Sunday, December 7, 2014

Weekend Update

I've been meaning on writing something about justice, the lack of it, or the insane perversion of it within the US, but I wanted to start off with a quote and can't find the book. In fact, I can't find most of the things I look for these days: the place is a total mess, and getting oppressively so. Don't even know where to start sorting it out. So I figured I'd skip the links post today, then found a couple already tucked away in the draft file. So it seems like I can't even follow a plan on not doing something any more.

Another thing I've been thinking about is coming up with a more systematic piece on "the four wars of 2014" -- Israel/Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine -- and how they are mutually reinforcing, mostly due to delusions prevalent in Washington these days (some examples of which follow).

Anyhow, shorter and more scattered than I'd like, but more than I expected.

  • Thomas Frank: Ann Coulter and David Brooks play a sneaky, unserious class card: As I understand Brooks' post-Ferguson spin (hat tip here to No More Mister Nice Blog), nobody (on the right, anyway) is a racist any more, but good conservatives do practice something he calls "classism" -- i.e., they do look down on lazy people whose lack of responsibility and work ethic have resulted in their being poor and miserable. That, of course, is a spin on reality. The fact is that conservatives encourage their followers to believe such things, and some poor whites are flattered, ignorant, and gullible enough to do so. Frank then tries to link this up with some of Coulter's nonsense, quoting her:

    Liberals thrive on the attractions of snobbery. Only when you appreciate the powerful driving force of snobbery in the liberals' worldview do all their preposterous counterintuitive arguments make sense. They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs.

    Now, I remember practically the very day in 7th grade when my classmates discovered the word "snob" and it spread like a virus as an all-purpose epithet to shame anyone you had any sort of complaint about. It works, of course, because the only mutually agreeable relationships are based on equality, and it did tend to level the field -- although one soon came to suspect that the ones who led the charge had the most to hide. (And if that suggests that Coulter never really grew out of 7th grade, well, the foo shits.) The fact is, I never knew any real snobs until I went to an expensive private college -- and even that was muted because, after all, I was one of them. Still, nothing in Coulter's paragraph makes any sense. There are lots of things that snobs think and do differently from the rest of us, but none of them made Coulter's list. Frank tries to join the two quotes around "embracing criminals," but that's overwhelmed by the negatives: Brooks seems to be thinking that it's OK to generalize from criminals to class they frequent, while Coulter is generalizing from criminals to the snobs (i.e., liberals) who "embrace" them. And once you criminalize someone, you can never punish them too much.

    When Democrats finally get over the impulse to deny and prevaricate and blame others, and instead ask where they themselves went wrong, one place they might begin is their beloved issue of free trade. Take NAFTA, the granddaddy of all trade agreements, whose twentieth anniversary we celebrated this year: There has never been a more obviously class-based piece of legislation. It was supported with uncanny unanimity by members of the commentariat and the professional class, and, indeed, it has worked well for such people. For members of the working class, however, it has been precisely the disaster their organizations predicted.

    The deal crushed enthusiasm for the Democratic Party among the working-class voters who were then considered part of the Democratic base and contributed to the Democrats' loss of the House of Representatives in 1994, a disaster from which, the economist Jeff Faux wrote in 2006, "the Democratic Party still has not recovered." And, indeed, from which the party seemingly has no desire to recover. Just the other day, President Obama announced that he is fired up and ready to go . . . with the Republicans in Congress on the Trans Pacific Partnership, even though much of his own party is opposed to it.

    Democrats who sign up for our master class on classism might also look back over their response to the financial crisis, during which they bailed out their BFFs on Wall Street and let everyone else go to hell. Or the many favors they failed to do for their former BFFs in organized labor. Or their lack of interest in getting a public option included in health-care reform.

  • Simon Maloy: "A fan of blowing things up": Why new DefSec nominee Ashton Carter was ready to restart Korean War: Not a huge surprise that Obama's pick to replace Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense is a hawk more committed to the military than to democracy, but it's hard to imagine a more vivid example of his myopia than his cavalier attitude toward bombing North Korea. If there's anything one should have learned from studying wars throughout history it's that you never can predict all the consequences. Still, Carter thinks the US can blow up a working nuclear reactor without causing it to malfunction, melt down, explode, and spread toxic radiation. He also thinks that North Korea wouldn't retaliate for such an attack, even though their main defense against US attack for more than 60 years has been the deterrence of their artillery pointed at Seoul. And in any case he thinks that the many thousands of Koreans who would die from that test of will are a small price compared to the risk that North Korea might eventually possess nuclear weapons and long-range missiles (which, by the way, they now do, and like most nations with such arms do nothing with). In other words, Carter is not just the wrong person to become Secretary of Defense; he probably ought to be packed away to a mental ward somewhere. (It goes without saying that he's already been endorsed by Lindsay Graham and Donald Rumsfeld.) Another example of how Obama's "changing the way we think about war"?

  • Ron Paul: Reckless Congress 'Declares War' on Russia: On H. Res. 758: "16 pages of war propaganda that should have made even neocons blush." Only 10 representatives voted against it (5 Democrats and 5 Republicans).

    These are the kinds of resolutions I have always watched closely in Congress, as what are billed as "harmless" statements of opinion often lead to sanctions and war. I remember in 1998 arguing strongly against the Iraq Liberation Act because, as I said at the time, I knew it would lead to war. I did not oppose the Act because I was an admirer of Saddam Hussein -- just as now I am not an admirer of Putin or any foreign political leader -- but rather because I knew then that another war against Iraq would not solve the problems and would probably make things worse. We all know what happened next.

  • Nathan Thrall: Rage in Jerusalem: Useful background about Jerusalem, the center of the ad hoc violence that threatens a "third intifada," how the expanded-and-annexed city's 30% Palestinian minority has been isolated and estranged by the political system.

    Palestinians in general feel disconnected from their political leaders, but the sense of abandonment is particularly acute in Jerusalem, where the PA is strictly forbidden from acting and to which Ramallah, like most of the Arab world, devotes many lofty words but very few deeds. When he assented to the five-year interim arrangements for Palestinian self-governance in the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat agreed to exclude Jerusalem from the areas that would be governed pro tempore by the PA. Local leaders, notably the late Faisal Husseini, refused to agree to this, which is one reason Yitzhak Rabin, who resolutely opposed dividing Jerusalem when he was prime minister and said he would rather abandon peace than give up a united capital, chose to bypass Husseini and instead pursued secret negotiations in Oslo with Arafat's emissaries.

    Palestinians in Jerusalem have been bereft of political leaders since Husseini's death in 2001. All four of Jerusalem's representatives in the Palestinian parliament -- all of them members of Hamas, elected in 2006 -- have been deported. Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, monitors 'political subversion,' which includes lawful opposition to the Israeli occupation. Since all Palestinian political parties oppose the occupation, they and their activities have, in effect, been criminalised. Even innocuous Palestinian institutions such as the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce have been shut down. Years of Israeli suppression of Palestinian political activity have ensured that when violence erupts in Jerusalem, there is no legitimate leadership to quell it; and spontaneous, unorganised protests and attacks are far more difficult for the security forces to thwart and contain.

  • More Israel links:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Adam Shatz: West End Boy: Reviews two books on the rise of Islamophobia in Europe, specifically focusing on Anders Breivik's 2011 bombing and killing spree in Norway.

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