Sony Esteus and Community Radio in Haiti
On the last day of his life, popular radio advocate Sony Estéus was to attend the opening of Voice of Ile-à-Vâche Community Radio, the newest in an expanding network of grassroots stations throughout Haiti.
Month: March 2015
Uncle Pentagon: Growing Up in the Shadow of the American War State
Source: TomDispatch
The Pentagon loomed so large in my childhood that it could have been another member of my family. Maybe a menacing uncle who doled out put-downs and whacks to teach us lessons or a rich, dismissive great-aunt intent on propriety and good manners.
Whatever the case, our holidays were built around visits to the Pentagon’s massive grounds. That’s where we went for Easter, Christmas, even summer vacation (to commemorate the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). When we were little, my brother and sister and I would cry with terror and dread as we first glimpsed the building from the bridge across the Potomac River. To us, it pulsated with malice as if it came with an ominous, beat-driven soundtrack out of Star Wars.
Latin America’s Safe Abortion Hotlines: Reproductive Rights 911
Abortion is illegal or prohibitively restricted in most of Latin America. While even pro-woman governments and politicians in Latin America struggle against strong opposition to legalizing abortion, women and activists across the continent are safely taking access to chemical abortion out of the clinic and into their own hands.
Is Venezuela Really an ‘Extraordinary Threat’ to the United States?
Source: The Nation
Yesterday, Barack Obama sent a letter to Congress announcing that he was applying the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to Venezuela, declaring the “situation” there to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Washington named seven Venezuelan politicians as targeted by the act, their property in the US liable to seizure.
It’s a serious step taken with extraordinarily strong language (as the head of the Organization of American States pointed out; “very harsh,” he said). Reuters writes: “Declaring any country a threat to national security is the first step in starting a U.S. sanctions program. The same process has been followed with countries such as Iran and Syria, U.S. officials said.”
Combating the Islamic State: The Real Options
The fears created by the IS have actually reduced in major ways the civil rights of citizens and residents in the United States and western Europe. There is massive hypocrisy concerning which tyrants are being opposed. In effect, everyone protects the tyrants that are their geopolitical ally and denounces the tyrants that are not.
Slavoj Žižek: Whither Zionism?
Source: In These Times
In July 2008, the Viennese daily Die Presse published a caricature of two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!”
This joke turns around the standard Zionist argument against the critics of the policies of the State of Israel: Like every other state, the State of Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticized, but the country’s critics misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes.