Global News and Analysis

It was the worst of times

In 2010 joblessness and foreclosures reached record heights.  In cities like Detroit and Milwaukee, 50% of African American males, ages 18-60, were unemployed.

In Afghanistan Obama’s troop surge and U.S. air strikes were killing so many civilians that the Afghan people were viewing the U.S. military and NATO as foreign occupiers.

Meanwhile, most Al Qaeda operatives have scattered across the Mideast, Central Asia and Africa.  Only a few dozen remain in Afghanistan.  Yet our government continues to squander billions on the Afghan war, swelling government deficits and fueling Tea Party discontent. read more

Source: IPS News

After the separation barrier against Palestinian territories, Israel has begun to build a new wall, this one to keep migrants from Africa out. The new wall is coming up on the Egyptian border, and with Egyptian support.

The Israeli government approved plans late last month to build a detention camp near its border with Egypt to house illegal African immigrants. Local activists decried the move, which they say flies in the face of internationally accepted human rights norms.

“The idea of a prison built expressly for African immigrants is not only racist, it also contravenes basic tenets of international law,” Hafez Abu Saeda, president of the Cairo-based Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights told IPS. read more

Source: Truthdig

The recent Federal Communications Commission decision to “protect” net neutrality was long awaited by activists, but it turned out to be smoke and mirrors, catering largely to service providers such as Comcast and AT&T. What is needed now is a collective movement by all Internet users throughout the world, not just the relative few who have been fighting on our behalf, to stop the demise of Internet freedom before it’s too late.

While the new FCC ruling requires that telecom and telephone companies maintain transparency in their policies, it does little to regulate those policies. Chief among the dangerous practices that it will fail to adequately regulate is the imminent “pay for priority” system desired by a few dominant Internet service providers. The FCC’s impotent ruling comes just as it is about to put its seal of approval on Comcast’s merger with NBC International, one of the world’s largest content providers. The conflict of interest is glaring, yet the FCC seems to have missed it; or just maybe regulators intend their decision as a Band-Aid to try to fix the problem. read more

Source: The Independent

Who did we under-appreciate in 2010? In the endless whirr of 24/7 corporate news, the people who actually make a difference are often trampled in the stampede to the next forgettable news-nugget like Lady Gaga’s meat-dress. So in the final moments of this year, let’s look at a few people who deserved more of our attention.

Under-Appreciated Person One: Bradley Manning. While we were all fixated on Julian Assange, the story of the young American soldier who actually leaked the classified documents passed almost unnoticed. If Manning was mentioned at all, it was to be described as an impetuous, angry kid who downloaded the documents on to a CD and leaked them as a result of a “grudge” or “tantrum”. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

[A longer version of this essay appears in “Celebrity,” the Winter 2011 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
— William Shakespeare

Label celebrity a consumer society’s most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society’s art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion. Such a society is the one that America has been attempting to make for itself since John F. Kennedy was king in Camelot, and the collective effort — nearly 50 years of dancing with the stars under the disco balls in Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street — deserves an appreciation of the historical antecedents. read more

Source: Green Left Weekly

One of the features of advances in military technology is that an increasing proportion of those killed in wars are civilians, not combatants.

During the 20th century, airstrikes became the preferred form of warfare by technologically well-resourced superpowers. This led to civilians becoming the majority of those killed in wars worldwide.

In the first decade of the new century, new developments in military technology have raised the possibility for powerful countries of increasingly dispensing with combatants entirely. read more