White House Wobbles on Egyptian Tightrope

Washington needs a friendly regime in Cairo more than it needs a democratic government

by Simon Tisdall

"in the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one. Whether the issue is Israel-Palestine, Hamas and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, security for Gulf oil supplies, Sudan, or the spread of Islamist fundamentalist ideas, Washington wants Egypt, the Arab world's most populous and influential country, in its corner. That's the political and geostrategic bottom line. In this sense, Egypt's demonstrators are not just fighting the regime. They are fighting Washington, too."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/29-2

Are We Witnessing the Start of a Global Revolution?

North Africa and the Global Political Awakening, Part 1

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

 

"To put it bluntly: in earlier times, it was easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people; today, it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.[1]"

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22963

Egypt at the tipping point? by Joel Beinin | The Middle East Channel

Egypt at the tipping point? by Joel Beinin | The Middle East Channel

Egypt’s Class Conflict

Egypt’s Class Conflict

Joshua Sperber: Another Professor Fired for Views on Middle East

Joshua Sperber: Another Professor Fired for Views on Middle East

Gramsci on Education

"The relationship between teacher and pupil is active and reciprocal so that every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher."
— Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, p. 350

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Pentagon, Inc. | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Pentagon, Inc. | TomDispatch

"With Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war’s supporters argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the commands of the state. Opponents of the war, especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise. They revived the distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state. Real patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral."

...

"The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays."

Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Tunisia
Christopher Alexander
Middle East Report, 205 (1997)
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer205/alex.htm 

The 'New Normal' of Unemployment

Published on Saturday, January 15, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
by Dean Baker

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/15-2

Tunisia: The First WikiLeaks Revolution?

Published on Saturday, January 15, 2011 by Foreign Policy

by Elizabeth Dickinson

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/01/15

Tunisia: People Power Succeeds Without Western Backing

by Emad Mekay

Published on Saturday, January 15, 2011 by the Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/01/15-0

 

Juan Cole on Lebanon

Another US Quagmire? Lebanon Government Falls

http://www.juancole.com/2011/01/another-us-quagmire-lebanon-government-falls.html

Juan Cole: The First Middle Eastern Revolution since 1979

The First Middle Eastern Revolution since 1979

http://www.juancole.com/2011/01/the-first-middle-eastern-revolution-since-1979.html 

Tunisia: Government of National Unity or Tanks in the Street?

http://www.juancole.com/2011/01/tunisia-government-of-national-unity-or-tanks-in-the-street.html 

 

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: On Tunisian Revolution vesus Iranian

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: On Tunisian Revolution vesus Iranian: "Some have sent me asking for reasons for my enthusiasm for the Tunisian Revolution and not for the so-called Green (Early Khumayni) Revoluti..."

Tomgram: Max Blumenthal, The Great Fear | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Max Blumenthal, The Great Fear | TomDispatch.

"By now, the Islamophobic crusade has gone beyond the right-wing pro-Israel activists, cyber-bigots, and ambitious hucksters who conceived it. It now belongs to leading Republican presidential candidates, top-rated cable news hosts, and crowds of Tea Party activists. As the fervor spreads, the crusaders are basking in the glory of what they accomplished. “I didn’t choose this moment,” Geller mused to the New York Times, “this moment chose me.” "

Pam Martens: The Tax-Payers' Tab: a Cool $9 Trillion

Pam Martens: The Tax-Payers' Tab: a Cool $9 Trillion

The Real Oil Problem
BY M. A. ADELMAN
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
REGULATION (SPRING 2004)

'DEPENDENCE ON OIL Price fixing by private companies on the
opecscale would not be tolerated in any industrial country. In
the United States, the officers of firms that engage in such activities
go to jail. But the opecmembers are sovereign states, subject
to no country’s laws. Moreover, the United States and other
nations want to think they have the opec nations’ support —
particularly the Saudis.

This alleged support consists in “access” to oil. But in a global
market filled with buyers and sellers, everyone has access.
Another myth is mutual obligation: The opec nations’ supply
oil, the United States protects them. In truth there is no
choice; we must protect the opec nations from outsiders or
neighbors. They owe us nothing for protection and will give
us nothing. Of course, opec will supply oil. The only question
is how much oil — and that determines the price. The supposed
opec (or Saudi) obligation to supply is what lawyers call
“void for vagueness.” But those in government crave assurance
that they are accomplishing something, and they will pay for
that assurance.
...

CONCLUSION
U.S. oil policies are based on fantasies not facts: gaps, shortages,
and surpluses. Those ideas are at the core of the Carter legislation,
and of the current Energy Bill. The Carter White House
also believed what the current Bush White House believes —
that, in the face of all evidence, they are getting binding assurance
of supply by opec, or by Saudi Arabia. That myth is part
of the larger myth that the world is running out of oil."

