Dialogue & Initiative 2012 The new annual edition of our journal of discussion and analysis is now out. More than 130 pages, it includes 13 articles related to the Occupy! movement, as well as seven others vital to study in this election year. Cost is $10 plus shipping. Or get one by becoming a sustainer. Click the title to buy it directly.
|
Blog of the Week:
Slide Show of the events at the 'School of the Assassins' protests at Fort Benning, 2012
|
Lost Writings of SDS..
Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson 
Changemaker, 273pp, $22.50
For the full contents, click the link and view 'Preview' under the cover graphic.
|
|
By Randy Shannon, CCDS
"Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."
- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
I. Introduction
The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.
|
|
Order Our
Full Employment Booklets
 |
...In a new and updated 2nd Edition
Capitalism may well collapse under its own excesses, but what would one propose to replace it? Margaret Thatcher's mantra was TINA...There Is No Alternative. David Schweickart's vision of "Economic Democracy" proposes a serious alternative. Even more fundamentally, it opens the door to thinking about alternatives. His may or may not turn out to be the definitive "successor system," but he is a leader in breaking out of the box. |
|
Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion |
Sex and the Automobile in the Jazz Age
By Peter Ling in History Today: 'Brothels on wheels' thundered the moralists but Peter Ling argues the advent of mass motoring in the 1920s was only one of the changes in social and group relationships that made easier the pursuit of carnal desire.
|
 A Memoir of the 1960s by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press, $25.64 | | Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
|
Carl Davidson's Latest Book:
New Paths to Socialism
Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci and the Green and Solidarity Economies |
Solidarity Economy:What It's All About
Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei
Buy it here...
|
Voices from the Underground Press of the 1960s, Part 2- Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
- Preface by Ken Wachsberger
$37.50 + $6 shipping
|
|
Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement
By Don Hamerquist
|
|
|
|
An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Cliff or No Cliff, Hands Off Social Security and Medicare!
Most of all, it's urgent that you defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, make solidarity with the Occupy! movement and end the wars! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...
|
Somewhere Under the Rainbow
BY Carl Davidson
In These Times
A rainbow coalition of Democratic voters gave Barack Obama a victory over big Wall Street money and the steady drumbeat of hard-right racism. Nearly 45 percent of the president's voters were people of color, with their numbers augmented by white women, youth and trade unionists. It was enough to keep him in the White House, but not enough to decisively change the overall balance of forces.
Now the harder struggles begin-for Obama, for the Democratic Party and for the Left. Tough choices face all three.
Obama has to decide how he wants to govern in his second term. Does he want to be remembered as a center-right conciliator of neoliberal austerity and militarism who discounted key components of his rainbow? Or does he want to forge a deeper center-left majority coalition that can make wise use of government to create jobs, spur growth, promote equity and find solutions to global problems short of war? Since he has always been a liberal speaking mainly to the center, he can go either way.
The Democrats have a longer-term choice. Do they want to be the Blue Dog party of neoliberalism elite, best summed up by a Rahm Emanuel policy of "unite the center," move to the Right and dismiss the Left? Or do they want to revisit their Keynesian roots with a Green New Deal that builds an educational and manufacturing infrastructure for the 21st century? The first course means the country continues its steady reactionary drift, rewarding a privileged few. The second means a progressive turn that can reward the rest of us.
The Left faces a choice, too. Do we continue trying to build mass movements, in the hope that they will be the engines of a new and transformative strategic politics? Or do we go further than our usual "movement building" mantra and put new emphasis on organization building? We've seen the Wisconsin and Ohio uprisings, Occupy Wall Street, and the pressing of the Robin Hood tax by the Congressional Progressive Caucus-all of which are the beginnings of an emerging popular front against finance capital, one pregnant with new potential. But without organization, movements simply ebb and flow-and often dissipate. Our task now is to combine fanning the flames with a new organizing thrust.
We have to evolve political groups with electoral capacities than can win elections locally. We must expand the ranks of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, turning it into our left- progressive pole inside the Beltway.
We have to encourage more social justice trade unions, like the Chicago Teachers Union. We have to grow our grassroots coalitions, like the Virginia New Majority, and to launch solidarity economy projects, like Cleveland's Evergreen Cooperatives. We have to promote a new culture of educating with reason, promoting science over ideology, and defending the core democratic values of the Enlightenment. We must speak truth to power while we fashion the instruments to take power. In brief, we require a united, determined core of Left political organizers with a wider and deeper vision for economic democracy and a socialism worthy of the 21st century.
