13 Year Afghan War "Over" - Dierdre Fulton in Common Dreams

2 Trillion dollars later and hundreds of thousands dead or displaced, the world is predictably less safe for the west than it was - and jihadism is much more entrenched.

With little fanfare, the United States and NATO formally ended the longest war in U.S. history with a ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, leaving observers to wonder what—if anything—was achieved.

Over 13 years, U.S.-led war in Afghanistan claimed the lives of about 3,500 foreign troops (at least 2,224 of them American soldiers) and an estimated 21,000 Afghan civilians; most experts agree that the country is as violent as ever and that the death toll will continue to rise. Many say the war is over in name only.

In late September, the U.S. and Afghanistan signed a controversial Bilateral Security Agreement that allows for U.S. training, funding, and arming of the Afghan military; establishes long-term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan with access to numerous bases and installations in the country; and extends immunity to U.S. service members under Afghan law.

There will still be roughly 11,000 American troops in Afghanistan next year as part of the Resolute Support mission to train, advise and assist Afghanistan’s roughly 350,000 security forces. 

Writing for The Guardian, Will Hutton argues: "At a meta strategic level, the U.S. was wrong. The war against terrorism developed by George W Bush after 09/11 is a great failure. The reflex reaction to a heinous act of mass terror was not to outsmart, out-think and marginalize a new enemy - it was to get even by being even more violent, lawless and vicious. This lead NATO into the Afghanistan quagmire and a coalition into the other quagmire; Iraq. 

2 Trillion dollars later and hundreds of thousands dead or displaced, the world is predictably less safe for the west than it was - and jihadism is much more entrenched.

The full article is available here

Drones & Discrimination - Kathy Kelly in Tikkun

The U.S. is the undisputed world leader in incarceration, as it is the world leader in military dominance. 

On December 10 - International Human Rights Day, federal Magistrate Matt Whitworth sentenced me to 3 months in prison for having crossed the line at a military base that wages drone warfare. The punishment for our attempt to speak on behalf of trapped and desperate people, abroad, will be an opportunity to speak with people trapped by prisons and impoverishment here in the U.S.

The trial was based on a trespass charge incurred on June 1, 2014.  We carried a loaf of bread and a letter for Brig Gen. Glen D. Van Herck. In court, we testified that we hadn’t acted with criminal intent but had, rather, exercised our First Amendment right (and responsibility) to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.

A group of Afghan friends had entrusted me with a simple message, their grievance, which they couldn’t personally deliver: please stop killing us.

It’s one thing to read about the shameful racism and discrimination of the U.S. criminal justice system. It’s quite another to sit next to a woman who is facing ten or more years in prison, isolated from children she has not held in years, and to learn from her about the circumstances that led to her imprisonment.  Many women prisoners, unable to find decent jobs in the regular economy, turn to the underground economy.

The U.S. is the undisputed world leader in incarceration, as it is the world leader in military dominance. Each time I’ve left a U.S. prison, I’ve felt as though I was leaving the scene of a crime. When I return to the U.S. from sites of our war making, abroad, I feel the same way.

Emerging back into the regular world seems tantamount to accepting a contract, pledging to forget the punishments we visit on impoverished people. I’m invited to forget about the people still trapped inside nightmare worlds we have made for them.

The full article is available here

Santa's Real Workshop: Town in China Makes World's Decorations - Oliver Wainright

Inside the ‘Christmas village’ of Yiwu, there’s no snow and no elves, just 600 factories that produce 60% of all the decorations in the world. 

Our yuletide myth-making might like to imagine that Christmas is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering away in a snow-bound log cabin somewhere in the Arctic Circle. 

But it’s not. 

The likelihood is that most of those baubles, tinsel and flashing LED lights you’ve draped liberally around your house came from Yiwu, 185 miles south of Shanghai – where there’s not a (real) pine tree nor (natural) snowflake in sight.

Inside the ‘Christmas village’ of Yiwu, there’s no snow and no elves, just 600 factories that produce 60% of all the decorations in the world.  They're staffed primarily by migrant laborers, working 12 hours a day for a maximum of $200-300 a month.

Aiming at the lower end of the market, Yiwu’s sales thrived during the recession, as the world shopped for cut-price festive fun, but international sales are down this year. 

Still, according to Cai Qingliang, vice chairman of the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, domestic appetite is on the rise, as China embraces the annual festival of Mammon. Santa Claus, says the Economist, is now better known to most Chinese people than Jesus.

The beaming sales reps of Yiwu market couldn’t sound happier with their life sentence of eternal Christmastime. According to Cheng Yaping, co-founder of the Boyang Craft Factory, who runs a stall decked out like a miniature winter wonderland: “Sitting here every day, being able to look at all these beautiful decorations, is really great for your mood.”

It’s somehow unlikely that those on the other end of the production line, consigned to dipping snowflakes in red-swamped workshops for us to pick up at the checkout for $.99, feel quite the same way.

The full article is available here

The Hunger Games Economy - Jebediah Purdy in The Daily Beast

The enormous resonance of the story in The Hunger Games suggests it’s caught something many Americans sense: the rules we are currently living by are not the best we can do. We are living with our own Hunger Game.

What are our Hunger Games? I’d start with the economy. The fact that tens of millions of Americans still can’t afford health care—especially but not only in states that have resisted Obamacare—means that losing the game can literally mean dying. Statistically, rejecting the Medicaid expansion means more than a thousand early deaths every year in my state, North Carolina, mostly among the working poor. That’s just one rule of the game.

Because it’s hard to unionize, a worker who asks for more is likely to be replaced by someone who will ask for less.  Solidarity is harder, and people are pitted against one another.  The 29 coal miners who were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia four years ago were non-unionized, which made it easier for their bosses to ignore safety rules and press for ramped-up production over human life.  Don Blankenship, then-head of the company, has just been criminally indicted, but it’s five years too late.  His policies made the workplace a Hunger Games arena of its own.

At the start of each Hunger Games, the contestants scramble for a pile of survival gear and weapons before taking off for the woods to hunt one another.  In America, black children are born into families with about 10%—one-tenth—the average wealth of white families.  They are born in neighborhoods with fewer business owners, fewer professionals—fewer of the patrons who can spot their talent and send the real-world version of those little silver parachutes that drop into the Hunger Games arena to save our heroes.

The Hunger Games  Mockingjay’s moral core is solidarity: the Gamers start caring about one another and resisting the rule that only one contestant can survive the Hunger Games. 

The political pivot comes when they realize that there could be a world without Hunger Games at all.  The rules of this game are man-made.  They benefit some people and hurt many others—even the so-called winners, who survive by becoming killers, then become the celebrity playthings of Capitol elites.

But once we understand that it’s the rules of the game that are the problem, we can see that no one needs to be racist for the system to keep spitting out racist results.  No one needs to hate for a game to be hateful.  Even “fair” rules, which treat every person alike, are not really fair if the contestants scramble across the starting line in very unequal situations, some with swords and bows, some with a little rope and a box of matches.  The problem is that being a decent person in an indecent situation is not enough, even though it may also be all you can do.

This is especially hard to see because Americans, even more than other people, tend to see the rules of the market as natural and unchangeable facts.  In American life, the familiar version of market competition is often treated as like the Law of Gravity, the kind you can’t change and defy only if you don’t mind falling on your face.

The full article is available here

Ebola Coverage Puts Old Fears in New Virus - Janine Jackson

Ebola is less a story about a bizarre new disease and its unpredictably disastrous capacities, and more a sad old story about poverty and priorities. 

The epidemic has so far killed at least 4,800 people in West Africa. There is no reason to believe Ebola will or could exact analogous tolls here, because, despite ooga-booga stories about Africans carrying tainted “bushmeat” in their luggage (Newsweek, 8/21/14; FAIR Blog, 8/28/14), the forces behind the viral outbreak largely have to do with infrastructure deficits and lack of access to healthcare.

But sober and data-driven isn’t exactly US media’s style, particularly when dealing with a disease associated with There that is seen to be coming Here. The concoction of ignorance and breathlessness has generated some truly terrible coverage.

“Fears of the other” have attended perceptions of disease “ever since the germ theory first associated microbes with illness,” Washington told FAIR’s CounterSpin (10/24/14), citing “Typhoid Mary,” an Irish woman when they were a “despised minority,” along with accusations that Chinese people were spreading plague in 1900s San Francisco and charges that Jews fomented disease in Polish ghettos.

No one suggests that journalists should know more than medical professionals about a disease that is largely unfamiliar to most people, or strive to speak definitively about evolving events.

It is fair to insist that they delineate what they know from what they don’t, and resist speculation and rumor-mongering. Not just because these have no place in responsible public health reporting, but because misinformation has effects.

In this case, these include both the fanning of violent xenophobia —as we’ve already seen in the case of, for example, Senegalese-American boys in the Bronx being beaten up while their attackers shouted “Ebola!” (Gothamist, 10/27/14)—and the individual and societal problems resulting from a misunderstanding of relative risk.

The full article is available here