January 2013 - Page 2 of 6

Egypt on the Brink

Sharif Abdel Kouddous January 29, 2013 Sharif Abdel Kouddous

Cairo, Egypt

The second anniversary of Egypt’s revolution has been marked by rocks, firebombs, tear gas and bullets. More than fifty people have been killed and over a thousand wounded across the country. The army has been granted arrest powers, and military troops have been deployed to the three cities where President Mohamed Morsi has declared a state of emergency and ordered a curfew.

This outbreak of rage has laid bare the precarious state of a country plagued by a disfigured transition process, a lingering sense of injustice and the repeated failures of an entire political class that has forsaken a host of popular grievances in its scuffle for power. read more

Žižek – Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood’s gift to American power

Slavoj Žižek January 29, 2013 Slavoj Žižek

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Many have pointed out that Kathryn Bigelow’s film endorses torture. But why has such a film been made now?

Here is how, in a letter to the LA Times, Kathryn Bigelow justified Zero Dark Thirty’s depicting of the torture methods used by government agents to catch and kill Osama bin Laden:

“Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.” read more

Vermont: One Tiny State’s Movement to Ban Private Prisons

Jonathan Leavitt January 24, 2013 Jonathan Leavitt

Vermont, the most progressive state in America, spent over $14 million last year to lock up Vermonters in for profit prison like Lee Adjustment Center in Kentucky. A dialogue about mass incarceration, budget crises, and privatization is unfolding. A group of Vermonters working out of Church basements and living rooms is attempting to build a movement to push this conversation forward by passing a historic law banning Vermont’s use of for-profit prisons.

The Longest War: A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year

Rebecca Solnit January 24, 2013 Rebecca Solnit

Source: Tom Dispatch

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern. read more

Armed and Dangerous: The Gun Debate

Greg Guma January 24, 2013 Greg Guma

Effective regulation, combined with a comprehensive national database and a training program for gun users, would establish over time that less access to guns leads to less violent crime. This has been the case in Europe and some US states. Success would help shatter the myth that government is the problem, and that people are better off armed to the teeth and on their own.

Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women

Vandana Shiva January 23, 2013 Vandana Shiva

Source: Yes Magazine

Violence against women is as old as patriarchy.

Traditional patriarchy has structured our worldviews and mindsets, our social and cultural worlds, on the basis of domination over women and the denial of their full humanity and right to equality. But it has intensified and become more pervasive in the recent past. It has taken on more brutal forms, like the murder of the Delhi gang rape victim and the recent suicide of a 17-year-old rape victim in Chandigarh.

In India, rape cases and cases of violence against women have increased over the years. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported 10,068 rape cases in 1990, which increased to 16496 in 2000. With 24,206 cases in 2011, rape cases jumped to incredible increase of 873 percent from 1971 when NCRB started to record cases of rape. And Delhi has emerged as the rape capital of India, accounting for 25 percent of cases. read more