There should be no honeymoon for Obama or holiday for Congress. Now is the time for hitting the ground running, both as a militant minority and a wider progressive majority. The forces of "bipartisan compromise" and "grand bargains" are already working on plans, like Simpson-Bowles to bail out capitalism's systemic crisis on our dime.
Politicians pay attention to organized money, organized voters and (at least occasionally) organized thinking. The Left is lacking in the first, but we can put the latter two into play. We rarely gain anything at the top that we haven't already gathered the strength for at the base-and that ball is in our court, not Obama's or the Democratic Party's.
|
|
Jane McAlevey talks with Sarah Jaffe about her new book "Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)" about how to organize the right way and how big labor gets it wrong.
November 26, 2012 - "Raising Hell" is what the title of Jane McAlevey's new book says she spent her time in the labor movement doing, and she isn't joking.
In the book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement , out now from Verso, McAlevey names names and shares secrets about organizing within the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union. The book ranges from the mess that was the 2000 election in Florida, to winning battles for public housing with workers in Connecticut, to her years in Las Vegas fighting for healthcare workers, to battling her own higher-ups and union members in the power struggle that eventually drove her out of SEIU. But what she really wants to talk about is organizing: how to do it right, how the Democratic Party gets it wrong, and why there's no substitute for face-to-face conversations with workers.
McAlevey sat down with AlterNet to talk about organizing in so-called "right-to-work" states, the too-close relationship between unions and Democrats who leave them high and dry, the brutality of fighting the boss, and why the worst thing to happen to labor in the U.S. might just have been purging the Communists from the movement.
Sarah Jaffe: You start the book out with the aftermath of the 2000 election in Florida, and of course we just finished a presidential election where organized labor went all-out to elect President Obama. Having come through the 2000 battle, I'd love to hear your thoughts on labor and elections.
Jane McAlevey: The point I'm really trying to raise is that the Democratic Party has way too much control over what the AFL-CIO and the other unions are doing. Instead of labor telling the Democratic Party what they're going to do, the Democratic Party scripts out for labor what they're going to do. Which isn't really working for unions very much at all.
In Florida it was a slightly different situation, but it's reflective of the same problem we have right now. Many of us could see that it was going completely wrong, that we needed to be in the street, doing street theater. We had a million ideas a day about what we needed to do to turn the heat up, that this was going to be a political fight, not a legal fight. But there was just no possibility. Just none. And I was just so naïve back then. Super naïve that we were actually going to break and have a different idea.
So the purpose of the opening of the book is to say that the relationship is way too close and if anything it needs to flip, who's telling who what to do.
There's a big debate about 2008, what role labor played in the victory. I think it's actually more clear that they did play a big role this time. In '08 half the planet was voting for Obama, he was still so exciting, but this year, in the cutthroat fights in the battleground states, yeah, he's damn lucky that he had unions.
But there's never been any evidence that that's going to change the tenor of the relationship. Unions in this country have never had the chutzpah to say there's a threat every year. If you look back over time, like late August heading into Labor Day the year before elections, Trumka in this case, Sweeney in the past, Lane Kirkland in the past, they'll all start "We're not going to get kicked around by the Democratic party this time because we didn't get anything, we're thinking of endorsing someone else." It's like this scripted joke, because everyone knows it's a joke. It doesn't ever happen. ...(Click title for more)
|
 | | Former GOP Strategist Kevin Phillips on Roots of American Revolution, Future of US Politics |
Kevin Phillips, political consultant and former Republican strategist. His most recent book is called 1775: A Good Year for Revolution. His other best-selling books include Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune_, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Harper's magazine and National Public Radio.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: With the Republican Party in a state of turmoil following Mitt Romney's loss three weeks ago, we begin today's show with a guest who was once one of the most influential Republican strategists. In 1969, Kevin Phillips wrote the groundbreaking book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Newsweek described the book as the, quote, "political bible of the Nixon administration." Phillips helped popularize the Southern strategy that helped Republicans win the backing of white Southern voters by appealing to racism against African Americans. Phillips later became a fierce critic of the Republican Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips has gone on to write a number of best-selling books, including Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, and Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Well, he is just out with a new book; it's called 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, which debunks the notion that 1776 was the most crucial year of the American Revolution.
We welcome you back to Democracy Now!
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Nice to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Kevin, it's great to have you back. I mean, we had you on certainly during the Bush years as you wrote about American dynasty. You, such a significant figure in Republican politics going back to the Nixon White House and your development of the Southern strategy. But you have certainly changed your mind over the years about what's good for democracy in the United States. And before we go back to 1775-I mean, this book is fascinating, and I think it's very much also a book about movements-your thoughts about where the Republican Party is today?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, I think the Republican Party today is not very sure of what it is. It is a little bit too interested in upper-bracket America. But I think the party system as a whole has drawn away from its moorings. You have a Democratic president supporting the bailouts of banks. The history of the Democratic Party, under Jefferson, Jackson and FDR, was to crack down on the banks. So I think you have both parties today don't stand for very much aside from self-interest, and they're mostly involved in hustling money from the 20 or 30 richest zip codes in the country.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Kevin Phillips, one of the things, to go to your book, that you say is that one of the grandest political realignments that occurred, the emerging republican majority-that is, a small-R republican majority-occurred during the revolution. Could you elaborate on that and the significance of that for what you've said now about the political realignments both in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party today?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, the importance of 1775 was something that always tantalized me as someone who spent a lot of time on different realignments, not just in the emerging Republican majority but in other books that discuss the Republican realignments in the 1890s and under Lincoln. And it seemed to me that if you looked at the realignments of American political parties, it was time to look at the underlying realignment of how you took colonists out of the orbit of a monarchical system and an empire and gave them the sense and determination to become what was the-obviously the first power in the Western Hemisphere, but the first offshoot of Europe, so to speak, to become independent and set up on its own. And I know a fair amount about it, but as I was drawn into it, it became a fascination.
What happened that set the United States in motion in the mid-1770s is still relevant in some ways, because what it showed was that you sometimes have to have a lot of very disagreeable politics to make progress, that you don't get anywhere by having all kinds of nice slogans and by trying to barter every difference with a cliché and pretend that all's well and the United States is in wonderful shape. The United States is not in wonderful shape, and it needs to get back some of that spunk that it had when people were willing to talk very bluntly about harsh and tough measures.
And one thing I learned out of 1774, because-actually, starting then-and 1775 was that there was a lot of tough fighting and harsh politics that underpinned the sort of happy image of the 4th of July, when we all came together and became this wonderful country that never disagreed internally, was never radical, never had a harsh politics. It's time to sort of go back and think about confronting realities again.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we go back, the Southern strategy-and especially for young people who might not be familiar with what it is that you developed, that you laid out-what it was and how it has changed and what you think needs to happen now?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, first of all, the Southern strategy is something that has become a cliché as opposed to an identification of anything that was ever flat-out there. The first Southern strategy was Barry Goldwater's in 1964, and it was basically to try to win the South by not enforcing or not even enacting the civil rights laws. The Republican strategy in 1968 was what we called to win the Outer South. The Outer South were the states that George Wallace wasn't going to be able to take into the third-party orbit. And that in fact is what happened. And once Wallace-and that particular instance was shot in 1972, but once Wallace faded away, you basically got the South, from the Republican standpoint, because the psychological changes hadn't been made, and then when there was no longer a Wallace party, those votes went Republican in 1972.
But one of the things that everybody was aware of was that you had to enforce the civil rights laws, if only for realistic politics. Not talking about the morality, but if you didn't enforce the civil rights laws, the Democrats would be able to wiggle back to their old straddle, which was, "Well, maybe we will, and maybe we won't, and you remember us, we were the party that, you know, fought for four years for the Southern way." Republicans didn't fight four years in the Civil War for the Southern way; the Democrats had.
So, what it means today, though, in my opinion, is that the Republicans have the South most of the time. They don't have to bid in a very hard way for it. On the other hand, as the black vote gels in certain places, a marginal state like Virginia is enough to make the difference. That gives the Democrats a new set of voters that didn't work for them before. The black votes that they put together in the '70s and '80s and '90s rarely won. Now they're more effective....(Click title for more)
|
Utopian Socialists, German Communists, and Other Republicans
By JOHN NICHOLS
International Socialist Review
John Nichols is a writer for the Nation, and he also contributes to the Progressive and In These Times. He is the author of The Genius of Impeachment (The New Press), a critically acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000, Jews for Buchanan (The New Press), and a best-selling biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press).This article is a chapter in his new book The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism, published by Verso Books this year. It is republished with permission.
