Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Kevin Gosztola the American undergraduate writer and filmmaker has posed the question: Why Did Ecuador Grant Asylum to Julian Assange? in an article he published in The Nation magazine. In the article he states “…in the face of rumors that British authorities were considering storming the Ecuadorean embassy in London to arrest Julian Assange, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that his country will grant the WikiLeaks founder diplomatic asylum. He declared that his government endorsed the “fears” expressed by Assange that he could face political persecution if sent to Sweden, and that such asylum would protect him from the possibility of being extradited to the United States. …Patiño read from a list of points detailing the foundation for the asylum request by Assange, who he described as “an award-winning communications professional” known “internationally for his struggle for freedom of expression, press freedom and human rights in general.” He cited “strong evidence” that Assange faced possible “retaliation by the country or countries that produced the information,” revealed by Cablegate, noting that such retaliation “may endanger [his] safety, integrity, and even his life.” He said that “given an extradition to the United States of America, Mr. Assange would not have a fair trial, could be tried by special courts or military” and could be the victim of “cruel and degrading” treatment. …if the Swedish government is genuinely concerned over the women who brought forth the allegations against him, it is troubling to see its government continue to refuse to send someone to question Assange in London. It is this refusal that ultimately helped convince Ecuador to grant asylum.”

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Thierry Guetta the 46 year old French American Los Angeles based filmmaker and street artist known as Mr. Brainwash has been profiled by Matilda Battersby for the Independent in an article titled ‘Mr Brainwash: Banksy’s street-art protégé and his latest brainwave – The master of hype arrives in London for a blockbuster new show’. Battersby states “…when we met last month Mr Brainwash told me he still had no idea what to do with the 120,000ft space [the Old Sorting Office] and isn’t anywhere near finishing the work for it. He has the blind optimism of a child, and is convinced it will come together magically. …He propels himself through the conversation like a Duracell Bunny on steroids, wearing paint-spattered jeans and hoodie. His legs jiggle, his arms flap, he jumps up and down and uses his hands to draw in the air. He’s often been accused of being a fake. But after spending an hour in his company I’m astonished to find myself thinking he’s anything but: kooky, yes; scarily energetic, too; but endearing and bubbling over with vim. If this is an act then he deserves that Oscar. …he says: “I take everything seriously and I do everything with my heart. So when I got the chance of doing something I was like a mental patient who finally got to see a shrink. I vomited out everything I had inside.” … His signature style pitches somewhere between Banksy’s black and white stencils and Andy Warhol’s colourful prints. He draws straight on walls or prints computerized images onto large sheets of paper and pastes them up in separate pieces. It is a technique he learned while following Fairey and his work is now almost as ubiquitous in LA as Fairey’s own.”

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Joseph Andoni Massad the 49 year old Palestinian American Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History has published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘Egypt’s nouveaux riches and the Palestinians’ in which he details how the beneficiaries of the post-Sadat financial success continue to sell out Egypt and the Palestinians. In the article Massad states “The Sadatist and nouveaux riches’ campaigns would invent stories about Palestinians having lost their country because they themselves were “sell-outs” and had “sold their country to the Jews”. These rumours continue to be widespread in Egyptian society, at all levels, till this very day, sustained as they are by the utter chauvinist hatred engendered by this petty uneducated class, who under Mubarak continued to rob the country clean and impoverish vast sectors of its population, in the process accumulating billions of dollars. The anti-Palestinian campaign was central to the Sadatist project of instituting an anti-Arab chauvinist Egyptian nationalism in place of Egyptian Arab nationalism. The charge that Palestinians sold their country is of course a distracting tactic used by an Egyptian comprador class which, in fact, did sell Egypt to the highest bidders (in addition to Americans and Israelis, Saudis have also been favourite buyers) since the 1970s and is fighting the current transformation of the country in order to be able to sell whatever is left of the country unhindered. … Hard as they try to keep the anti-Palestinian rumour mill going, Egypt’s comprador class of sellouts and their liberal press agents will continue to lose ground, as they are now recognised plainly for what they are and what they have been for the last four decades, enemies of the majority of Egyptians.”

