foreign affairs columnist. It wasn’t until that summer she decided to analyse Friedman’s work after reading “a sequence of ridiculous articles”.
Finding it difficult to “cram all of that incompetence into a concise book”, Fernandez divided the content into three issues that “most enraged” her, analysing his work along with a brief examination of the shortcomings of the U.S. media.
Should we call it murder?
December 6th, 2011 § 3 Comments
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has been the international financial armada in the battle against the three diseases. The collapse of the next round of Global Fund grants, known as Round 11, is the most serious, catastrophic setback in the Fund’s decade of existence. Hiding behind the banner of the financial crisis, the donor countries have clearly decided that if budgetary cuts are to be made, the Global Fund can be among the first to go.
It’s terribly important to recognize the moral implications. It’s not just the fact that people will die; it’s the fact that those who have made the decision know that people will die. How does that get rationalized? How does that get dealt with in the inner sanctums of development ministries and cabinet discussions? What in God’s name do they say to each other?
London 2012 and the Bhopal Disaster
December 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Saffi Ullah Ahmad
As the 2012 London Olympics approach, a furore has erupted surrounding the £7m sponsorship of the games by the controversial Dow Chemical Company, which is connected with the world’s worst industrial catastrophe, in the Indian city of Bhopal. Lingering effects of the disaster continue to kill and maim people trapped by poverty.
The company has been commissioned to produce a specialized decorative wrap for the Olympic stadium. Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, and leading human rights groups including Amnesty International have expressed dismay at the London 2012 Organising Committee (LOCOG)’s decision and rumours have circulated regarding a possible Indian boycott. In protest to the deal, thousands of survivors of the disaster burned effigies of the chairman of London 2012, Lord Sebastian Coe, on Friday. A larger group of protestors blocked five of Bhopal’s train lines on Saturday 3 December, the 27th anniversary of the disaster, in the face of fierce police beatings.
Gross negligence on the part of the Union Carbide Corporation, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow, culminated in a fatal explosion in a pesticide factory on 2-3 December 1984, releasing 40 tonnes of highly toxic gas which laid waste to one of the poorest regions in India.
The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone
December 4th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
In August, at Marxism 2011, Richard Wilkinson gave the following talk on his book, co-authored with Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone.
Doug Henwood interview: The Imperial Messenger
December 3rd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I was recently interviewed about my new anti-Thomas Friedman book by the great Doug Henwood for his program “Behind the News”. The show aired this morning on Berkeley’s KPFA 94.1.
The first guest was Michael Dorsey, professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth, who was speaking from the annual climate summit currently underway in Durban, South Africa.
My part begins at minute 27.10 with a wonderfully relevant introductory song.
Henwood has also included the recording of Friedman’s infamous “Suck. On. This” performance on Charlie Rose on behalf of the Iraq war effort. Remarks Henwood in response: “It’s like junior high school, only with automatic weapons and high explosives”.
Listen to the interview at the Left Business Observer or click below:
Photographs of Guatemala
December 3rd, 2011 § 1 Comment
In an effort to think about things other than Thomas Friedman I have been reviewing photographs of my hitchhiking travels in Latin America with Amelia Opalinska.
I’ve decided to post a few of Amelia’s photos of Guatemala, taken in 2006. The structure that appears to be a Mayan ruin covered in concrete is located near the west Guatemalan town of Huehuetenango, birthplace of José Efraín Ríos Montt, who with U.S. backing presided over the systematic killing of Mayan peasants and other undesirable sectors of society in the early 1980s.
Anatol Lieven: how to end the US dust-up with Pakistan
December 2nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Anatol Lieven, author of the excellent Pakistan: A Hard Country, on Christopher Lydon’s indispensable Radio Open Source, discussing the recent dust up between Pakistan and the US.
Anatol Lieven is explaining how the so-called allies in the so-called War on Terror have come to pot-shotting each other on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. In the Financial Times last May (“How American folly could destroy Pakistan“) Lieven was warning of the perverse logic of confrontation in US policy. The killing last weekend of 24 Pakistani soldiersin a NATO air strike for which President Obama is refusing to apologize can be taken as confirmation of the hazard. Ever since the US Navy swoop on OBL early in May, the risk in Lieven’s eyes was that the US would overplay its hand with demands on the thoroughly alienated Pakistani Army. The American demand-too-far (Lieven is saying emphatically today) is that the Pakistani Army go to war on the Taliban home bases in the Pashtun tribal wilderness. That demand cannot, will not, be met: (a) because the Taliban is a big part of the network that Pakistan counts on to protect and project its interest in Afghanistan when the US forces shrivel, then leave; and (b) because the big majority of Pakistanis — army, elite and masses — see the Taliban in Afghanistan as a legitimate resistance force fighting foreign occupation, like the mujahedeen who fought the Soviets, or Communist guerillas who fought Nazis in Europe. When Pakistan under Pres / Gen Musharraf undertook a half-way offensive against the Taliban in the border wilderness, “they set off an Islamist rebellion inside Pakistan which continues to this day… The Pakistanis do have a case: thanks to the U.S., they have a civil war inside Pakistan which has claimed far more Pakistani lives than Americans killed on 9.11. … We keep talking about wanting to support democracy. Well, the democratic majority in Pakistan wants us to go to hell.”
Guernica Magazine: Introduction to The Imperial Messenger
December 1st, 2011 § 1 Comment
(Photo via Flickr by Charles Haynes)
Guernica Magazine has just featured the introduction to The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. The intro begins:
In the first chapter of his bestseller on globalization, The World Is Flat, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times Thomas Friedman suggests that his repertoire of achievements also includes being heir to Christopher Columbus. According to Friedman, he has followed in the footsteps of the fifteenth-century icon by making an unexpected discovery regarding the shape of the world during an encounter with “people called Indians.”
Friedman’s Indians reside in India proper, of course, not in the Caribbean, and include among their ranks CEO Nandan Nilekani of Infosys Technologies Limited in Bangalore, where Friedman has come in the early twenty-first century to investigate phenomena such as outsourcing and to exult over the globalization-era instructions he receives at the KGA Golf Club downtown: “Aim at either Microsoft orIBM.” Nilekani unwittingly plants the flat-world seed in Friedman’s mind by commenting, in reference to technological advancements enabling other countries to challenge presumed American hegemony in certain business sectors: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”
The Columbus-like discovery process culminates with Friedman’s conversion of one of the components of Nilekani’s idiomatic expression into a more convenient synonym: “What Nandan is saying, I thought to myself, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? I rolled that word around in my head for a while and then, in the chemical way that these things happen, it just popped out: My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”
