Author Archives: News Sources

Obama and climate change: The real story

Bill McKibben writes: Two years ago, on a gorgeous November day, 12,000 activists surrounded the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Signs we carried featured quotes from Barack Obama in 2008: “Time to end the tyranny of oil”; “In my administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow.”

Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even then, there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were too closely tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change seriously. But in the two years since, it’s looked more and more like they were right – that in our hope for action we were willing ourselves to overlook the black-and-white proof of how he really feels.

If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.

You could argue that private industry, not the White House, has driven that boom, and in part you’d be right. But that’s not what Obama himself would say. Here’s Obama speaking in Cushing, Oklahoma, last year, in a speech that historians will quote many generations hence. It is to energy what Mitt Romney’s secretly taped talk about the 47 percent was to inequality. Except that Obama was out in public, boasting for all the world to hear:

“Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quad­rupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem . . . is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go.” [Continue reading…]

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Meet the American hedge fund billionaire who could start a ‘holy war’ in the Middle East

Alex Kane reports: Henry Swieca is a money man. The New York-based billionaire made his fortune by co-founding Highbridge Capital Corp., a hedge fund that boasted clients like the American International Group.

In 2009, the banking giant JP Morgan Chase, another client of Highbridge, fully took over the flagship hedge fund. Swieca went on to play a role at two more hedge funds: Talpion Fund Management, which he launched, and Clearline Capital, which Swieca joined as a startup investor in February 2013.

Swieca, whose net worth is $1.2 billion as of September 2013, is well-known as a financial guru. His every move is covered by the financial press. But he’s less known for what his foundation pours money into: right-wing, pro-Israel causes. Along with a host of charitable groups and domestic Jewish centers, the Swieca Family Foundation, which he runs with his Israeli-American wife Estee, has poured tons of cash into pro-Israel groups–including to religious extremist groups that operate in the most sensitive of holy places. Swieca did not return requests for comment on his donations.

According to tax records reviewed by AlterNet, Swieca, an Orthodox Jew, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the American Israel Education Foundation, the non-profit offshoot of the powerful lobbying group called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He’s also handed over cash to groups like the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces; the right-wing, anti-Muslim David Horowitz Freedom Center; and the Hebron Fund, a Brooklyn-based organization that funnels American money into illegal Israeli settlements in Hebron, a big city in the West Bank that has the most intense regime of settler violence and enforced segregation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

But perhaps most alarmingly is Swieca’s funding of the Temple Institute, an organization that promotes the building of the Third Temple on the third most holy site for Muslims. [Continue reading…]

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Top Senate Democrats break with White House and circulate new Iran sanctions bill

Ali Gharib reports: Three top senators, including two Democrats, have begun circulating a draft of a new Iran sanctions bill that critics say could violate the terms of an agreement struck between Iran and the United States in Geneva last month. The bill, set for introduction by the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, along with top sanctions hawks Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), defies the Obama administration’s repeated requests for Congress to hold off on any new legislation that could imperil last month’s interim nuclear pact with Iran while talks continue toward a comprehensive final deal.

A copy of the bill, dubbed the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013*, was obtained by Foreign Policy. The new sanctions are unlikely to come to a vote in the Senate this week in the final days of the 2013 session.* Instead, the Senate would likely consider the measure after it returns on Jan. 6.

The legislation would broaden the scope of the sanctions already imposed against Iran, expanding the restrictions on Iran’s energy sector to include all aspects of its petroleum trade and putting in place measures targeting Iran’s shipping and mining sectors. The bill allows Obama to waive the new sanctions during the current talks by certifying every 30 days that Iran is complying with the Geneva deal and negotiating in good faith on a final agreement, as well as meeting other conditions such as not sponsoring or carrying out acts of terrorism against U.S. targets.

In accordance with goals laid out frequently by hard-liners in Congress and the influential lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the bill sets tough conditions for a final deal, should one be reached with Iranian negotiators. Among those conditions is a provision that only allows Obama to waive new sanctions, even after a final deal has been struck, if that deal bars Iran from enriching any new uranium whatsoever. The bill states Obama may not waive sanctions unless the United States and its allies “reached a final and verifiable agreement or arrangement with Iran that will … dismantle Iran’s illicit nuclear infrastructure, including enrichment and reprocessing capabilities and facilities.” (Congress could also block Obama’s waivers by passing a “joint resolution of disapproval” against a final deal.) [Continue reading…]

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Which Iran will we choose?