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Michael T Klare the American Professor of Peace and World Security Studies published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘The hunger wars in our future’ highlighting the rising food prices due to drought may again lead to social unrest and violent conflict. Klare states “With more than one-half of US counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans – and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported US grains. This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences. …Food – affordable food – is essential to human survival and well-being. Take that away, and people become anxious, desperate and angry. …many nations depend on grain imports from the US to supplement their own harvests, and because intense drought and floods are damaging crops elsewhere as well, food supplies are expected to shrink and prices to rise across the planet. …keep an eye out for the social and political effects that undoubtedly won’t begin to show up here or globally until later this year or 2013. Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food shortages and billions of famished, desperate people.”

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Sharon Hayes the 42 year old American artist who uses mixed mediums of video, performance, and installation in an ongoing investigation into various intersections between history, politics and speech, has been profiled by Kyle Chayka on Blouin Artinfo for her Whitney Museum exhibition titled ‘There’s So Much I Want to Say to You’. In the article Chayka states “…Hayes came of age during the rise of gay liberation movements and Third Wave feminism, twin currents that drive “There’s So Much I Want to Say to You.” In this tour-de-force solo show, the artist is equal parts activist, diarist, and journalist, charting her own individual upheavals even as she experiences the upheavals of her time and excavates the struggles of the past. A gay woman, Hayes integrates the personal and the political in a way that brings to mind the recent identity-based work of Simon Fujiwara and Danh Vo, but with a keener sense of the painful realities of the world and their impact on the individual. In formats ranging from her 1990s-era solo theatrical performances to her 2004 DJ set drawn from her extensive collection of spoken-word LPs, Hayes draws on lives and stories outside her own. Much of the Whitney exhibition confronts the struggle for queer identity. Sixteen-millimeter film footage shot at the 1971 “Christopher Street Liberation Day and Gay-In” is voiced over by Hayes and activist Kate Millett, who was born in 1934, in a piece called “Gay Power.” Millett reminisces about the excitement of the day while the camera runs up and down young bodies lit by the yellowing setting sun.”

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Mattea Kramer the American senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project has published an article on TomDispatch titled ‘Four spending myths that could wreck our world’ urging US lawmakers need to set aside budget initiatives based on fear and fantasy, and fund more domestic programmes. Kramer states “We’re at the edge of the cliff of deficit disaster! National security spending is being, or will soon be, slashed to the bone! Obamacare will sink the ship of state! Each of these claims has grabbed national attention in a big way, sucking up years’ worth of precious TV airtime. That’s a serious bummer, since each of them is a spending myth of the first order. Myth one: Today’s deficits have taken us to a historically unprecedented, economically catastrophic place. Myth two: Military and other national security spending have already taken their lumps and future budget-cutting efforts will have to take aim at domestic programmes instead. Myth three: Government health-insurance programmes are more costly than private insurance. Myth four: The Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare” – will bankrupt the federal government while levying the biggest tax in US history.  …If lawmakers skipped the myth-making and began putting the United States’ resources into a series of domestic investments that would spur the economy now, their acts would yield dividends for years to come. That means pushing education and job training, plus a host of job-creation measures, to the top of the priority list, and setting aside initiatives based on fear and fantasy.”

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Nick Turse the American journalist, historian and author has published an article on Toms Dispatch titled ‘Obama’s Scramble for Africa’ where he discusses ‘Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s “New Spice Route” in Africa’. In the article Turse states “They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.  Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa. Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. …operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years: last year’s war in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of airports and bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles… The U.S. also has had troops deployed in Mali, despite having officially suspended military relations with that country following a coup. …engaged in a twenty-first century scramble for Africa, the possibility of successive waves of overlapping blowback grows exponentially.  Mali may only be the beginning and there’s no telling how any of it will end.  In the meantime, keep your eye on Africa.  The U.S. military is going to make news there for years to come.”

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Kenneth Saul Rogoff the 59 year old American Professor of Public Policy & Economics, and a chess Grandmaster has published an article on the Project Syndicate titled ‘Will Governmental Folly Now Allow for a Cyber Crisis?’ claiming most politicians are congenitally incapable of making difficult choices until risks actually materialise. In the article Rogoff states “When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, many shocked critics asked why markets, regulators and financial experts failed to see it coming. Today, one might ask the same question about the global economy’s vulnerability to cyber-attack. Indeed, the parallels between financial crises and the threat of cyber meltdowns are striking. Although the greatest cyber threat comes from rogue states with the capacity to develop extremely sophisticated computer viruses, risks can also come from anarchistic hackers and terrorists, or even from computer glitches compounded by natural catastrophe. …No economy is more vulnerable than the US, and it is arrogance to believe that US cyber superiority (to all except perhaps China) provides it with impenetrable security from attack. …Unfortunately the solution is not so simple as just building better anti-virus programmes. Virus protection and virus development constitute an uneven arms race. A virus can be just a couple hundred lines of computer code, compared to hundreds of thousands of lines for anti-virus programmes, which must be designed to detect wide classes of enemies. We are told not to worry about large-scale cyber meltdowns, because none has occurred, and governments are being vigilant.”

