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Cornel West: Gaza Is the Hood on Steroids, Thanks to Israel |
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Monday, 02 March 2015 09:02 |
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Excerpt: "There is no doubt in my mind that the Israeli occupation is ugly, it's vicious, it's brutal, and it needs to not just be brought to attention, it needs to be brought to an end."
Cornel West. (photo: BET)
Cornel West: Gaza Is the Hood on Steroids, Thanks to Israel
By David Palumbo-Liu, Salon
02 March 15
Cornel West speaks with a Stanford professor about the divestment effort and Palestinian activism
 ne of the fundamental questions with regard to the critique of — and activism against — the Israeli occupation: How does this connect up with other social movements, and other struggles? Is the case of Israel and Palestine so specific, so complex, as to resist analogy? And if so, what does that mean for those who would be inclined to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, but unable to see their way clear to act in solidarity with them, as they might for others?
These are pressing and difficult problems, yet increasingly, and especially on college campuses, and in academic organizations, people are willing to discuss and debate things like divestment, as well as academic and cultural boycotts that refuse to endorse the status quo. Indeed, earlier this month a group of 600 artists that included Ken Loach, Brian Eno, Khalid Abdalla and Haim Bresheeth announced they were endorsing a cultural boycott of Israel.
At a recent event at Stanford, where I am a professor of comparative literature, Cornel West paused in the midst of a speech to praise the student organizers who had put forward a bill to ask the Stanford trustees to divest; the bill had failed by only one vote. (And, on February 18, there would be a revote, in which the bill was passed, 10-4-1.) West made a point of insisting that raising the Palestinian flag should not be seen as an act of narrow nationalism, but rather as an act of solidarity with an oppressed people, and as part of the effort to grant them their right to self determination.
Afterwards, I spoke about how the issue of Israel-Palestine was registering not only with young people, but also with older progressives and intellectuals, and about the linkages between civil rights struggles in the US and abroad.
First of all, let me ask you: Why do you endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement? In what ways do the movement and its goals resonate with your longstanding activism, your values and principles?
Well I always proceed based on moral criteria and spiritual standards that have to do with keeping track of the humanity of persons. And there is no doubt in my mind that the Israeli occupation is ugly, it’s vicious, it’s brutal, and it needs to not just be brought to attention, it needs to be brought to an end. It’s also true that I am against the occupation of the Tibetan people and the occupation of Kashmir and others, but this particular occupation is one that deserves our attention precisely because as an American citizen my tax money is being used to perpetuate that ugly occupation.
Let me draw out a possible link between your anti-racist activism and your support of the Palestinian people. After Ferguson, a lot of people drew the parallel to Gaza. But as soon as they did, many others chimed in and said, “No, those cases are not at all the same and you can’t make that comparison.” And in fact when Angela Davis was invited to give the Martin Luther King, Jr. convocation for the city of Santa Cruz, Calif., recently, she got a lot of criticism for drawing out the parallels. What are your thoughts on that, how do you see making a legitimate case for the connection between Ferguson and Gaza?
Well first, in terms of the various kinds of Zionist critiques, we make it clear that this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Jewish hatred or anti-Jewish prejudice. This has to do with a moral and spiritual and political critique of occupation. Secondly, there is no doubt that Gaza is not just a “kind of” concentration camp, it is the hood on steroids. Now in the black community, located within the American empire, you do have forms of domination and subordination, forms of police surveillance and so forth, so that we are not making claims of identity, we are making claims of forms of domination that must be connected. And those are not the only two — we could talk about the Dalit people in India and the ways that their humanity is being lost and there are parallels there; we could talk about peasants in Mexico. So all of these are going to have similarities and dissimilarities. But there is no doubt that for the Ferguson moment in America and the anti-occupation moment in the Israel-Palestinian struggle there is a very important connection to make and I think we should continue to make it.
Well at one of our events today you called me a literary critic, but you’re a literary critic too—I’ve read some of your essays–so I want to ask you a question: How do we change the narrative around Israel-Palestine? How does that story change when one version is so ingrained in the American psyche — and it’s a particular narrative of the founding of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, and one that continues to justify the occupation and the colonial settler project of the state of Israel?
Well I am not the sophisticated literary critic you are, but I can say this: You can just look at the history of the divestment movement here at Stanford. You told me that two years ago when the student government voted on a divestment resolution, the vote was one “Yes,” seven “No,” and five abstentions. And just a few days ago when a similar divestment bill was presented, the vote was nine “Yes,” five “No,” and one abstention. The narrative is being changed and it’s only by means of voices — new stories and analysis, and bodies on the line, not just here but also across national boundaries — to shift the court of world opinion. And that’s precisely what is taking place. And of course at the center of it is the unbelievable courage of the Palestinian brothers and sisters against just overwhelming odds.
