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Monday, January 5, 2009 |
Guardian: "Happy new year? You must be joking. 2009 will begin with a wail, and then get worse. Millions of people have already been put out of work, across the world, by this first truly globalised crisis of capitalism. Tens of millions more will be made jobless soon. Those of us lucky enough still to have work will feel poorer and less secure. To celebrate his Nobel prize in economics, Paul Krugman promises us months of 'economic hell'.
Something will be very wrong, however, if the assumptions of the kind of free-market capitalism - sometimes called 'neoliberal' - that has appeared triumphant since 1989 are not re-examined in this 20th anniversary year. First there's the balance between state and market, public and private, the visible and invisible hand. Even before last September's meltdown, Barack Obama was trying to nudge his compatriots towards the idea that government is not always a dirty word. Subsequent months have seen a dramatic shift towards a larger role for the state, usually in spasms of desperate governmental improvisation, sometimes (as in Gordon Brown's London) ideologically legitimated as Keynesianism, sometimes (as in George Bush's Washington) just plain, unvarnished Desperationism.
The mantra with which most political and business leaders enter 2009 is 'back to economic growth, whatever it costs'. Like the crew of a sailing boat in a storm, they just want to keep it afloat and moving through the waves in some direction - never mind which. But even as we weather the worst of the storm, which has not hit us yet, we should be taking a hard look at the course we are steering. That requires leadership of a high order, but also citizens demanding such leadership."
11:02:22 AM 
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Newshoggers: "This image is captioned in the London Times, as 'Israeli artillery shells explode with a chemical agent designed to create smokescreen for ground forces'. But last night the same picture was simply captioned as an artillery shell exploding over Gaza and other similiar images at AFP/Getty are similiarly captioned. One wonders why Murdoch's flagship newspaper decided to change the caption.
In two of those AFP/Getty images, here and here, you can clearly see impact explosions and fires begun by those impacts. Those are not chemical smoke shells. An ex-military officer friend tells me that the shells seen exploding in all these pictures are DPICM or Cluster Munition rounds. Identical cluster munitions were used in Lebanon by the IDF during the 2006 conflict and by both the UK and US during the invasion of Iraq. It's likely that the IDF are using US-made M483A1 DPICM artillery-delivered shells."
Independent: "How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which - in any other conflict - journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it - Askalaan in Arabic - were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They - or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren - are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza - a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin - and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world."
10:53:06 AM
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© Copyright 2009.
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