Paul Krugman, professor of international trade and economics at Princeton University
The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.
— Paul Krugman, New York Times column, June 21, 2018
conomist Paul Krugman is a smart Princeton professor who won a Nobel Prize, and most of what he …
Detachment, Isolation, Dehumanization, and Emotional Estrangement from Human Relationships
by Mirah Riben / June 26th, 2018
A recently released phone video shot by 19-year-old Parkland, Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz, reveals a cold, callus young man who claims to “hate everyone and everything.”
Los Angeles Times reporter, Melissa Healy, compares Nikolas Cruz to Sandy Hook school shooter, Adam Lanza, and sees a commonality in isolation and “a profound sense of alienation from virtually all human relationships.”
The anonymous web on which we play and interact is clearly a double-edged sword. Healy notes:
Most adolescents and young adults come to recognize there’s a fundamental difference between going online and actually having a close personal relationship. But for kids …
In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts‘, I pointed out four conflict configurations that are paid little attention by conflict theorists.
In this article, I would like to discuss a fifth conflict configuration that is effectively ignored by conflict theorists (and virtually everyone else). This conflict is undoubtedly the most fundamental conflict in human society, because it generates all of the violence humans perpetrate and experience, and yet it is utterly invisible to almost everyone.
I have previously described this conflict as ‘the adult war on children’. It is indeed humanity’s ‘dirty little secret’.
The modern detainee in a political sense has to be understood in the abstract. Those who take to feats of hacking, publishing and articulating positions on the issue of institutional secrets have become something of a species, not as rare as they once were, but no less remarkable for that fact. And what a hounded species at that.
Across the globe prisons are now peopled by traditional, and in some instances, unconventional journalists, who have found themselves in the possession of classified material. In one specific instance, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stands tall, albeit in limited space, within the Ecuadorean embassy …
First Israel built a sophisticated missile interception system named Iron Dome to neutralise the threat of homemade rockets fired out of Gaza.
Next it created technology that could detect and destroy tunnels Palestinians had cut through the parched earth deep under the fences Israel erected to imprison Gaza on all sides.
Israel’s priority was to keep Gaza locked down with a blockade and its two million inhabitants invisible.
Now Israel is facing a new and apparently even tougher challenge: how to stop Palestinian resistance from Gaza using flaming kites, which have set fire to lands close by in Israel. F-16 fighter jets …
Syria will not allow Western investors to step into the rebuilding of war-damaged country as they only come to “take” from foreign economies, Syria’s Bashar Assad told Russian media, adding he will seek friendly aid instead.
The US and its Western allies have been actively engaged in the seven-year long war in Syria, including the illegal stationing of troops in the country and backing anti-government militants such as Free Syrian Army (FSA) and “moderate” Islamist groups. The …
An Arizona Sunset
The monsoon has begun here in the Sonoran Desert, and I’ve returned to my roots. Eight times now, the winds of my restless Gypsy lifestyle have blown me into the land we call Arizona. The stomping ground of my childhood still smells the same after a summer rain. Creosote is largely responsible for that unforgettable odor, but I’d guess it gets assistance from abundant palo verde, mesquite, and the usual host of desert suspects. For a short while, the stink of all mankind’s idiocy and indiscretions is forgotten in …
For the majority of young Americans, progressivism has taken on a uniquely bourgeois focus that detracts from any radical thought. Historical movements for change, such as anti-imperialism or racial justice, have been either discarded or fronted in the perspective of individual “wokeness”; student political radicality has been overtaken by the radical chic.
Progressive students are very much willing to fight for social justice and against oppression, so long as it doesn’t cut too deep into their education or career prospects. Students idolize historical radicals and mourn contemporary tragedies—often very loudly and publicly, so that the whole world might know where they …
Logo commemorating Tatuy TV’s tenth anniversary With a trajectory of over 10 years, Tatuy Televisión Comunistaria is a reference in Venezuela and abroad, producing a variety of content which is essential for everyone looking to understand and follow events in Venezuela. In this interview we talked to two of its members, Juan Lenzo and Iris Rodríguez, about the history of Tatuy TV, how it’s organized, how they see the role of community media in the context of the Bolivarian Revolution. We also talked about the series “Chávez the …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 24th, 2018
Last week, rallies in support of Julian Assange were held around the world. We participated in two #AssangeUnity events seeking to #FreeAssange in Washington, DC.