M. A. Adelman is professor of economics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He is the author of several books, including The Economics of Petroleum Supply:
Selected Papers 1962–1993 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993) and The Genie Out
of the Bottle: World Oil Since 1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). More recently,
he published “World Oil Production and Prices 1947-2000” in the Quarterly Review of
Economics and Finance (Vol. 42).

Warfare and corporate welfare

The Economist

Warfare and corporate welfare

Meet General Warbucks

"I think there much to be said for this, but there's got to be more to the story. America's drawn-out wars abroad are stupendously expensive. The stupendous expense of course attracts profit-seeking firms rather like sharks to blood. And the wars are so drawn out in part because, as Mr Fallows and Robert Gates suggest, there's nothing concrete at stake for most Americans. Like the hum of an air conditioner, after a while, one simply stops noticing the wars are there, much less that many billions of taxpayer dollars are thereby making some private citizens immensely rich."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/12/warfare_and_corporate_welfare?fsrc=scn%2Ffb%2Fwl%2Fbl%2Fwarbucks

Please, not again

Without boldness from Barack Obama there is a real risk of war in the Middle East

The United States, Israel and the Arabs

Dec 29th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

http://www.economist.com/node/17800151

Pentagon's Christmas Present: Largest Military Budget Since World War II

by Rick Rozoff

December 23, 2010

http://inteldaily.com/2010/12/pentagon%E2%80%99s-christmas-present-largest-military-budget-since-world-war-ii/ 

Rights, not righteousness

by Meredith Tax
guardian.co.uk,
20 December 2010

"Until the larger progressive movement either stops being afraid of the word or comes up with an alternative way of naming long-term social transformation, it will not be able to challenge the overwhelming dominance of capital in politics, business, the educational system and the culture as a whole.

Until then, there will be plenty of calls to build a new people's movement, but no ideological foundation on which to base one. This is because radical movements are not built on the basis of policy prescriptions. They are built on a transformational vision, like that of the Communist Manifesto. The reason the Manifesto was a call to action that lasted over 150 years was that it coupled an analysis of what was wrong with a vision of how things could be different. It even laid out a rudimentary pathway from one to the other. It spoke in the voice of prophecy. We need to be able to speak this way again."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/20/us-politics-gender

Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks

Slavoj Žižek

"The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks

Walden Bello: The Triumph of Austerity

Walden Bello: The Triumph of Austerity

CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Joseph Massad: Sectarianism and Its Discontents

Joseph Massad: Sectarianism and Its Discontents

THE CIA FILE
ON LUIS POSADA CARRILES

A FORMER AGENCY ASSET GOES ON TRIAL IN THE U.S

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 334

By Peter Kornbluh and Erin Maskell

Posted - January 11, 2011
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB334/index.htm

Paul Craig Roberts: Spinning Unemployment in a Collapsing Empire

Paul Craig Roberts: Spinning Unemployment in a Collapsing Empire

Ralph Nader: How the Left is Left Out

Ralph Nader: How the Left is Left Out

A Letter to the New York Times

How the Left is Left Out

By RALPH NADER

"The Repeal Amendment" (editorial, Dec. 27) asserts that many Americans who are economically struggling "have no progressive champion," and that the left has "ceded the field to the Tea Party and, in doing so, allowed it to make history."

Hello! There are plenty of distinguished progressive champions lobbying, rallying, exposing, suing and organizing at the national, state and local level. Yet they have been mostly left out of the mass media, on television and radio and in the news, feature, style, opinion and book review pages of major newspapers, including The Times.

Meanwhile, the Tea Partiers have seen their modest initiatives hugely magnified and therefore expanded by major media. This has mainstreamed the radical right, including Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Pamela Geller, as well as the most extreme neoconservatives who still receive media attention despite their deceptive, disastrous Iraq war-mongering.

Check your own pages and you will see the evidence. Or better yet, have your public editor look into why flagrant, often bigoted right-wingers are given so much time and space compared with fact-based progressive leaders committed to the "equality and welfare" that your editorial espouses.

After all, mass media coverage matters greatly for social and political movements.

Ralph Nader
Washington, DC

2011: Calling Time on Capitalism | Professor Richard D. Wolff

2011: Calling Time on Capitalism | Professor Richard D. Wolff

Mike Whitney: Why Washington Hates Hugo Chavez

Mike Whitney: Why Washington Hates Hugo Chavez

"In Chavez's Venezuela the basic needs of ordinary working people take precedent over the profiteering of cutthroat banksters. Is it any wonder why Washington hates him?"

Harry Targ: 50 Years Since Ike's Warning

Harry Targ: 50 Years Since Ike's Warning