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.
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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 …
The United States seems destined to plague us with miseries in the name of liberty.
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Latin America
Once the United States is in Cuba, who will get it out?
— José Martí, Cuban national hero
Fair minded people and governments around the world have praised the U.S. decision to finally ease up on Cuba after 55 years of unmitigated hostility. The final agreement, which included a prisoner swap, was hammered out in nine meetings over 18 months of secret talks in Canada between representatives of Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro, with the Vatican acting as …
Tansi, here’s the lowdown on something that happened to me on Wednesday, December 10 in Oskana (Pile of Bones), or Regina, Saskatchewan. But first, let me introduce myself.
My name is Simon Ash-Moccasin (Thomas). I am a proud Nehiyiwak (Cree person) from Saulteaux First Nation, formerly called Little Jack/ Fish Lake Reserve, in Treaty 6 territory, Turtle Island. I assist in keeping two wonderful gifts form the Creator, my daughters Sage and Maija. I have a degree in education. I’ve been an actor, playwright, and slam poet, as well as a community volunteer and a board member for various organizations in …
There is no principle in international law more fundamental than the right of all peoples to self-determination. This is universally accepted by the entire world, yet nearly 70 years after the signing of the UN Charter, the United States continues to fight tooth and nail against this most basic human right.
On December 18, the U.S. was one of only seven countries to vote against a UN General Assembly resolution that passed with 180 votes affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
Earlier this year, the U.S. also found themselves on the wrong side of the international …
Part 2: Broken Windows, Workfare, and the Battle for Public Space in Giuliani’s New York
by Jacob Ertel / December 22nd, 2014
In March 1982, conservative theoreticians James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published a brief article in The Atlantic entitled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” that was to drastically alter the scope of policing. As opposed to previous ‘community policing’ stratagems in which police officers were encouraged to play an active if not collaborative role in building relationships with the community in their designated location, Wilson and Kelling advocated for the deployment of heightened police aggression—‘zero tolerance’—towards small-time offenders.
The central thesis in “Broken Windows” is that petty crimes inevitably lead to serious, potentially violent ones. Only by …
It’s no surprise to discover that anarchist theorist Pyotr Kropotkin was interested in Christmas. In Russian culture, St. Nicholas (??????? ??????????) was revered as a defender of the oppressed, the weak and the disadvantaged. Kropotkin shared the sentiments. But there was also a family link. As everyone knows, Kropotkin could trace his ancestry to the ancient Rurik dynasty that ruled Russia before the upstart Romanovs and which, from the first century CE, controlled the trade routes between Moscow and the Byzantine Empire. Nicholas’s branch of the family had been sent out to patrol the Black Sea. But Nicholas was a …
In 1964 my wife was 18 years old, too young at that time to vote in England, where she lived. She was nevertheless present when her boss – she worked for an advertising agency in Manchester – assembled the staff and told them to vote Tory, implying dark economic times would accompany the arrival of a Labour government and hinting at possible redundancies.
Factory bosses in the United States did the same on a much wider scale in the election of 1896. In many towns in eastern seaboard states, when men arrived for work on the morning of the day the …
Most of us know that the NSA is spending billions of our taxpayer dollars to track our every move, though the data is collected and only used if some hired dude, following procedures that look for programmed threats, decides you’re doing something suspicious. We know that companies like Amazon follow your moves on its website so that it can plaster your Internet Protocol (IP) path with purchase recommendations. They use your Tracking Cookies or Browsing history to determine your past inquiries.
Furthermore, some of us know how organizations of political candidates collect data on voter preferences and habits, but few know …
New research pinpoints how music helps heal PTSD, restores memories, rebuilds neuron pathways
by Paul Haeder / December 21st, 2014
Note: Alive Inside just came out, about music therapy. My work here is for my regular gig as a writer – Spokane Magazine. It is currently out. Before my piece, a compelling quote from an MD from the documentary, Alive Inside.
Dr. Bill Thomas, a gerontologist and advocate for long-term care reform, points out the film, “The health care system imagines the human being to be a very complicated machine. We have medicines that can adjust the dials, but we haven’t done anything medically speaking to touch the heart and soul of the patient.
When in the course of human destiny the aggressions of a Government against the people it has been formed to protect become so untenable and egregious as to threaten the security and freedom of that people, it is the sacred duty and obligation of said people to detach from and dissolve that Government until such a time arises when it is safe to once more reconstitute the union with the proper assurances allowed for that prove conditions have been made congruent and agreeable with the basic God-given rights that all people are naturally born with, including among these: the right …
Daniel Pantaleo, the rogue police officer who choked the unarmed 43-year-old Black man named Eric Garner to death for allegedly selling single untaxed cigarettes, will not go to trial. Garner was murdered on July 17, 2014 in his native borough of Staten Island. A grandfather as well as a father of six, Garner had previously submitted a complaint in federal court in 2007 after an officer conducted a cavity search on him in a public street. ((Joseph Goldstein and Nate Schweber, “Man’s Death After Chokehold Raises Old Issue for the Police,” New York Times, July 18, 2014.)) In …
Any conditions that compel the teacher to take note of failures rather than of healthy growth give false standards and result in distortion and perversion.
— John Dewey ((John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909): 189.))
School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam.
The United States of America, the global policeman, is “changing its relationship with the people of Cuba”, as President Barack Obama put it. With this announcement of a resumption of diplomatic relations after John F. Kennedy severed them January 1, 1961 we need to evaluate what is behind it and what is positive and negative.
By Ron RideourI feel compelled to spell out my take on this new policy after having Cuba in my heart for five decades, from the day of my first protest during …
The world is still hell-bent for hydrocarbon-based energy. Russia is one of the world’s largest producer of energy. Russia has recently announced that in the future she will no longer trade energy in US dollars, but in rubles and currencies of the trading partners. In fact, this rule will apply to all trading. Russia and China are detaching their economies from that of the western financial system. To confirm this decision, in July 2014 Russia’s Gazprom concluded a 400 billion gas deal with China, and in November this year they signed an additional slightly smaller contract – all to be …
Dystopian narratives have long been an alluring and thought-provoking form of entertainment, especially for those who take an interest in studying social and political structures. From classics like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to the current hit, The Hunger Games, these stories play on our fears while simultaneously serving as warning signs for the future.
Their attractiveness within American society is not surprising. Our lives are driven by fear. Fear leads us to spend and consume; fear leads us to withdraw from our communities; and fear leads us to apathy regarding our own social and political processes. This fear is …
The sudden dramatic collapse in the price of oil appears to be an act of geopolitical warfare against Russia. The result could be trillions of dollars in oil derivative losses; and the FDIC could be liable, following repeal of key portions of the Dodd-Frank Act last weekend.
Senator Elizabeth Warren charged Citigroup last week with “holding government funding hostage to ram through its government bailout provision.” At issue was a section in the omnibus budget bill repealing the Lincoln Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act, which protected depositor funds by requiring the largest banks to push out a portion of their derivatives …
In 1964, the Brazilian military, in a US-designed coup, overthrew a liberal (not more to the left than that) government and proceeded to rule with an iron fist for the next 21 years. In 1979 the military regime passed an amnesty law blocking the prosecution of its members for torture and other crimes. The amnesty still holds. ((Associated Press, December 11, 2014.))
That’s how they handle such matters in what used to be called The Third World. In the First World, however, they have no need for such legal niceties. In the United States, military torturers and their political godfathers …
Paul Craig Roberts views normalization of relations with Cuba as a Trojan horse for a US corporate takeover of the Communist island. Is this the beginning of the end for the Cuban Revolution?
