Music: Shankar Tucker with Mugdha Hasabnis & Amit Mishra — ‘Kinara’
Netanyahu brags about defying the U.S. and expanding settlements
Noam Sheizaf writes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of his settlement building achievements in a recent meeting with young Likud supporters. Responding to a question from the audience, Netanyahu said: “I was threatened in Washington: ‘not one brick’ [of settlement construction] … after five years, we built a little more than one brick…”
Asked “about peace talks with the Palestinians,” Netanyahu reportedly replied, “about the – what?” to which the audience responded by breaking out into laughter.
Last year was a record year in settlement construction in the West Bank. According to figures released by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), there were construction starts on 2,534 housing units last year, not including East Jerusalem – an increase of 123 percent from 2012, and more than any other year since the CBS began compiling data.
Netanyahu’s quotes were posted online by Akiva Lamm, a Likud member from Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron. [Continue reading…]
Afghanistan hits out at U.S. spying allegations from Wikileaks
AFP reports: Afghanistan on Sunday, May 25, expressed anger at the United States for allegedly monitoring almost all the country’s telephone conversations after revelations by the Wikileaks website.
Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said on Friday, May 23, that Afghanistan was one of at least two countries where the US National Security Agency “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls”.
The Afghan government responded to the claims by ordering the interior and telecommunication ministries to stop illegal monitoring of calls, and said it would lodge a complaint with the US.
“These activities are an obvious violation of agreements based on technical use of these (telephone) stations,” said a government statement.
“Most importantly, it is a violation of the national sovereignty of Afghanistan, and a violation of the human rights guaranteed to all Afghans.” [Continue reading…]
Most U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan attack houses
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.
By way of contrast, since 2008, in neighbouring Afghanistan drone strikes on buildings have been banned in all but the most urgent situations, as part of measures to protect civilian lives. But a new investigative project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research project based at London’s Goldsmiths University, and New York-based Situ Research, reveals that in Pakistan, domestic buildings continue to be the most frequent target of drone attacks.
The project examines, for the first time, the types of target attacked in each drone strike – be they houses, vehicles or madrassas (religious schools) – and the time of day the attack took place. [Continue reading…]
Poroshenko a leader Moscow ‘ready’ to work with
AFP reports: Russia said Monday it was ready to talk to Ukraine’s new president Petro Poroshenko, raising hopes that after months of tensions Moscow sees in the billionaire a leader it can work with.
“We are ready for dialogue with Kiev’s representatives, with Petro Poroshenko,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Russia’s first reaction to his victory in Sunday’s vote.
Lavrov was cautious, saying Moscow was ready for “pragmatic dialogue, on an equal footing” and warned that for Kiev to continue its military operations against pro-Russia rebels in the east would be a “colossal mistake”.
But Poroshenko — a billionaire with strong Russian business interests and a history of working with both pro-Western and Moscow-backed Ukrainian governments — is the kind of figure analysts say the Kremlin can see as a partner.
“Poroshenko is an extremely attractive president for the Kremlin… This is a person who will be able to negotiate with Moscow and find compromise,” said Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute of Strategic Assessments.
“There was a camp in the Kremlin that wanted to feed the fire in Ukraine. Now I think they will move into the shadows,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet reacted himself to Poroshenko’s victory, but he did say he will “respect” the result of the vote and promised to work with Kiev’s new authorities. [Continue reading…]
Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Ukrainian government warplanes carried out airstrikes against pro-Russian rebels who seized Donetsk international airport on Monday, triggering a battle in and around the complex in a show of force by both sides after the election of a new president.
Reuters journalists saw black smoke billowing from the area of the airport after repeated explosions and gunfire, while jets roared overhead. A security official also said paratroops had landed in one of the fiercest clashes since violence broke out in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine some two months ago.
Loud thuds sounded from the area but after four to five hours Ukrainian soldiers appeared to have pushed back at least some of the separatists towards the town, though it was not clear if the army had recovered control of the airport.
There was no full account from either side of casualties. But the press service of the regional administration said one man had been killed and two injured from shrapnel of a shell which struck a part of the railway station serving the airport.
