Solidarity with Kobanê
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/solidarity-with-kobane
« If Kobanê falls, the result will be an uncontrollable spiral of more wars and massacres across the whole of the region. History will note who is responsible for it. »
►http://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/101014/kobane-est-elle-seule
Rappelant l’expérience « exemplaire » du Kurdistan syrien, avec sa Charte de Rojava « qui parle de liberté, de justice, de dignité et de démocratie ; d’égalité et de recherche d’un équilibre écologique », le philosophe italien Sandro Mezzadra appelait, dans ce texte du 7 octobre, les Européens à aider d’urgence la ville de Kobané à résister à l’assaut de l’Etat islamique (EI).
▻http://revueperiode.net/author/sandro-mezzadra
Sandro Mezzadra est professeur associé de philosophie politique à l’université de Bologne. Ses recherches portent sur les ères de migration, la théorie postcoloniale, le capitalisme contemporain, l’opéraïsme et le marxiste autonome. Il a récemment publié, avec Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Duke University Press, 2013.
Michael Brown shooting and the crimes journalists choose as newsworthy | Columbia Journalism Review, Alexis Sobel Fitts, 28 août 2014 ▻http://www.cjr.org/minority_reports/michael_brown_ferguson_media.php?page=all
While charges of racial bias in the media have, at the moment, been limited to discussion of how Brown and other black victims are portrayed, broader issues of bias are revealed when looking at which crimes journalists choose as newsworthy. In a survey of broadcast news published Tuesday, Media Matters for America found that television coverage crime suspects’ race doesn’t match up to the raw data of who is actually arrested—black suspects receive disproportionate coverage for their alleged crimes.
Researchers for the group watched New York newscasts on WCBS, WNBC, WABC, and WNYW, counting the percentage of suspects revealed as African American, either by a photo aired on the newscast or a verbal description. Over a three-month period, the parade of potential perps were overwhelmingly black: Eighty percent of theft suspects were African American, as were 73 percent of assault suspects and 68 percent of murder suspects whose cases received airtime. But when Media Matters compared the numbers to arrest statistics from the NYPD, the racial breakdown showed a much lower percentage of black suspects. “African-American suspects were arrested in 54 percent of murders, 55 percent of thefts, and 49 percent of assaults,” they wrote.
The comparisons on the study weren’t perfect: Media Matters could only get aggregate data from the last four years of NYPD arrests, while they surveyed only three months of New York news. Still, the results fit into a longstanding pattern of the media covering black suspects more often—and often more harshly—than white suspects of similar crimes.
In a study of the Chicago broadcast media, a research team found that black defendants were more likely than defendants of other races to be shown through a mugshot rather than a personal picture or none at all. Another study of television coverage found black suspects are twice as likely as white suspects to be shown on camera under police restraint. While it’s difficult to pinpoint whether a particular suspect is being covered more harshly because of their race, taken in tandem this data points to a dangerous precedent: Black men are easily perceived as criminals, disproportionately to the rate they may be committing crimes.
#ferguson #médias #race #iftheygunnedmedown
Escaping the New #Honduras | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/escaping-the-new-honduras
Much media attention has been paid to the forced gang recruitment that pushes children to exit Honduras, but the economic and social factors that have helped swell the ranks of gangs have been largely overlooked. It’s an open secret that the post-coup governments of Hernández and fellow National Party predecessor Pepe Lobo have presided over an economic failure. Gains made by the Zelaya government pre-coup have been undone. Child poverty, previously trending downward, has jumped. Inequality has increased and is now the highest in the region. Unemployment has risen after Lobo cut social spending.
There are policies that can diminish the power of Central American drug cartels and gangs and which would abate some of the “push” factors driving people north, but they don’t involve the ramped-up military spending championed by members of Congress. A better, more humane approach would involve poverty reduction, anti-inequality measures, and policies that foster social inclusion.
Honduras, with US support, has been going down a very different path than that since the ouster of Manuel #Zelaya.
Anatomy of a War
Video of a forgotten tribunal against US crimes in Vietnam.
In 1966, two of Europe’s most distinguished philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, issued a call for a War Crimes Tribunal to try the United States for crimes against humanity in their conduct of the war in Vietnam. A number of us were sent to North Vietnam to observe and record the attacks on civilians. I spent six weeks under the bombs, an experience that shaped the rest of my life.