'These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.' -Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837
'Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.' -Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln's assistant secretary of war, 1848
'The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.' -Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen's Association to Lincoln, 1864
ON DECEMBER 3, 1861, a former one-term congressman, who had spent most of the past dozen years studying dissident economic theories, mounting challenges to the existing political order and proposing ever more radical responses to the American crisis, delivered his first State of the Union address as the sixteenth president of the United States.
Since assuming office eight months earlier, this new president had struggled, without success, first to restore the severed bonds of the Union and then to avert a wrenching civil war. Now, eleven southern slave states were in open and violent rebellion against the government he led.
His inaugural address of the previous spring had closed with a poignant reflection on the prospect of eventual peace, imagining a day when the Union might again be touched "by the better angels of our nature." But, now, in the last month of what Walt Whitman would recall as America's "sad, distracted year"-"Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd cannons"-the better angels seemed to have deserted the continent. Every effort to restore the republic had been thwarted. There was no room for accommodation with the Confederate States of America. Fort Sumter had been fired upon and the flag of southern rebellion now flew above Charleston Harbor. Virginia, the cradle of presidents, the state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison, had joined the revolt and assembled a capital of the Confederacy less than 100 miles from Washington. Hundreds of Union and Confederate soldiers had died, with thousands more wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run. Armies had been reorganized and generals replaced with the recognition that this was no skirmish. This was a protracted war that would eventually force all Americans to "[throw] off the costumes of peace with [an] indifferent hand."
In the presence of the remaining congressmen and senators who filled only a portion of the seats in the Capitol chamber on that December day, the new president knew that he needed to address the circumstance of a nation that was no longer in any sense united. He did so as an agitated, angered American who spoke no more of angels and instead bemoaned "the disloyal citizens of the United States who have offered the ruin of our country." He warned, ominously, of how "A nation which endures factious domestic division is exposed to disrespect abroad, and...is sure sooner or later to invoke foreign intervention." He fretted about a strained federal budget, expressing hope "that the expenditures made necessary by the rebellion are not beyond the resources of the loyal people." He noted that three vacancies would need to be filled on a suddenly abandoned Supreme Court and observed that "one of the unavoidable consequences of the present insurrection is the entire suppression in many places of all the ordinary means of administering civil justice by the officers and in the forms of existing law."
This was a wartime State of the Union address delivered not so much by a president as a commander in chief. Its purpose was to rally what remained of the House and Senate-after the exodus of the southern Solons who had joined a mutiny against the elected government-and to portray the struggle as not merely one for the preservation of a system of governance but for democracy itself. "It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government-the rights of the people," declared the solemn speaker. "Conclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of all right to participate in the selection of public officers except the legislative boldly advocated, with labored arguments to prove that large control of the people in government is the source of all political evil. Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people."
These were the words that might have ended the address, had the president not begged the pardon of his listeners to add: "In my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism."
There was something more that Lincoln wanted to say to America. He needed to speak of another division, another struggle. The man who so carefully chose his words did not relinquish the podium before devoting "brief attention" to his fears regarding "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government." ...(Click title for more)
|
By Julianne Hing
Colorlines
Cedrico Green can't exactly remember how many times he went back and forth to juvenile. When asked to venture a guess he says, "Maybe 30." He was put on probation by a youth court judge for getting into a fight when he was in eighth grade. Thereafter, any of Green's school-based infractions, from being a few minutes late for class to breaking the school dress code by wearing the wrong color socks, counted as violations of his probation and led to his immediate suspension and incarceration in the local juvenile detention center.
But Green wasn't alone. A bracing Department of Justice lawsuit filed last month against Meridian, Miss., where Green lives and is set to graduate from high school this coming year, argues that the city's juvenile justice system has operated a school to prison pipeline that shoves students out of school and into the criminal justice system, and violates young people's due process rights along the way.
In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal's office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what kind of offense the child has committed or whether that offense is even worthy of an arrest. The police department's policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency.
Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations.
"[D]efendants engage in a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct through which they routinely and systematically arrest and incarcerate children, including for minor school rule infractions, without even the most basic procedural safeguards, and in violation of these children's constitutional rights," the DOJ's 37-page complaint reads. Meridian's years of systemic abuse punish youth "so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience," the complaint reads.
The federal lawsuit casts a wide net in indicting the systems that worked to deny Meridian children their constitutional rights. It names as defendants the state of Mississippi; the city of Meridian; Lauderdale County, which runs the Lauderdale County Youth Court; and the local Defendant Youth Court Judges Frank Coleman and Veldore Young for violating Meridian students' rights up and down the chain.