One last question: When you hear some people say, in the face of protest, agitation, critique, and civil disobedience, “we have to have peace, we need to obey the law,” like Obama did after the Ferguson verdict—you often have to think that it is precisely those whom the status quo serves, and in fact those who have the power to maintain the status quo in their favor, who are saying that we need to maintain peace (as they see it) at all cost. How do you move people out of their sense of privilege and entitlement?
Well first I think we have to be very clear that the call for the end of the vicious Israeli occupation is today a kind of litmus test for progressives, because you have sacrifice so much. There is no doubt that you will be called an anti-semite, that you will be called a chauvinist; there is no doubt you will be called someone who is downplaying the history of oppression of Jews. For so long, we have allowed not just the conservatives, not just the neo-liberals, but even progressive intellectuals to be silent when it comes to Palestinian peoples. So we have to call into question our own academic colleagues, we have to call into question our own fellow intellectuals.
And as a black intellectual it means I have to make the connection between the Obama apologists — who, as intellectuals, hide and conceal, not the silence, but the promotion of the military might that facilitates the killing of 500 Palestinian babies — with not one mumbling word being said by a President as the apologist intellectuals themselves don’t say a mumbling word. That needs to be shattered, that needs to be called into question. One can no longer say one is a serious progressive, let alone committed to moral integrity, without lifting one’s voice to call for an end to the Occupation of the Palestinian people. We have got to make that more and more a central part of our action.
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford University. Follow him on Twitter at @palumboliu.
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Greece's Win Against the Big Banks |
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Monday, 02 March 2015 09:00 |
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Krugman writes: "Greece came out of the negotiations pretty well, although the big fights are still to come."
Paul Krugman. (photo: NYT)
Greece's Win Against the Big Banks
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
02 March 15
 ast week, after much drama, the new Greek government reached a deal with its creditors. Earlier this week, the Greeks filled in some details on how they intend to meet the terms. So how did it go?
Well, if you were to believe many of the news reports and opinion pieces of the past few days, you’d think that it was a disaster — that it was a “surrender” on the part of Syriza, the new ruling coalition in Athens. Some factions within Syriza apparently think so, too. But it wasn’t. On the contrary, Greece came out of the negotiations pretty well, although the big fights are still to come. And by doing O.K., Greece has done the rest of Europe a favor.
To make sense of what happened, you need to understand that the main issue of contention involves just one number: the size of the Greek primary surplus, the difference between government revenues and government expenditures not counting interest on the debt. The primary surplus measures the resources that Greece is actually transferring to its creditors. Everything else, including the notional size of the debt — which is a more or less arbitrary number at this point, with little bearing on the amount anyone expects Greece to pay — matters only to the extent that it affects the primary surplus Greece is forced to run.
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People of Israel: You Should Know... |
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Sunday, 01 March 2015 15:15 |
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Reich writes: "People of Israel: You should know that the new-found alliance between your Prime Minister and our Republican Party, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and some wealthy right-wing Jews here (such as billionaire Sheldon Adelson), is poisoning the relationship between Israel and the United States."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
People of Israel: You Should Know...
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook
01 March 15
 f Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is entitled to speak to Congress and the American people on his disagreement with American foreign policy, a lowly former U.S. Secretary of Labor (who also happens to be Jewish) has every right to address the Israeli people on an issue over which he disagrees with official Israeli policy. (He doesn't have a formal way of communicating, so if you know any Israeli’s please forward to them the following message.)
People of Israel: You should know that the new-found alliance between your Prime Minister and our Republican Party, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and some wealthy right-wing Jews here (such as billionaire Sheldon Adelson), is poisoning the relationship between Israel and the United States. Netanyahu’s decision to address Congress on Tuesday to argue against a nuclear deal with Iran that’s one of the President’s highest priorities, and also to speak to Aipac – just two weeks before your own national elections – foists your own domestic politics onto ours. As such, it is having a polarizing effect here in the United States, pushing many Americans to side against Israel, and thereby posing a long-term threat to Israel’s security. Meanwhile, many American Jews who have refrained from speaking out against the right-wing radicalism that has taken hold in Israel – a radicalism that rejects a “two-state solution” and continues to build new settlements on the West Bank, and which we believe imperils the future of Israel - are now feeling emboldened to do so. Aipac does not speak for us. House Republicans do not speak for us. Billionaires do not speak for us. We have been silent for too long.
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A Cynical Challenge to the ACA |
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Sunday, 01 March 2015 15:12 |
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Toobin writes: "This week, the Court will hear arguments in a momentous case, King v. Burwell, a challenge to a central feature of the Affordable Care Act. But, in contrast to other landmarks in Supreme Court history, the King case is notable mostly for the cynicism at its heart. Instead of grandeur, there is a smallness about this lawsuit in every way except in the stakes riding on its outcome."
Supporters of President Barack Obama's health care law celebrate outside the Supreme Court. (photo: AP)
ALSO SEE: The Phony Legal Attack on Health Care
A Cynical Challenge to the A.C.A.
