Jefferson23
Jefferson23's JournalThe Revolution That Wasn’t ( Hugh Roberts )
Western opinion has had difficulty working out what to think, or at any rate what to say, about Egypt. It now seems that the pedlars of hallucinations have been cowed and it is no longer fashionable to describe the events of 3 July in Cairo as a second revolution. But to describe them as a counter-revolution, while indisputably more accurate, presupposes that there was a revolution in the first place. The bulk of Western media commentary seems still to be wedded to this notion. That what the media called the Arab spring was a succession of revolutions became orthodoxy very quickly. Egypt was indispensable to the idea of an Arab spring and so it had to have had a revolution too.
In part this was wishful thinking. The daring young Egyptians who organised the remarkable demonstrations in Tahrir Square and elsewhere from 25 January 2011 onwards were certainly revolutionary in spirit and when their demand that Mubarak should go was granted they couldnt help thinking that what they had achieved was a revolution. They were of course encouraged in this by the enthusiastic reporting of the Western media, disoriented as they have been since the rise of the journalism of attachment during the Balkan wars. But it was also the result of the influence of accomplished fact. The events in Tunisia were certainly a revolution. The role of the Tunisian army was a very modest one, essentially that of refusing, in its moment of truth, to slaughter the demonstrators to save Ben Ali. The role of the Egyptian army in February 2011, however, was not modest; it only seemed to be. Where the Tunisian army showed itself to be a genuinely apolitical servant of the state, the Egyptian army struck an attitude of neutrality and even sympathy for the demonstrators that masked its commanders real outlook. That was good enough for reporters who couldnt tell the difference between appearances and realities. In outward form, both countries had had revolutions, and practically identical ones at that. So the Arab spring was up and running and the question was simply: Whos next?
To think about the recent appalling turn of events in Egypt in terms of an original revolution, with 25 January 2011 as the start of Year One, is to amputate the drama of the last two and half years from its historical roots, the story of what the Egyptian state became during the later stages of Hosni Mubaraks protracted presidency. This is not a simple affair. It is the story of what the Mubarak presidency signified for the Egyptian state, for its various components, especially the army, and for its form of government, but also of what it signified for the various types of opposition his rule provoked or allowed. All this combined in the gathering crisis of the state itself, a crisis that was building long before the revolution in Tunisia got underway.
Mubarak ruled Egypt for more than thirty years, longer than Nasser (18 years) and Sadat (11 years) put together, and he made clear his intention to remain in office until he died, while simultaneously giving the impression that he intended his son Gamal to succeed him. His reign was thus an instance of both the wider phenomena that Roger Owen discusses in exemplary depth: the rise of presidents for life in the Arab world and these leaders tendency or at least the temptation to try to secure the presidency for their families by instituting a dynastic succession. Mubarak concentrated power in the presidency to an arguably unprecedented degree, building on what Sadat had done but taking it much further.
remainder: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n17/hugh-roberts/the-revolution-that-wasnt
How an Insular Beltway Elite Makes Wars of Choice More Likely
The pressure on President Obama to intervene in Syria is hyped -- and the pressure to stay out of the conflict is unjustly ignored.
Conor Friedersdorf Aug 28 2013, 6:36 AM ET
Intervention in Syria is extremely, undeniably unpopular.
"Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria's government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed," Lesley Wroughton of Reuters reported August 24. "About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria's civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act." And if there were proof that Bashar al-Assad's forces used chemical weapons? Even then, just one in four Americans favors intervention.
The citizenry wants us to stay out of this conflict. And there is no legislative majority pushing for intervention. A declaration of war against Syria would almost certainly fail in Congress. Yet the consensus in the press is that President Obama faces tremendous pressure to intervene. In fact, the same Reuters reporter, Lesley Wroughton, co-bylined another piece last week that began:
With his international credibility seen increasingly on the line, President Barack Obama on Thursday faced growing calls at home and abroad for forceful action against the Syrian government over accusations it carried out a massive new deadly chemical weapons attack ...
