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Midterm Anxieties |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=17265"><span class="small">Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 02 November 2014 13:40 |
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Talbot writes: "When does Ebola look like a gift? Apparently, when you are a Republican candidate for the Senate who sees it as a handy pretext for bringing up immigration politics while scaring people into voting for you."
Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia. (photo: AP)
Midterm Anxieties
By Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
02 November 14
 hen does Ebola look like a gift? Apparently, when you are a Republican candidate for the Senate who sees it as a handy pretext for bringing up immigration politics while scaring people into voting for you. Thom Tillis, in a campaign debate in North Carolina with Senator Kay Hagan, put it this way: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got an Ebola outbreak. We have bad actors that can come across the border. We need to seal the border.” In New Hampshire, Scott Brown started off by conjuring up ISIS fighters slipping through spongy borders, then casually switched to Ebola-sickened hordes. “One of the reasons why I have been so adamant about closing our border,” he said, “is because if people are coming through normal channels—can you imagine what they can do through a porous border?” Both ISIS and Ebola provoke enough anxiety for most people to contemplate them without being goaded. There are, however, no reported instances of Ebola-infected immigrants crossing illegally from Mexico, and, with ISIS fighters busy in Iraq and Syria, it’s possible but not likely that they’re hanging out in Ciudad Juárez, planning a raid on Arizona, as Representative Trent Franks maintains. But, as Franks and his fellow-Republicans demonstrated, you don’t need to construct a plausible or even a coherent scenario to deploy such threats for political ends.
The Democrats were not entirely immune from such temptation. Campaign ads and a few candidates—including Senator Mark Udall, of Colorado—implied that Ebola surveillance would have been better coördinated if the Republicans hadn’t managed to cut the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That apportionment of blame wasn’t strictly accurate. Funding for the N.I.H. and the C.D.C. hasn’t always kept pace with inflation in recent years, but, in some budgets, Congress allocated them more money than the Obama Administration had requested. Still, at least such tactics centered on the agencies responsible, and didn’t engage in the old practice of conflating disease and foreignness.
The medical historian Howard Markel notes that “Chinese immigrants were once linked to bubonic plague and hookworm, Mexicans were thought to be infested with lice, and Russian Jews were seen as somehow especially vulnerable to tuberculosis and—a favorite wastebasket diagnosis of nativists in the early 1900s—‘poor physique.’ ” Taking advantage of such associations, which were almost never based on legitimate science, nativists helped pass the Immigration Act of 1924, the racist law that imposed quotas on the basis of national origin—Asians were completely excluded—and governed U.S. immigration until 1965. Senator Patrick McCarran, of Nevada, a co-sponsor of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which, among other provisions, made it easier to bar immigrants who had chronic diseases, offered a metaphor that made explicit immigration law’s preoccupation with purity. Immigration was a stream, he said, adding that if it “is healthy, the impact on our society is salutary; but if that stream is polluted our institutions and our way of life become infected.”
Politicians now know better than to talk openly about immigration in terms of purity and contagion, but they still make the connection. This summer, as unaccompanied minors from Central America began arriving in large numbers at the border, Representative Phil Gingrey, of Georgia—a doctor, as it happens—wrote a letter to the C.D.C. in which he said that the influx “poses many risks, including grave public health threats,” and claimed that many of the children lacked basic vaccinations such as those for measles. In fact, the vaccination rates for measles in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico are around ninety per cent, which means that children from those countries are about as likely to be vaccinated as children in the United States are. Undoubtedly, some of the kids were sick, or suffering from malnutrition and other ailments associated with poverty, but they were not an invading army of germ warriors.
President Obama tried to keep immigration politics out of the midterm elections; in September, the Washington Post reported that he had decided not to take the executive action on immigration reform which he had promised—protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation—until after the midterms, “acquiescing to Democrats’ fears that such a move would damage their prospects for maintaining control of the U.S. Senate.” Meanwhile, the Administration announced plans to build an enormous detention camp for women and children who enter the country from Mexico without documentation. It will be situated in South Texas and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company with a controversial record. In 2009, the Administration stopped housing families in a similar facility that the company ran in Texas, the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, following widespread criticism and a lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. which asserted that harsh, prisonlike conditions were harming the mental health of the children held there. Federal immigration officials found many “deficiencies,” including inadequate sanitation and an over-all attitude of “disinterest and complacency.” But somehow we’re back in a political moment when the privately contracted detention of children seems like good immigration policy.
