As European flights lay freezing in airports across the capitals, with various de-icing procedures being implemented, the news about missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 began to makes its own way through the various channels. That sent a different sort of chill through discussions about air safety. The flight in question, with its 162 passengers, lost contact with air traffic control after take off on Saturday over the Java Sea heading to Singapore from Surabaya.
It has been a tragic year for air travel, and its promoters. The body count relative to other accidents or incidents in travel is always negligible …
Who will remember what this age was like? And how will it be remembered? For the abyss of silence at the center of all the noise? The fierce shadow cast by all the blazing lights that never went off, that shone night and day?
The one terminal war foreshadowed endlessly in the last century shattered into a dozen endless wars all going on simultaneously, fought only by the poorest people in the most degraded landscapes? (Where there was nothing but oil. Nothing but diamonds. Nothing but cobalt.) Two towers coming down, a hundred towers going up. The slums stretching as far …
The Establishment
In pre-modern times, European Jews lived in separate communities, governed by their religious authorities, with corporate rights and obligations, determined by the state. The Enlightenment and the growth of liberal rights and freedoms led to the end of Judaic temporal authority, dissolution of the corporate community and its legal status, and subjection of Jews to civil authority like all citizens, former denizens of other estates. The modern period of Jewish history began, symbolically, with the French revolution of 1789, which led to the emancipation of French Jewry, building on earlier advances in the …
It’s been a year of fervent activism on police accountability, living wages, climate change, personal freedoms, immigrant rights, an open internet and diplomacy over war. The electoral beating the Democrats received has prompted both the Administration and some spineless congresspeople to realize that support for progressive issues could reinvigorate their base —a realization that has already led to Obama’s executive action on immigration and the opening to Cuba.
So here are some of the 2014 highlights.
1. Uprising for police accountability. The movement for police accountability has swept the nation, spawning brilliant new leaders from communities most affected, …
TINDUF, ALGERIA — News about the historic change of relations between the United States and Cuba triggered cheers across the five Sahrawi refugee camps located near this Sahara Desert city located 1,100-miles southwest of Algeria’s capital of Algiers on the Mediterranean Sea.
That news elevated hopes among many Sahrawi that the major changes in relations between the U.S. and its longtime, bitter enemy Cuba would lead to the U.S. pushing for changes with its longtime ally – Morocco.
Morocco is the country that has illegally occupied the Western Sahara, the ancestral homeland of …
The U.S.-led NATO war on Afghanistan has lasted so long they’ve decided to rename it, declare the old war over, and announce a brand new war they’re just sure you’re going to love.
The war thus far has lasted as long as U.S. participation in World War II plus U.S. participation in World War I, plus the Korean War, plus the Spanish American War, plus the full length of the U.S. war on the Philippines, combined with the whole duration of the Mexican American War.
Now, some of those other wars accomplished things, I will admit — such as stealing half of …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 28th, 2014
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the target of low oil prices is Russia and Iran, throwing their economies into turmoil and opening their doors to sovereign raiders.
Despite being disproven as a strategy for reducing crime, the broken windows policing theory is still utilized in New York and throughout in the United States to crack down on disorder and nonviolent crime. To think that harsh enforcement of this type of “crime” would prevent serious crime like homicide and assault is patently absurd on its face. If you want to rid society of the most serious crimes, you should be enforcing the most serious crimes, like aggressive war. Call it broken countries policing.
In the United States in 2014, you may be arrested for selling loose cigarettes, jumping …
Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, the Iranian army’s chief commander of ground forces, described today the new Iranian drone as a ‘mobile bomb.’ According to Iranian state media, ‘Yasir’ is a flying bomb, designed to strike air, ground and naval targets.
AP photoI am delighted by the news and congratulate the Iranian engineers and military industry. Iranian advanced technology is needed in order to deter Israel from celebrating its genocidal inclinations.
However, the Israelis label the new Iranian bomb a “suicidal drone,” no less no more. I would like …
Regime change in Cuba? Che rolling in his grave? The first shriek comes from a liberal, the latter a Marxist. With all due respect to both, I think the former quite confused if he thinks that Castroite Cuba more closely reflects his own Keynesian delusions, and the latter seems not to understand Che’s significant contribution to the normalization of relations between Cuba and the US (even though it occurs long after his death). Che was the Beard’s partner in the charade that was Cuban socialism, and his ally in the effort to rid that island of all forms …
In January 2013 Google CEO Eric Schmidt visited North Korea with an aide and his daughter, as well as frequent DPRK visitor, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. He was of course given VIP treatment by his hosts in Pyongyang, and taken to Kim Il-song University to view students studying on the Internet. It was a private visit and the U.S. State Department did not endorse it any more than it endorsed Dennis Rodman’s trip the following month.
