|
FOCUS: Progressives Don't Break Up Over Tactics |
 |
|
Tuesday, 30 August 2016 10:08 |
|
Galindez writes: "Vote for whomever you want this November, then roll up your sleeves and fight for a Progressive agenda. No matter who becomes president, there is more that we agree on than what divides us."
Activists outside the US Capitol. (photo: Paulina Leonovich/Twitter)
Progressives Don't Break Up Over Tactics
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
30 August 16
 ote for whomever you want this November, then roll up your sleeves and fight for a Progressive agenda. No matter who becomes president, there is more that we agree on than what divides us. Set the political parties aside for a moment. We want to end poverty, we want save the planet, we want to get money out of politics, we want universal health care, we want public colleges and universities to be free, and we want to end racism and all forms of bigotry. Those are just some of the issues we need to fight for.
Let’s keep the issues out front and not break up over personalities and the dreaded divider of the left, tactics. We always disagree on tactics, and it keeps us from showing a united front. The launch of “Our Revolution” has not been pretty. Are we really going to split up over whom Bernie trusts to run the organization while he returns to the Senate?
Jeff Weaver is not Karl Rove. Weaver has not been known as someone who spends his time raising money from billionaires. Jeff Weaver does not have a history of representing Wall Street or the Democratic Party establishment.
Weaver was arrested after building a shantytown on Boston University and he sued the university when they prevented him from hanging banners calling for divestment from South Africa. Weaver ran for political office twice as an independent before working on Bernie’s campaigns and Congressional staff. I trust Bernie and Bernie trusts Jeff Weaver.
I don’t want to take sides. I still think we can all work together. I have watched many coalitions fall apart over tactics. We want the same thing; we just disagree on how to get there. I believe in diversity of tactics. Occupy fell apart over tactics. It always happens. Let’s make it different this time.
There is room for electoral politics, mass mobilizations, civil disobedience, democrats, Greens, and independents. We need social media, a ground game, a mass media campaign, a local and a national strategy. We need “Our Revolution,” Brand New Congress, independent media, candidates, activists and voters.
We need everyone. I have said it before and will say it again: Trust Bernie. He cares more about our movement than about his political career.
PRESS RELEASE: Our Revolution Announces Formation of Board
Our Revolution on Monday announced the formation of its board. The diverse coalition of eleven former elected officials, organizational leaders, and grassroots activists join the board to continue the work they started as volunteers and surrogates for Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, mobilizing progressives across the country to transform American politics.
“I am proud to join the board and continue volunteering for Our Revolution. Bernie’s transformative campaign was just the beginning,” said civil rights leader Ben Jealous. “We now have to follow through on our promises to help pass criminal justice reform, the $15 minimum wage and climate change legislation while stopping our endless wars and the TPP, and electing true progressives from the Deep South to the Northwest.”
“I am proud to continue this work with Our Revolution, because this is the work worth doing,” said former Ohio state senator Nina Turner. “We are focused on the mission of transforming our political landscape issue by issue and candidate by candidate. It is through our unity and engagement that we continue to tap into this awakened consciousness which has the power to transform our country for generations to come.”
“Some of us have spent years working for civil rights, against discrimination and hate crimes. Some of us have worked for workers’ rights, a fair economy, or protecting our environment. Some of us are immigrants, others born here,” said Board Chair Larry Cohen. “But we all have something in common: we want to protect human rights here in the United States and globally.”
“I’m incredibly excited to continue the work that Bernie and so many others started in order to further our shared progressive agenda,” said former Nevada assemblywoman Lucy Flores. “It’s truly an honor to work alongside the talented Our Revolution board and staff, who are as committed as I am to the future of our political movement.”
Full board list below:
Nina Turner
Fmr. Ohio State Senator
Deborah Parker
Native American Leader
Ben Jealous
Civil Rights Leader
Jim Hightower
Political Leader, National Radio Commentator & Writer
Jim Zogby
Arab American Human Rights Leader
Huck Gutman
Former Chief of Staff for Senator Bernie Sanders
Jane Kleeb
Environmental Activist
Lucy Flores
Fmr. Nevada Assemblywoman
Larry Cohen
Labor
Catalina Velasquez
Immigration, Reproductive Justice and Trans Queer Liberation Activist
Shailene Woodley
Actress and Environmental Activist
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
 |
|
After 525 Years, It's Time to Actually Listen to Native Americans |
|
|
Tuesday, 30 August 2016 08:10 |
|
McKibben writes: "If the Army Corps, or the Obama administration, simply said: 'You know what, you're right. We don't need to build this pipeline.' It would mean that after 525 years, someone had actually paid attention to the good sense that Native Americans have been offering almost from the start."