If allegations of a large-scale chemical attack are verified -- Syria's government has denied them -- Obama will surely face calls to move more aggressively, possibly even with military force, in retaliation for repeated violations of U.S. "red lines." Obama's failure to confront Assad with the serious consequences he has long threatened would likely reinforce a global perception of a president preoccupied with domestic matters and unwilling to act decisively in the volatile Middle East, a picture already set by his mixed response to the crisis in Egypt.
Where is this pressure coming from? Strangely, that question doesn't even occur to a lot of news organizations. Take this CBS story. The very first sentence says, "The Obama administration faced new pressure Thursday to take action on Syria." New pressure from whom? The story proceeds as if it doesn't matter. How can readers judge how much weight the pressure should carry? Pressure from hundreds of thousands of citizens in the streets confers a certain degree of legitimacy. So does pressure from a just-passed House bill urging a certain course of action, or even unanimous pressure from all of the experts on a given subject.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/how-an-insular-beltway-elite-makes-wars-of-choice-more-likely/279116/
New Federal Rule Aims To Boost Disability Employment
** Going in the correct direction, good stuff.By Michelle Diament
August 28, 2013
The Obama administration is pressing forward with a plan to urge companies doing business with the federal government to dramatically increase the number of employees with disabilities in their ranks.
Under a final rule announced Tuesday, most federal contractors will be expected to ensure that people with disabilities account for at least 7 percent of workers within each job group at their companies. If businesses meet that threshold, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that it could mean as many as 585,000 jobs for people with disabilities within the first year.
The need is clear, said Patricia Shiu, director of the Labor Departments Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, calling the unemployment rate for people with disabilities unacceptably high.
The new rule would not establish a quota, but rather a goal that contractors would be expected to work toward. Firms with at least 50 employees and $50,000 in federal commitments would have to take specific steps with regard to recruitment, training, record keeping and policy dissemination much like they are already required to do to encourage workplace equality for women and members of minority groups in order to increase their employment of people with disabilities.
remainder: http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2013/08/28/new-rule-employment/18604/
Only a Peace Conference, Not Air Strikes, Can Stop Further Bloodshed
Governments in Washington, London and Paris should realise that in one respect the slaughter by chemical weapons of hundreds of people in Damascus on 21 August is an opportunity as well as a crime. It is an opportunity because the chemical weapons atrocity and the crisis it has provoked show that the Syrian civil war cannot be left to fester. The use of poison gas is the grossest sign, but not the only one, that the level of violence is spiralling out of control.
Patrick Cockburn
The Independent UK
August 26, 2013
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American, British and French air strikes by planes or missiles look probable in retaliation for the alleged use of poison gas by the Syrian army against people in rebel-held areas of Damascus. Controversy rages about whether or not this is the right thing to do, an argument coloured by memories of official mendacity over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2003 and Nato's destruction of Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2011 under the guise of a limited humanitarian operation.
What armed intervention by foreign powers in Syria will not do is bring an end to the present bloody stalemate in the two-and-a-half-year-old civil war. But governments in Washington, London and Paris should realise that in one respect the slaughter by chemical weapons of hundreds of people in Damascus on 21 August is an opportunity as well as a crime.
It is an opportunity because the chemical weapons atrocity and the crisis it has provoked show that the Syrian civil war cannot be left to fester. Previously, there was a shallow belief that, like the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990, the Syrian war was basically containable. This hope has ebbed over the past year as sectarian and ethnic violence in Syria has spread to Lebanon and Iraq. The use of poison gas is the grossest sign, but not the only one, that the level of violence is spiralling out of control inside Syria.
in full: http://portside.org/2013-08-26/only-peace-conference-not-air-strikes-can-stop-further-bloodshed
What if everything we’ve come to think of as American is predicated on freak coincidence?( R.Gordon)
And what if that coincidence has run its course?
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Published Jul 21, 2013
Picture this, arranged along a time line.
For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isnt to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve. All of the wars, literature, love affairs, and religious schisms, the schemes for empire-making and ocean-crossing and simple profit and freedom, the entire human theater of ambition and deceit and redemption took place on a scale too small to register, too minor to much improve the lot of ordinary human beings. In England before the middle of the eighteenth century, where industrialization first began, the pace of progress was so slow that it took 350 years for a family to double its standard of living. In Sweden, during a similar 200-year period, there was essentially no improvement at all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome.