Trita Parsi, Bijan Khajehpour and Reza Marashi write: The historic interim agreement between the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) and Iran over its nuclear dispute is not just about enrichment, centrifuges and breakout capabilities. Ultimately, it will help determine who and what will define Iran’s foreign and domestic policies for decades to come. Will it be the security-oriented, confrontational and internally repressive orientation preferred by the Iranian hardliners? Or will the more cooperative, moderate and win-win approach favored by President Hassan Rouhani and the majority of the population take root and prevail?

In a new report published today (“Extending Hands and Unclenching Fists“) — which relies on in-depth interviews with senior Iranian political officials, intellectuals and members of business community — we show that the West can weaken the hardline Iranian narrative of confrontation and resistance and facilitate a comprehensive nuclear deal by collaborating with Iran on scientific projects that carry no proliferation risk.

For the U.S. and Europe, this means augmenting a successful nuclear deal through other areas of mutual interest can help usher in a more cooperative and less threatening Iran whose domestic political liberalization positively impacts the Middle East as a whole. In the past, we have seen Iran take important steps in this direction, but without reaching the desired results.

The 2013 presidential election unexpectedly catapulted centrist leaders into power that have sought an opening to the West on numerous occasions. Such efforts include the 2001 collaboration with the U.S. in Afghanistan, the 2003 Grand Bargain offer, and the 2005 offer to limit Iran’s enrichment program to 3,000 centrifuges (Iran currently has 19,000). These offers were all made prior to the West imposing crippling sanctions. By rejecting this outreach, Washington strengthened the hand of Iranian hardliners who believe the only way to compel the U.S. to deal with Iran is not by sending peace offers, but rather by resisting American power. [Continue reading…]

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The Arab uprisings, three years on

Rami G. Khouri writes: I have learned in life that when you have a problem to ponder or stress to overcome, you should resort to one of three options: take a nap, listen to music, or just wait and let some time pass. The last option is particularly helpful when you are trying to understand the significance of political developments of the day, such as this week’s third anniversary of the initiation of the current Arab uprisings by Mohammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation. The passage of three years allows us to better understand what is going on across the Arab region in a way that was not so clear in December 2010.

When the fruit and vegetables peddler Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in the rural Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, his spontaneous act comprised a combination of protest, self-assertion and defiance that resonated instantly and widely across the entire Arab world. It launched a series of rolling protests and revolutions that have morphed into wars and chaotic conditions in some countries, and slow constitutional transformations in others.

Dramatic and unpredictable developments almost certainly await us in the years ahead. For now, though, here is my assessment of how to appreciate what has been going on across the Arab world during the last three years.

1. The initial sense that we experienced spontaneous popular revolutions to overthrow dictators and replace them with more democratic governance systems was certainly correct for those heady days in early 2011. The slow and erratic progress to that end in different Arab countries indicates that this remains a goal across most countries, but also that we are dealing with much bigger processes and deeper forces than merely linear democratic governance transitions, such as were experienced more smoothly, for example, in post-Franco Spain or post-military junta Greece.

2. It seems clear now that democratization is only one technical aspect of a much wider historical transformation that is playing itself out in different ways across the region, and that relates much more powerfully to the two foundational elements of national and personal life—the concepts of modern Arab statehood and citizenship. Neither statehood nor citizenship were ever defined by the collective will of free Arab men and women, but now we witness some Arab countries grappling with these issues for the first time ever, and in most cases this is occurring in a very messy and inconsistent way. That is the historical norm across the world, and Arabs finally are resuming their place in world history, after a century of absence due to colonial or homegrown dictatorships.

