Browsing PBH By Articles

On The Bush Doctrine And The Arab Spring

As the Arab Spring has blossomed into the Arab Summer, there has been an effort among members of the conservative community to align the narrative of the Bush Doctrine and the resulting endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan with that of the Arab Spring. While promoting his memoir, Cheney claimed that the Bush Administration and its subsequent doctrine that it prescribed in the Middle East are to thank for the eruption of empowerment and action witnessed today:

But make no mistake: neither the Administration nor the President deserve any credit for the remarkable things happening now in Northern Africa and the Middle East. The only thing that the Bush Doctrine — defined by top-down, deregulated and contracted transplantation of one-size-fits-none “democracy” — deserves credit for is the “democratic” decrepitude that is so present in the leaders and institutions of Iraq and Afghanistan today.

Afghanistan’s crooked and corrupt state can largely be attributed to its President, Hamid Karzai. Chosen as interim president in 2002 by the Bush Administration, Karzai’s alleged lure was that despite being a southern Pashtun, he had good relations with the non-Pashtun and Taliban-leaning North, and could hopefully unite the two and begin the transition down an American-guided path. Unsurprisingly, this was a myopic vision on behalf of the Bush regime, as according to Abdullah Abdullah, former Karzai foreign minister and current political opponent, Karzai has only “[distanced] the Afghan government from the Afghan people” and that “the Taliban is taking advantage of this.”

The company Karzai keeps isn’t comforting either. One of the most feared and powerful opium and heroin traders in the Kandahar region happened to be Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali. Oddly enough, Ahmed was elected as a Kandahar province representative until he was killed in July by one of his own bodyguards.

And then there was Gul Agha Sherzai, the man who, according to The Globe and Mail, received millions of dollars from the CIA and US government to get rid of the Taliban, yet after doing so proceeded to allow them to become part of the de facto government. He was also the man who admitted to receiving $1 million a week from his share of import duties and from the opium trade. Keep in mind that most Afghans live on less than a dollar a day.

Ever-so characteristic of a Bush selection, the elections in which Karzai ran were rife with chicanery and general corruption, along with ‘support’ from people like Karim Khalili, current Vice President who has also been accused of war crimes and killing thousands of people. And we thought quail hunting gone awry was bad. After being confronted about the alleged ballot stuffing and intimidation, all Karzai had to say was that “there was fraud in 2004, there is today, there will be tomorrow.”

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Examining Racism In Modern Justice And Criminology

There continues to be very real and pervasive elements of racism and classism in the American justice system. Though elements of the law seem colorblind and judicious, the practice of policing, identifying, and punishing ‘criminal’ behavior have taken very serious racial undertones.

Criminal profiling is the process of using known principles of psychology and criminology to create the profile of a potential offender. That’s usually what you see when all the detectives of Law & Order: Criminal Intent get together and start putting pictures, pins, and evidence up on a cork board. There is little evidence that this criminal profiling is actually effective, as it mostly relies on common sense justifications. It is, nonetheless, a tactic that is used in police stations across the country.

The ugly stepsister of criminal profiling is racial profiling. On the surface, it seems to make sense. If reported suspects include a 5’4 white woman and a 6’2 black man, why would the police search for anyone else? Unfortunately, eyewitnesses are often incorrect and influenced by outside factors, and racial profiling can have damaging effects on those innocent people who “fit the profile.”

One of the biggest stories to hit the press in recent years occurred in a vibrant college town in Virginia. For over six years, a serial rapist haunted the town of Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. From 1997 to 2003, the police were unable to catch the man who raped at least six women, and devised a plan to acquire the DNA of every person who met the suspects profile. Unfortunately, the information was extremely limited: police had a series of sketches depicting very different people, with the only common denominator being the suspect was a black male:

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Rethinking Marx In The 21st Century

The Article: Why Karl Marx Was Right by Lee Sustar in Socialist Worker.

The Text: Economist Nouriel Roubini, whose predictions of the financial crash of 2008 earned him the nickname “Dr. Doom,” has referred his patients to a specialist in capitalist crisis: Dr. Karl Marx.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Roubini said:

Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.

For several hours on August 12, the Journal website ran the video of the interview as a top story, under the headline, “Roubini: Marx was Right.”

Considering that the first edition of Marx’s three-volume masterwork Capital appeared in 1867, Roubini’s revelation isn’t exactly news to socialist opponents of capitalism. But given the intractable nature of the current crisis–a deep global recession, a weak recovery in the traditional core of the system in the U.S. and Europe, and now the possibility of a lurch into a second recession–mainstream, or bourgeois, economics has been exposed as ideologically driven and incapable of offering solutions.

Stimulus spending, championed by liberal followers of the economist John Maynard Keynes, was in full swing two years ago. It staved off total economic collapse after the financial crash, but failed to produce a sustained boom and led to big government budget deficits.

That opened the door to the free-market champions of the so-called Austrian economic school of Friedrich von Hayek, who argued that slashing spending was key to an economic revival–only to see such measures choke off growth in Europe and, more recently, the U.S.

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Vladimir Putin, The World’s Dreamiest Action Man

Finally, The Atlantic has done what we have all secretly longed for: created a gallery dedicated to former KGB spy, Judo master, and (largely considered) the richest man in Europe, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. And man is it brilliant.

The Galliano Affair: Fashion And Racism In 21st Century France

L’enfant terrible of fashion, John Galliano, received a suspended sentence on September 8th for anti-Semitic and racist remarks made at a bar within walking distance of his home in Paris. He might have been better off had he not left under his own power that night as his chauffeur was “trained” to contact a lawyer as soon as the Valium and booze kicked in.

He went to rehab (in America, of course) and expressed regret for “the sadness this whole affair has caused.”

Although incidents were down last year from the alarming peaks of 2009 — 466 incidents last year vs. 822 the year before — French anti-Semitism has been on the rise in recent years. Anti-Semitism in France has a long history and in some ways, Galliano’s comments were more of a sourcils haussés moment than full-on cul par terre. Shocking, but not surprising.

And yet, anti-Semitism in France is at an all time low among the French. French Catholic families now overwhelmingly view French Jews as French [pdf]; the new Others are seen as the Maghrebis, Arabs, and Berbers from the former North African colonies of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. Even the far-right Front National has been toning down its anti-Jewish rhetoric lately, and Marinne Le Pen, their current leader, is actively courting French Jews to join the Front’s crusade against Arab and Berber immigrants. All of which is made more bizarre by the fact that Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, is Godfather to Plume M’bala M’bala, the third daughter of activist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala who began his career fighting for the cause of the sans papiers, the undocumented Maghrebis.

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