While fears of Ebola—a disease from which one person in the United States has died—clouded the campaign like one of those imaginary miasmas to which doctors once attributed illness, real dangers seemed to slip from view. The latest school shooting, on October 24th, in Washington State, generated almost no discussion on the campaign trail, especially not of gun control. Just a week earlier, researchers affiliated with the Harvard School of Public Health had published findings showing that mass shootings in the United States—those in which the shooter did not generally know the victims, and in which at least four people were killed—have tripled since 2011. Over the past three years, a mass shooting has occurred, on average, every sixty-four days; over the previous twenty-nine years, one occurred every two hundred days. Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman, who became a gun-control advocate after she was wounded in a shooting in which six people died, toured the country in the run-up to the elections, calling for tighter legislation in order to help save lives. Not a single candidate joined her.
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Deceptions of the FBI |
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Sunday, 02 November 2014 13:38 |
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Excerpt: "The F.B.I. has a history of pushing the limits that protect Americans’ civil liberties. And it has continued to broaden agents’ investigative powers in troubling ways."
(photo: Michael Sohn/AP)
ALSO SEE: The FBI Was So Hapless Hunting a Teen Kid,
It Had To Pretend to Be From a Newspaper
Deceptions of the FBI
The New York Times | Editorial
02 November 14
 f your Internet service goes down and you call a technician, can you be certain that the person who arrives at your door is actually there to restore service? What if he is a law enforcement agent in disguise who has disabled the service so he can enter your home to look around for evidence of a crime?
Americans should not have to worry about scenarios like this, but F.B.I. agents used this ruse during a gambling investigation in Las Vegas in July. Most disturbing of all, the Justice Department is now defending the agents’ actions in court.
During the 2014 World Cup, the agents suspected that an illegal gambling ring was operating out of several hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, but they apparently did not have enough evidence to get a court-issued warrant. So they enlisted the hotel’s assistance in shutting off the Internet to those rooms, prompting the rooms’ occupants to call for help. Undercover agents disguised as repairmen appeared at the door, and the occupants let them in. While pretending to fix the service, the agents saw men watching soccer matches and looking at betting odds on their computers.
READ MORE
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How Will Women Voters Use Their Power This Election? |
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Sunday, 02 November 2014 13:29 |
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Friedman writes: "When it comes to women voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections, the metaphors are all mixed up. In some headlines, it’s a war."
(photo: Corbis)
ALSO SEE: Why America Elects So Few Women
How Will Women Voters Use Their Power This Election?
By Ann Friedman, New York Magazine
02 November 14
hen it comes to women voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections, the metaphors are all mixed up. In some headlines, it’s a war. Democrats are still referencing the Republican “war on women,” while GOP candidates say there’s no war at all — it was all a liberal meme. In other headlines, it’s a political dating game. “Women are big this election season,” wrote New York Times columnist Gail Collins last week. “No group is more courted. It’s great!”
So which is it: a battle or a courtship? It’s both. The election has started to feel like a bar fight between two entitled dudes over a woman — it might seem like they’re each trying to earn her attention, but in many ways it’s more about them. This is a strange political era, in which it’s finally cool for politicians of all stripes to claim they are pro-empowerment, but they don’t all feel obligated to follow through with the sorts of policies that would improve life for a majority of American women. Our votes have never been more coveted, but meaningful changes — mandatory family-leave policies or a $15 federal minimum wage — still seem like only distant possibilities.