Rather than dealing mainly with democratic revolutions, as was the perception three years ago, it now appears clearer with hindsight that we are dealing with far more complex issues related to how individual men and women shape and ensure their rights as citizens within the larger units of their own ethnic, tribal and sectarian identities and their own sovereign state. All of these levels are being defined and anchored at the same time. [Continue reading…]

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Why the NSA ruling could backfire into a court disaster we’ll regret for decades

Steven Rosenfeld writes: Pundits across the political left should be careful about heaping too much praise on U.S. District Judge Richard Leon for this week’s dramatic ruling that the National Security Agency’s electronic dragnet capturing Americans’ online activities is “significantly likely” to be unconstitutional, even though it is a powerful rebuke to America’s spymasters.

That’s because Leon, a longtime Republican warrior, is as much of a legal loudmouth and rightwing activist judge as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. More importantly, his elbows-out 68-page opinion is not going to be the last word on the government’s data mining. Leon’s ruling is one of several NSA-related suits moving through the federal courts, including rulings that have reached the opposite conclusion.

“It should be noted that last month Judge Jeffrey Miller of the Southern District of California found the NSA business records program to be constitutional,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman, said Tuesday. “Leon’s opinion also differs from those of at least 15 separate federal district court judges… Only the Supreme Court can resolve the question on the constitutionality of the NSA’s program.”

These conflicts will likely trigger a review by the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority already has sanctioned NSA electronic eavesdropping and is known for elevating government searchs over individual rights. In other words, Leon’s rebuke may help put the issue in front of a court majority that is poised to codify national security over privacy rights. [Continue reading…]

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The many enemies of a deal with Iran

Christopher Dickey writes: “Black swans” are the unlikely and unforeseen events that change the world. Mathematical probability cannot predict them and conventional wisdom is blind to them, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wrote six years ago when he coined the term. They seem to come out of nowhere, like the airliners of 9/11. But anyone who has a feel for the ever-deceptive volatility of the Middle East can see that right now the black swans are circling like vultures.

Their dark wings can be glimpsed in random headlines: a mysterious American disappears during on an off-the-books mission for the CIA. Members of a cult-like Iranian opposition group are slaughtered in Iraq even as their leaders forge close ties to famous American politicians. The worsening U.S. relationship with its old ally Saudi Arabia is threatened by renewed questions about the complicity of Saudi officials in the 9/11 attacks. Those are just a few of the sinister bits of information floating around the chaotic region these days.

None of these developments are certain to provoke cataclysmic change and, probability-wise, they probably won’t. But the region is so on edge, with Libya crumbling, Egypt in turmoil, and Syria tearing itself apart, that, like the act of a single assassin in Sarajevo in 1914, one unforeseen incident can bring on a cascade of catastrophes.

Let’s set the scene by looking at the Iran talks: The Obama administration has made those negotiations, to stop the mullahs from acquiring atomic weapons, a top priority. But last month’s breakthrough accords between Iran and the United States (plus France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China) are “just interim,” as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius reminded the World Policy Conference in Monaco on Saturday. A final deal isn’t due for six months, if then.

The Iranians now have most of the know-how and most of the radioactive stuff they need to build a bomb. Will they truly and definitively step back from that threshold? Fabius, whose skepticism stalled the Geneva accords for a time, says he is skeptical still.

If the talks fail, the chances increase dramatically that the United States will get dragged into a new war in the Middle East, most likely alongside Israel. The objective of the surgical attacks that have been talked about would be to stall the Iranian program for just a few years—perhaps a very few years. But in response to such an action, it’s likely the Iranians would pursue a much more secretive effort without any United Nations inspectors to track it, and they’d eventually wind up with the bomb.

The only way to be 100 percent sure they won’t go down that path would be to change the regime. That was the logic behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and we know how that went. [Continue reading…]

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The ‘peace process’ delusion is worse than apartheid

Lev Grinberg writes: The death of Nelson Mandela, a major hero of the struggle for freedom and equality in the 20th century, has generated a host of strange and curious comparisons and interpretations. Strangest of all is the one crowning Mandela as the leader of the non-violent struggle. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may not have been alone in upholding this distorted notion, but in his case, the political intention is unmistakable: to wit, the reason why the Palestinians are unable to achieve their coveted liberty and equality is that they do not have their own Mandela to lead a non-violent struggle. Such interpretation reflects not ignorance, but a deliberate deception. Mandela’s struggle should be reviewed and compared to the Palestinian struggle in order to understand both the similarities and the differences between them. It is thus worthwhile to consider briefly the link between violence and liberation.