The tribunal convened in Stockholm in 1967. The jury members included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, Vladimir Dedijer, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, and David Dellinger, among others. The gathering was either ignored or denigrated by the mainstream media. The aim was not legal but moral. To bring the crimes to the notice of the public.
A year later Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai Massacre, one of many carried out by US troops in Vietnam. There was no video record of the tribunal until the emergence, a few years ago, of this film by a Swedish activist, Steffan Lamm. It should speak to us strongly today as we watch the crimes being committed in Gaza.
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/anatomy-of-a-war
#vidéo #guerre #Vietnam #My_Lai_Massacre #USA #Etats-Unis #crimes_de_guerre #Steffan_Lamm #crimes_contre_l'humanité
Universalizing Settler Liberty | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/the-legacies-of-settler-empire
Rana, an associate professor of law at Cornell University, argues that the American experience is best understood as one of “settler empire.” English colonists, along with their descendants, viewed society as grounded in an ideal of freedom that emphasized continuous popular mobilization and direct economic decision-making.
However, this ideal was politically bound to territorial conquest and to the dispossession and control of marginalized groups. These practices of liberty and subordination were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. Even today, he argues, the legacies of settler empire shape and sustain the twin dynamics of racial exclusion and economic exploitation.
The Logic of Israeli #Violence | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/the-logic-of-israeli-violence
... describing such violence as aimless misses the underlying logic of Israel’s conduct throughout Operation Protective Edge and, indeed, for much of its history.
As Darryl Li points out, “Since 2005, #Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in #colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.”
This strategy, Li goes on to argue, is one way that Israel is working to maintain a Jewish majority in the territories it controls so that it can continue to deny equal rights for the rest of the population.
The suppression of Palestinian resistance is crucial to the success of the Israeli experiment.
(...)
The ability of a group to tell their own stories about themselves is a key aspect of their autonomous existence. Impeding the capacity of Palestinians to undertake these practices is what Israel does when it destroys the home of the poet Othman Hussein and that of the artist Raed Issa; when it kills cameraman Khaled Reyadh Hamad in Shujaiya and a driver for Gaza’s Media 24 news agency named Hamdi Shihab; when it attacks Arabic-speaking journalists at al-Jazeera and the BBC; or when it destroys the building that’s home to the Sawt al-Watan radio station.
Undermining the ability of a people to educate their young, to train them for work, and to teach them to think critically is furthermore a way of stifling their independent existence. This is the implication of the 133 schools that have been hit.
While destroying cultural and educational institutions keeps a people from symbolically re-producing itself, Israel’s mass murder of 229 Palestinian children and injuring of 1,949 others is the most grotesque, most literal impediment to the capacity of Palestinians to continue to exist as a group in Palestine going forward. That is what it means for Israel to have put 194,000 children in need of psychological support. That is what it means for maternity care to be restricted “for an estimated 45,000 pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, of whom approximately 5,000 have been displaced.”
That is what it means to obstruct family life by destroying or severely damaging the homes of 3,695 families and creating conditions that render it virtually impossible to conduct the day-to-day activities constitutive of generational continuity, such as causing 1.2 million people to have “no or very limited access to water or sanitation services due to damage to the electricity system or lack of fuel to run generators.”
That is what it means for the number of displaced people in UNRWA shelters to be “approaching 10% of the entire population of Gaza, with approximately 170,461 in 82 schools” that are “without adequate water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure in place and without sufficient space.” That is what it means for all of Gaza’s 1.8 million people to be affected by the war.
Des Indiens d’Amérique aux Palestiniens de Palestine.
▻http://www.vacarme.org/article2666.html
Les opprimés peuvent changer, les oppressions perdurent. De mêmes rapports de domination peuvent se reproduire endossés par de nouveaux acteurs dans d’autres conditions technologiques et militaires. Oui, l’#antisémitisme existe encore, tout comme il existe encore des Indiens en Amérique. Oui, notre lutte contre l’antisémitisme ne peut s’arrêter qu’avec lui. Mais nous ne supportons pas que cette lutte devienne, d’éditorial en déclaration, du Figaro à Libération, le moyen de discréditer la résistance palestinienne et son soutien en France. Nous ne supportons pas que quelques faits isolés deviennent des phénomènes de société. Nous rappelons que brûler un drapeau israélien n’est pas nécessairement de l’antisémitisme. Brûler un drapeau est d’abord un geste anti-nationaliste et anti-impérialiste, un geste politique de libération.