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David Vine the American Assistant professor of anthropology and currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S. military bases located outside the United States, has published an article on TomDispatch titled ‘The Lily-Pad Strategy’ on how the Pentagon is quietly transforming its overseas base empire and creating a dangerous new way of war. In the article Vine states “You might think that the U.S. military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. …Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states …In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces — essentially floating bases — and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas. …Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically …While relying on smaller bases may sound smarter and more cost effective than maintaining huge bases that have often caused anger in places like Okinawa and South Korea, lily pads threaten U.S. and global security in several ways …bases have a way of growing and reproducing uncontrollably. Indeed, bases tend to beget bases, creating “base races” with other nations, heightening military tensions, and discouraging diplomatic solutions to conflicts.”

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Stan Cox the American senior scientist at The Land Institute and author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World has published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘Air-conditioning: The cold reality’€™. Cox discusses how the use of power-hungry appliances is skyrocketing in the developing world, and is a major factor of CO2 emissions. Cox states ‘The Earth is running a fever. So with summers growing hotter (and with affluence rising) year by year, our world is becoming more and more dependent on air-conditioning. The possibility that air-conditioning could go universal has, in turn, raised ecological alarms, prompting a scramble for more eco-friendly cooling. …Those countries around the world that still have a low degree of dependence on air-conditioning should think twice before moving toward the United States’ industrial comfort standards. Energy consumption is not the only burning issue. The cool, still, dry atmosphere of the standard US home or office has a variety of other unpleasant and sometimes hazardous side effects. …If we are ever to gain some control over fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse emissions, a massive worldwide adjustment of thermostats will be required. But most importantly, we’ll need to adjust our own internal thermostats. By taking a more flexible attitude toward comfort and finding alternative ways to make the indoor environment livable, we can not only save energy but also become more resilient human beings. And we will need that resilience. The coming decades will test our ability to adapt and create, and we cannot leave it to technology to bail us out next time.”€

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Nina Rosenwald the American Chairperson of the Board of the Middle East Media and Research Institute and Vice President of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs has been profiled by Max Blumenthal in an article published on The Nation titled ‘The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate’. In the article Blumenthal states ” An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald spreads her millions through the William Rosenwald Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation named for her father, a famed Jewish philanthropist who created the United Jewish Appeal in 1939. His daughter’s focus is more explicitly political. According to a report by the Center for American Progress titled “Fear Inc.,” Rosenwald and her sister Elizabeth Varet, who also directs the family foundation, have donated more than $2.8 million since 2000 to “organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia.” Besides funding a Who’s Who of anti-Muslim outfits, Rosenwald has served on the board of AIPAC, the central arm of America’s Israel lobby, and holds leadership roles in a host of mainstream pro-Israel organizations. As groups like AIPAC lead the charge for a US military strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran, threatening to turn apocalyptic visions of civilizational warfare into catastrophic reality, Rosenwald’s wealth has fueled a rapidly emerging alliance between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic fringe. …Who is this benefactor of Islamophobia? According to those familiar with Rosenwald, she is anything but a sophisticated Machiavellian operator—“a babe in the woods,” as one of her longtime acquaintances described her to me.”

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Belén Fernández the 30 year old American magazine editor and feature writer has published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘Puerto Rico’s outlaw police force’ describing how police in the US territory have been accused of civil rights abuses and overzealous crackdowns on peaceful protests. In the article Fernández states “…intense crackdowns by Puerto Rican police on peaceful protests that began in response to fiscal austerity measures, the firing of 30,000 state employees, the suspension of collective bargaining rights, and a 50 per cent increase in tuition fees – rendering education prohibitively expensive for many students. …the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD)’s rampant violations of human and constitutional rights range from beatings with batons and nightsticks to sexual harassment of female protesters, from the administration of pepper spray at point-blank range and potentially lethal rubber bullets to the indiscriminate use of chemical agents – including tear gas dispersed from helicopters and a highly toxic form of gas not used in the US in 50 years. …As for disproportionate police-to-resident ratios, the PRPD’s employment of more than 17,000 officers for a population of 3.7 million is more than twice the national average. However, the expansion of both mainland policing activities and of a reality in which those tasked with the protection of civil rights are often the ones violating them – indicates that Puerto Rican struggles may indeed increasingly “mirror those across America”.”