Mandela won his senior position when he decided to lead an armed struggle in South Africa, and established the military branch of the African National Congress. Going underground, he then led terror and sabotage operations against the apartheid regime, for which he was sentenced to life in prison. Twenty-seven years later he was released to conduct negotiations with South Africa’s State President Frederik William de Klerk, designed to put an end to the apartheid regime. De Klerk managed to bring the Whites around to concede a regime of White supremacy and privilege, do away with inter-racial segregation, and accept the principle of equal voting rights for Blacks and Whites. Such concessions were the result of not only the armed struggle, but of the apartheid regime’s mounting unpopularity and of the economic and political boycott imposed on South Africa. In other words, it was only when the White elites of South Africa felt the direct impact of these sanctions that de Klerk was able to convince them that they should renounce apartheid and their privileges. It is important to realize that without violent struggle, the Blacks of South Africa would never have won recognition. But armed struggle alone is not enough, because the powers ruling the State are always more powerful, organized and better equipped. International pressure is therefore necessary. The more international pressure, the less violence is required.

Could an analysis of Black struggle in South Africa teach us something about the Palestinian struggle? I believe that it can, despite the differences between the two regimes in terms of the nature of segregation and types of privileges. Palestinian violence did engender international pressure during 1988-1992, which resulted in Israel’s recognition of the PLO in 1993. Following this recognition, Yasser Arafat committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict, and got Mandela’s blessing for it. Unfortunately, mutual recognition has led matters in the opposite direction – to an upgraded version of Israel’s military and economic control and oppression. The reason for this is that Israelis, along with the rest of the world, imagined that the sheer act of recognition was the end of the process, rather than its beginning. The world stopped putting pressure on Israel, the Arab boycott was lifted, and every country in the world, including Russia, eastern Europe, China, and the Asian and African continents, have opened their gates for commerce with Israel. Israelis, too, have bought into the peace delusion, turning their attention to internal struggles over Israel’s ‘civic’ agenda, choosing to close their eyes to the doubling and later tripling of the Jewish population in the Occupied Territories. And when the Palestinians resorted to violence once again as diplomacy failed in 2000, Israelis were surprised and disappointed, and supported escalating oppressive violence. Simply put, when the world does not put pressure on the oppressive regime, the privileged group has no motivation to make any concessions. A cyclic routine of violence was thus created, erupting from time to time but never achieving anything beyond mutual bloodshed and destruction. [Continue reading…]

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What NSA reforms would mean for Americans (and everyone else)

Joshua Brustein writes: The White House just released the report from an advisory panel (PDF) suggesting changes to intelligence gathering surrounding communication technologies. The Obama administration doesn’t have to accept any of the 46 recommendations, of course, but if it does, it would mean some major shifts in the government’s approach to privacy, and critics of the National Security Agency are taking the proposals seriously. “We view it as a blueprint for restoring privacy protection in post-9/11 America,” says Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Here’s what the policy recommendations would mean for three key groups.

American Citizens: The panel essentially calls for an end to fishing expeditions where the government collects a lot of information and holds on to it in case it becomes useful at some point. The report calls for an end to the collection and storage of metadata about phone communications, and the panel would prevent “mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals to enable future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.” It also suggests tighter restrictions on specific requests for information.

This doesn’t mean loads of personal information shouldn’t be collected and stored. Instead, the panel suggests having private companies or a third party hold on to the information. If the government wants to get it, it would have to ask. This could provide a level of safety, since the private groups would presumably push back against such requests (although it seems telephone companies haven’t done much of that so far). But not everyone likes the idea. “What we’re concerned about is this is opening the door for mandatory data retention, meaning there is a massive database about everything you do,” says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The panel also wants to break up the duties of the NSA so that the military-related aspects of its work are separate from its defensive duties. Perhaps a civilian would be in charge. There are also various suggestions for tightening control of classified information to prevent the next coming of Edward Snowden. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s Morsi charged with ‘terrorist acts’

Al Jazeera reports: Egypt’s deposed President Mohamed Morsi will stand trial on charges of “conspiring with foreign groups” to commit “terrorist acts”.