Dozens of tribal members from several Native American nations taking to horseback to protest against the proposed construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota. (photo: Megan Mitchell/NBC)
After 525 Years, It's Time to Actually Listen to Native Americans
By Bill McKibben, Grist
30 August 16
 he center of the fight for our planet’s future shifts. But this week it’s on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation straddling the border between North Dakota and South Dakota. There, tribal members have been, well, standing like a rock in the way of the planned Dakota Access Pipeline, a huge hose for collecting oil out of the Bakken shale and carrying it off to the Midwest and the Gulf where it can be made into gasoline.
The standoff has been picturesque and dramatic, featuring American Indians on horseback. But mostly it’s been brave and lonely, far from most journalists and up against the same forces that have made life hard for Indigenous Peoples for centuries.
The U.S. Army, for instance. It’s the Army Corps of Engineers that last month granted Energy Transfer Corporation the permit necessary to start construction near the reservation, despite a petition signed by 150,000 people, and carried—on foot—by young people from the reservation all the way to Washington. That would be the same U.S. Army that—well, google “Wounded Knee.” Or “Custer.” “Washita River.” “Pine Ridge.”
That’s not really ancient history, not any of it. It’s the reason that Native Americans live confined to bleak reservations in vast stretches of the country that no one thought were good for much of anything else. But those areas—ironically enough—now turn out to be essential for the production or transportation of the last great stocks of hydrocarbons, the ones whose combustion scientists tell us will take us over the edge of global warming.
And if former generations of the U.S. Army made it possible to grab land from Native people, then this largely civilian era of the Army Corps is making it easy to pollute and spoil what little we left them. As the corporation said over the weekend, it was “constructing this pipeline in accordance with applicable laws, and the local, state and federal permits and approvals we have received.”
But it’s not constructing it in accordance with the laws of physics. July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet, and likely, say scientists, the hottest month since the beginning of human civilization. And in any event, those “applicable laws, permits, and approvals” are merely the cover for the latest plunder.
A spill from this pipeline would pollute the Missouri River, just as spills in recent years have done irreparable damage to the Kalamazoo and Yellowstone rivers. And that river is both the spiritual and economic lifeblood of the Standing Rock Reservation, one of the poorest census tracts in the entire country.
Forget, for a minute, the threat to the reservation, and forget, for a minute, the endless history of unfairness. Think instead of what it might mean if the Army Corps, or the Obama administration, simply said: “You know what, you’re right. We don’t need to build this pipeline.”
It would mean that after 525 years, someone had actually paid attention to the good sense that Native Americans have been offering almost from the start. It’s not that American Indians are ecological saints—no human beings are. But as the first people who saw what Europeans did to a continent when given essentially free rein, they were the appalled witnesses to everything from the slaughter of the buffalo to the destruction of the great Pacific salmon runs.
And in recent years they have been the vanguard of the movement to slow down climate change. Why did the Keystone XL pipeline not get built? Above all because Indigenous Peoples on both sides of the border took the lead in a battle that stretched over a decade. Why did Canadian leaders fail in their efforts to replace it with the Northern Gateway pipeline? Because tribes and bands across the west of that country made it clear they could not be bought off. Why will the easiest-to-access deep-water port on the Pacific coast not be turned into the country’s biggest new coal export terminal? Because the Lummi Nation at Cherry Point joined with protesters across the region to say no. This same dynamic is at play around the world, where Indigenous Peoples from the Amazon to the coral atolls of the Pacific are doing more than anyone else to slow down the grinding destruction of our earth.
One has the ominous sense of grim history about to be reenacted at Standing Rock. North Dakota authorities—who are in essence a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry—have insisted that the Sioux are violent, that they have “pipe bombs.” There are rumors about calling in the National Guard. The possibility for renewed tragedy is very real.
