Iran Is Nearing Collapse Under the Strain of Covid-19 | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/world/iran-coronavirus-us-sanctions
Iran Is Nearing Collapse Under the Strain of Covid-19 | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/world/iran-coronavirus-us-sanctions
Paul Farmer on How We Tell the Story of a Pandemic | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/paul-farmer-fever-feuds-interview
PF: Anytime you write off a population or a group of people as beyond salvation, that’s often a marker of clinical nihilism. We see that here largely in the direction of poor people, people of color, and sometimes the elderly. We have a long history of not doing enough for people who can’t pay for care, and this is one of the scourges of fee-for-service medicine. How could it be otherwise?
The Long Roots of Endless War | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/united-states-of-war-david-vine-review
But it is, and it’s unsettling to reflect on just how long the country has been. Students who entered college this fall have lived their entire lives during the Global War on Terrorism and its successor campaigns. The decade before that saw American deployments in the Gulf War, the Balkan conflicts, Haiti, Macedonia, and Somalia. In fact, since 1945, when Washington cast itself as the global peacekeeper, war has been a way of life. Classifying military engagements can be tricky, but arguably there have been only two years in the past seven and a half decades—1977 and 1979—when the United States was not invading or fighting in some foreign country.
The question is why. Is it something deep-seated in the culture? Legislators in the pocket of the military-industrial complex? An out-of-control imperial presidency? Surely all have played a part. A revelatory new book by David Vine, The United States of War, names another crucial factor, one that is too often overlooked: military bases. Since its earliest years, the United States has operated bases in foreign lands. These have a way of inviting war, both by stoking resentment toward the United States and by encouraging US leaders to respond with force. As conflicts mount, the military builds more, leading to a vicious circle. Bases make wars, which make bases, and so on. Today, Washington controls some 750 bases in foreign countries and overseas territories.
Austin, Texas, Just Voted to End the Drug War | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/jose-garza-texas-drugs-election
“On day one, we will end the prosecution of low-level drug offenses here in Travis County,” announced district attorney candidate José Garza, at a February forum on criminal justice reform in Austin. “We will end the prosecution of possession and sale offenses of a gram or less.”
That may have sounded to some like a bold statement, but Garza argued it was the rational response to a “broken system.”
On Tuesday night, voters in the state capital of Texas and the surrounding county agreed. Garza, a former federal public defender, immigrant rights activist, and executive director of the Texas Workers Defense Project–Proyecto Defensa Laboral, swept to victory over Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore in a closely watched Democratic primary runoff election. And the successful challenger signaled that he is ready to act. “We know that 60-percent of all people arrested and charged with drug possession through traffic stops are people of color,” he told reporters. “So, it is time to end the war on drugs in this community to begin to unwind the racial disparities in our criminal justice system.”
Sur le sujet, une partie du passionnant documentaire 13th de Ava Duvernay :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/861494
#13th #Ava_Duvernay #USA #histoire #racisme #prison #esclavage #racisme #Black_Lives_Matter #documentaire
How the CIA Learned to Rock | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/wind-of-change-cia
The CIA had not just an ideology but also an aesthetic. The Cold War was a cultural struggle as well as a political one. To demonstrate the superiority of Western Civilization, and particularly to win over wavering European intellectuals who might be attracted to communism, the agency funded literary magazines like The Paris Review—founding editor Peter Matthiesson was on the CIA’s payroll as a spy—and sponsored exhibits of Abstract Expressionism. In the late 1970s, the journalist Richard Elman researched “the Aesthetics of the CIA” and found documents revealing that the agency seriously considered a suggestion that “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets be translated into Russian and dropped by airplane all over the Soviet Union.”
Instead, the agency even in the 1950s thought that America’s musical strength lay in popular work. In a 1955, Frank Wisner, then deputy director of plans, rejected the idea of sending the New York Ballet to Moscow. “Our initial presentations to Soviet audiences should aim for mass appeal,” Wisner argued. He wanted music that was “expressive of our folklore or unmistakably typical of U.S.” Wisner was particularly interested in works by “negro performers” that would display their “capacity” and “the opportunities they have in U.S. artistic life.” Wisner believed that “first-rate American jazz” would “serve to demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American musicianship.”