The Palestinian #Resistance and Its Enemies | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/the-palestinian-resistance-and-its-enemies
Responding to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other resistance forces in the #Gaza Strip’s rejection of the so-called “ceasefire proposal,” Palestinian president Mahmoud #Abbas lamented, “The Palestinian factions’ refusal to deal with the Egyptian proposal for ceasefire with Israel has disappointed all of us.”
That ceasefire called for the end of rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip, but said nothing of the Israeli occupation, siege, and blockade from which those rockets were born. It was, in other words, not a ceasefire proposal at all. With his comments, Abbas, the leader of Fatah and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, distanced himself from the rest of the Palestinian factions.
Since the 2007 Hamas-Fatah conflict, the Palestinian political spectrum has polarized. Divisions between the two main factions are not merely geographical, institutional, ideological, or political. Most centrally, they run along the fault line of their conflicting agendas: resistance and anti-resistance.
Division is not new in Palestinian national politics. Political and ideological disagreements have been features of factional politics within the Palestinian national movement since its inception. However, during moments of resistance to intensified Israeli aggression, these fissures used to close up, to be replaced with a sense of unity and shared destiny.
Unfortunately, recent years have undermined this tendency. Resistance is no longer seen as a unifying umbrella under which Palestinian factions leave behind their disputes.
Western and Israeli media like to depict Abbas as a representative of the most moderate Palestinian political camp. But in the eyes of Palestinians, his hostility to the resistance makes him appear to be an unofficial spokesman of the Israeli government. That hostility is even more problematic given that he presides over a political trend that still presents itself as a “national liberation movement.”
Do libertarians care about freedom ?
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/the-limits-of-libertarianism
Consommation collaborative : posséder ou partager ?, par Martin Denoun et Geoffroy Valadon (octobre 2013) ►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2013/10/DENOUN/49720
Et si l’usage ne correspondait pas nécessairement à la propriété ?
Pour des trucs comme une tondeuse ou une perceuse, ça tombe sous le sens.
Against Sharing | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/against-sharing
There’s nothing innovative or new about this business model. #Uber is just capitalism, in its most naked form.
A Red with an FBI Badge
On reactionary novelist James Ellroy and his Underworld USA trilogy’s surprising treatment of communism and anticommunism.
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/a-red-with-an-fbi-badge
Are human rights activists today’s #warmongers ? - Opinion - The Boston Globe
By Stephen Kinzer | MAY 25, 2014
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/24/are-human-rights-activists-today-warmongers/gef04rpPxgEdCEdx4DQ87J/story.html
ALMOST EVERYONE likes the idea of human rights. The phrase itself is freighted with goodness. Supporting human rights is like supporting world peace.
The modern human rights movement began as a band of outsiders, fighting governments on behalf of the faceless and voiceless. President Jimmy Carter brought it into the American foreign policy establishment by naming an outspoken assistant secretary of state for human rights. This meant that concern for the poor, the brutalized, and the imprisoned would be heard in the highest councils of government.
Now, several decades after the human rights movement traded its outsider status for influence in Washington, it is clear that this has produced negative as well as positive results. The movement has become a global behemoth. Sometimes it functions as a handmaiden to the power it was once dedicated to combating.
The most appalling result of this process in the United States is that some human rights activists now regularly call for using force to resolve the world’s problems. At one time, “human rights” implied opposition to war. Now some of the most outspoken warmongers in Washington are self-proclaimed human rights advocates.
(...)
This is a radical development in the history of the human rights movement. Once it was generals, defense contractors, and chest-thumping politicians who saw war as the best solution to global problems. Now human rights activists play that role. Some seem to have given up on diplomacy and statecraft. Instead they promote the steady militarization of American foreign policy.
These trigger-happy human rights activists rotate in and out of government jobs. This month more than 100 scholars, activists, and Nobel Peace Prize winners protested against this revolving door in an open letter to #Human_Rights_Watch, which, thanks to an astonishing $100 million gift from the financier George Soros, has become king of the human rights hill.
