Last week an international tribunal ended an extensive investigation and trial into the torture allegations brought against the Bush administration. It concluded that the Bush torture team Addington, Yoo, Haynes, Bybee, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush is guilty of war crimes..
Most Americans heard nothing about this.
via Bush torture team found guilty – Steven Rockford – Open Salon.
The entire modern conservative movement consists of an ongoing attempt to sever the relationship of a self-governing people to their government, to break down the concept of a political commonwealth. Many of the conservative attempts to wedge people apart through the use of an Other to be feared and despised — whether that was black people, or empowered women, or immigrants, or gay people — have been framed to attack the government’s attempts to ameliorate discrimination against the groups in question. In modern conservative thought, then, and in the mindset it seeks to ingrain on the people of the country, the government is the ultimate Other.
In doing so, the corporate masters of the conservative movement are good with all of this because they seek a wary, frightened and insecure people. Those people are too cowed to make waves, too spooked to assert their rights as citizens, too confused to demand accountability. That huge local bank in the middle of your town is chopped up into office space. If any part of it is still a bank, it’s owned by a megabank based in New York, where things are being done to your money that you won’t even know about until the registered letters from the bank start showing up in the mail. Or maybe there isn’t a bank there at all. Just an ATM cut into the great sandstone wall of the place.
via The Post Office Is Not an Other. The Post Office Is Us. By Charles P. Pierce – Esquire.
For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.
Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.
The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.
Thsi is about Greece – but much of it could just as easily be about the US.
Were one to write a pre-election analysis in the glorious days of Greece’s ancien regime, one would most probably have to present and analyse the political positions of the main competing parties. Yet, this is one of the most outdated things one might want to do if one intends to say anything useful about Greece today. In fact, no-one expects to learn anything new from the traditionally televised debates among politicians (no doubt that this disillusionment should be regarded as one positive outcome of the “crisis”). Alas, there are still many hopes regarding the outcome of the elections.
The old anarchist slogan that inspired this article’s title has gained urgent actuality in Greece. Spray-painted with black and red letters on random walls throughout the urban landscape, its bold message stands in alarming contrast to the empty utterances by the talking heads now standing for election.
For a long time, the most insightful and inspiring quotes about the political situation in Greece have totally eclipsed the manifestos of technocrats and the reports of journalists. Hope and insights, endurance and critique, are more likely to be expressed through red and black graffiti than in the speeches made by experts.
The “Greek crisis” has had at least two side effects so far: it demonstrated that official politics has no vision whatsoever, and that mainstream journalism has no shame.
via If elections could change things, they’d be illegal – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.
A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.”
“Again?” someone said.
We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.
“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”
