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By Stephen Zunes President Obama’s selection of John Kerry as the next secretary of state sends the wrong signal to America’s allies and adversaries alike. Kerry’s record in the United States Senate, where he currently chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, has included spurious attacks on the International Court of Justice, unqualified defense of Israeli occupation policies and human rights violations, and support for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, thereby raising serious questions about his commitment to international law and treaty obligations. Furthermore, his false claims about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and his repeated denials of well-documented human rights abuses by allied governments raise serious questions about his credibility.

Once again, perhaps in the most anguishing manner ever, the deadly shooting of 20 children (and 8 adults) between the ages of 5 and 10 at the Newton, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School, has left America in a stunned posture of tragic bemusement. Why should such incidents be happening here, especially in such a peaceful and affluent town? The shock is accompanied by spontaneous outpourings of grief, bewilderment, empathy, communal esprit, and a sense of national tragedy. Such an unavoidably dark mood is officially confirmed by the well-crafted emotional message of the president, Barack Obama. The template of response has become a national liturgy in light of the dismal pattern of public response: media sensationalism of a totalizing kind, at once enveloping, sentimental, and tasteless (endless interviewing of surviving children and teachers, and even family members of victims), but dutifully avoiding deeper questions relating to guns, violence, and cultural stimulants...

… was the title of the Symposium at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia-USA 17-19 Nov 2012. An example of the blossoming wave of peace studies all over the US; inter-disciplinary and international. Most papers were given by very promising students on most aspects of peace studies. It is inconceivable that this will not have a major impact on US foreign policy in a generation or so, particularly with the demographic shift from the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males voting Romney to the negations of all of that, including Blacks, Latins and women voting Obama. And with that shift the idea of a Chosen People with a Promised Land and a Covenant with the Almighty making them exceptional and indispensable, above the law of ordinary states, will slowly die.

Around the world even more than in the United States there is an audible sigh of relief the day after Obama won a clear mandate for a second term as president. Deconstructed it mainly meant that many more were relieved that Romney lost, rather than excited that Obama won. Yet there were some, with whom I partly agree, whose gaze carries beyond the narrow victory in popular vote (as distinct from the decisive victory in the electoral college vote), to appreciate a positive fundamental change in American demographics. The white majority coalition that Reagan fashioned so skillfully in the 1980s, achieving incredibly regressive societal results, seems to be losing out to the rising proportion of the electorate that is African-American and Latino, reinforced by the political outlook of youth and the liberal outlook of many women when it comes to reproductive rights. Perhaps, as indicative of a changing social climate...

From Washington, DC on Election Night One of them won, of course, even if the real winners as usual were the non-voters, for whatever reason: men more than women. About 23:15 Obama passed the magic 50 percent mark, not of popular votes but of electoral colleges, with 302-206, well above 270; it turned into a landslide. Net result: status quo, no change. The media did their best to make the presidential election look important, being the pinnacle, the altar on which democracy is built. Some democracy. Bad enough with a Supreme Court washing the process in six billion dollars as one more freedom of expression like talking words; any kind of words, libelous, often neither true nor relevant. Stupid TV spots. But many issues were somehow articulated, there were real disagreements, there was some kind of rhetorical left-right.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the third and final presidential debate of the 2012 campaign was the similarity between the two candidates on many basic foreign policy issues. Part of the reason is that, as he did in the first two debates, GOP candidate Mitt Romney reversed himself on a number of extreme right-wing positions he had taken earlier in a desperate effort to depict himself as a moderate. At the same time, Obama’s hawkish stances served as yet another reminder of just how far to the right Obama has evolved since running as an anti-war candidate just four years ago. Indeed, Romney’s perceived need to lie about Obama’s record and his reluctance to provide much in the way of specific policy alternatives is indicative of how little difference there actually is between the two when it comes to the U.S. role in the world. Both candidates agree on...

In 2008, Barack Obama rekindled faith in the America electoral process for many, and revived the deeper promise of American democracy, bringing to the foreground of the national political experience a brilliant and compassionate African American candidate. When Obama actually won the presidency, it was one of the exciting political moments in my lifetime, and rather reassuring as a sequel to the dark years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Of course, many Americans didn’t share such positive feelings, and an important embittered minority believed that the election of a liberal-minded black man was the lowest point ever reached in national politics, challenging this segment of society that now was deeply alienated from the prevailing political current to mobilize their forces so as to win back control of the country on behalf of white Christian Americans, and also a time to indulge such absurd scenarios as an imminent Muslim takeover of...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Bar Martin Luther King, Barack Obama is the finest political orator in America’s living memory. His supporters are dumbstruck that in his debate with his challenger for the November 6th vote for the presidency his performance was so weak. He didn’t even mention Mitt Romney’s absurd statement that he has written off 47% of Americans because they depend on some sort of government handouts. Hopefully Obama can recover this lost ground in the next two debates, one on domestic policy, the other on foreign affairs.

By David Krieger Fifty years ago this month, the world teetered on the precipice of a nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union during the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis. We were fortunate to have survived that crisis, thanks largely to the restraint shown by President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. Now, fifty years later, there is no immediate crisis such as that in 1962 over Soviet nuclear-armed missiles being placed in Cuba. There are, however, still some 19,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nine nuclear-armed nations: the US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Approximately 95 percent of these weapons are in the arsenals of the US and Russia. Some 2,000 of them are kept in a state of high alert, ready to be immediately launched upon an order to do so at any moment of any day or night.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> The wild demonstrations that last week burst out in many places in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan and other places will not be the last and neither were they the first to protest Western insults of the prophet Mohammad. Much more serious were the ones that erupted in 1988 following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses”, and seven years ago the protests and threats that followed the publication of satirical cartoons in a Danish paper, mocking Mohammad.

It seems bizarre that right-wing pundits would be so desperate to use the recent anti-American protests in the Middle East—in most cases numbering only a few hundred people and (except for a peaceful Hezbollah-organized rally in Lebanon) in no cases numbering more than two or three thousand—as somehow indicative of why the United States should oppose greater democracy in the Middle East. Even more strangely, some media pundits are criticizing Arabs as being “ungrateful” for U.S. support of pro-democracy movements when, in reality, the United States initially opposed the popular movements that deposed Western-backed despots in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, and remains a preeminent backer of dictatorships in the region today. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney falsely accused President Obama

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