But the possibility for a new outcome is there as well. The Army Corps of Engineers might back off. The president might decide, as he did with Keystone, that this pipeline would “exacerbate” climate change and hence should be reviewed more carefully. We might, after five centuries, actually listen to the only people who’ve ever successfully inhabited this continent for the long term.
|
|
|
When Billionaires Rule: How the Rich and Powerful Shape Our Media |
|
|
Tuesday, 30 August 2016 08:08 |
|
Pickard writes: "Throughout American history, wealthy elites have attempted to control the news - from Southern slaveholders and their allies trying to quell abolitionist journalism to press barons like William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick opposing FDR's New Deal. But the tactics used to undermine adversarial journalism in our digital age have grown more subtle and varied."
The New York Stock Exchange. (photo: Ben Hider/NYSE Euronext)
When Billionaires Rule: How the Rich and Powerful Shape Our Media
By Victor Pickard, Jacobin
30 August 16
The demise of Gawker shows that the greatest impediment to media democracy isn’t the state — it’s the rich and powerful.
 igns of a journalism crisis abound. The newspaper industry is in a downward spiral, and cable television offers little beyond campaign-driven commentary. Reporting that “afflicts the comfortable” can find little sustenance within the vast wasteland of American news media.
But Gawker seemed different. Along with a handful of other profitable (or somewhat sustainable) online news sites, it appeared to be an exemplar of a new kind of journalism — one that could skewer elites while reaping the fruits of digital advertising.
Of course, Gawker tended toward sensationalistic and tawdry coverage. But it was also capable of hard-hitting reporting, and its irreverence allowed it to offer sorely needed scrutiny of the powerful and famous. It inhabited a niche where at least some degree of independent journalism was possible (see, for instance, its exposure of the David Petraeus scandal).
Then along came Peter Thiel. A Silicon Valley libertarian billionaire, Thiel sought vengeance for an earlier piece in Gawker about his sexuality. He bankrolled a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan, forcing the outlet into bankruptcy and single-handedly blowing the Gawker model out of the water. As former Gawker features editor Tom Scocca succinctly put it, the news site folded simply because “one wealthy person maliciously set out to destroy it, spending millions of dollars in secret” — making clear, Scocca concluded, that there’s “no freedom in this world but power and money.”
Beyond such dystopian visions, the Gawker affair has exposed a number of pathologies in our media system and raised troubling questions about threats to press freedoms from the wealthy. More specifically, it has revealed the precarious state of American journalism and the economic forces that shape what can and can’t be published.
Ultimately, Gawker’s destruction is one more example of how our impoverished, commercially dependent news media cannot withstand the might of concentrated economic power. What happened to Gawker could conceivably happen to any media outlet. Journalism costs money; it needs considerable resources and institutional support to survive — and good journalism will inevitably anger the powerful.
Amid the sordid details of Gawker’s closure, it’s easy to miss this bigger story, one that portends a dark future of deferential journalism and unassailable power. Gawker’s destruction is symptomatic of larger shifts in American society, where billionaires and corporations determine what we can see and say in the media.
The Playthings of Billionaires
Throughout American history, wealthy elites have attempted to control the news — from Southern slaveholders and their allies trying to quell abolitionist journalism to press barons like William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick opposing FDR’s New Deal. But the tactics used to undermine adversarial journalism in our digital age have grown more subtle and varied.
These attacks coincide with an unprecedented structural crisis for journalism. As readers and advertisers have migrated to the web (where ads contribute pennies-to-the-dollar of traditional print ad revenue), the 150-year-old business model for American commercial journalism — one that’s overly dependent on advertising — has collapsed.
Making matters worse, online advertising revenue is largely going to Google and Facebook. As they become our primary news sources, these new digital gatekeepers and their algorithms increasingly determine what information society receives.
The newspaper industry, still the primary source for actual journalism, has lost over 40 percent of its news staff since its pre-recession peak in 2007. Its revenues have also been in freefall. Following a particularly bad year in 2015, the Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media report observed that “the industry may be past its point of no return.”
Rushing into the vacuum left by professional journalism are corporate “sponsored content” and billionaire-backed news, giving rise to a pay-to-play “payola society” in which America’s inequalities are increasingly inscribed into its media system. In this media landscape — marred by digital divides and invasive and deceptive forms of advertising — rich people and corporations can say what they want, but nearly everyone else is censored by market forces.
The financial weakness of the fourth estate renders it vulnerable to further capture from commercial and political interests. Despite the industry’s rapid devaluation in recent years, newspapers still hold significant political power, and they’re easy pickings for rich politicos with personal agendas. For example, the wealthy right-winger Sheldon Adelson purchased Nevada’s biggest paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to advance his business and political objectives.