Morsi, toppled by the military in July and already on trial for alleged involvement in the killings of opposition protesters, was also accused on Wednesday of divulging “secrets of defence to foreign countries” and “funding terrorism for militant training to fulfil the goals of the International Organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood”, according to a prosecutor document seen by Al Jazeera sources.

Egypt’s public prosecutor ordered Morsi and 35 co-accused to stand trial on charges including conspiring with foreign organisations to commit terrorist acts in Egypt and divulging military secrets to a foreign state.

In a statement, the prosecutor said that Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood had committed acts of violence and terrorism in Egypt and prepared a “terrorist plan” that included an alliance with the Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. [Continue reading…]

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I challenged the NSA in court because it’s a totalitarian attack on human rights

Tea Party activist Larry Klayman writes: Shortly after it was disclosed by then Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA was running roughshod over the constitutional rights of the American people, I filed two class action lawsuits, on behalf of myself and a client, Charles Strange, who lost his son, a NSA cryptologist, in the Afghan war. These lawsuits not only ask for large monetary damages, but also for an injunction against the US government spying on over 300 million citizens in violation of the Patriot and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Acts.

The laws make it crystal clear that the NSA, CIA, FBI or any other American government agency can only eavesdrop on persons who are under investigation for being in contact with foreign terrorists, or who are under criminal investigation. What Greenwald, the Guardian and Snowden revealed was a massive ongoing NSA program that collects so-called metadata, which intrudes into the most intimate details of a person’s life, accessing the cell phone, internet and social media communications of nearly the entire US populace. It is, in effect, the biggest and most dangerous violation of constitutional rights in American history.

The obvious effect of this outrage is to chill the free speech, associational and due process rights of all Americans, as now they are under constant surveillance by a government that over 80% of the people, according to Pew Research polling, distrusts, after decades of scandal and corruption by our executive and legislative branches. [Continue reading…]

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After help from CBS, the NSA’s PR campaign takes a major legal hit

Michael Scherer writes: The National Security Agency began the week with a public relations coup: a favorable segment on the spy agency by the CBS News program 60 Minutes. The segment was authored by CBS correspondent John Miller, an intelligence community veteran and former public affairs officer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who failed to disclose to viewers that he was eyeing a return to his career in law enforcement when the episode aired, a fact that was first reported by the New York Post.

In the segment, Miller described the controversy over the NSA’s collection of telephone metadata as partly the result of confusion. “So you understand then, there might be a little confusion among Americans who read in the newspaper that the N.S.A. has vacuumed up, the records of the telephone calls of every man, woman and child in the United States for a period of years—that sounds like spying on Americans,” Miller said, in one of his questions to NSA Director Keith Alexander.

Miller’s apparent suggestion here, endorsed by Alexander, was that the collection of metadata phone records does not amount to domestic spying, because the records do not include the content of calls and the records are searched only when there is a suspected terrorist target. “Metadata has become one of the most important tools in the NSA’s arsenal,” said Miller.

This is precisely the message the NSA has been trying to get out, ever since its contractor, Edward Snowden, stole and released documents disclosing the once classified program. And there is a clear urgency to the NSA mission. The public relations war matters because Congress is now considering reform bills that could put an end to the program. Sometime next year, public polling about how American’s feel about their information being collected will play a role in determining the outcome of the debate.

But the NSA’s moment of glory was short-lived. Hours after the show aired, Federal District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that the very same program was likely unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, a fact that lead newscasts and newspapers on Tuesday. [Continue reading…]

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West signals to Syrian opposition Assad may stay

Reuters reports: Western nations have indicated to the Syrian opposition that peace talks next month may not lead to the removal of President Bashar al-Assad and that his Alawite minority will remain key in any transitional administration, opposition sources said.