The default way of appealing to women has lately hinged on highlighting (for Democrats) or ignoring (for Republicans) the extremely retrograde views of a handful of candidates. Even though women care about the full range of political and social issues, nothing motivates them at the polls quite like threats to their bodily autonomy. Last election cycle, Democrats pounced on Republican candidates’ anti-choice extremism and parlayed it into a record-breaking gender gap on Election Day. (Remember Todd Akin saying women’s bodies could just “shut down” unwanted sexual advances?) The GOP’s “war on women,” as Dems dubbed this and other gaffes, made it seem easy for women to choose a party — and critical for them to get out and vote. “The gender gap is smaller when Republicans don't make mistakes," Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women in Politics Institute at American University, told CNN.
This year, there have been far fewer mistakes. Republicans’ strategy has been about abortion, too — mostly attempting to distract women voters from the issue altogether. They’ve made superficial pleas for women to “break up” with Obama, a metaphor expertly skewered by Kristen Schaal on The Daily Show earlier this month. They’ve been promoting female candidates with noun-heavy non-slogans like “Mother. Soldier. Independent leader.” They’ve run ads featuring gay sons and reassuring lady-doctors. And, not surprisingly, they’ve trotted out the argument that “all issues are women’s issues,” which mostly amounts to peppy talk about women-owned businesses. “Women care as much as anyone about economic empowerment, pocketbook issues,” said Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, the Republican who is running against Wendy Davis, and ahead of her in some polls of women voters.
In some ways, Abbott is right. What constitutes a “women’s issue” has never been murkier. “We’re being allowed to be just as vast and messy and complicated as men have always been allowed to be,” says a young woman in a Planned Parenthood–produced get-out-the-vote video featuring Lena Dunham and her fans. In it, young women call for action on classic feminist issues like reproductive justice and pay equality, but also family-oriented immigration policies, prison reform, and a higher minimum wage. These are the sorts of issues that are rarely trotted out in ads targeting women voters.
It pains me to say that it’s up to women to make sure the bar fight is about us and what we want. Women’s coveted-voter status means we’re in a great position to demand action on all of the issues we care about. The first step is for us to turn out in droves in midterm elections (like Tuesday’s), especially because there isn’t a GOP “rape caucus” on the ballot. While reproductive choice is obviously a fundamental right, it’s on us to demand that a pro-woman platform address other issues, too. And that those issues are just as important to us.
One experiment in organizing women voters to collectively demand better is the Women’s Equality Party in New York State, which allows voters to vote for a major-party candidate while also “cross-endorsing” the platform of a smaller political party. The newly formed WEP says it offers voters “a real chance to make history, and codify in votes and laws that women deserve to be treated equally.” Its main issues are abortion rights and equal pay, which, along with references to Seneca Falls and a prominent endorsement from Gloria Steinem, give it a distinctly second-wave flavor. And it’s controversial — some feminists have charged the WEP with siphoning off votes from the longer-established progressive Working Families Party — in other words, using women’s interests as a convenient cover for old-fashioned political maneuvering.
Now that everyone claims to be fighting on behalf of women, it’s become more difficult to know whom to go home with. But the only way beyond the pandering is to get more involved, not to tune it out. The new challenge for women voters is to demand, with the same fervor we feel when we read offensive quotes about our reproductive rights, that pandering politicians actually address all of our issues. Because going home alone to eat Cheez-Its in our underwear is not an option.
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FOCUS | Only One Thing Will Make Israel Change Course |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=22251"><span class="small">Noam Chomsky, The Noam Chomsky Website</span></a>
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Sunday, 02 November 2014 12:26 |
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Chomsky writes: "The agreement calls for an end to military action by Israel and Hamas as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years. This is, however, just the most recent of a series of cease-fire agreements reached after each of Israel's periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza."
Prof. Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and activist. (photo: Va Shiva)
Only One Thing Will Make Israel Change Course
By Noam Chomsky, The Noam Chomsky Website
02 November 14
 n August 26, Israel and the Palestinian Authority both accepted a cease-fire agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind.
The agreement calls for an end to military action by Israel and Hamas as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.
This is, however, just the most recent of a series of cease-fire agreements reached after each of Israel's periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza.
Since November 2005 the terms of these agreements have remained essentially the same. The regular pattern is for Israel to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it -- as Israel has conceded -- until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality.