While not all billionaires’ media ventures bolster the Right — eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s funding of The Intercept comes to mind — hoping the well-heeled will fund journalism that takes on fellow elites is not a systemic solution. The whims of the rich and powerful are unreliable parameters for the public discourse.
The fourth estate is meant to act as a countervailing force against concentrated power while fostering alternative visions for society. The commercial press has never lived up to these ideals, but in its current compromised state, it’s even less capable. And it’s likely to get worse.
Corporate Libertarianism
In the classical liberal conception, we need only worry about the state infringing on our First Amendment rights (“Congress shall make no law. . .”). This made more sense in the 1700s, when despotic governments were rightly feared and corporate power was not yet a major force. But in our age of hyper-inequality and lightly regulated monopolies, wealthy elites and corporations often pose a greater threat.
And there’s a vast apparatus that extends this power, with Gawker as Exhibit A: after years of so-called tort reform — abetted by a corporate propaganda campaign — Thiel was able to exploit legal instruments and unlimited funds to drive a media outlet he found offensive into the ground.
More broadly, the First Amendment is increasingly deployed both as a shield against threats to capital and a sword against regulatory incursions. The most famous “money = speech” case in recent years is Citizens United, but this insidious logic is informing various legal discourses that use the First Amendment to advance the power of moneyed interests.
This corporate libertarian paradigm invites a Hobbesian war of all against all, with the wealthy and corporations much better armed than others. We’ve seen this vision hinted at in Donald Trump’s rhetoric when he says he wants to “open up” libel law “so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
While the influences undermining news media are typically more economic than legal, they lead to similar power relationships, with money the driving force.
Beyond Gawker
Any progressive agenda worth the name must fight for an adversarial news media that provides accurate information about social problems, challenges powerful interests, and opens up a forum for unpopular and under-represented voices and viewpoints.
The US media system both reflects societal inequalities and helps perpetuate them. But given the right structural conditions, journalism can also be a force for social justice. While unhooking media from profit imperatives and commercial pressures isn’t a panacea, it’s a necessary starting point for creating a more vibrant press.
Commercial news values typically bolster the status quo; they rarely challenge it. Absent social-democratic policies that subsidize noncommercial media, it’s difficult to imagine ways to support journalism that isn’t profitable. Left entirely to the market, anything that doesn’t attract advertisers and wealthy interests is likely to go unsaid, and anything that does attract dollars, from shouting heads on cable television to clickbait online, is likely to get amplified.
Unfortunately, market forces are often treated as the natural order of things, the guarantor of a free people and a free press. Media outlets are conceptualized as mere commodities, not public goods that require non-market support mechanisms. Contrary to its faux-populist “give the people what they want” mythology, such an approach naturalizes the powerful and profitable and treats oppositional journalism as a risky anomaly.
As the long history of failed media reform efforts attests, the commercial media system was never well-suited for democracy. But we’re now facing a perfect storm of concentrated corporate power, an overclass of billionaires, and an eviscerated press that’s desperate for ever-diminishing revenues.
Seen in this light, Gawker’s demise is one more sign that we need a radical project for media democracy. Otherwise we’ll be forced to confront a future where petulant billionaires crush media outlets and corporations choose which stories get told.
|
|
New US Policy: Kill the Kurds |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 29 August 2016 13:30 |
|
Boardman writes: "The continuing incoherence, insanity, and ultimate inanity of US policy in and around Syria was highlighted brilliantly, albeit perhaps inadvertently, by Vice President Joe Biden on a state visit to Turkey August 24, when he threatened the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State - the Kurdish militias - with American punishment if they didn't play nice with the Turks."
Turkish prime minister Binali Yildirim, right, and U.S. vice president Joe Biden at Cankaya Palace in Ankara. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
New US Policy: Kill the Kurds
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
29 August 16
Syria: what do you do when you don’t know what to do?
he continuing incoherence, insanity, and ultimate inanity of US policy in and around Syria was highlighted brilliantly, albeit perhaps inadvertently, by Vice President Joe Biden on a state visit to Turkey August 24, when he threatened the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State – the Kurdish militias – with American punishment if they didn’t play nice with the Turks, who have spent years supporting the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL), attacking “bad” Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, and who are now attacking “good” Kurds in Syria.