In April in a Wall Street Journal interview Schmidt questioned whether those he had viewed at the university were really students (as opposed …
Statement at the closing ceremony of the fourth session of the eighth legislature of the National People's Power Assembly
by Raúl Castro / December 27th, 2014
Comrades all:
We have all lived through intense and exciting moments in the last few days.
In this very month of December we successfully held the Fifth CARICOM-Cuba Summit. Last Sunday we held the Thirteenth Summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America and, on that occasion, we paid a well-deserved tribute to their founders: our close friend and Bolivarian President, Hugo Chávez Frías, and the Commander of the Cuban Revolution, Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz.
Present in this session are Gerardo, Ramón and Antonio, a source of genuine rejoicing and happiness for all of our people. I will elaborate on …
Everyone wants good news, so the government makes it up. The latest fiction is that US real GDP grew 4.6% in the second quarter and 5% in the third.
Where did this growth come from?
Not from rising real consumer incomes.
Not from rising consumer credit.
Not from rising real retail sales.
Not from the housing sector.
Not from a trade surplus.
The growth came from a Bureau of Economic Analysis survey of consumer spending on services. The BEA found that spending on Obamacare drove the US real GDP growth to 5% in the third quarter.
In America, unlike in other countries, a huge chunk of …
Part 5 of 5: Broken Windows, Workfare, and the Battle for Public Space in Giuliani’s New York
by Jacob Ertel / December 26th, 2014
Accumulation by Dispossession, Dispossession by Criminalization
Workfare and broken windows policing are mutually reinforcing political-economic institutions, but they do not have to be. As Smith explains, the level of “revanchism” displayed by the Giuliani administration “was neither a politically nor a socially necessary outcome of economic crisis and restructuring. It was a choice by a narrow group of political and corporate leaders who really do constitute, with others, a ruling class.” ((Smith, Neil. “Which New Urbanism? The Revanchist 90s.” Perspecta, Vol. 30, Settlement Patterns (1999), 105.)) Whereas the Keynesian urban policy in place from the 1930s to the 1970s was …
When I was 15 years old and a member of the Irgun underground (by today’s criteria, an honest-to-goodness terrorist organization), we sang “(In the past) we had the heroes / Bar Kochba and the Maccabees / Now we have the new ones / The national youth…” The melody was a German military marching song.
Why did we look for heroes in the remote past?
We were in desperate need of national heroes to emulate. For 18 centuries, Jews had not fought. Dispersed throughout the world, they saw no reason to fight for emperors and kings who mostly persecuted them. (Though some of …
“The violence is not a new thing,” says Jose-Pablo Buerba about Mexico’s civil unrest and protest in recent weeks. An international political economist from Mexico City, Buerba works with heads of state around the world on matters economic. He is a native of Mexico City, where he has lived and worked these last few months.
Before his December 2014 departure from the Distrito Federal (Mexico City), Buerba had asked not to have his identity revealed in an interview he had granted me within twenty-four hours of protestors setting fire to Mexico’s National Palace door. “Please don’t,” he had requested, adding that he …
Last night, in Beijing, I sat in a historic Szechuan restaurant with a friend who happens to be a Chinese diplomat. We exchanged some stories, ordered food, and then, suddenly, my throat felt dry and my eyes got misty.
I bowed and thanked her for the heartfelt offer China made to rescue Russia.
Just before leaving my hotel, I read the news on the RT:
“China’s foreign minister has pledged support to Russia as it faces an economic downturn due to sanctions and a drop in oil prices. Boosting trade in Yuan is a solution proposed by Beijing’s commerce minister.
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 24th, 2014
Activist and community leader Tawanda Jones responds to FOX 45 Baltimore airing a heavily edited clip making it seem she was chanting “kill a cop” at a protest.
Part 4 of 5: Broken Windows, Workfare, and the Battle for Public Space.
by Jacob Ertel / December 24th, 2014
Producing Criminals
New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani’s 1993 appointment of Bill Bratton to the position of Police Commissioner marked the beginning of the quality-of-life initiative, a form of policing explicitly grounded in the broken windows theory. Bratton had previously served as the head of the New York City Transit Police from 1990 to 1992 before leaving to Boston for a brief stint as Police Commissioner there. As the head of the Transit Police, Bratton focused his efforts on ‘retaking’ the city’s famed subway system from the homeless and the fare-beaters, lobbying the city for new semi-automatic hand guns in order to …
You and I constitute the very system that we blame for the world’s problems, which is starkly illustrated at Christmas when we rob our fragile earth on the high streets in the name of Jesus. What better way to celebrate the birth of Christ this year than to unite under the banner of freedom and justice, and peacefully demonstrate for an end to hunger and poverty across the world, writes Mohammed Mesbahi.
