These Supreme Court cases could kill what remains of US democracy

 Al Jazeera English

In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has dutifully laboured to erode the protections guaranteed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a civil rights era milestone that aimed to safeguard minority voters from racial discrimination. Now, six decades after the law’s passage, the country’s highest judicial body will decide whether to drop some of the few pretences to justice and equality in US electoral democracy that remain.

Keep in mind that this is the same conservative-majority court that recently brought us the evisceration of Roe v Wade and other assorted sociopathic rulings, such as the one enshrining the constitutional right to carry a gun outside the home. That, by the way, was just a month after the Uvalde elementary school mass killing of 19 children and two adults.

One of the high-profile cases that the Supreme Court is currently hearing deals with Alabama’s congressional redistricting map, which was implemented by that state’s Republican legislature following the census in 2020. The redistricting scheme is a rather transparent violation of the Voting Rights Act. While more than 27 percent of Alabama’s voting-age population is Black, deft cartographic manoeuvres have produced an arrangement in which African American voters have a realistic chance of electing a candidate they like in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

US capitalism is bad for your mental health

 Al Jazeera English

When I was in high school in Texas in the late 1990s, running myself ragged with academic and extracurricular activities, I began suffering from acute panic attacks.

The first round lasted for six months, during which I experienced continuous shortness of breath, a berserk heart rate and the feeling that I had been wrenched out of reality and placed in a parallel and terrifying universe, where I was entirely alone and where no one would help me.

Having been raised in the ruthless system known as United States capitalism — in which the need for individual success had been hardwired into my brain — my terror was exacerbated by the assumption that I was dying or otherwise failing miserably at existence.

When the panic attacks resurfaced a few years later in college in New York, where hyperventilating in the bathroom quickly proved incompatible with attendance at lectures, I underwent a professional psychological evaluation. The doctor needed just 90 seconds before prescribing heavy-duty anxiety medication.

So it was that I briefly joined the ranks of Americans medicated to deal with mental health issues caused by, well, the US. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Brazil, it is time to wake up from your Bolsonaro nightmare

 Al Jazeera English

In the aftermath of Brazil’s last general election in 2018, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page celebrated the victory of Jair Bolsonaro – a former low-ranking army officer, far-right fringe politician, and fan of Brazil’s sadistic military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

According to one bizarre article by the right-wing writer Mary Anastasia O’Grady, there was a simple explanation for the electoral triumph of the man that many analysts had compared with the then-president of the United States, Donald Trump. Despite the fact that Bolsonaro had been “labeled a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a fascist, an advocate of torture and an aspiring dictator”, he had prevailed, the piece argued, because Brazilians were “in the midst of a national awakening in which socialism – the alternative to a Bolsonaro presidency – has been put on trial”.

While a socialist presidency certainly beats fascist torture any day, “socialism” was in truth not even in the running in 2018. The Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) – whose candidate Bolsonaro defeated – is not socialist but rather centre-left, and has furthermore done its fair share to advance neoliberal capitalist interests over the years. Granted, the PT has also committed such flagrantly leftist crimes as helping to extricate millions of Brazilians from poverty and hunger, as transpired during the first decade of this century under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Now, it’s election time again in South America’s largest country – and folks may be in for another “awakening”. As Brazil votes tomorrow, Lula is back in the race, and is leading Bolsonaro in the polls (although, as Bloomberg reports, Goldman Sachs and concerned hedge funds have assured clients the election will be “tighter” than surveys suggest). READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why Marvel’s Mossad superheroine Sabra is all kinds of wrong

 Al Jazeera English

Over a period of two days just outside Beirut in September 1982, Israeli-backed Lebanese militiamen slaughtered up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in what became known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Pregnant women were stabbed in the stomach; foetuses were ripped out. Children had their throats cut; young men were lined up and shot in the back.

Israel’s military provided logistical support throughout the butchery, which occurred three months into the apocalyptic Israeli invasion of Lebanon that had been green-lit by the United States.

So it was not the most appropriate timing in the world when, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre this month, Disney’s Marvel Studios announced that its film, Captain America: New World Order, slated for release in 2024, would feature an Israeli character called Sabra. This little-known character made her Marvel Comics debut in the 1980s as the “super heroine of the state of Israel,” and will be played by Israeli actress Shira Haas.

And while her name is not a reference to the massacre in Lebanon, the whole thing is still super problematic. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Neurotic in paradise: Capitalist hangover on a ‘red’ Greek island

Al Jazeera English

It was some years ago during a brutal winter in Bosnia that I first learned of the existence of the remote Greek island of Ikaria. Prior to the pandemic, Sarajevo was one of my regular stops as I pursued a life of frenzied international itinerance, eschewing a fixed residence and, more importantly, avoiding my execrable country of birth, the United States.

On this particular visit to subzero Sarajevo, I alternated between falling on ice outdoors and sitting in my apartment looking at pictures of summertime scenes on the internet. And it was on account of the latter pastime that Ikaria entered my consciousness, via a spate of articles extolling the island’s rugged beauty and the extraordinary longevity of its inhabitants. . . .