The message, delivered to senior members of the Syrian National Coalition at a meeting of the anti-Assad Friends of Syria alliance in London last week, was prompted by rise of al Qaeda and other militant groups, and their takeover of a border crossing and arms depots near Turkey belonging to the moderate Free Syrian Army, the sources told Reuters.

“Our Western friends made it clear in London that Assad cannot be allowed to go now because they think chaos and an Islamist militant takeover would ensue,” said one senior member of the Coalition who is close to officials from Saudi Arabia.

Noting the possibility of Assad holding a presidential election when his term formally ends next year, the Coalition member added: “Some do not even seem to mind if he runs again next year, forgetting he gassed his own people.”

The shift in Western priorities, particularly the United States and Britain, from removing Assad towards combating Islamist militants is causing divisions within international powers backing the nearly three-year-old revolt, according to diplomats and senior members of the coalition. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s chemical weapons to travel by guarded convoy before destruction

The Guardian reports: Syria’s chemical weapon arsenal is to be taken cross-country in Russian armoured trucks guarded by Syrian government troops and tracked by American satellite navigation equipment on its way to the Mediterranean coast.

The unprecedented and precarious two-week operation will take the cargo – 500 tonnes of chemical components of sarin and VX nerve agents and canisters of mustard gas – from 12 sites around the country to the port of Latakia, where they will be loaded onto Danish and Norwegian cargo ships.

China will provide surveillance cameras and ambulances on stand-by in case of any accidents, while Finland has offered to provide its own emergency response teams.

The ships will sail under Danish and Norwegian naval escort to an unnamed Italian port to be transferred to a US vessel, the Cape Ray, which will be carrying two chemical reactor chambers to neutralise the chemical weapons while at sea. On-board tankerswill store the by-products for later incineration. [Continue reading…]

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Richard Rodriguez on what the Left has lost by rejecting religion

Salon talks to Richard Rodriguez about his new book, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography:

Let me read a line to you from late in the book, and if you could explain it a little bit. You say, “After September 11, critical division in America feels and sounds like religious division.” Where are you going with that?

Well, it seems to me that there are two aspects of that. One of them is that I think that increasingly the left has conceded organized religion to the political right. This has been a catastrophe on the left.

I’m old enough to remember the black Civil Rights movement, which was as I understood it a movement of the left and insofar as it was challenging the orthodoxy of conservatives in the American South. White conservatism. And here was a group of protestant ministers leading processions, which were really religious processions through the small towns and the suburbs of the South. We shall overcome. Well, we have forgotten just how disruptive religion can be to the status quo. How challenging it is to the status quo. I also talk about Cesar Chavez, who is, who was embraced by the political left in his time but he was obviously a challenge to organized labor, the teamsters and to large farmers in the central valley.

So somehow we had decided on the left that religion belongs to Fox Television, or it belongs to some kind of right-wing fanaticism in the Middle East and we have given it up, and it has made us a really empty — that is, it has made the left really empty. I’ll point to one easy instance. Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And what America heard was really a sermon. It was as though slavery and Jim Crow could not be described as a simple political narrative; racism was a moral offense, not simply an illegality. And with his vision of a time “when all of God’s children” in America would be free, he described the nation within a religious parable of redemption.

Fifty years later, our technocratic, secular president gave a speech at the Lincoln memorial, honoring the memory of the speech Dr. King had given. And nothing President Obama said can we remember these few weeks later; his words were dwarfed by our memory of the soaring religious oratory of fifty years ago. And what’s happened to us — and I would include myself in the cultural left — what has happened to us is we have almost no language to talk about the dream life of America, to talk about the soul of America, to talk about the mystery of being alive at this point in our lives, this point in our national history. That’s what we’ve lost in giving it to Fox Television.

So here’s the flip side of that. You write about the “New Atheism” emerging from England, catching on here. How is it new and why does it seem like a dead end to you?