Their letter says that, although Human Rights Watch claims to defend and protect human rights, its ties to the American military and security establishments “call into question its independence.” It names prominent Human Rights Watch figures who have served in the State Department and #CIA; condemns the group for supporting “the illegal practice of kidnapping and transferring terrorism suspects around the planet”; and asserts that it produces biased reports exaggerating human rights abuses in countries the United States dislikes, like #Venezuela, while being gentler to American allies like #Honduras.
“#HRW ’s close relationships with the US government suffuse such instances with the appearance of a conflict of interest,” the letter says.
(...)
The world needs fearless truth-tellers. Some human rights advocates are. Others have succumbed to the temptations of power. Their movement is in danger of losing its way.
#droits_humains #va-t-en_guerre #porte_tournante #pouvoir #caution_morale
Human Rights Watch’s Revolving Door | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/human-rights-watchs-revolving-door
Let’s pretend that we want to start an organization to defend the rights of people across the globe that has no affiliation to any government or corporate interest. Which of the following characters should we therefore exclude from intimate roles in our organization’s operation? (You may choose more than one answer.)
1. An individual who presided over a NATO bombing, including various civilian targets.
2. An individual who was formerly a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, a speechwriter for Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright and a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff who in 2009 declared that, under “limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for the illegal CIA rendition program that has seen an untold number of innocent people kidnapped and tortured.
3. A former US Ambassador to Colombia, who later lobbied on behalf of Newmont Mining and J.P. Morgan — two US firms whose track records of environmental destruction would suggest that human wellbeing falls below elite profit on their list of priorities.
4. A former CIA analyst.
If you answered “all of the above,” you’re one step ahead of Human Rights Watch, which has played institutional host not only to persons matching descriptions A–D but to many others with similar backgrounds.
#Javier_Solana, for example, was NATO secretary general during the 1999 assault on Yugoslavia, an event HRW itself described as entailing “violations of international humanitarian law.” Solana is now on the group’s Board of Directors.
Thomas #Piketty riposte aux critiques du « Financial Times »
▻http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2014/05/24/le-financial-times-fait-la-lecon-a-thomas-piketty_4425046_3234.html
Mis en cause par le Financial Times, l’économiste français Thomas Piketty a maintenu les conclusions de son ouvrage « Le Capital au XXIe siècle » sur l’accroissement des inégalités dans le monde. Dans son édition de samedi, le quotidien britannique épingle les erreurs de calcul commises par l’économiste, admiré par les milieux intellectuels américains. Son ouvrage monumental est devenu un véritable phénomène d’édition.
Publié en septembre aux éditions du Seuil en France, le livre s’était déjà vendu fin avril à plus de 200 000 exemplaires aux Etats-Unis et au Royaume-Uni alors que l’ouvrage n’était pas encore sorti dans les librairies britanniques. La presse parle même d’une véritable « Piketty-mania ».
L’article du Financial Times, journal des milieux d’affaires, critique durement le contenu du livre :
« Les données sous-tendant les 577 pages de la somme du professeur Piketty, qui a dominé la liste des meilleures ventes au cours des dernières semaines, contiennent une série d’erreurs qui ont faussé ses conclusions. »
LE FT ÉVOQUE DES ERREURS DE CALCUL
La thèse centrale de l’économiste français, selon laquelle les inégalités n’ont jamais été aussi fortes depuis les années qui ont précédé le premier conflit mondial en 1914, reposerait donc sur des calculs erronés :
« Dans ses feuilles de calcul, (...), il y a des erreurs de transcription à partir des sources originales et des formules incorrectes. (...) l apparaît également que certaines données sont sélectionnées ou construites sans source originale. »
Le FT va même jusqu’à évoquer les deux économistes de Harvard, Carmen Reinhart et Kenneth Rogoff, contraints l’an passé de publier une correction à leur étude controversée sur l’impact de la dette publique sur la croissance, après la mise au jour d’erreurs.
« Les données qu’on a sur les patrimoines sont imparfaites mais d’autres comme les déclarations de succession sont plus fiables. Je fais cela en toute transparence, je mets tout en ligne », a réagi samedi l’économiste interrogé par l’AFP. « Là où le Financial Times est malhonnête, c’est qu’il laisse entendre que cela change des choses aux conclusions alors que cela ne change rien. Des études plus récentes ne font que conforter mes conclusions, en utilisant des sources différentes », a-t-il ajouté.