No one has pinpointed the precise secret to Ikarian endurance, but it appears to involve a combination of a slow life, social camaraderie, olive oil, wild sage tea, goat’s milk, outdoor labour, afternoon naps, therapeutic winds and sexual activity into old age — not to mention the sheer exquisiteness of the physical environment. As if that weren’t good enough, it gets even better: Ikaria is known locally as the “red rock” in reference to its communist tendencies, which only intensified in accordance with the island’s service as a place of banishment for Greek leftists in the mid-twentieth century. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

 

The Chilean constitutional vote: A tectonic shift?

Al Jazeera English

In the aftermath of the deadly magnitude 8.8 earthquake that rocked Chile in February 2010, US columnist Bret Stephens – whose brand of conservative zealotry commands a regrettably lucrative market in the imperial commentariat – took to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page to explain “How Milton Friedman Saved Chile”.

In Stephens’ view, the late free-market fundamentalist was to thank for the fact that the disaster did not cause more damage – and for giving Chileans the “intellectual wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew”. Never mind that Friedman’s “intellectual” contributions to the South American nation consist of providing the neoliberal ideology that underpinned the bloody US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which thousands of Chileans did not survive. Tens of thousands more were tortured by the state.

Never mind, too, that the strict Chilean building codes referenced by Stephens hailed from 1972, i.e. from the pre-dictatorship presidency of democratically elected Salvador Allende – whose belief in economic equality, social justice, and other diabolical things had necessitated the lethal 1973 coup against him by the guardians of hemispheric order. Following Allende’s election, US President Richard Nixon famously ordered the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream”. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, busied himself setting the stage for the coup.

Fast forward 49 years and the foundations of order are once again being shaken – but not by an earthquake. In a compulsory nationwide plebiscite on Sunday, September 4, Chileans will vote on whether to approve a new draft constitution to replace the current one, which dates from 1980 and the Pinochet heyday. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Keeping up (dis)appearances in El Salvador

 Al Jazeera English

In her brief book Salvador, penned during the bloody Salvadoran civil war of 1979-92, Joan Didion reflects on the Spanish word “desaparecer,” meaning “to disappear”. She notes that its “flexibility” in Spanish as both a transitive and intransitive verb had “been adopted by those speaking English in El Salvador, as in John Sullivan was disappeared from the Sheraton; the government disappeared the students”.

Indeed, there was plenty of disappearing going on in the country — whether transitively or intransitively. The International Commission on Missing Persons, based in The Hague, estimates that about 9,000 people disappeared in El Salvador during the war. This is on top of the more than 75,000 people killed, with the majority of atrocities committed by the United States-backed right-wing military and associated death squads.

By coincidence, in 1992 — the year of the conflict’s ostensible end — the United Nations adopted a Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance. In 2010, the UN declared August 30 as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

But declarations and international days do not make missing people reappear. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump and I can agree: The US is a ‘third-world country’

 Al Jazeera English

When on August 8 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in search of classified documents, the ex-president of the United States decried the episode as “an assault [that] could only take place in broken, third-world countries”. He continued to lament that America had “now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before”.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, chimed in on Twitter with the assessment: “This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics!!!” Never mind that the FBI’s seizure of secret documents does not fit the “corruption” bill quite as well as some other characteristics of American democracy: say, the fact that non-taxpaying billionaires can be president or that the country is run as a crooked, oligarchic corporatocracy.

This is not the first time Trump has likened the US to a “third-world country”, which was also his epithet of choice when he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But Trump & Co are not the only members of the US ruling elite to exercise this vocabulary. The January 2021 attack on the US Capitol prompted a surge in pejorative “third world” and “banana republic” comparisons from everyone from Biden to George W Bush, former US leader and civilised ravager of Afghanistan and Iraq. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel: normalising terror, one dawn at a time

 Al Jazeera English

Israel’s latest military assault on the Gaza Strip – codenamed Operation Breaking Dawn – spanned three days in early August and killed at least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children. According to the Israeli government, the attack was a “preemptive” operation against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group – which is as creative an excuse as any for spontaneously bombing people for no apparent reason.

A total of zero Israelis were killed over the course of Israel’s sanguinary dawn-breaking in Gaza, an acute discrepancy in casualties that is par for the course in the Zionist state’s dealings with the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave. While lethal and nonlethal forms of Israeli military torment have continued to be fixtures of daily existence in Gaza even after Israel’s so-called “withdrawal” from the territory in 2005, Breaking Dawn was the bloodiest episode since the 11-day Israeli attack in May 2021 – nobly dubbed Operation Guardian of the Walls – which killed more than 260 Palestinians, including 67 children. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The El Salvador diaries: The cult of Nayib Bukele

 Al Jazeera English

On August 2, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – whose Twitter profile has evolved from “officially the coolest president in the world” to the “coolest dictator in the world” to just “El Presidente” – took to his favourite social media platform to announce that El Salvador had gone from being the “most dangerous country in the world to the safest country in Latin America”.

Accompanying the tweet was the hashtag #GuerraContraPandillas – “war on gangs” – and a statistics chart from the Salvadoran National Civilian Police indicating that, on August 1, there had allegedly been zero homicides nationwide.

Granted, the country is not very “safe” for the casualties of the war on gangs which is currently being waged in the context of a state of emergency imposed at the end of March in response to a spike in gang killings. The spike was occasioned by a breakdown in secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and the Salvadoran gangs – for which underhanded business Bukele assumed the codename “Batman”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.