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
01 March 15
 he great Supreme Court cases turn on the majestic ambiguities embedded in the Constitution. It is not a simple thing to define and apply terms like “the freedom of speech,” or “equal protection of the laws,” much less explain how much process is “due.” Still, the Justices, in their best moments, have explicated these terms in ways that ennobled the lives of millions. This week, the Court will hear arguments in a momentous case, King v. Burwell, a challenge to a central feature of the Affordable Care Act. But, in contrast to other landmarks in Supreme Court history, the King case is notable mostly for the cynicism at its heart. Instead of grandeur, there is a smallness about this lawsuit in every way except in the stakes riding on its outcome.
Shortly after the A.C.A. passed, in 2010, a group of conservative lawyers met at a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, and scoured the nine-hundred-page text of the law, looking for grist for possible lawsuits. Michael Greve, a board member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian outfit funded by, among others, the Koch brothers, said, of the law, “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.” In time, lawyers hired by the C.E.I. discovered four words buried in Section 36B, which refers to the exchanges—now known as marketplaces—where people can buy health-insurance policies. The A.C.A. created federal tax subsidies for those earning less than a certain income to help pay for their premiums and other expenses, and, in describing who is eligible, Section 36B refers to exchanges “established by the State.” However, thirty-four states, most of them under Republican control, refused to create exchanges; for residents of such states, the law had established a federal exchange. But, according to the conjurings of the C.E.I. attorneys, the subsidies should be granted only to people who bought policies on the state exchanges, because of those four words in Section 36B. The lawyers recruited plaintiffs and filed a lawsuit; their goal is to revoke the subsidies provided to the roughly seven and a half million people who were left no choice by the states where they live but to buy on the federal exchange.
The claim borders on the frivolous. The plaintiffs can’t assert that the A.C.A. violates the Constitution, because the Justices narrowly upheld the validity of the law in 2012. Rather, the suit claims that the Obama Administration is violating the terms of its own law. But the A.C.A. never even suggests that customers on the federal exchange are ineligible for subsidies. In fact, there’s a provision that says that, if a state refuses to open an exchange, the federal government will “establish and operate such Exchange within the State.” The congressional debate over the A.C.A. included fifty-three meetings of the Senate Finance Committee and seven days of committee debates on amendments. The full Senate spent twenty-five consecutive days on it, the second-longest session ever on a single piece of legislation. There were similar marathons in the House. Yet no member of Congress ever suggested that the subsidies were available only on the state exchanges. This lawsuit is not an attempt to enforce the terms of the law; it’s an attempt to use what is at most a semantic infelicity to kill the law altogether.
During Obama’s remaining time in office, more challenges to his legacy, like the King case, will work their way through the courts. Even before Republicans took full control of Congress earlier this year, the legislative process had basically come to a halt; now, if the G.O.P. manages to pass laws in both houses, they will likely be met by Presidential vetoes. So Obama’s adversaries have taken their agenda to federal judges, who are nearly as politically polarized as the legislators in Congress. Last month, Republican officeholders in twenty-six states chose to bring a challenge to the President’s immigration plan before Judge Andrew S. Hanen, an outspoken conservative in Brownsville, Texas. On procedural rather than constitutional grounds, Hanen ordered a nationwide hold on the plan, which is a crucial element of the President’s program for his second term.
In a human sense as much as in a legal one, the stakes in King v. Burwell dwarf those of the immigration lawsuit and, indeed, most cases in the history of the Supreme Court. If the Justices rule for the plaintiffs, the seven and a half million people on the federal exchange who receive tax subsidies will lose them immediately, which means that most of them will also lose their insurance, because they can no longer afford it. Insurance companies will then likely raise rates for the remaining policyholders, many of whom would drop their coverage, leading to even higher rates, and so on; this sequence is known as the A.C.A. death spiral. A remarkable coalition of state officials, insurance companies, hospitals, physicians, and nurses—many among them less than friendly to the Obama Administration—have filed briefs in the case warning of the consequences if the subsidies are withdrawn. A brief written by the deans of nineteen leading schools of public health states with bracing directness that, if the plaintiffs win this case, nearly ten thousand Americans will die unnecessary deaths each year.
In a more civilized era—even the nineteen-nineties—Congress routinely passed technical fixes to major laws, in order to remove minor ambiguities, like the one that is arguably present in the A.C.A. For example, in 1999, with little controversy or notice, Congress made small changes in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, two years after its original passage. But that largeness of spirit has vanished from Congress, so it falls once again to the Supreme Court to determine the future of the A.C.A. The Justices all have well-developed views about the Constitution, and strong preferences about how our understanding of it should evolve. But their decision in the mean-spirited lawsuit that is King v. Burwell will reflect little on the interpretive schools to which they belong. The Court will have many more chances to define the Constitution for the ages. In this case, though, the Justices’ choice is a simple one: life or death.
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fter digging in for days, Rudy Giuliani finally wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed trying to roll back his attack on President Obama for insufficiently loving America. Chuck Todd called the media frenzy a "race to the bottom" for everyone involved and Mississippi governor 