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Jenifer Fenton the American freelance reporter based in Doha UAE has published an article on her own blog titled ‘Cover-up campaign hits Gulf streets’ in which she discusses how Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are encouraging expatriates to dress modestly and respect the local culture. Fenton states “…the “One of Us” public awareness push, which hopes to educate expatriates about appropriate dress. …to cover up between the shoulders and the knees. …Most local women in Qatar and the UAE wear an abaya, a black garment that covers most of the body. The men wear the kandura, which tends to be ankle-length and a shade of white. The “UAE Dress Code” campaign … began out of disgust at the sight of foreigners dressed in what they deemed to be inappropriate attire …While the awareness campaigns are not focused on creating dress code laws, they are about respecting cultural norms. But modesty and taste are subjective and without clear laws, what is acceptable attire is often left to the discretion of the wearer. Article 30 of the UAE Constitution says, “Freedom of opinion and expressing it verbally, in writing or by other means of expression shall be guaranteed within the limits of the law.” But to what extent does “other means” cover clothing – or lack of it? There are also no laws that explicitly spell out the do’s and don’ts of dressing in Qatar.”

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Joseph Samuel Nye the 75 year old American political science Professor and co-founder of the international relations theory neoliberalism, developing the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. Nye has published an article on the Project Syndicate where he discusses with reference to Syria, when should States intervene militarily to stop atrocities in other countries. Nye states, …The idea of a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) was adopted unanimously at the UN’s World Summit in 2005, but subsequent events showed that not all member states interpreted the resolution the same way. Russia has consistently argued that only Security Council resolutions, not General Assembly resolutions, are binding international law. Meanwhile, Russia has vetoed a Security Council resolution on Syria, and, somewhat ironically, Annan has been called back and enlisted in a so-far futile effort to stop the carnage there. …In fact, R2P is more about struggles over political legitimacy and soft power than it is about hard international law. Some Western lawyers argue that it entails the responsibility to combat genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes under the various conventions of international humanitarian law. But Russia, China and others are reluctant to provide a legal or political basis for actions such as what occurred in Libya. …There are other reasons why R2P has not been a success in the Syrian case. Drawn from traditional “just war” theory, R2P rests not only on right intentions, but also on the existence of a reasonable prospect of success.”

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Kerry James Marshall the 56 year old American artist painter known for his large-scale paintings, sculptures, and objects that take African-American life and history as their subject matter. His work often deals with the effects of the Civil Rights movement on domestic life, in addition to working with elements of popular culture. Marshall developed a signature style during his early years involving the use of extremely dark, essentially black figures. These images represent his perspective of African Americans with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances, while at the same time confronting racial stereotypes within contemporary American society. Marshall has been profiled by Rachel Wolff in an article on Artinfo, where he states “€œIf you look historically at the way painting has moved from representation to abstraction, the implications of that, in some ways, erased what people can identify as political and social content in a work, one of the quickest ways you can erase what they saw as limitations of ethnicity and race was to do abstract work, and by doing so, you would find your way into the mainstream of the art world. I am trying to demonstrate that there is a great deal of potential left in the black aesthetic and within the specificity of the Black Nationalist position as represented by the colors red, black, and green. That you can transcend what is perceived to be the limitation of a race-conscious kind of work. It is a limitation only if you accept someone else’s foreclosure from the outside. If you go into it yourself, you can exercise a good deal. And you are limited only by your own ability to imagine possibilities.”€

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Mark Weisbrot the American economist, columnist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘Learning the wrong lessons from Latvia’ referring to Europe’s use of the Baltic state’s austerity programmes as an example. In the article Weisbrot states “Latvia, a Baltic country of 2.2 million that most people could not find on a map, has suddenly garnered attention from economists involved in the debate over the future of Europe and the global economy. …This is terrible, because if there’s one simple lesson that most of the world – if not the European authorities – seems to be learning from the prolonged crisis in Europe, it is that fiscal tightening is not the proper response to a recession. …Latvia lost about a quarter of its national income. Unemployment rose from 5.3 per cent to more than 20 per cent of the labour force and, …under-employment peaked at more than 30 per cent. Official unemployment remains at more than 15 per cent today, even after the economy finally grew by 5.5 per cent last year, and about 10 per cent of the labour force has left the country. …the bottom line is that no country with three times the unemployment rate that it had before the world recession, and Latvia’s huge income losses, should be considered even a qualified success story. It would be a shame if these unwarranted conclusions from Latvia’s experience were to help prolong the unnecessary suffering in the eurozone.”

