|
Links May 17 09
- Frank Rich on the need for torture investigation – Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush – (NYT)
-
Ahmed Rashid – Pakistan on the Brink – (NYRB)
-
Tony Karon – The Writing on the Wall for Obama’s ‘Af-Pak’ Vietnam – (Rootless Cosmopolitan)
-
Not mentioned in U.S. news – US drone attack kills 29 in North Waziristan – (Dawn)
- Good piece, but too much ‘middle of the road’ – Obama and the Middle East – (NYRB)
-
Mearsheimer – Saving Israel From Itself – (American Conservative)
-
Israeli Tourism Adverts Wipe Palestine From the Map – (Palestine Campaign)
-
Tea, coffee, sausages are also verboten – Israel bans books, music and clothes from entering Gaza – (Haaretz)
Please add your links, views and news in the comments.
But many impatient Barflies expect him to transform the sinking ship into a gleaming ocean liner while still at sea and totally ignore the huge gashes that threaten to sink it
I have several times pointed out that what Obiman inherited is so horrendous and the obstacles so daunting that…etc. But, there are things he can do, important things, within his power, things a majority of Americans would agree with. He isn’t doing them.
One ex:
Torture – He has, on his side, the world, national and international *law*, US opinion (the residue could be manipulated through a national pride meme), the military itself one guesses (or factions within it anyway), one could lengthen the list.
Second, it is a ‘contained‘ issue, it does not spill over onto other matters: besides the few who enjoy torturing and the past and hypothetical future victims, his actions on this matter affect nobody. Even if one day reparations would have to be paid, the sums would be slivers of peanuts as compared to bail-outs or any number of other things, like aid to Israel, but let me not digress.
(From a pragmatist pov, leaving my revulsion, moral issues, etc. out.)
I won’t go into details now as I don’t have dates straight and don’t have time to google, but consider, just as an ex.
Obi-man suspended the Gitmo military tribunals. In fact they have let many ppl go…hundreds, over time. The cases pending (airtight, for some innocents, it is said) of many who were hoping for final conclusion were stopped in their tracks, and the prisoners moulder along longer…And B. O. replaced them with … err nothing…to then re-instore them!
At best, this is a stupendous error:
– an error of law – what applies? International / national law or Bush Cos bric-a-brac of legal justifications for torture? How is the Bush legacy to be unwound? Nothing is stated. Even a distant, cold consideration of the prisoners, or world Int’l relations, would not have produced this outcome.
– a political error – never take a legal step you cannot back up or move forward with. Never.
– an image error. B.O. was elected to clean up the US image, so far it is ‘fail’ and his leftist caring persona (fake imho) has taken a huge bashing. Such rapid loss of trust/support/image/call it glow spells out, hah, fooled you again.
– an error of justice, humanitarianism, fairness, probity, etc.
At worst, well it is worse.
Beware of the soft-left, the neo-libs, the pious, pontificating, social democrats. Watch them like hawks, they are more dangerous than the right.
Posted by: Tangerine | May 18 2009 13:54 utc | 36
i enjoyed reading this little piece by Eugenia Tsao, on On The Devaluation of Labor here’s a snippet:
The union-bashing and labour-trivializing that has come into vogue of late has typically been predicated on a small set of dubious assumptions:
The first is the notion, extensively debunked on this site and elsewhere, that the wages and benefits enjoyed by unionized workers are undeservedly generous, and have served only to exacerbate the economic downturn. Aided by the kinds of subtle rhetorical techniques beloved by news editors everywhere—the strategically positioned photograph, the passivized headline, the carefully selected metaphor—this perception has achieved a commonsensical flavour amongst unsuspecting readerships throughout the West. Narcotized from years of propaganda, we have been conditioned to scapegoat those who produce the wealth rather than those who have mismanaged it. The relationship between personal wealth and personal worth, we are assured, is a linear one: the more money a person has, the more he’s contributed to society, so let him be. Those who have literally given their lives to their industries, by contrast—often enduring lurid occupational hazards along the way, such as daily exposure to toxins and radiation—are called overpaid parasites.
The second of these assumptions is the notion that there is a qualitative distinction between “skilled” and “unskilled” labour whereby certain kinds of activities (e.g. picking apples) inherently merit less remuneration, because one does not need special credentials to undertake them, while other kinds of activities (e.g. marking essays) merit more remuneration, because such positions do require special accreditations. I will not here examine the legitimacy of this belief. I will say, however, that the dichotomy—designed as it is to engender feelings of envy and resentment—lends itself beautifully to the managerial divide-and-conquer tactics familiar to labour organizers. When a cafeteria server’s wage is perceived to be too high, the teaching assistant is supposed to gaze ruefully at her hard-earned B.Sc. diploma and become indignant. When a laboratory technician loses her job, the bricklayer is supposed to feel a frisson of delight at the revelation that education does not confer immunity. We are all supposed to seethe bitterly when those less “skilled” than we refuse to know their place, and to smirk when those more “skilled” than we are brought down a notch or two.
The third of these assumptions is the conviction that university diplomas and professional degrees confer uniqueness and irreplaceability. Janitors are, allegedly, all more or less interchangeable; PhDs are not. This is the logic upon which my friend, the administrator, was drawing in lamenting the dispensability of her position. But is this even remotely true? When a university department sets up a hiring committee in order to fill a vacant professorship, one of the first things they do is determine what kind of specialist they are looking for: someone who studies land tenure systems in East Africa, for instance, or an arctic archaeologist. A formal job search is then launched, and, for each and every one of these vacancies, hundreds of roughly identical applications pour in. For each and every professor—or lawyer, or doctor—who retires or resigns, someone equivalently qualified is waiting in the wings. Does this mean that all arctic archaeologists are interchangeable? No. What it means is that, in an economy that treats us all as utilities, formal education in itself accords neither indispensability nor individuality.
We ought not delude ourselves. We all wield skills that are vital to our collective survival: the construction worker no less than the engineer, the lab technician no less than the endocrine surgeon. When a waste collector finds himself unemployed, society does not screech to a halt, true—nor does it when an architect finds herself unemployed. There are no unalterable or essential criteria behind these distinctions, whatever the economists say. Labour is labour; we are either all replaceable or all irreplaceable.
*
allow me to add a quick story: last week the shelter i work at put on a “Veterans Stand Down” to benefit homeless veterans. three days before the event, two semi trucks arrived with over 150,000 pounds of military surplus gear. to unload all this stuff, we assembled a motley crew of volunteers, a few military folks, and a whole bunch of the homeless folks we serve, including some of our chronic clients, who usually suffer from addiction and/or mental disorders.
for that brief amount of time, everyone pitched in to get the job done, and everyone had a great time doing it. the volunteers mingled with the drunks who mingled with the soldiers, and in just four hours we got all the gear off the trucks and packed into a tiny church.
as a bitter cynic i was personally elated to find myself unable to dismiss this little display of people from very different walks of life working together to get a job done as inconsequential.
take from it what you will.
Posted by: Lizard | May 18 2009 18:54 utc | 53
|
