security

By David R. Loy Buddhist Reflections on Occupy Wall Street In a Buddhist blog about Occupy Wall Street, Michael Stone quotes the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who spoke to the New York Occupiers at Zuccotti Park on October 9, 2011: “They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down!” As...

Finally, there is some argumentation in the West supportive of a nuclear free zone for the Middle East. Such thinking is still treated as politically marginal, and hardly audible above the beat of the war drums. It also tends to be defensively and pragmatically phrased as in the NY Times article by Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull (January 15, 2012) with full disclosure title, “Preventing a Nuclear Iran, Peacefully.”

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> The talk is talk. Or will it walk? Mitt Romney, the US Republican candidate for the presidency, says that on his watch Iran would not be allowed to build a nuclear weapon but that on his watch President Barack Obama will let it happen.

NATO, Missile Defense and Russian Insecurity. And what if you look at it from their side now? By David Krieger and Steven Starr In the aftermath of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has become increasingly powerful. It was created in 1949 as an alliance of Western military forces to protect against the perceived military threat posed by the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries. With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO has expanded by adding former Soviet bloc countries, moving to the borders of Russia. It has also engaged in military actions, notably in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya. For the past several years, the US and NATO have been pursuing the deployment of an integrated missile defense system in Western, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well as in surrounding waters. The Russians have protested vigorously that the planned...

By Stephen Zunes An ad on my Facebook page from barackobama.com reads, “Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich say they would start foreign aid to Israel at zero. Reject their extreme plan now!” This struck me as odd for two reasons: First, it is disingenuous and misleading. The actual position taken by these Republican presidential candidates is that all foreign aid should initially start at zero as means of reducing the deficit, to be immediately followed by the resumption of aid on a case-by-case basis. As they themselves have acknowledged, they would immediately resume aid to Israel and perhaps even increase it. Ironically, U.S. “aid for Israel” goes almost exclusively to U.S. arms manufacturers, with which the Republican candidates have a close relationship.

The Occupy Movement is a sign of US sanity.  Leaderless makes it less vulnerable, immensely consciousness-raising, not insisting on any one single analysis or remedy–for the time being.  People so concerned that they sacrifice some personal comfort–gaining togetherness and a sense of meaning, a gift for a democracy. And what a sign of US insanity their touch with authority was: no leading politicians eager to preach or learn or both, but tear gas, pepper spray, evictions.  In the 1960’s Vietnam era, Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara ultimately left his office to talk sense into demonstrators.  It worked-the other way around.  That the social worker from Chicago, Obama, did not, is a shame.