Saying that a deadline had passed at 1 p.m. (1000 GMT) for separatist militants to lay down their arms, a spokesman for the Ukrainian joint forces’ security operation in the region said two Sukhoi Su-25 jets had carried out strafing runs, firing warning shots around Sergei Prokofiev International Airport. [Continue reading…]
The rise of Europe’s anti-EU nationalists
What about the extreme rights in #Ukraine and #EU? pic.twitter.com/vU7sbCSQS1
— Michael Roth MdB (@MiRo_SPD) May 25, 2014
Following elections in France and the rest of the EU, Roger Cohen writes: Make no mistake, [National Front leader Marine Le Pen] could become president. The National Front has surged before, notably in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the incumbent’s father, reached the runoff stage of the presidential election. But in the dozen years since then the European and French crises have deepened. France has near zero growth and growing unemployment. With an estimated 25 percent of the European Parliament vote, the National Front crushed both the governing Socialists (14 percent) and the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (20.8 percent).
“An earthquake,” was the verdict of the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls. He is not wrong. A two-party system is now a three-party system. Marine Le Pen, subtler and cleverer and more ambitious than her father, is electable. She is plausible.
Elsewhere on the Continent the anger behind the National Front’s surge was also evident (no election is better suited for letting off steam than the European because the real power of the European Parliament is limited). In Britain, Austria and Denmark, more than 15 percent of the vote went to similar anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, anti-establishment, anti-boredom political movements. But it is in France, which constitutes with Germany the core of the European Union, that a European, economic and psychological crisis has assumed its most acute form.
According to the French daily Le Monde, the National Front took 43 percent of workers’ votes and 37 percent of the vote of the unemployed. Popular sentiment in France has turned against a Europe associated with austerity, stagnation, unemployment and high immigration. Le Pen’s promise of a more nationalist and anti-immigrant France, rejecting European integration and America, has appeal to the disenchanted. A promised Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, with Putin and his “family values” as Europe’s salvation, masks a void of economic ideas. [Continue reading…]
Martin Kettle writes: Britain likes to think that it marches to a different political drum from the rest of Europe. Yet the 2014 European parliament election has generated a great political paradox. In these elections, British voters flocked in record numbers to the anti-Europe flagship party Ukip. And yet, as they voted against Europe, British voters have never seemed more part of the European mainstream than they do this morning. Across Europe, in one way or another, voters in most countries did very much the same thing.
The European Union has never confronted a crisis of legitimacy like the one that erupted in the polling booths of Europe this weekend. From Aberdeen to Athens and from Lisbon to Leipzig, and irrespective of whether the nation is in or out of the eurozone, the 2014 European elections were an uncoordinated but common revolt against national governments and a revolt against the post-crash priorities of the European project.
This election wasn’t a revolt of Britain against the EU. It was a revolt of European voters against the EU and against national governing parties. And British voters were simply one part of it. [Continue reading…]
Egypt’s new strongman, Sisi knows best
The New York Times reports: Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army officer soon to be Egypt’s president, promises to remedy Egypt’s crippling fuel shortage by installing energy-efficient bulbs in every home socket, even if he has to send a government employee to screw in each one.
“I’m not leaving a chance for people to act on their own,” Mr. Sisi said in his first and most extensive television interview. “My program will be mandatory.”
Mr. Sisi, 59, disciplined and domineering, is universally expected to become Egypt’s head of state after a pro forma election scheduled to begin Monday. He has already been the nation’s paramount decision maker since he ousted Egypt’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last summer.
Now, more than three years after the Arab Spring uprising raised hopes of a democratic Egypt, his move into the presidential palace will formally return Egypt to the rule of a paternalistic military strongman in the tradition of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. [Continue reading…]
The cloud of unknowing
Karl Taro Greenfeld writes: I can’t help it. Every few weeks, my wife mentions the latest book her book club is reading, and no matter what it is, whether I’ve read it or not, I offer an opinion of the work, based entirely on … what, exactly? Often, these are books I’ve not even read a review or essay about, yet I freely hold forth on the grandiosity of Cheryl Strayed or the restrained sentimentality of Edwidge Danticat. These data motes are gleaned, apparently, from the ether — or, more realistically, from various social media feeds.
What was Solange Knowles’s elevator attack on Jay-Z about? I didn’t watch the security-camera video on TMZ — it would have taken too long — but I scrolled through enough chatter to know that Solange had scrubbed her Instagram feed of photos of her sister, Beyoncé. How about this season of “Game of Thrones” and that nonconsensual intercourse in the crypt? I don’t watch the show, but I’ve scanned the recaps on Vulture.com, and I am prepared to argue that this was deeply offensive. Is Pope Francis a postmodern pontiff? I’ve never listened to one of his homilies nor watched his recent “60 Minutes” appearance, but I’ve seen plenty of his @Pontifex tweets retweeted, so I’m ready to say his position on inequality and social justice is remarkably progressive.
It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. Instead of watching “Mad Men” or the Super Bowl or the Oscars or a presidential debate, you can simply scroll through someone else’s live-tweeting of it, or read the recaps the next day. Our cultural canon is becoming determined by whatever gets the most clicks.
In his 1987 book “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” E. D. Hirsch Jr. listed 5,000 essential concepts and names — 1066, Babbitt, Pickwickian — that educated people should be familiar with. (Or at least that’s what I believe he wrote, not having actually read the book.) Mr. Hirsch’s book, along with its contemporary “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom, made the point that cultural literacy — Mr. Bloom’s canon — was the bedrock of our agreed-upon values.
What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness. [Continue reading…]
Music: Maati Baani feat. Shankar Tucker — ‘Baawariya’
The Pope in Palestine
Look at this pic of Pope in Bethlehem & ask yourself who has history on its side; occupation or self-determination? pic.twitter.com/dOvcP8gL6J
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) May 25, 2014
The Guardian reports: It is an image that will define Pope Francis’s first visit to the Holy Land as pontiff. Head bowed in prayer, the leader of the Catholic church pressed his palm against the graffiti-covered concrete of Israel’s imposing “separation wall”, a Palestinian girl holding a flag by his side. It was, as his aides conceded later, a silent statement against a symbol of division and conflict.
The powerful gesture was made minutes after an appeal to both sides to end a conflict that the pope said was “increasingly unacceptable”.
The unscheduled, conspicuous stop halfway through his three-day visit to the Holy Land, made en route to an open-air mass in Manger Square, Bethlehem, confirmed Francis’s reputation for determined independence. So too did his invitation to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli president, Shimon Peres, to join him in Rome to meet and pray together for peace – an unprecedented papal intervention in the stalled peace process. [Continue reading…]
Pope Francis makes biblical case for addressing climate change: ‘If we destroy creation, creation will destroy us’
Climate Progress: Pope Francis made the religious case for tackling climate change on Wednesday, calling on his fellow Christians to become “Custodians of Creation” and issuing a dire warning about the potentially catastrophic effects of global climate change.
Speaking to a massive crowd in Rome, the first Argentinian pope delivered a short address in which he argued that respect for the “beauty of nature and the grandeur of the cosmos” is a Christian value, noting that failure to care for the planet risks apocalyptic consequences. [Continue reading…]
Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘Sura Coutance’ (live)
Who decides what remains secret? Greenwald or Assange?
Michael Kinsley and the New York Times provoked outrage this week through a critical review of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide.
Kinsley raised an important question, made some sound observations, but drew a self-contradictory conclusion. He wrote:
The Snowden leaks were important — a legitimate scoop — and we might never have known about the N.S.A.’s lawbreaking if it hadn’t been for them. Most leaks from large bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to have.
Yet he concluded that the final say over the release of government secrets is a decision that “must ultimately be made by the government.”
So, Kinsley is all in favor of “good” leaks but believes that in a democracy these need to be government-approved leaks.
That doesn’t make any sense.
Once government decides to reveal a secret, it’s no longer a secret and there is no leak.
The whole idea of whistleblowing is that it challenges specific government claims that secrecy is serving a public interest.
On one side the government is asserting that the public is being protected by its ignorance, while on the other side the whistleblower is revealing information which he or she believes the public needs to know.
The beauty of this ad hoc mechanism is that we, the public, then get to decide who has made the stronger claim: the government or the whistleblower?
Yet Kinlsey raises an important question: who can be entrusted with the decisions about which secrets should be exposed?
It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences.
Kinsley thinks we should defer to government yet fails to explain how he envisages there will ever be any more good leaks in this scenario. Are we to imagine a government that blows the whistle on itself?
On this much, Kinsley is emphatic: “Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.”
One can view that statement as an expression of antipathy towards Greenwald, yet it is also a response to the fact that when it comes to the Snowden revelations, Greenwald has been the central decision-maker.