This is the beginning of a new phase of the campaign to stop the persecution of Julian Assange and allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London without the threat of being arrested in the UK or facing prosecution by the United States. On April 10 2017 people gathered outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to celebrate the 11th Birthday of WikiLeaks. From …
It is a credit to the venality of Australia’s refugee policy that much time is spent on letting others do what that particular country ought to be doing. For a state so obsessed with the idea of a “rule-based order”, breaking those rules comes naturally – all in the national interest, of course.
Canberra’s policy makers, since the 1990s, have been earning their morally tainted fare evading international law with an insistence bordering on the pathological. The reasons for doing so have been cruel and vapid: target the market of people smuggling by moving it to other regions; harden the Australian …
The Nuremberg Principles not only prohibit such crimes but oblige those of us aware of the crime to act against it. “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity … is a crime under International Law.” […]
The ongoing building and maintenance of Trident submarines and ballistic missile systems constitute war crimes that can and should be investigated and prosecuted by judicial authorities at all levels. As citizens, we are required by International Law to denounce and resist known crimes.
President Trump’s cruel policy of separating immigrant children from their parents as they sought asylum here mocked the idea that the US government values families. Unfortunately the US has a long and sad history of separating children from their parents. For example, the US took American-Indian children from their parents and Black slave families were often torn apart.
Fortunately the media provided non-stop coverage of Trump’s latest abomination. In addition, the US public continues to express its outrage about this horrific situation. This public outrage is one of the factors that finally caused Trump to end his appalling policy.
The Western world never ceases to speak of its “democratic values.” In Western political theory, the way democracy works is by free speech and a free press. By speaking out, citizens and media keep the government accountable.
This liberal tradition means that there are no words or terms that cannot be used because some designated “victim group” can claim to feel offended. The inroads into free speech made by political correctness, now institutionalized in universities and the public school system, in the presstitute media, in American corporations such as Google, …
The tradition is represented as noble, the confiding link between confessor and penitent, a bridge never to be broken, even under pain of death. Taken that way, the confessional is brandished as the Catholic Church’s great weapon against the wiles and predations of secular power. The State shall have no say where the priest’s confidence is concerned, for all may go to him to seek amends. “The sacramental seal,” goes the relevant code of canon law, “is inviolable; therefore it is absolutely forbidden for the confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and …
For the last few days I have had to read about Anthony Bourdain and how he was such a wonderful human being. The praise in these eulogies has been laid on thick, with Bourdain being hailed as an exceptional human being who stood up for marginalized societies and championed social justice issues. I have also read post after post on social media websites by so-called “thought leaders” or vegan activists respected in the “animal rights movement,” who complain about those of us who dared criticize the actions of Mr. Bourdain. They claim that those of us who point out his …
As discontent increases with overly expensive and totally inadequate US health care, it is time to look closely at the beginnings of the modern Cuban medical system. Like the US, Cuba had unintegrated, overlapping medical institutions that failed the poor, especially black, population of the island. Though several European countries have developed health care systems about 40% cheaper than the US, Cuba was able to craft health care which became more than 80% less costly than the US with a roughly equivalent life expectancy.
When the revolutionary government took the reins in 1959, millions of Cubans went without medical care. The …
The weekend edition of the Financial Times dated April 7/8 featured a story in the House and Home section under the title ‘Barcelona hits the Brakes.’ The story describes the negative effect of last October’s Catalan independence referendum on Barcelona’s real estate market. The Times cites data from the Spanish property website Idealista. During the summer of 2017 (Q3 2017) properties in the city gained an impressive 018 percent compared to the previous year. In Q4 2017, in the midst of uncertainty stemming from the referendum, the prices fell 1.2 percent, with the sharpest drop taking place in the priciest …
I know Moscow. It is one of the great cities of the world. Barney Ronay should stick to sports reporting. He diminishes himself by trying to join in Guardian anti-Russian sneering.