Then two things happened that did matter, and they were so grand that they dwarfed everything that had come before and encompassed most everything that has come since: the first industrial revolution, beginning in 1750 or so in the north of England, and the second industrial revolution, beginning around 1870 and created mostly in this country. That the second industrial revolution happened just as the first had begun to dissipate was an incredible stroke of good luck. It meant that during the whole modern era from 1750 onwardwhich contains, not coincidentally, the full life span of the United Stateshuman well-being accelerated at a rate that could barely have been contemplated before. Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.
At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed.
If you are like most economistsuntil a couple of years ago, it was virtually all economistsyou are not greatly troubled by this story, which is, with some variation, the consensus long-arc view of economic history. The machinery of innovation, after all, is now more organized and sophisticated than it has ever been, human intelligence is more efficiently marshaled by spreading education and expanding global connectedness, and the examples of the Internet, and perhaps artificial intelligence, suggest that progress continues to be rapid.
But if you are prone to a more radical sense of what is possible, you might begin to follow a different line of thought. If nothing like the first and second industrial revolutions had ever happened before, what is to say that anything similar will happen again? Then, perhaps, the global economic slump that we have endured since 2008 might not merely be the consequence of the burst housing bubble, or financial entanglement and overreach, or the coming generational trauma of the retiring baby boomers, but instead a glimpse at a far broader change, the slow expiration of a historically singular event. Perhaps our fitful post-crisis recovery is no aberration. This line of thinking would make you an acolyte of a 72-year-old economist at Northwestern named Robert Gordon, and you would probably share his view that it would be crazy to expect something on the scale of the second industrial revolution to ever take place again.
Some things, Gordon says, and he says it often enough that it has become both a battle cry and a mantra, can happen only once.
in full: http://nymag.com/news/features/economic-growth-2013-7/
The G.O.P.’s Surveillance Judiciary
July 29, 2013, 11:36 am
by Scott Horton
In Fridays New York Times, Charlie Savage takes a closer look at the judges hand-picked by John Roberts for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.
Ten of the courts 11 judges all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; six once worked for the federal government. Since the chief justice began making assignments in 2005, 86 percent of his choices have been Republican appointees, and 50 percent have been former executive branch officials.
Not surprisingly, the Times review shows that Roberts has fashioned a court in his own image: movement conservative, Republican, largely consisting of persons who previously worked in the government. In sum, Roberts has picked a court that can be relied upon to quickly approve any government request for surveillance, through whatever instruments and according to whatever rules the government wishes.
The two chief justices who preceded Roberts, William H. Rehnquist and Warren E. Burger, were also conservative Republicans, and like Roberts they also ensured that a majority of the FISA courts judges were conservative Republicans. However, neither of his predecessors was nearly so obsessive about it as Roberts two-thirds of their selections were Republicans, while for Roberts, all but one have been Republican.
Equally consequential, to my mind, are the legal backgrounds of the judges selected. As Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, a career prosecutor, has explained, Judges who used to be executive-branch lawyers were more likely to share a get the bad guys mindset and defer to the Justice Department if executive-branch officials told them that new surveillance powers were justified.
in full: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/07/the-gops-surveillance-judiciary/
Obamas To Chair Special Olympics World Games
** Good stuffBy Shaun Heasley
July 31, 2013
The president and first lady will serve as honorary chairs when the Special Olympics World Games return to the United States in 2015, organizers say.
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will lend their support to the international competition when the summer games are held in Los Angeles in two years.
Michelle and I are so honored to serve as co-chairs of this inspiring event, the president said in a video statement released Tuesday announcing the couples new role. The athletes coming to these games represent the grit and determination that is at the very root of the American spirit. They keep working when the challenges seem greatest. They see opportunity where some see limitation.
The games scheduled for July 25 through August 2, 2015 are expected to draw some 7,000 athletes with disabilities from 170 countries around the world in addition to 500,000 spectators. Organizers say it will be the largest event held in Los Angeles since the city hosted the Olympic Games in 1984.
http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2013/07/31/obamas-special-olympics/18424/
on edit for link.