LES ÉLOGES DE KRUGMAN
Reçu mi-avril à la Maison Blanche et au ministère américain des finances, M. Piketty a écumé colloques et conférences aux Etats-Unis et en Europe, afin de dénoncer l’extrême concentration des richesses et de plaider pour une plus forte taxation du capital via un impôt mondial. Dans l’article du Financial Times, il explique avoir utilisé « de nombreuses sources différentes » qui seront « enrichies dans le futur ». « Mais je serai surpris que cela change les données sur l’évolution à long-terme de la redistribution de la richesse », déclare le français.
S’il a pu être qualifié de nouveau marxisme, son imposant ouvrage (près de 1 000 pages dans l’édition française) a notamment reçu les éloges de Paul Krugman, Prix Nobel d’économie et influent chroniqueur du New York Times, qui a assuré que ce livre « changeait la manière de réfléchir sur la société et de faire de l’économie ».
Not Another Piketty Symposium, by Mike Beggs
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/not-another-piketty-symposium
Très bon :
Capital in the Twenty-First Century came out, and did not disappoint — least of all its publisher, Harvard’s Belknap Press. By now, reviews are so far past saturation point that the Washington Post wrote a ten-step guide to writing one: “Tour de force it up… Mention Alexis de Tocqueville… Don’t forget to use the term ‘unified theory’ or some variation of it… Talk about the footnotes…” Mention his literary references “in a way that shows you’re obviously familiar with them.”
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-write-a-thomas-piketty-think-piece-in-10-easy-steps/2014/04/28/a0a29b30-cb27-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html
How to write a Thomas Piketty think piece, in 10 easy steps
I know, it must feel like you’re the only person who hasn’t weighed in on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century.” Don’t worry: You, too, can join the Nobel laureates, Pulitzer winners and assorted big thinkers reviewing, analyzing and explainering Amazon’s top-selling book. Simply follow these 10 steps on how to write your very own Piketty review, just like the experts:
Blague à part, ça a l’air prometteur :
Our Piketty coverage will be appearing over the next three days. In my own contribution, I explore how Piketty brings capital and labor back to the center of the discussion of inequality. Seth Ackerman looks more deeply into the question of marginal productivity and the capital controversies. Finally, Suresh Naidu asks what Capital means for mainstream economics.
▻http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2014/06/04/stephen-colbert-enrage-contre-frenchy-thomas-piketty-252683
Le célèbre humoriste américain Stephen Colbert, dont le show parodie celui d’un chroniqueur ultraconservateur, a consacré une partie de son émission de lundi soir à un phénomène étourdissant : un livre d’économie, écrit par un Français, de 700 pages, plein de phrases compliquées, est en tête des ventes de livre aux Etats-Unis : « Le Capital au XXIe siècle ».
Colbert fait mine de fustiger Piketty, cette « fraude », qui « juché sur le sommet de la liste des best-sellers, cherche à détruire notre mode de vie », « ce professeur qui a séduit votre petite amie lors de son semestre passé à l’étranger ».
C’est le Harry Potter de la politique économique, dit-on. « Harry Potter et l’ennui mortel », ponctue Colbert.
« Harry Potter et l’ennui mortel », par Thomas Piketty
L’humoriste imagine un produit dérivé pour « Le Capital ». Il reprend, sur un T-shirt, l’un des constats que fait Piketty dans son livre pour expliquer l’explosion de la fortune des plus riches : r>g. Traduisez : la rentabilité du capital est supérieure à la croissance.
Colbert rebaptise Piketty « Pépé The Punitive Tax Rate » (« Pépé le taux d’impôt punitif ») en hommage à un personnage des dessins animés des Looney Tunes, le petit putois au fort accent français « Pepe le pew ».
« Pourquoi voulez-vous détruire le système économique occidental ? »
Il reçoit ensuite l’économiste français pour une interview. Elle commence fort :
« – Pourquoi voulez-vous détruire le système économique occidental pour le remplacer par une redistribution socialiste de la richesse ?
– Je ne suis pas en train d’essayer de faire ça voyez-vous, je …
– Votre accent prouve que si ! »
Beau compte-rendu critique de David Harvey : ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/266667