This is not quite as complicated as it is stupid, self-defeating, and ultimately deceitful. Let’s review the bidding:
- The Turks are a NATO ally whose reliability is an on-and-off thing unrelated to Turkey’s actual treaty obligations. The only reason Turkey is part of NATO is because somebody during the Cold War thought it would be a good idea to counter the USSR. With the USSR gone, Turkey is more like a dagger pointed at the heart of NATO, hence the delicate psycho-diplo-military dance NATO nations have had to follow for years, unwilling to cut Turkey loose from NATO, even now, as the Turkish government devolves toward authoritarianism and tighter ties with Russia. Putting it in perspective, Turkey’s longstanding, abysmal record on political and human rights is a prime reason that the European Union continues to deny Turkey EU membership. Turkey is not a truly modern state: Turks waged a genocidal campaign against its Armenian citizens a century ago, but it’s still against the law to mention that genocide in Turkey (by comparison, Americans can talk freely about the greater American genocide against native peoples, but the progress toward anything like justice is about the same in both countries).
- The Kurds are for the Turks, metaphorically, the 21st century Armenians. The Turks exhibit all the signs of wanting to wage genocidal war on the Kurds but they are held off by multiple factors, not least the current taboo on genocide upheld by NATO and the EU, at least publicly, most of the time. The Kurds are also more militarized than the Armenians ever were, and the Kurdish home territory is a mountainous region that has resisted invaders for centuries. Also the Kurdish region is spread over four countries, so any Turkish genocide of the Kurds would work only if it included attacks on Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Each of those countries has also gone through periods of Kurdish repression, so there is always the theoretical possibility of an allied genocide of the Kurds. Right now, the Kurds in Turkey, having survived an attempted Kurdish genocide in the 1930s, continue their low level conflict with the Turkish military, punctuated by periods like the current high level conflict. The Kurds long for their own country, a Kurdistan, and no one else wants them to have that for reasons that are obscure and chronically destabilizing. (A similar situation keeps Afghanistan unstable, where the Pashtun are spread across southern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, and no one wants them to have their own Pashtunistan, either.)
- The US has no vital interests in any of these places. To be clear, the country of the United States has no vital interests. The empire of the United States is a different, undemocratic, self-directed global power structure that sees vital interests in faraway yurts in the most distant desert. That part is not up for debate. But the distinction between the US as a country and the US as an empire helps to understand why the country is pushed into doing things that are stupid, self-destructive, and planet-threatening on behalf of the empire. Everybody pretty much knows, even if they won’t admit it, that with a nod from the US the Turkish genocide of the Kurds could begin tomorrow, if not sooner. That is the context for the creative tension within which the US VP makes his not so veiled threats.
Biden to Kurds: defend yourselves from the Turks and we will hurt you
August 24, the day that VP Biden was talking tough in Ankara, was the same day the US and Turkey went to war against Syria, although it mostly wasn’t reported that way. It was advertised as Turkey finally responding to pleas to fight ISIS. Some called it an “escalation” and some called it an “incursion,” echoing official lines in Viet Nam, but it was an invasion. As invasions go, it was pretty small potatoes, unreported in detail, but involving probably a few hundred troops with heavy artillery support, and maybe dozens of tanks and aircraft. This was not the first Turkish attack on Syria, but it’s the first to seize and hold territory, and to do so with US sanction and air support (even though US special forces are on one of the other sides).
The reality is that Syria is still a sovereign country with a legitimate government still in place. No matter what may be true about the Syrian government or the all-but-uncountable forces arrayed against it and within it, the government remains legitimate, which is why the US and others keep calling for its overthrow. The Syrian government is fighting a very complicated, five-year-old civil war against combatants both Syrian and foreign, some of whom control significant areas of Syria, over which they’re fighting with the Syrian government and each other. As civil wars go, this one is particularly messy, not only because Syria was made up all along of different ethnic groups. Since Syrian citizens took up arms against their government, they have enjoyed, if that’s the right word, outside support of various kinds and quantities of fighters and materiel from the US, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and probably Jordan (which, with Turkey, has sheltered millions of Syrian refugees).
Even so, when the Turkish military with US air support crosses the border and captures the town of Jarabulus (population around 26,000), that’s a new thing in this war where other countries mostly use proxies to fight for whatever they think they’re fighting for, not their own armed forces. Russia is an exception, fighting for the Syrian government at the invitation of the Syrian government. Every other combatant is an uninvited guest. When the US-backed Turkish military crossed the border and captured Syrian territory, that was an act of undeclared war (like the US war with the Saudis on Yemen).