The story of the CIA’s love of popular music is brought up to date in a splendid podcast called Wind of Change, by New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. In the eight-episode series, Keefe investigates the rumor that CIA agents composed the ballad “Wind of Change,” first performed in 1989 by the German heavy metal group Scorpions and released the following year. The song was a huge hit on both sides of the Iron Curtain, becoming a kind of unofficial anthem for the end of communism.
The podcast is very much a detective story, and like all whodunits deserves to be left spoiler-free. But one of its strengths is that Keefe places his story fully in the context of the CIA’s history of arts patronage.
As Keefe observes, “We think of culture—or we want to think of culture—as organic and spontaneous, as purer than politics. Nina Simone clearly did. She felt it gave her a deep connection to the people she met in Nigeria. So it is really unsettling to learn that the hidden hand of government was at work. It’s a feeling of dispossession, like someone picked your pocket.”
#CIA #Culture #Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Nina_Simone #Fred_Turner #Democratic_surround
There’s Only One Possible Conclusion: White America Likes Its Killer Cops | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/society/white-america-cops
The police work for white people, and they know it. White people know it too. Deep down, white people know exactly whom the police are supposed to “protect and serve,” and they damn well know it’s not black and brown people. We saw some video of that too, over the weekend. Amy Cooper was walking in Central Park with her dog. Her dog was off its leash, in violation of park rules and city ordinances. A bird-watcher, Christian Cooper, who happens to be black, asked her to follow the rules. Instead of just putting her dog on a leash, Amy decided to use Christian’s race against him. She first threatened to call the cops, and then did just that, claiming that an “African American man” was “threatening” her in the park.
The very instant that Amy Cooper felt she needed the support of institutionalized racism to get her through her morning, she knew exactly where to find it. She knew exactly whom to call. Amy Cooper was the one in violation of the rules. Yet there she was, calling the cops. No doubt, it wouldn’t have even occurred to her to call them to the scene of her lawlessness if not for the way cops tend to harass, jail, and, yes, murder people who look like Christian Cooper. Or George Floyd. Or Eric Garner. Or Terence Crutcher. Or Alton Sterling. Or Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr. Or Amadou Diallo.
Extérieur nuit sur une highway étasunienne. Un policier demande à une conductrice de sortir de son véhicule. Celle-ci, apeurée, tarde à s’exécuter. Le policier se fait rassurant :
“But you’re not black. Remember we only kill black people”.
These People Aren’t Freedom Fighters—They’re Virus-Spreading Sociopaths
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/liberate-america-covid
I’m going to make a confession: I am half inclined to let the fringe Republicans agitating to “liberate” America go out and catch Covid-19 and die in whatever way seems best to them. Safely ensconced in my house, living under the protection of a Democratic governor, I am not required to care about maskless fools in Ohio, frosting the statehouse windows with their communicable diseases.
In related news: I’ve never once cared about a recreational mountain climber who goes missing halfway up Mount Killayadumass. You pays your money, you takes your chances.
And yet, I care about the sherpas. I care about the impoverished community of workers who make their living propping up the rugged individualist fantasies of richer people, and who sometimes die in the process of making the mountain-climbing economy work.
Bill Gates Gives to the Rich (Including Himself) | The Nation
►https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundation-philanthropy
Une sérieuse critique du système #FBMG entre #business et #charité
Bill Gates’s outsize charitable giving—$36 billion to date—has created a blinding halo effect around his philanthropic work, as many of the institutions best placed to scrutinize his foundation are now funded by Gates, including academic think tanks that churn out uncritical reviews of its charitable efforts and news outlets that praise its giving or pass on investigating its influence.
In the absence of outside scrutiny, this private foundation has had far-reaching effects on public policy, pushing privately run charter schools into states where courts and voters have rejected them, using earmarked funds to direct the World Health Organization to work on the foundation’s global health agenda, and subsidizing Merck’s and Bayer’s entry into developing countries. Gates, who routinely appears on the Forbes list of the world’s most powerful people, has proved that philanthropy can buy political influence.
#philanthropie #philanthrocapitalisme
Merci @fil