The DOJ's complaint also charges that in the course of its eight-month investigation the city blocked the inquiry by refusing to hand over youth court records. Attorneys for city officials deny that claim, and say they are bound by law to protect the confidentiality of youth who've been through the system and so cannot share their records with the federal government.
'Judge, Jury and Executioner'
The DOJ's lawsuit, despite its bombshell revelations for the rest of the country, has been a long time coming. Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP have been concerned about Meridian for years.
The SPLC's inquiry into Meridian began in 2008, when attorneys started hearing reports of "horrific abuse" of youth housed in juvenile detention centers, said Jody Owens, managing attorney of the SPLC's juvenile justice initiative in Mississippi. Advocates learned that 67 percent of youth in detention centers arrived there from the Meridian school system, Owens said. In between school and detention, students were denied access to counsel and due process, and many were never made aware of what they were even being arrested for. "The administrators were the judge, jury and executioner," Owens said.
This practice has also appeared to target black students. Meridian, a city of 40,000 people, is 61 percent African-American. But over a five-year period, Owens said, "There was never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were suspended for." ...(Click title for more)
|
 By Rod Such
The Electronic Intifada
Nov 20, 2012 - Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country - And Why They Can't Make Peace by former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Patrick Tyler is an unflinching history of the role of militarism in Israeli society. Tyler previously wrote A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East - from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2009), which examined how US presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush responded to events in the Middle East.
In this new work Tyler narrows his focus to the Israeli establishment. He sums up his thesis in the prologue: "Israel, six decades after its founding, remains a nation in thrall to an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy, who seem ever on the hair trigger in dealing with their regional rivals, and whose contingency planners embrace worst-case scenarios that often exaggerate complex or ambiguous developments as threats to national existence. They do so, reflexively and instinctively, in order to perpetuate a system of governance where national policy is dominated by the military."
In Fortress Israel, Tyler mines a trove of US government documents declassified in 2007, many of which were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, where Tyler is a fellow.
These documents, especially those from the administration of Richard Nixon, have received scant attention from the corporate media. Tyler also relies on interviews he conducted with many Israeli leaders, as well as secondary sources - the most prominent of which is The Iron Wall (2000), a book by the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim.
Both The Iron Wall and Fortress Israel demolish key pillars of Israel's long-standing propaganda effort to portray itself as the perpetual victim of surrounding, hostile Arab nations. They show instead that Israel was the aggressor in nearly all of its military conflicts.
The 1956 Suez Crisis, for example, resulted from a conspiracy hatched by France, Britain, and Israel in which Israel attacked Egyptian forces so that Britain and France could pretend to intervene as "stabilizing" forces and thereby maintain control of the Suez Canal. Similarly, both studies reveal that Israel launched the 1967 war not because it believed Egypt was about to attack but because it saw an unprecedented opportunity to destroy the Egyptian army. Imperial interests
Tyler's research demonstrates that the Israeli elites long ago recognized the usefulness of aligning Israel with Western imperialist interests in the Middle East and openly courted the US on that basis. Although the Eisenhower administration forced the withdrawal of Britain, France and Israel from Egypt in 1956, angered that all three countries acted without its support, it soon realized that Israel represented a valuable Cold War ally - especially as Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser tilted toward the Soviet Union.
But Tyler argues that whereas the Eisenhower administration acted to restrain Israel "so that it might find accommodation with its neighbors," the Nixon administration, especially National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, sought to use Israel to achieve US interests in the Cold War.
Drawing on the 2007 documents, Tyler quotes from a 1969 memo to Nixon from Richard Helms, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, saying Israeli aggression against Egypt should be encouraged "since it benefits the West as well as Israel." A cover note by Kissinger argued that if Nasser were toppled, any successor would lack his "charisma." "Hit 'em hard"
An Israeli bombing campaign against targets deep inside Egypt followed in January 1970. In May that year Nixon told Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban and Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli ambassador to the US, to "let 'em have it! Hit 'em as hard as you can!" One of those hits had already included an Egyptian elementary school, killing 47 children.