These escalations are called "mowing the lawn" in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as "removing the topsoil" by a senior U.S. military officer, quoted in Al Jazeera America.
The first of this series was the Agreement on Movement and Access between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November 2005.
It called for a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the transit of people; crossings between Israel and Gaza for goods and people; the reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank; bus and truck convoys between the West Bank and Gaza; the building of a seaport in Gaza; and the reopening of the airport in Gaza that Israeli bombing had demolished.
That agreement was reached shortly after Israel withdrew its settlers and military forces from Gaza. The motive for the disengagement was explained by Dov Weisglass, a confidant of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was in charge of negotiating and implementing it.
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process," Weisglass told Haaretz. "And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," Weisglass added. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
This pattern has continued to the present: through Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 to Pillar of Defense in 2012 to this summer's Protective Edge, the most extreme exercise in mowing the lawn -- so far.
For more than 20 years, Israel has been committed to separating Gaza from the West Bank in violation of the Oslo Accords it signed in 1993, which declare Gaza and the West Bank to be an inseparable territorial unity.
A look at a map explains the rationale. Separated from Gaza, any West Bank enclaves left to Palestinians have no access to the outside world. They are contained by two hostile powers, Israel and Jordan, both close U.S. allies -- and contrary to illusions, the U.S. is very far from a neutral "honest broker."
Furthermore, Israel has been systematically taking over the Jordan Valley, driving out Palestinians, establishing settlements, sinking wells and otherwise ensuring that the region -- about one-third of the West Bank, with much of its arable land -- will ultimately be integrated into Israel along with the other regions being taken over.
The remaining Palestinian cantons will be completely imprisoned. Unification with Gaza would interfere with these plans, which trace back to the early days of the occupation and have had steady support from the major Israeli political blocs.
Israel might feel that its takeover of Palestinian territory in the West Bank has proceeded so far that there is little to fear from some limited form of autonomy for the enclaves that remain to Palestinians.
There is also some truth to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's observation: "Many elements in the region understand today that, in the struggle in which they are threatened, Israel is not an enemy but a partner." Presumably he was alluding to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates.
Israel's leading diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar adds, however, that "all those 'many elements in the region' also understand that there is no brave and comprehensive diplomatic move on the horizon without an agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and a just, agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem."
That is not on Israel's agenda, he points out, and is in fact in direct conflict with the 1999 electoral program of the governing Likud coalition, never rescinded, which "flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River."
Some knowledgeable Israeli commentators, notably columnist Danny Rubinstein, believe that Israel is poised to reverse course and relax its stranglehold on Gaza.
We'll see.
The record of these past years suggests otherwise and the first signs are not auspicious. As Operation Protective Edge ended, Israel announced its largest appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years, almost 1,000 acres.
It is commonly claimed on all sides that, if the two-state settlement is dead as a result of Israel's takeover of Palestinian lands, then the outcome will be one state west of the Jordan.
Some Palestinians welcome this outcome, anticipating that they can then engage in a fight for equal rights modeled on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Many Israeli commentators warn that the resulting "demographic problem" of more Arab than Jewish births and diminishing Jewish immigration will undermine their hope for a "democratic Jewish state."
But these widespread beliefs are dubious.
The realistic alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will continue to carry forward the plans it has been implementing for years: taking over whatever is of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian population concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas that it is absorbing. That should avoid the dreaded "demographic problem."
The areas being taken over include a vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem, the area within the illegal separation wall, corridors cutting through the regions to the east and probably the Jordan Valley.
Gaza will likely remain under its usual harsh siege, separated from the West Bank. And the Syrian Golan Heights -- like Jerusalem, annexed in violation of Security Council orders -- will quietly become part of Greater Israel. In the meantime, West Bank Palestinians will be contained in unviable cantons, with special accommodation for elites in standard neocolonial style.
For a century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily on the pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground, which the world was to ultimately come to accept. It has been a highly successful policy. There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic and ideological support.
For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change U.S. policies, not an idle dream by any means.
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very now and again,