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Laura D’Andrea Tyson the 65 year old American Economist Professor and former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration, has published an article on the Project Syndicate titled ‘The Wrong Austerity Cure’. In the article Tyson states “Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and French President François Hollande are right: Europe needs bold, coordinated policies to promote growth, along with market-based structural reforms to foster competition and an easing of fiscal targets until output and employment recover. But how can significant new growth initiatives be financed? The reality is that the rest of Europe cannot succeed in restoring growth without Germany, and Germany remains wedded to the austerity cure. With a modest fiscal deficit, record-low borrowing costs, and a huge current-account surplus, Germany has the financial firepower to unleash a significant stimulus. But Germany sees no need to stimulate its own economy, and is willing to consider only modest eurozone measures… Despite pleas from the IMF and the OECD, Germany also remains implacably opposed to Eurobonds, which could ease the funding constraints of other eurozone members… the worsening banking crisis, with deposits fleeing from the eurozone periphery, is further strangling Europe’s growth prospects. It is probably too late to save Greece. But a shift towards policies to promote growth, supported by the easing of deficit targets and the issuance of Eurobonds, is essential to bring Europe back from the brink of sustained recession, to stabilise Europe’s financial markets, and to prevent another significant disruption to global capital markets.”

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Michael T. Klare the American Professor of Peace and World Security Studies has published an article on TomDispatch questioning if Barack Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney, highlighting four ways he is pursuing Cheney’s geopolitics of global energy. In the article Klare states “As details of his administration’s global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known — a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected assassinations — President Obama has been compared to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action. …When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president.  …it is possible to reconstruct the geopolitical blueprint that Cheney followed …a blueprint that President Obama, eerily enough, now appears to be implementing, despite the many risks involved.1. Promote domestic oil and gas production at any cost to reduce America’s dependence on unfriendly foreign suppliers… 2. Keep control over the oil flow from the Persian Gulf … in order to retain an “economic stranglehold” over other major oil importers. 3. Dominate the sea lanes of Asia, so as to control the flow of oil and other raw materials to America’s potential economic rivals, China and Japan. 4. Promote energy “diversification” in Europe, especially through increased reliance on oil and natural gas supplies from the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea basin… This four-part geopolitical blueprint, relentlessly pursued by Cheney while vice president, is now being implemented in every respect by President Obama.”

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Cara Christopher the 24 year old American Fine artist and Graphic Designer whose work centers around self portraits and vibrant pop art, has been interviewed by Summer Dawn Hortillosa for the Jersey City Independent. In the interview Christopher states “I am very much inspired by the concept that beauty comes from the inside. I think the concept that many have of true beauty is only what the advertising and entertainment industry is leading us up to believe… I believe that real beauty is conveyed through a work of art when the depth of intensity and emotion is shown is very high, especially through the use of very vibrant color combinations. …I have made a number of collages in which I gathered a large amount of images from many different sources. Many of these sources are fashion magazines, mainstream music magazines, celebrity tabloids, etc. …I collage them all together, not based at all on subject matter, but solely based on how the form of the space fits with the other shapes. With these pieces, I am aiming to show how the media is constantly saturating us with all of these printed images and how powerful of an effect that can have on our consciousness. …there are many things to experience that give human life redemption and a great deal of meaning and importance, such as painting, music, dance, etc. I want people to experience my art and feel that they are more connected with the world, other people, and themselves.”