During this same period, Tyler notes, US officials became aware that Israel was a nuclear weapons power, after years of Israeli denials. Kissinger had just received a CIA estimate that Israel possessed at least ten nuclear weapons. According to a Kissinger memo, Rabin told him there were two reasons for developing the bomb: "'first to deter the Arabs from striking Israel, and second, if deterrence fails and Israel were about to be overrun, to destroy the Arabs in a nuclear Armageddon.'"...(Click title for more)
|
By Dan Kaufman
Paste Magazine
Nov 21, 2012 - Leave it to director Ang Lee to create a thinking man's blockbuster. In much of his past work, he has strived to imbue his stories with a deep sense of purpose-to explore themes of longing and connection. Even when dabbling in genre films, he's tried to look past the Hollywood flash and stay true to this artistic vision, for better (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) or worse (Hulk). With Life of Pi, Lee may have found the perfect balance of spectacle and substance, creating his best outing in years.
Originally a popular novel by Yann Martel, Life of Pi tells of Pi Patel, played by three actors in various periods of time: as a boy (Ayush Tandon), a teenager (Suraj Sharma), and an adult (Irrfan Khan), who narrates the entire story in flashback to a biographer (Rafe Spall). The young Pi's natural curiosity extends so far as to lead him to believe in Catholicism and Islam in equal measure to his family's Hinduism. This is a somewhat disturbing turn of events to his father (Adil Hussain), a hotel and zoo owner who prefers science and reason over religion. Lee has a lot of fun depicting this early part of the story, creating shots and piecing them together with a whimsy that matches Pi's wide-eyed optimism.
When teenage Pi and his family must transport the animals from their zoo to Canada, their boat hits a bad storm, which Pi initially greets with excitement, running out on deck with a foolish grin to witness this terrifying and awesome validation of God's existence. It's hard for the audience to disagree with him, as the churning waves and thunder crashes are as magnificent a tempest as ever has been committed to film. But ultimately, the ship sinks, and Pi is left stranded in a lifeboat with limited supplies and an adult Bengal tiger-one he's known for years from the zoo. Make no mistake, this is no Disney-fied singing and wisecracking animal. As Pi has already learned in a harrowing earlier scene, while majestic and soulful, the tiger is still a dangerous and unpredictable force of nature.
From the storm on, the film goes from visually playful to stunning. Director Lee gets a lot of mileage out of the simple idea of a boy and tiger on a small boat. When the waters are still, they reflect colorful sunsets and twinkling starfields, giving the impression the boat is adrift in some cosmic plane rather than at sea. Fish and other aquatic life swarm around in shimmering luminescence. And all of this is rendered in 3D, enhancing the visuals in subtle ways as opposed to the tsunami on the senses the typical modern action/adventure goes for.
But let's not forget the story. From the very beginning, we know Pi winds up okay, which allows the audience to truly focus on the journey, and Pi's attempts to not just survive, but also coexist with the tiger, to create a tentative understanding so they can both make it through. It works as both a metaphor for spiritual discovery and a straight-up adventure.
Suraj Sharma's heartfelt performance as Pi is all the more remarkable considering the rigorous physical demands of the role, and all the time he likely had to spend reacting to empty air where the CGI tiger would later be inserted. As the adult Pi, Irrfan Khan tells his story with a refreshing simplicity and melancholy, which speaks to both the actor's skill and the director's sense of economy.
While relaxing into what appears to be the denouement, the film introduces a whole new wrinkle, which muddies the water a little, so to speak. I haven't read the novel, but it seems clear this was a crucial element to the story. It's a narrative hurdle that Lee still manages to surmount, avoiding the derailment it could have been.
Overall, Life of Pi deserves praise for its restraint as much as its visual opulence. Ang Lee has created a truly adult adventure, not because the material is salacious or violent, but because it deals with complex themes of spirituality and self-discovery in the guise of an accessible and engrossing fantasy. The film tells us there are no easy answers for Pi, or for anyone, but luckily the road to finding them can be spectacularly entertaining.
Director: Ang Lee Writers: David Magee (screenplay); Yann Martel (novel) Starring: Irrfan Khan, Suraj Sharma, Rafe Spall, Gérard Depardieu, Tabu, Adil Hussain Release Date: Nov. 21, 2012
|
|
Become a CCDS member today!
 The
time is long past for 'Lone Rangers'. Being a socialist by your self is
no fun and doesn't help much. Join CCDS today--$36 regular, $48
household and $18 youth.
Better yet, beome a sustainer at $20 per month,
and we'll send you a copy of Jack O'Dell's new book, 'Climbing Jacobs
Ladder,' drawing on the lessons of the movement in the South in the
1950s and 1960s.
Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS |
|
|