* * * * * *
When disappointed with our politicians and distressed by the problems within our society, we come under the impression that there is …
Noam Chomsky characterizes the Revolutionary War period as engendering the “vicious repression of dissident opinion.” The repressive measures to which Chomsky alludes have become portents of the myriad repressive policies and suppressions of dissidence that bleed out of Revolutionary times and spill well into the present. The late Howard Zinn corroborated Chomsky’s observation with stressing that, only “seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress passed a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech” in America—the Sedition Act of 1798.
This act gave early Congress exceptional reign over speech and expression in America. It had roots …
The Need to Challenge Centers of Power across the Board
by Kim Petersen / December 23rd, 2014
The Real News Network recently took on the propaganda surrounding the hack of Sony’s electronic data. Why the US government should be so concerned about the security of a foreign firm (since everyone knows that Sony is a Japanese firm, and since the US is probably spying on Sony anyway) is interesting in itself. Nonetheless, the mere fact that TRNN discussed this topic in the manner it did sets it apart from the corporate media.
The choice of Lawrence Wilkerson as an analyst, however, is perplexing giving his obvious animus to the regime in North Korea. ((See Kim Petersen, “…
Karl Marx once observed that ancient Greek art, rooted in Greek mythology, still constituted for modern people “a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevails as the standard and model beyond attainment.” He asked: “Why should the social childhood of mankind, where it has obtained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return?”
(In other words, even though Marx’s beloved Homer and Aeschylus were products of a society long extinct, its slave-owning class structure abhorrent to the modern mind, Greek myths still retain profound meanings for us in …
Relations between Cuba and the United States have been tumultuous since Castro took control in January 1959 from the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Fidel Castro and Fidelistas won a revolution and were determined to keep it at all costs. While the United States government was determined to do whatever was necessary – invasion, espionage, assassination attempts on high-ranking Cubans including Castro, subversion, embargos (except open immigration for refugees) and even pressing other nations not to trade with or invest in Cuba.
Foreign policy observers know that the U.S. has propped up dozens of brutal dictatorships in three continents at the same time the …
In terms of losses in human lives, 2014 has been a horrific year for Palestinians, surpassing the horrors of both 2008 and 2009, when an Israeli war against the Gaza Strip killed and wounded thousands.
While some aspects of the conflict are stagnating between a corrupt, ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA), and the criminality of Israeli wars and occupation, it would also be fair to argue that 2014 was also a game changer to some degree – and it is not all bad news.
To an extent, 2014 has been a year of clarity for those keen to understand the reality of …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 23rd, 2014
Paul Jay interviews Col. Larry Wilkerson, who says Sony might be able to protect itself from class action suits brought by employees over privacy if the blame is pinned on North Korea.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for a moratorium on demonstrations against police brutality in the wake of the killing of two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40.
De Blasio’s statement must be understood by protesters and black people nationwide as a further attempt by the political establishment to delegitimize and thus finally nip this still budding national movement.
De Blasio’s unprecedented call fits in nicely with the narratives voiced uniformly by police everywhere immediately in the shooting’s aftermath, beginning with NYPD Commissioner William Bratton. The shooting was a …
The negotiations over Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb-building abilities seem to be stuck in a rut. Given the detailed undertakings by Iran incorporated in the interim agreement made last year it should have only been a hop, skip and a jump to forge a final agreement.
In reality it hasn’t been so easy. Over many years the US with European connivance most – not always – of the time manufactured and manipulated the whole crisis. To overcome the suspicions aroused by that, now past, tactic is not easy.
That is not just my opinion after following this subject for 30 years. …
Part 3: Broken Windows, Workfare, and the Battle for Public Space in Giuliani’s New York
by Jacob Ertel / December 23rd, 2014
Workfare in Theory
A more thorough examination of the theory and practice of workfare is in order so as to better understand the relationship between broken windows policing and the imposition of welfare-to-work policies on both the federal and state levels. As sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward aver, “relief arrangements are ancillary to economic arrangements,” such that these arrangements exert a regulatory effect on labor by expanding to placate the unemployed in times of economic crisis, later to rapidly contract and send aid recipients back into the labor market. ((Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The …
Nationalist narratives and political movements have dominated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a long time. They all ended up in a dead end. This insight has led Ran Greenstein, Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, not to look at history in retrospect, knowing the outcome, but rather from a contemporaneous perspective of the actors. None of the anti-Zionist actors, discussed in the book, Zionism and its Discontents. A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine (Pluto Press, London 2014), achieved their goals, but they all made valuable contributions, which can serve as a starting point for …