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Khaled A. Beydoun the American Attorney and author has published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘The business of remaking Arab-American identity’ in which he provides an overview of racial categorization within the USA. Beydoun states “Since its inception, the United States government has had a fixation with race. The judiciary was the government’s arbiter of making and molding racial designations, and subsequently, classifying new immigrant communities into the fluidly shifting and arbitrary American racial taxonomy. Racial categories were shaped, and reshaped, according to shifting demographics. Initially, three primary categories, White, Black, and the catch-all “Mongoloid” group were created to distinguish between Americans, and segregate the latter groups from full-fledged citizenship. These categories were incessantly morphed, by American courts, and new titles such as “Caucasian” and “Hispanic”, for instance, were introduced. …The first major wave of Arab-Americans, who arrived in America circa the turn of the 20th century, was largely Christian natives of the Ottoman-colonised Levant. Religion, and the physical appearance of this wave, facilitated racial passing, and American courts ruled that (this pioneering) influx of Arabs were “part of the white race”. …Arab-Americans would ultimately be racialised differently, creating a divided landscape where American courts facilitated the early wave’s pursuit of whiteness and white privilege, and established jurisprudential baselines that denied the subsequent wave of largely Muslim, “ethnic” Arabs that same path. Caucasian was a legal term imposed on Arabs-Americans, while whiteness as an on-the-ground status was only enjoyed by those Arabs the courts – and the court of public opinion – deemed worthy of inclusion.”

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Andrew J. Bacevich the 65 year old American Professor of International Relations and retired career officer in the US Army has published an article in the LA Times titled ‘Divorcing Pakistan’ which contends the interests of Washington and Islamabad do not align, and neither do their preferred forms of paranoia. Bacevich states “The history of U.S.-Pakistani relations is one of wild swings between feigned friendship and ill-disguised mistrust. When the United States needs Pakistan, Washington showers Islamabad with money, weapons and expressions of high esteem. Once the need wanes, the gratuities cease, often with brutal abruptness. Instead of largesse, Pakistan gets lectures, with the instruction seldom well received. …But seldom has a marriage of convenience produced greater inconvenience and consternation for the parties involved. Simply put, U.S. and Pakistani interests do not align. Worse, neither do our preferred forms of paranoia. Pakistanis don’t worry about Islamists taking over the world. Americans are untroubled by the prospect of India emerging as a power of the first rank. The United States stayed in this unhappy marriage for the last decade in large part because Pakistan provided the transit route for supplies sustaining NATO’s ongoing war in landlocked Afghanistan. … A recently negotiated agreement with several former-Soviet Central Asian republics creates alternatives, removing Pakistan’s grip on NATO’s logistical windpipe. …As with most divorces, the proceedings promise to be ugly. Already, the U.S. is escalating its campaign of missile attacks against “militants” on Pakistani soil. U.S. officials dismiss complaints that this infringes on Pakistan’s national sovereignty.”

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Robert L Grenier the American former CIA director of counter-terrorism who was dismissed from the position, and now Chairman of ERG Partners, an independent financial and strategic advisory firm focusing on the security and intelligence sectors, has released an article on Aljazeera discussing implications of the USA playing the ‘India card’ in Afghanistan. Grenier states “Involving India in the US war in Afghanistan could further polarise Pakistan and turn the country into a proxy war. …US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta’s visit to New Delhi, in which he pressed the Indians to raise their level of engagement in Afghanistan. No longer satisfied simply with Indian provision of economic and development assistance, the American defence chief indicated he would like to see India engaged with Afghan security forces as well. In so saying, he was apparently not unmindful of how this message would be received in Islamabad. …But the US government should know that to the extent it is successful in pressing India into high-profile security engagement in Afghanistan, the more likely it is to produce the very situation it fears most: A renewed Afghan civil war in which India and Pakistan are actively engaged in support of their respective proxies, and in which Islamabad’s ties to the Taliban are strongly reinforced. …it should likewise exercise great caution in playing the “India card” in Afghanistan.”

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Sarah Sze the 42 year old American contemporary artist who uses ordinary objects to create sculptures and site-specific installations, states “I want people to stop and look at my art”. Sze’s latest installation profiled by Vanessa Thorpe for the Observer at the London Victoria Miro gallery, Thorpe states “…known for the involving intricacy of her sculptural work, but this dramatic piece, which now dominates a room … seems in danger of hypnotising even her. It is a theatrical construction that plays with light and water and yet is made entirely of household items. …The installation reminds me of student storage, with desk lamps, electric fans, paperclips, stepladders, books, chairs, and the added intimacy of folded clothes and a sleeping bag. Sze picks up bits and bobs everywhere she goes, she says; happy to exhibit the trace of her travels. … A talent for subtle showmanship has won her an international reputation and next year she will represent the US at the Venice Biennale. She is always thinking about the way the viewer sees her art and wants visitors to the London show to feel drawn to a “backstage area”, to glimpse things they feel they were not intended to. … “I am aware people might dismiss my art, but I’m interested in getting them to stop and look; for no other reason than that is what I do.”