In fact, Ronay had already joined the Guardian‘s sneering with his review of the World Cup’s opening ceremony and first match. He commented:
It’s a vital point, similar to that made by the incredible truth and reconciliation commission event that followed the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, and that point is this: before any society can really advance it must recognise and admit to itself the mistakes and crimes …
The margin between what is a human right as an inalienable possession, and how it is seen in political terms is razor fine. In some cases, the distinctions are near impossible to make. To understand the crime of genocide is to also understand the political machinations that limited its purview. No political or cultural groups, for instance, were permitted coverage by the definition in the UN Convention responsible for criminalising it.
The same goes for the policing bodies who might use human rights in calculating fashion, less to advance an agenda of the human kind than that of the political. This …
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is urging obedience to the law requiring the separation of families of undocumented immigrants, separating 11,000 children from their parents so far, 2000 in the last month, by citing scripture. Christian scripture, specifically. He cites a passage from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in the New Testament, written probably in Corinth between 52 and 55 CE and addressed to “all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints.” Let’s look at that text in context, just …
South Korean President Moon Jae-In
The South Korean president, Moon Jae-In, has been a discreet if powerful mover in the recent détente and peace-building process between North and South Korea and the US. If the momentum of the Panmunjom Declaration and the successful summit between the DPRK and the US are continued, then promising outcomes are possible: peace and denuclearization of the peninsula, economic reintegration, diplomatic normalization, possible future confederation, and fundamental geopolitical shift. What bodes well is that the people of South Korea have extraordinary confidence in …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 20th, 2018
Immigrant rights are human rights (Susan Melkisethian from flickr)
The ugliness of US immigration policy is once again evident. There is national outrage that separating children, often infants, from their parents is wrong. There is also national consensus (nine out of ten people in the US) that people brought here by their parents, the Dreamers, should not be forced out of the country as adults. The highly restrictive, dysfunctional immigration system in the United States serves the interests of big business and US Empire. Investors can cross …
The point of anarchism is to create a better society for everyone. To realize anarchism, many agree, is to do away with power. Why? Because gravitating towards power, hierarchy, and subjugation sullies our politics and makes the aims of anarchism impossible.
Of course, even an egalitarian society might give rise to leaders and dominion. And people can be ambitious; they might influence others in myriad ways and inspire hierarchy. In fact, Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” expounds precisely on this tendency.
But whereas anarchists are wont to do away with hierarchy and any power that would sustain it, others believe humanity …
Europe is facing the most significant refugee crisis since World War II. All attempts at resolving the issue have failed, mostly because they have ignored the root causes of the problem.
On June 11, Italy’s new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, blocked the Aquarius rescue ship, carrying 629 refugees and economic migrants, from docking at its ports.
A statement by Doctors without Borders (MSF) stated that the boat was carrying 123 unaccompanied minors and seven pregnant women.
“From now on, Italy begins to say NO to the traffic of human beings, NO to the business of illegal immigration,” said Salvini, who also heads the …
Musings on the Barbarism of Privatized Health Care
by David Penner / June 19th, 2018
As it is presently constructed, the American health care system is predicated on the pernicious idea that good health care is a privilege. Meanwhile, medical students, residents, and other interlopers regard observing patients’ doctor’s visits to be their right, regardless of whether or not the patient’s consent has been obtained. This dichotomy embodies the egregious inequality inherent in the two-tier system, and is indicative of a complete inversion of the way any humane health care system must be ideologically oriented.
The subject of physician shadowing is inextricably linked with unfettered capitalism and the neoliberal project, where the privileged few have a …
Disruption, disturbance, eruption, the words crowning the presidency of Donald J. Trump, who has effectively demonstrated an idea made famous by Nazi doodler of law and political theorist Carl Schmitt: politics is defined, not by identifying with friends in cosy harmony but with enemies in constant tension.
There are many ways that Trump might be seen as a creature of Schmittian reaction. Alliances may well be lauded as good (the diplomat’s clichés of “eternal friendship”, “special bonds” and the treacly covering that comes with it), but then again, potential adversaries can also be considered in accommodating fashion. In every enduring friendship …