Subminimum Wage Plan Divides Disability Advocates
** What can I say, a constant struggle.By Michelle Diament
July 30, 2013 Text Size A A
Disability advocates are split over a proposal in the U.S. Senate that would establish limits on people with disabilities working for less than minimum wage.
The Senates Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is expected to take up a reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act on Wednesday. Within the proposed legislation is a plan to establish first-ever requirements that must be met before individuals with disabilities could be allowed to work for less than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.
Currently, many with disabilities leave high school and are referred directly to sheltered workshop environments. That would change under whats known as section 511 of the bill. Those with disabilities could only be placed in subminimum-wage jobs if they meet certain age-related requirements and while receiving job training services to prepare them for competitive employment. Whats more, individuals age 24 or younger would be required to pursue vocational rehabilitation services first.
I believe it is critically important that every young person with a disability have an opportunity to experience competitive, integrated employment as they transition from school to adult life, said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the bills chief sponsors, in a statement to Disability Scoop.
remainder: http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2013/07/30/subminimum-wage-divides/18409/
The Real Insider Threat ( Will the NSA’s surveillance program threaten the Atlantic Alliance? )
By Scott Horton
Since The Guardian began to serialize leaks by a former CIA contractor named Edward Snowden, the affair, as presented by American media, has taken on the familiar tropes of Hollywood cinema: one part Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, another part Tom Hanks in The Terminal, a smidgen of Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State. This drama may have peaked yesterday, when an aircraft carrying Bolivias president was forced to the ground in Europe as a result of what its ambassador to the United Nations claimed was intense pressure from American authorities, who were apparently driven wild with unfounded suspicion that Snowden might be aboard. The grounding was a flagrant violation of international law, and around the world today, it is being taken as evidence both of Americas pathological obsession with Snowden, and of its heavy-handedness.
Outside America, the story focuses on the NSA surveillance scandal and the substantive revelations that followed from the Snowden documents. But inside America, it is the Snowden scandal, and everything seems to revolve around his persona. We are treated to tales about his schooling, his family, his girlfriend, and endless speculation about his psychology as if any of this had some bearing on the credibility of the documents he revealed, when in fact it does not.
Its worth probing the American medias eccentric approach to the story. Certainly this can be traced to the prevalent tabloid style, which values personalities over facts and policy issues, but it also reveals the hand of a government, and an intelligence community, that has developed considerable skill in media management. The Snowden case, as it has been unfolded to the American public, bears a striking similarity to those of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Russell Tice, and Thomas Drake nameless government spokesmen identify the source of the leaks as an enemy of the state who has put lives at risk in wartime. The source is vilified, his character darkened, and he himself rather than the leaked materials is turned into the real story.
Just as the first Snowden documents were working their way into the press, McClatchy got its hands on a June 1, 2012, Pentagon memo that outlines the Insider Threat Program, a systematic-response program designed to help the government combat leaks related to national security. Curiously, the ITP targets not foreign enemies, but the American public. Treat the leaker as a spy and a vital threat to the country, the Pentagon counseled: Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States. The memo failed to take into account the possibility that a leaker might be motivated by a sense of civil duty, a concern about illegal, immoral, unethical conduct, a sense of corruption and incompetence that will continue unchecked unless disclosed to the public.
in full: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/07/the-real-insider-threat/
Scott Horton bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Horton_%28attorney%29
Obama Administration Looks To Improve Transition Outcomes
** Excellent beginning.By Michelle Diament
May 10, 2013
In an effort to identify better strategies to help young people with disabilities transition from school to work, a handful of federal agencies are seeking public input.
Starting Monday, the U.S. Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services as well as the Social Security Administration are kicking off a two-week so-called online dialogue.
The agencies are asking policymakers, educators, service providers, families and youth with disabilities themselves to share their thoughts through a Web interface on how to improve transition outcomes.
Federal officials say they hope to learn about regulatory and legislative barriers that young people with disabilities are facing in accessing employment, education, Social Security and health and human services. Ultimately, the input received on the website may help shape future policies and practices, they said.
in full: http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2013/05/10/obama-transition-outcomes/17926/
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