His judgement and that of his confidants, has not gone uncontested.
This week we saw what looked suspiciously like a contest for the limelight. Julian Assange challenged The Intercept’s apparent deference to government pressure when it concealed the identity of a whole country whose cellular communications are being recorded by the NSA — “country X” as The Intercept reported, or Afghanistan as Assange claimed.
What neither side did was provide much detailed information about the process through which they had made their determination about what to conceal or reveal. That lack of transparency bore an uncanny resemblance to governments which say, trust us, we know what we’re doing.
For those of us who are not inclined to trust the government, it’s not altogether clear why we should trust the judgement of either Glenn Greenwald or Julian Assange.
In the age of Wikileaks and Snowden and the release of large volumes of classified information, it might look like whistleblowing has become a form of civil disobedience which challenges the very legitimacy of secrecy. Indeed, an argument can be made that the concept of secrecy is quickly becoming an anachronism.
Yet as things stand now, it seems worth trying to answer Kinsley’s question — who decides? — by reviving a more traditional view of the role of the whistleblower, there being no better example than that provided by Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg had no legal authority to release the Pentagon Papers, but he had the moral authority. He decided that these documents must not remain secret and he was willing to face the full consequences of that decision. On June 28, 1971, as he publicly surrendered to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts in Boston, Ellsberg said:
I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.
When determining what should remain secret, Ellsberg neither deferred to the government nor entrusted that decision to a journalist.
Invariably, the whistleblower is claiming the authority to make a decision that would preferably never be left to one person. But if such an individual feels unqualified to determine what information should be made public and what should remain secret, there is also reason to question how he is going to make the determination about who instead is capable of making those decisions.
The fact that Snowden lacked the confidence to be a decision-making whistleblower doesn’t mean he should have kept quiet, but what he should have done is spread that responsibility more widely.
Should Glenn Greenwald decide? is a question that should never have needed asking.
The cooperative economy
Orion magazine: In the mid-1960s, when author, historian, and political economist Gar Alperovitz was working as legislative director for Senator Gaylord Nelson, change was in the air. Ink had dried on an early version of the Clean Air Act, the civil rights movement had won major victories, and the first Earth Day was in the works. The U.S. still faced plenty of serious challenges, but many Americans felt their country was capable of dealing with them successfully.
Today, things feel very different. “From climate change to a medieval level of wealth disparity, what we face in this country is no longer a regulatory crisis,” says Alperovitz. “We face a systemic crisis. And if you begin there, you begin to wonder: Is capitalism itself in profound trouble?”
Alperovitz believes it is. The author of several books on the subject, including America Beyond Capitalism, and a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, he points to capitalism’s increasing dysfunction as the impetus for the rise of another economy, one built from the ground up by democratically owned organizations like cooperatives, community land trusts, and municipal institutions.
Orion editor Scott Gast spoke with Alperovitz after the publication of his most recent book, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution
What was democracy?
Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk write: If information technology turns out to have world-historical significance, it is not because of its economic promise, still less because it may facilitate the toppling of dictators. It is because information technology makes plain that the story democracies have told about themselves for more than two centuries has been a bluff.
Democracy, as we know it in the modern world, is based on a peculiar compromise. The word to which we pay such homage means the “rule of the people.” But insofar as we can claim to govern ourselves at all, we do so in a remarkably indirect way. Every few years, the citizens of modern democracies make their way to the polls to cast their votes for a limited set of candidates. Once they have acquitted themselves of this duty, their elected representatives take over. In the daily functioning of democracy, the public is marginal.
This is not what democracy once looked like. In ancient Athens, the citizens constituted at most one-fifth of the population—the rest were women, children, resident aliens and slaves. But those Athenians who did count as citizens had a direct voice in matters of justice and war. The idea that a people should meet in public to discuss what to do was not unique to the Greeks — several indigenous societies across the world deliberated in similar ways — but nothing approaching direct democracy has been tried on a mass scale in the modern world.
