Dilip Simeon's blog

Let’s skip the obvious.  Leave aside, for instance, the way Donald Trump’s decision to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against a Syrian air base is but another example of what we already know: that acts of war are now the prerogative, and only the  prerogative , of the president (or of military commanders whom Trump has given  greater authority  to act on their own). Checks, balances? I doubt either of them applies anymore when it comes to war, American-style.  These days, the only  checks written  are to the Pentagon and “balance” isn’t a concept outside of gymnastics. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has learned that every  wild defeat  at home, every swirling  palace intrigue  that would make a tsar blush, can be... well, trumped by dumping  59 cruise missiles  or their equivalent in some distant land to  save  the "beautiful babies." Forget the  babies  “his” generals  have  been  killing ...

The world didn’t expect much from Edward Bellamy, a reclusive, tubercular writer who lived with his parents. Yet if he lived small, he dreamed big, and in 1888 he published a phenomenally successful utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 . It told of a man who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000 to electrified cities, music broadcasts and “credit cards.” Even more exciting than Bellamy’s technological forecasts were his political ones. Unforgiving capitalism would be replaced by a welfare state, he predicted, with universal education, guaranteed incomes and supported retirement. His readers started Bellamy Clubs and set off a craze for utopian novels. In the 19th-century United States, only “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold more copies in its first years than “Looking Backward.” Daniel Immerwahr: How to Hide an Empire Bellamy, and his fans across the country, felt confident a “radically different” future was imminent. And why not? The United States was a dynamic, almost volatile, coun...

It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an " axis of evil ," three countries then incapable of endangering this one? Oh, and, as it turned out, a rich young Saudi former ally, Osama bin Laden, and 19 hijackers, most of them also Saudis, from a tiny group called al-Qaeda that briefly possessed an " air force " of four commercial jets. No wonder this country was then touted as the  greatest force , the superest superpower ever, sporting a military that left all others in the dust. And then, of course, came the launching of the Global War on Terror, which soon would be normalized as the plain-old, uncapitalized "war on terror." Yes, that very war — even if nobody's called it that for years —  began  on September 11, 2001. At a Pentagon partially in ruins, Secretary of...

My friend then said to me abashedly, “I sometimes think it’s lucky I won’t be here to see what’s going to happen to the world.” And even as she began stumbling all over herself apologizing for saying such a thing, I understood exactly what she meant. I had had the very same thought and sense of shame and horror at even thinking it - at even thinking I would, in some strange sense, get off easy and leave a world from hell to my children and grandchildren. Nothing, in fact, could make me sadder. And you know what’s the worst thing? Whether I’m thinking about that “destroyer” in the Strait of Taiwan or the destruction of planet Earth, one thing is clear enough: it wouldn’t have to be this way....  https://tomdispatch.com/a-world-at-the-edge/ May 1968 - June 1989. It's been five decades since 1968, and things are somehow worse Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves Protests in USA over ...

The U.S. wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan showed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and the funding of the domestic military-industrial complex were, more than geopolitics, the key drivers of these wars. Empires can die from overreach and sacrificing broadly social goals for the narrow interests of political and economic minorities. The United States has 4.25 percent of the world's population yet accounts for about 20 percent of global deaths from COVID-19. A rich global superpower with a highly developed medical industry proved to be badly unprepared for and unable to cope with a viral pandemic. It now wrestles with a huge segment of its population that seems so alienated from major economic and political institutions that it risks self-destruction and demands the "right" to infect others. Refusing to accept lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates in the...

Journalist Anne Helen Petersen touched a cultural nerve when she published an article about her own experience of burnout. The 2019 BuzzFeed article, titled " How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation ," gave a name to an experience so many Millennials had been feeling for a long time. Likewise, the viral piece debunked a cultural myth about Millennials being "lazy"; the stereotype, Petersen says, may come from the fact that the build-up of small  stressful tasks leads to feeling overwhelmed. Petersen's feature was the culmination of years of being overworked, underpaid, depressed, anxious, and facing an endlessly challenging future - while being bound by impossible career expectations and the performance, on social media, of a "perfect" life. Months later, the  W H O  went on to recognize burnout as an "occupational phenomenon." In an interview with Salon, Petersen said she had no idea the article would resonate like it did, and eventu...

Should the state - the institution that organizes, enforces, and adjudicates the rules governing our behavior in society - exist in capitalism? That question has been important chiefly for certain ideologues who defend capitalism. Their major idea is that the problems of modern society are caused by the state. They are not caused by the employer-employee structure of capitalist enterprises or the markets, unequal distributions of wealth, and other institutions those enterprises support. Those ideologues imagine a pure, perfect, or good capitalism undistorted by any state apparatus. The capitalism they seek to achieve is very utopian. They conclude that by reducing the state (bad by definition), modern capitalism's problems can also be reduced. By eliminating the state, a thereby purified capitalism will solve those problems. From libertarians to Republican Party hacks, this ideology serves to deflect the justified resentment and anger of capitalism's victims away from capitalis...

Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken window is thereby an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows. The message: do whatever you want here because others have done it and got away with it. The broken window theory has led to picayune and arbitrary law enforcement in poor communities. But America’s most privileged and powerful have been breaking big windows with impunity. In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail…. Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy Robert Reich Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Tru...

NB: That there are Trumpists amongst India's terminal neo-Nazis is not surprising. But some so-called liberals are also reducng the movement against ingrained police racism to a communist plot (AntiFa). The same nonsense was dished out a century ago:  “ Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt ,” a  New York   Times  headline proclaimed on July 28, 1919. “Evidence is accumulating in the files of the Government to show that the negroes of this country are the object of a vicious and apparently well financed propaganda which is directed against the white people, and which seeks, by newspapers, pamphlets, and in other ways, to stir up discontent among the negroes, particularly the uneducated class in the Southern States.” Here was a familiar dynamic. America went to war, black America did much of the fighting, and then had the gall to fight for some dignity at home"... DS Foreign Policy in Focus : It was entirely fitting that Senator Tom Cotton would be the one to say...

A recent  study  from Brown University’s Watson Institute found that, since 2001, wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan have cost the US $6.4tn – $2tn more than all federal spending in 2018. The trouble with a prospective new war in Iran, of course, isn’t that it would cost too much money. It’s that it would put potentially millions of lives at risk, mostly to appease Donald Trump’s fragile ego, a coterie of neocons who’ve been edging toward it for years and a slew of defense contractors eager to cash in. Neither a Green New Deal nor another war would plummet the US into bankruptcy, a virtual impossibility barring earth-shattering changes to the make-up global economy. They probably wouldn’t even raise inflation. The disconnect between Republicans’ fiscal conservatism on climate and spendthrift war drums illustrates a basic fact about American politics: that our budgets are more than anything expressions of what it is the country chooses to value – not how much money we...