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Dahr Jamail the 44 year old American journalist best known as one of the few unembedded journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the 2003 Iraq invasion, has published an article on Aljazeera about the pollution of the world’s oceans, highlighting the alarm of Scientists and experts at amount of plastic debris and growing ‘dead zones’ in the world’s oceans. Jamail states “The amount of plastic floating in the Pacific Gyre – a massive swirling vortex of rubbish – has increased 100-fold in the past four decades, phytoplankton counts are dropping, over-fishing is causing dramatic decreases in fish populations, decreasing ocean salinity is intensifying weather extremes, and warming oceans are speeding up Antarctic melting. … Scientists recently investigated the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, and found an “alarming amount” of refuse, much of it comprising individual pieces of very small size. The eastern section of the spiralling mass, between Hawaii and California, is estimated to be around twice the size of Texas, and is having ecosystem-wide impacts… Another phenomenon afflicting Earth’s oceans are “dead zones”. While these can be formed by natural causes, climate change, along with human activities and industrial waste, have greatly aggravated the situation. The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released a study showing that rising global temperatures cause oceans to warm, which translates into a decreased capacity to hold oxygen.”

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Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama the 60 year old American political scientist and economist is the subject of an article published by Dan Hind on Aljazeera titled ‘Just how do you change the world? Is there a progressive counter-narrative to the libertarian right?’ Hind states “Francis Fukuyama wrote an article for Foreign Affairs entitled The Future of History. In it he talked about the absence of “a plausible progressive counter-narrative” to the “libertarian right”. This libertarian right has “held the ideological high ground on economic issues” for a generation. …Fukuyama claims that “one of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left-wing one”. So while he thinks it conceivable that the “Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction”, he can’t find space for the hundreds of other occupations in the United States and worldwide. The role of trade unionists and socialists in Arab Spring is nowhere to be found and the vast movement for real democracy in Spain likewise vanishes. The Tea Party is what captures Fukuyama’s attention. …It would be unfair to mock him for his failure to predict the rise of Syriza in Greece, the defeat of a right-wing president in France and the growing confidence of anti-capitalist left in Europe and North America. It is, though, reasonable to expect a prophet to have some kind of grip on the recent past.”

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Kehinde Wiley the 35 year old American portrait painter, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of contemporary men in heroic poses has been profiled by Ben Davis for ArtInfo as ‘How the Artist Painted Himself Into a Corner With His New Works’. Davis states “Wiley’s much-hyped… series of large oil-on-linen paintings in the same near-photorealist, mock-baroque style that made Wiley famous in the first place, though this time depicting African-American women (instead of men) who have been cast from the streets of the Bronx and Queens, each of them clad in frothy couture made for their sittings by fashion designer Riccardo Tisci, in poses inspired by works from the Louvre. …his big breakthrough during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he decided to cast young men off the street and paint them in the heroic terms of royal portraiture. The result was a clever merger between street style and postmodern painting. It’s a good formula. Possibly too good. It suggests intelligence (in the art-historical references) and social conscience (in the focus on the African-American community), but is also neither particularly hard to digest nor particularly confrontational. …On some level, Wiley is aware that he is a prisoner of his own success. He has tried to change things up …[but] did exactly the same thing…”

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Joshua Kucera the American freelance journalist in an article published on Aljazeera titled ‘Azerbaijan jockeys for new geopolitical weight’ questions ‘What do the US and Israel have to gain by strengthening Azerbaijan’s naval capacities in the Caspian sea?’ Kucera states “As the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran has loomed over the past several months, a great deal of attention has been paid to Israel’s close ties with Iran’s northern neighbour, Azerbaijan. And while those ties are indeed close, the two countries nonetheless have very different concerns vis-a-vis Iran – ones that make them unlikely to cooperate on any potential Israeli strike against Tehran. The most visible part of Azerbaijani-Israeli cooperation is in the weapons business. Azerbaijan and Israel announced a massive arms deal, worth US $1.6bn, earlier this year, fuelling speculation that Israel was using Azerbaijan as a proxy against Iran. …But while Israel’s concern about Iran is Tehran’s nuclear programme and the fear that Iranian nuclear weapons could be used against them, Azerbaijan has displayed a less alarmist view of Iran’s nuclear intentions. …However, Azerbaijan does have significant strategic concerns about Iran as well, and tensions between the two countries have the potential for creating a new flashpoint in the region – albeit one unrelated to Israel.”