It seems to me that the New Atheism — particularly its recent gaudy English manifestations — has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect. (As Cary Grant remarked: Americans are suckers for the accent!) On the one hand, the New Atheist, with his plummy Oxbridge tones, tries to convince Americans that God is dead at a time when London is alive with Hinduism and Islam. (The empiric nightmare: The colonials have turned on their masters and transformed the imperial city with their prayers and their growing families, even while Europe disappears into materialistic sterility.) Christopher Hitchens, most notably, before his death titled his atheist handbook as a deliberate affront to Islam: “God Is Not Great.” At the same time, he traveled the airwaves of America urging us to war in Iraq — and to maintain borders that the Foreign Office had drawn in the sand. With his atheism, he became a darling of the left. With his advocacy of the Iraq misadventure, he became a darling of the right. [Continue reading…]

As an Englishman in America who is frequently reminded that Americans are indeed suckers for the accent I retain, let me add a cultural footnote whose validity I can’t document but about which I am nevertheless convinced.

It’s on the origin of American crassness: it comes from England. Bad taste — we invented it.

From the English perspective, civilization has always been something that came from somewhere else.

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Boycott by American academics has a particular sting for Israel

The New York Times reports: An American organization of professors on Monday announced a boycott of Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, signaling that a movement to isolate and pressure Israel that is gaining ground in Europe has begun to make strides in the United States.

Members of the American Studies Association voted by a ratio of more than two to one to endorse the boycott in online balloting that concluded Sunday night, the group said.

With fewer than 5,000 members, the group is not one of the larger scholarly associations. But its vote is a milestone for a Palestinian movement known as B.D.S., for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, which for the past decade had found little traction in the United States. The American Studies Association is the second American academic group to back the boycott, movement organizers say, following the Association for Asian American Studies, which did so in April.

“It’s almost like a family betrayal,” said Manuel Trajtenberg, a leading Israeli scholar. “It’s very grave and very saddening that this happens, particularly so in the U.S.,” he said.

Dr. Trajtenberg, an economics professor at Tel Aviv University, earned his doctorate at Harvard and like many Israeli academics has had frequent sabbaticals at American universities.

Israel has strong trade ties with Western Europe, where the B.D.S. campaign has won some backing for economic measures, a particular concern for Israelis. Last week a Dutch company, Vitens, announced that it would not do business with Israel’s national water company, Mekorot, because of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israel recently faced a potential crisis when it seemed its universities and companies would lose out on some $700 million for research from a European Union program after new guidelines prohibited investment in any institutions operating in territory Israel seized in the 1967 war. Israeli academics were reeling at the possibility that they would be punished over government policy toward the Palestinians, until Israeli and European officials struck a deal late last month to allow Israel to participate.

In April, the Teachers’ Union of Ireland endorsed an academic boycott of Israel, and several times in recent years there have been strong efforts within Britain’s largest professors’ group, the University and College Union, to do the same.

Israelis have long seen Europe as more hostile — even anti-Semitic in some pockets — but a slap from the United States has a particular sting. [Continue reading…]

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Would Amazon prefer to employ robots instead of people?

David Streitfeld writes: Amazon warehouse employees in Germany walked off the job again Monday even as they tried to take their case directly to the e-commerce giant’s Seattle headquarters. The first action seemed more successful, involving more than a thousand workers. The second drew only about 50 people. “We are humans not robots,” one sign said.

The tech companies, including Amazon, are getting ever richer and more powerful, but there seems to be a bit of a backlash developing. In San Francisco last week, protesters briefly blocked a Google bus transporting workers to its Silicon Valley campus.

Amazon’s announcement two weeks ago on “60 Minutes” that it is pursuing delivery by drones inspired not admiration but widespread mockery. Amazon, critics said, was dwelling in fantasyland. (An Amazon spokesman disagreed with this assessment, saying the news “did inspire some admiration.”)

Perhaps Amazon brought up the subject of drones as a form of wish fulfillment. For the retailer, the moment when machines prepare and deliver packages could not come too soon. Humans are too much trouble. Germany is Amazon’s second largest market, and the labor turmoil there is increasing. [Continue reading…]

I’m not an economist, but I have to wonder whether Amazon’s goal of providing products as fast as possible might end up becoming a marketing strategy that benefits its competitors at the expense of the online giant itself. Shop online and pick up at the store may end up becoming the most successful business model — not only because it can work faster than Amazon, but also because people prefer to engage in transactions with people.

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