The American founders were adamant that it could not be otherwise. The body of the people, John Adams declared, “can never act, consult, or reason together, because they cannot march five hundred miles, nor spare the time, nor find a space to meet; and, therefore, the proposition, that they are the best keepers of their own liberties, is not true. They are the worst conceivable; they are no keepers at all.” Adams was dismissing one of the last gasps of the radical republican tradition—the Anti-Federalists, mostly composed of farmers and minor artisans in the colonies. Their arguments for making political life in America as local as possible were trumped by the founders’ superior propaganda and their vision of a republic that would encompass a much larger territory. Since then, for more than 200 years, almost every political thinker has conceded that the constraints of time and space make direct democracy impracticable. Even those who did not share the founders’ contempt for popular rule — Robespierre, Bolívar, Lenin — have acknowledged that representative institutions are unavoidable.
As long as direct democracy was impracticable within the confines of the modern territorial state, the claim that representative institutions constituted the truest form of self-government was just about plausible. But now, in the early twenty-first century, the claim about direct democracy being impossible at the national level and beyond is no longer credible. As the constraints of time and space have eroded, the ubiquitous assumption that we live in a democracy seems very far from reality. [Continue reading…]
Resistance to climate change is killing the government’s ability to use science
Michael White writes: We’ve invested heavily in research institutions in order to understand the risks of climate change; those institutions are now telling us the situation is dire. But rather than use these assessments to develop evidence-guided policies to address the urgent challenges identified, our elected officials are attempting to kill the messenger by attacking the resources and the credibility of those institutions.
Two weeks ago the U.S. House Appropriations Committee voted to pass an appropriations bill that singles out climate change research for cuts. In this bill, the NSF would get a total budget increase of 3.2 percent, well above the expected rate of inflation, but the NSF Geosciences Directorate, which funded one of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet studies, is deliberately excluded from this increase. NASA would be slated for a modest boost, but that would largely be targeted to planetary science programs focused on the Solar System, with offsetting cuts to earth science. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association budget would decline relative to inflation, and climate change research at the agency would get reduced by $36 million. The cuts to climate change research in this bill are in line with the spending priorities laid out last month by Paul Ryan and the House Budget Committee, and with earlier efforts to chip away at funding for climate change research. [Continue reading…]
The year of living more dangerously: Obama’s drone speech was a sham
Andrea J Prasow writes: A lot can happen in a year. And a lot can’t.
Twelve months ago today, Barack Obama gave a landmark national security speech in which he frankly acknowledged that the United States had at least in some cases compromised its values in the years since 9/11 – and offered his vision of a US national security policy more directly in line with “the freedoms and ideals that we defend.” It was widely praised as “a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America“.
Addressing an audience at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, the president pledged greater transparency about targeted killings, rededicated himself to closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and urged Congress to refine and ultimately repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which has been invoked to justify everything from military detention to drones strikes.
A year later, none of these promises have been met. Instead, drone strikes have continue (and likely killed and wounded civilians), 154 men remain detained at Guantanamo and the administration has taken no steps to roll back the AUMF. This is not the sort of change Obama promised. [Continue reading…]
How Ukrainian arms-dealing connects to Syria’s bloody civil war
Tim Fernholz reports: All the ingredients are there for a proper arms deal: A former government official with connections to the military-industrial complex. A stockpile of Soviet arms in Ukraine. Soldiers in Syria with a yen for ammo and cash to burn. The biggest problem? Getting the arms from eastern Europe to the battleground without alerting international authorities or tipping off your enemies.
The story isn’t about Russia or the United States. It’s about Russia and the United States.
This week, the Wall Street Journal shone a light (paywall) on one American’s thwarted effort to run guns into Syria for the anti-regime Free Syrian Army. Last fall, analysts at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) in Washington assembled public data to identify a network of businesses (pdf) in Ukraine and Russia at the heart of Russia’s efforts to arm the Syrian regime. The two stories have a lot in common, with a key difference being that Russia’s government is a lot more invested in arming its side of the conflict.
While weapons of all kinds have cropped up throughout the Syrian conflict, from the chemical weapons that made president Bashar Al-Assad an international pariah to homemade rockets, the rebels have two main problems: Getting enough rifles and ammunition to give them a basic infantry force, and—the bigger problem—countering the regime’s vast military advantage, especially as it has aircraft and the rebels don’t.
Many weapons in the conflict hail from the former eastern bloc, according to surveys of small arms in Syria (pdf) that are admittedly unscientific. There’s a reason for this: The Soviet Union cranked up a massive arms machine, and when it collapsed, the combination of chaos, weapons stockpiles and criminal entrepreneurship gave men like Viktor Bout and Leonard Minin careers as arms dealers. [Continue reading…]