Walker’s victory, un-sugar-coated

by Doug Henwood

This piece was published at Left Business Observer.

Democrats and labor types are coming up with a lot of excuses for Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin. Not all are worthless. But the excuse-making impulse should be beaten down with heavy sticks.

Yes, money mattered. Enormous amounts of cash poured in, mainly from right-wing tycoons, to support Walker’s effort to snuff public employee unions. While these sorts of tycoons—outside the Wall Street/Fortune 500 establishment—have long been the funding base for right-wing politics, they seem to have grown in wealth, number, consciousness, and mobilization since their days funding the John Birch Society and the Goldwater movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

But lingering too long on the money explanation is too easy. Several issues must be stared down. One is the horrible mistake of channelling a popular uprising into electoral politics. As I wrote almost a year ago (Wisconsin: game over?):

It’s the same damn story over and over. The state AFL-CIO chooses litigation and electoral politics over popular action, which dissolves everything into mush. Meanwhile, the right is vicious, crafty, and uncompromising. Guess who wins that sort of confrontation?

Please prove me wrong someday, you sad American “left.”

Continue reading “Walker’s victory, un-sugar-coated”

It Might Get Loud

This is a real treat. Three of the world’s most inventive guitarists, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White, speak about their art with plenty of interesting archival footage thrown in.

Ha-Joon Chang Interview

Electric Politics interview Cambridge economics scholar Ha-Joon Chang.

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Paul Krugman vs. Austerity and its Supporters

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman takes down a fat cat Tory donor Jon Moulton and a Tory MP Andrea Leadsom on BBC Newsnight, comprehensively demolishing their arguments for austerity and cuts.

Imran Khan: Next man in?

Pakistanis are understandably cynical about politics. But during my recent visit I was surprised to find people invigorated with a new found idealism which is enabling a break with politics as usual. At the centre of all these expectations is the person Imran Khan who has been riding on the crest of a human tsunami. In this episode of Al Jazeera’s People & Power, you get to witness some of this new found energy.

Once an international cricket star, Pakistan’s Imran Khan is now playing for a greater prize – to be his country’s next prime minister. But can he upset the political status quo? People & Power has hit the campaign trail to find out.

May TaxCast

TaxCast is an excellent program produced by the Tax Justice Network and hosted by Naomi Fowler. Each 15 minute podcast follows the latest news relating to tax evasion, tax avoidance and the shadow banking system. The show features discussions with experts in the field to help analyse the top stories each month.

In this month’s TaxCast:  Tax haven insiders speak out, the co-founder of Facebook ‘unfriends’ the US, and Europe considers a Financial Transaction Tax.

Ghazal

by M. Shahid Alam

A night reading Rumi fills ancient wineglasses.
By day speed & freeway suck God out of me.

I have stayed up all night thinking of you.
Wall Street & City leech love out of me.

Who is my brother if the world is a village?
Jet and internet pluck my roots out of me.

If earth goes toxic, let’s move out to Mars.
This devil optimism takes the heart out of me.

When blue sky and sun wrap me in their arms,
Shähid, this friendship takes the dread out of me.

M. Shahid Alam teaches economics at Northeastern University in Boston. He is the author of Israeli Exceptionalism (Palgrave, 2010).  His poems and Ghalib translations have appeared in Kenyon Review(forthcoming), Critical Muslim (forthcoming), Clapboard House, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Paintbrush, Black Bear Review, West Coast Review, Marlboro Review, Journal of South Asian Literature, Kimera, Sufi, Swan, Chowk, Blanket and Pulse.

Arm the Guerrillas

This was published at Foreign Policy.

There are some, perhaps many, Syrians who detest their government and are entirely aware of its treasonous nature — yet wish for the demonstrations and the guerrilla actions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to stop and for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to regain control as soon as possible. They take this position out of a profound pessimism: They believe it is impossible to uproot the surveillance-and-torture state and its deep sectarian substructure, that more people will die the longer the unrest continues, that the economy will collapse further, and that nothing will alter the end — Assad’s inevitable victory. Some Syrians go so far as to say that the regime itself, or a branch of it, is surreptitiously encouraging demonstrations so as to have an “excuse” to teach the new generation an unforgettable lesson.

I can’t agree with this defeatist perspective on principle — the principle being my refusal to give in to despair, and my faith in the ability of human beings to change their circumstances. I understand it, however, and I understand that I might share it if I were living in the heart of the horror instead of in Scotland. But apart from principle, I think the assumption underlying the defeatist perspective is mistaken. Yes, the regime is still able to kill, and will continue or even intensify its killing. However, it has lost control of the country and won’t be able to reestablish it.

The much-maligned United Nations observers have confirmed what news reports had already suggested: Large areas of the Syrian countryside and provincial cities are either under FSA control or nobody’s. Regime forces are able to infiltrate and punish areas under the revolutionaries’ sway, but they dare not linger. Sometimes, they are not even able to move in. When the Assad regime recently attempted to retake the eastern city of Rastan, the FSA destroyed a number of armored vehicles and killed 23 soldiers, forcing the military to retreat.

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