So who is the target, who is the enemy, and are they the same?
Billed as “a significant escalation of Turkey’s role in the fight against the Islamic State” (New York Times), the Turkish attack seems more seriously directed at the Kurdish citizens of Syria who have lived there right along. The Syrian Kurds have proved the most effective fighting force in Syria opposing ISIS, other than the Syrian government. And the Syrian Kurds enjoy the support of several hundred US Special Forces, who now find themselves facing the prospect of being attacked by a NATO army supported by their own country.
Jarabalus is on the west bank of the Euphrates River, which separates it from the Kurdish-dominated region of northern Syria. In 2013, ISIS forces took control of Jarabalus and have held it until recently, with little objection from Turkey. ISIS used this Turkish-Syrian border town as one of several crossing points for fighters and supplies with little interference from the Turks. In 2015, Syrian Kurdish forces threatened to attack ISIS in Jarabulus. Turkey’s President Erdogan warned the Kurds that such an attack would be met by the Turkish military, securing ISIS control of the town for another year. Now it’s the US vice president warning the Syrian Kurds not to interfere in their own country. Referring to the Kurdish desire to control that part of Syria where they live along the Turkish border, Biden said there would be no Kurdish “corridor” (as fragmentarily reported in the Washington Post):
Period. No separate entity on the border. A united Syria…. We have made it absolutely clear to … the YPG [Kurdish People’s Protection Units in Syria] that … they must move back across the river…. They cannot, will not, and under no circumstances will get American support if they do not keep that commitment. Period.
The “corridor” referred to by Biden is a hypothetical area that, if controlled by the Kurds, would connect western “Kurdistan” near Aleppo with the rest of “Kurdistan” in northeastern Syria. The Turks are dead set against this, as they consider all Kurds “terrorists.” The US has gone along with the Turks calling the Kurds in Turkey terrorists, but the US considers the Kurds in Syria non-terrorists, mostly because of their success fighting ISIS. Part of that Kurdish success was working with US Special Forces to take territory south of Jarabulus (Manbij and surrounding towns). According to Biden, that operation was carried out under a Kurdish promise to go back across the Euphrates and leave the area to Syrian rebels (who had been unable to take it on their own).
Turkey has long been shelling Kurdish communities in Syria, killing civilians with indifference, since Turkey’s main objective vis à vis the Kurds is ethnic cleansing. Now, with US blessing, Turkey is using its invasion of Jarabulus to attack Kurdish settlements to the south, killing dozens of civilians in attacks on Jub al-Kousa and al-Amarna. These are not Kurds who should have gone back across the Euphrates, these are Kurds who live in those towns.
There are roughly two million Kurds in Syria and about 30 million in the region. The Kurds have been subjugated and marginalized in all the countries where they live at one time or another. They have long been restive in Turkey. Then the chaos Americans brought to Iraq gave Iraqi Kurds some independence. In Syria, the Kurds earned greater independence by fighting ISIS more effectively than anyone else.
Having invaded Syria to fight ISIS, Turkey is now joining with Syrian rebels (of some sort) to attack Kurds. This is American policy at work. In effect, VP Biden has said: Hey, you Kurds, you’re subjugated people, you’ve been subjugated people long enough to be used to it, and you’re gonna stay subjugated, OK, so suck it up.
So we leave the Kurds to the mercy of their perennial persecutors, and for what? Some dim hope that Turkey will improve its human rights record and stop torturing prisoners? Or perhaps our wishful thinking is that if we abet the Turks in their darkest whims, maybe they won’t cozy up to the Russians so much? Whatever the Obama administration is thinking – assuming there is any thinking going on in this secretive government – American policy seems politically incoherent, as if it’s enough to say: This is what the American empire requires, don’t ask questions. But it is more than politically incoherent. American policy toward a people yearning to be free is morally repugnant.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
ith the highest population of prisoners in the world (we're 4% of the world's population but house 22% of the world's prisoners), it is imperative that we re-evaluate the way our country attempts to create order, peace and stability. Because when the systems that are here to help make society "safer" actually foster more chaos, violence and instability--they cannot go unchecked by the people. On the campaign trail a young sister asked me to follow up on a question about about incarceration for minor offenses. She asked "Well if low-level drug offenders don't belong in prison, who do you think does?" 
