Economist and Indypendent contributor Rick Wolff has a new post on how the banks, through the European Union, is forcing the Irish public to shoulder the losses generated by the capitalist class, namely the Irish banks and European banks. As Rick puts it, the austerity programs are presented as democratic, while the profits from the bailouts will flow, once more, to the wealthy and corporations.
Mom, Apple Pie and Islamophobia
The current nativist impulse is not new. The right’s anti-Muslim campaign is eerily similar to 19th-century anti- Catholic bigotry in America. Catholics here were subject to discrimination and violence because many didn’t speak English; religious practices such as confession, veneration of saints and transubstantiation seemed alien; many of their women (nuns) donned strange garb; and they were characterized as a fifth column loyal to a sinister foreign power, the Pope.
Likewise, Islamophobia goes back two centuries to Orientalism, which portrayed much of the world, particularly Arab and Islam, as barbaric and irrational in contrast to an enlightened West. More recently, American popular culture reacted to the Arab oil boycott in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 with the image of the despotic sheikh and fanatical mullah who prey upon a West enfeebled by secularism and liberalism. From there followed the “Worse Than Hitler” parade: Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The Islamophobia that sprouted after the Sept. 11 attacks was planted in this noxious soil. Curiously, it has taken nine years for Islamophobia to reach a fever pitch, at least in America (Europe was quicker to the game).
So why now?
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How Pot Friendly Parents Help Sink Legalization
This article, recently published on Alternet, examines one possible factor why Proposition 19, the proposal to legalize pot for personal consumption and cultivation, lost in California in November 2010.
Sifting through the failure of Proposition 19, supporters of legalizing marijuana can point to many factors for why it lost 54% to 46%: The fact that young voters, who reportedly supported legalization by a 40 percent margin, did not stampede to the polls; U.S.Attorney General Eric Holder’s threat to go after “individuals and organizations that possess, manufacture or distribute marijuana for recreational use, even if such activities are permitted under state law;” and California’s decriminalization, just one month before the vote, of possessing up to one ounce of weed.
Add to that the successful tarring of Prop 19 as a poorly worded measure that was vague on regulation and opponents hysterically warning of “potheads on the road” mowing down hundreds of innocents, and it’s easy to see why the measure fell short.
No doubt new legalization measures will be on the ballot in the future, whether in California or other Western states where acceptance of recreational usage is high. So it’s worth considering another reason that may have doomed Prop 19: cultural factors.
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The Victim That Is Israel
This article was originally published by Alternet and The Indypendent. It is an analysis of how the corporate media frames Israel as the victim, despite whatever crime it perpetrates. A version appears in the anthology, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara, published by OR Books. www.orbooks.com/our-books/midnight/
Amid the continuing fallout over the deadly confrontation aboard the Gaza aid ship, Mavi Marmara, there is a critical historical lesson: There is only one real victim, and that is Israel. Sure, the “small, isolated” nation may appear to have been the aggressor, having surrounded a humanitarian convoy in international waters with naval assault boats and helicopters before storming in with heavily armed elite forces killing and wounding dozens of civilians, but it was acting in self-defense.
Appearances are deceiving because understanding Israel’s eternal victimhood requires the proper mindset. And once you have the proper mindset, there is no need for facts. Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been hanging “around a lot of Israeli generals lately,” kindly advises us that there should be “no particular pain felt for the dead on the boat.” On the other hand, “There’s real pain in Israel…pain at the humiliation of the flotilla raid, pain on behalf of the injured soldiers, and pain that the geniuses who run this country could not figure out a way to outsmart a bunch of Turkish Islamists and their useful idiot fellow travelers.”
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How to Wreck the Economy
This article was written during Wall Street’s crash and burn in the fall of 2008, but it is as relevant as ever, explaining the intricacies of how the banking industry, the Fed and Washington inflated the housing bubble and then watched it implode.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression but were afraid to ask.
By Arun Gupta. Illustrations By Frank Reynoso
Max Fraad Wolff consulted on and Michelle Fawcett contributed to this article. Design By Anna Gold. Color By Irina Ivanova. This article relied on many sources, including “The Subprime Debacle” by Karl Beitel. Monthly Review, May 2008.
From 1982 to 2000, the U.S. stock market went on the longestbull run ever, as share prices rose to dizzying heights. In the late 1990s, a combination of factors, which included the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates, created a huge price bubble in Internet stocks. A speculative bubble occurs when price far outstrips the fundamental worth of the asset. Bubbles have occurred in everything from real estate, stocks and railroads to tulips, beanie babies and comic books. As with all bubbles, it took more and more money to make a return*. This led to the Internet bubble popping in March 2000.
*For instance, if you purchased 100 shares of Apple at $10 a share and it rose to $20, it cost $1,000 to make $1,000 profit (a 100 percent return), but if the shares were $100 each and rose to $110, it would cost $10,000 to make $1,000 profit (a 10 percent return — and the loss potential would be much greater, too.
Many Americans joined the stock mania literally in the last days and lost considerable wealth, and some, such as Enron employees, lost their life savings. When the stock market bubble erupted, turbulence rippled through the larger economy, causing investment and corporate spending to sink and unemployment to rise. Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, generating a shock wave of fear and a drop in consumer spending. Burned by the stock market, many people shifted to home purchases as a more secure way to build wealth.
Filed under Economy
Arun K. Gupta 