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James “Jamie” Dimon the 56 year old American chairman, president and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, one of the Big Four banks of the United States has appeared before the US Senate Banking Committee to explain his firms risky transactions with depositor funds recently losing billions of dollars. Brian Beutler for Talking Points Memo states “The long-shot big hope for Wall Street reformers was … Jamie Dimon would trip up before the Senate Banking Committee and expose the need for tighter rules governing big banks. …Instead, with some notable exceptions, the senators themselves turned the cross-examination into a coronation, and exposed the extent to which elected officials still feel compelled to genuflect to powerful financial interests. “You’re obviously renowned, rightfully so I think, as being one of the most, you know, one of the best CEOs in the country for financial institutions,” crooned Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). “You missed this, it’s a blip on the radar screen.” Most of the fawning came from GOP senators who in addition to relying on Wall Street largesse remain engaged in a political campaign against President Obama’s 2010 financial reform law. But some Democrats also treated Dimon if not quite like royalty then perhaps as a trusted confidant. … For reformers, that adds up to an opportunity missed.”

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Robert Bernard Reich the 66 year old American political economist and professor has published an article on his blog titled ‘The Big-Lie Coup d’Etat’ assessing the “… launching [of] a multi-million dollar TV ad buy [by] Crossroads GPS, the sister organization to the super PAC American Crossroads run by Republican political operative Karl Rove. …is a tax-exempt nonprofit group, it can spend unlimited money on politics — and it doesn’t have to reveal where it gets the dough. By law, all it has to do is spend most of the money on policy “issues,” which is a fig leaf for partisan politics. …The narrator in the ad … solemnly intones: “In 2008, Barack Obama said, ‘We can’t mortgage our children’s future on a mountain of debt.’ Now he’s adding $4 billion in debt every day, borrowing from China for his spending. Every second, growing our debt faster than our economy,” he continues. “Tell Obama, stop the spending.” This is a baldface lie, by the way. Obama isn’t adding to the debt every day. The debt is growing because of obligations entered into long ago, many under George W. Bush – including two giant tax cuts that went mostly to the very wealthy that were supposed to be temporary and which are still going, courtesy of Republican blackmail over raising the debt limit. In realty, government spending as a portion of GDP keeps dropping.”

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Michael Shank the American Vice-President at the Institute for Economics and Peace has co-published an article on Aljazeera with Congressman Mike Honda titled ‘Invest in the Afghan people not foreign contractors – The country’s post-withdrawal development plan should be handled by those who know Afghanistan best – the Afghans’. The article states “The truth is that development in Afghanistan is currently in the wrong hands. Tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayer money have been spent over almost 12 years in Afghanistan on development projects which were largely managed and implemented by foreign contractors and with little regard for long-term localised viability. It is now clear for anyone intimately involved in the reconstruction and stabilisation process that the key to building a strong state lies not in foreign contractors, but rather local village efforts connected to a Kabul command. To achieve a crucial state of regional stability, Afghans need peace, security and the right to self-determination based on their own social, cultural and religious values. In this spirit, it is problematic that the Afghanistan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development’s National Solidarity Program – out of which the highly effective Community Development Councils are run – remains stunted due to limited financial capacity…”

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Nikolas Kozloff the American writer and Latin American historian has published an article titled ‘Is Brazil the next cop on the beat in Africa? The Pentagon seems to hope so’ in which he argues that ‘any action Brazil takes in Africa should be based on peaceful cooperation and not military escalation’. Kozloff’s article on Aljazeera states “Facing budgetary constrictions and overstretched resources, the Pentagon knows that it cannot effectively patrol the entire globe on its own. …in Rio, Panetta [Pentagon] emphasized Brazil’s long held ties to Africa. Historically, Brazil was the largest destination of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and today a sizable portion of the country’s population is of African descent. …WikiLeaks cables suggest that some within the Brazilian political elite want to redirect Brazilian foreign policy toward Africa …Nevertheless, given all of the controversy about the US role in Africa, Brazil should firmly reject Panetta’s calls for closer military collaboration in the region. This doesn’t mean that Brazil should outright withdraw from Africa, and if anything the WikiLeaks documents serve to highlight the many shortcomings of the South American giant’s foreign policy on the continent. Hopefully, Brazil will become more engaged in Africa in the long-term, not less.”

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