Roundup: Media's Take

Jeffrey D. Sachs: The New Progressive Movement

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity.”OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Victor S. Navasky: Why Are Political Cartoons Incendiary?

Victor S. Navasky is a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, and chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, who is at work on a book about political cartoons.AS the founding editor and publisher in the late 1950’s of Monocle,  a “leisurely quarterly of political satire” (that meant we came out twice a year) whose motto was “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,” whenever the offices of a satirical magazine are firebombed, I’m interested.So earlier this month, when a Molotov cocktail landed in the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — luckily no one was injured — I wanted to know more.  It seems the bomb arrived the day after the publication chose the Prophet Muhammad as its guest editor in chief for that week’s issue, and in a reference to Islamic law, or Shariah, temporarily changed its name to “Charia Hebdo.” The issue also featured a cartoon image of the prophet on its cover and a caption that said “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” An equal opportunity offender, the periodical, historically known for pillorying Catholic clericalism and Judaism, was heavily criticized by Muslims in 2007 after reprinting cartoons of Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper that caused outrage in much of the Islamic world.

Mark Landler: A New Era of Gunboat Diplomacy

Mark Landler is a White House correspondent for The New York Times.IT may seem strange in an era of cyberwarfare and drone attacks, but the newest front in the rivalry between the United States and China is a tropical sea, where the drive to tap rich offshore oil and gas reserves has set off a conflict akin to the gunboat diplomacy of the 19th century.

Ronen Bergman: Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life

Ronen Bergman is a political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He is the author of “By Any Means Necessary: Israel’s Covert War for Its P.O.W.’s and M.I.A.’s.”On the afternoon of June 27, 1976, Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France flight originating from Israel and directed it eventually to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where most of the non-Israelis on board were immediately released. More than 100 hostages remained, 83 of whom were Israeli. They were held for the next six days, until an elite team of Israel Defense Force commandos freed them in the famous raid known as Operation Entebbe. The name of the mission became synonymous with Israel’s refusal to give in to the demands of terrorists and its willingness to go to extraordinary lengths, and risk many lives, to free Israeli hostages.

Eviatar Zerubavel: Why Do We Care About Our Ancestors?

Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently “The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life” and “Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past.”Why do we consider Barack Obama a black man with a white mother rather than a white man with a black father? What are the implications of knowing, as we now do, that chimpanzees are genetically closer to humans than they are to gorillas? Why did the Nazis believe that unions between Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? Are sixth cousins still family?In order to even address, let alone answer, such questions, we must first examine our unmistakably social visions of genealogical relatedness. What we need, in other words, is a sociological understanding of ancestry and descent.

Conor Friedersdorf: Attention Occupy Oakland and Bay Area Police: The Lessons of 1934 By Conor Friedersdorf

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

David Hayes: What the 1940s Can Teach London's Occupy Movement

David Hayes, deputy editor of openDemocracy, writes each month for Inside Story.A famous photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral in London shows the great dome of Christopher Wren’s late seventeenth-century masterpiece rising proudly above the smoke of the German Luftwaffe’s rain of fire during the intense bombardment of the city on 29 December 1940 – a living architectural symbol of civic and national resistance to an existential threat.

Paul R. Pillar: Apartheid, Then and Now

Paul R. Pillar is director of graduate studies at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program and a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.  He is a contributing editor to The National Interest where he writes a daily blog. The South African jurist Richard Goldstone endured much unjustified abuse when he prepared a report that cataloged Israeli excesses during the brutal military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 known as Operation Cast Lead. The abuse was heaped on him despite the truth of what he described, despite the balanced nature of a report that also described excesses committed by Israel's adversary Hamas, and despite Goldstone subsequently going out of his way to refute other accusations against Israel, relevant to the Gaza operation, that he believed were unjustified. Goldstone gives every indication of being a decent and fair man. Given that experience, it is understandable that Goldstone would seize additional opportunities to visibly defend Israel, especially at a time when the Arab Spring and the heightened sensibilities regarding popular sovereignty or its absence have sharpened the regional focus on Israel's continued subjugation of Palestinians.

Richard Lowry: Europe ... From Colonial Powers to Supplicants

Richard Lowry is the editor of National Review, a conservative American news magazine, and a syndicated columnist. One hundred and fifty years ago, no one could mistake the relative power of Europe and China. When the British defeated the Chinese in the First Opium War, they imposed an indemnity, took Hong Kong and forced open more Chinese ports to British merchants. They demanded extraterritoriality for British citizens, exempting them from Chinese law. Other Western powers extracted similar privileges. When this wasn’t enough, the British launched the Second Opium War after the Chinese seized a ship flying the British flag and refused to apologize. The French joined in, and the two together captured Beijing, and burned the emperor’s summer palaces for good measure. This nasty episode is worth recalling against the backdrop of the Europeans begging the Chinese to help bail them out from their debt crisis…

Peter D. Feaver: Obama Deserves Credit - for Following Bush's Footsteps

Peter D. Feaver, who received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1990, is a professor of political science and public policy and Bass Fellow at Duke University, and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy. He is coeditor of Shadow Government. I would like to join, however belatedly, the lively debate about how to assess President Obama's foreign policy and whether this will be a campaign asset or liability. Some of FP's own worthies have contributed as well (see Drezner's take here and here and Walt's take here). Perhaps the most provocative assertion is Thomas Friedman's claim that "Barack Obama has turned out to be so much more adept at implementing George W.

Doyle McManus: The Third-Party Wild Card

Doyle McManus writes for the LA Times.American voters have fired two modern presidents after just one term, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Both suffered because the economy was in poor shape, and both faced disaffection within their own parties. But there was another thing those candidates had in common: They both faced relatively strong third-party candidates in the November election. John B. Anderson in 1980 and H. Ross Perot in 1992 both ran as independent centrists, and while they weren't the only reason the incumbents lost (Ronald Reagan won a majority of the popular vote in 1980), they were certainly a factor.

Robert Worth: The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar

Robert Worth is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine who has reported from Egypt, Yemen and Libya.IN mid-June, the Syrian poet known as Adonis, one of the Arab world’s most renowned literary figures, addressed an open letter to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. The stage was set for one of those moments, familiar from revolutions past, in which an intellectual hero confronts an oppressive ruler and eloquently voices the grievances of a nation.Instead, Adonis — who lives in exile in France — bitterly disappointed many Syrians. His letter offered some criticisms, but also denigrated the protest movement that had roiled the country since March, and failed even to acknowledge the brutal crackdown that had left hundreds of Syrians dead. In retrospect, the incident has come to illustrate the remarkable gulf between the Arab world’s established intellectuals — many of them, like Adonis, former radicals — and the largely anonymous young people who have led the protests of the Arab Spring....

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Rethinking That ‘Special Relationship’ Between the U.S. and Britain

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an English journalist and author of Yo, Blair!," is writing a book on the legacy of Winston Churchill.Every four years, as the American people embark on the task of electing a president, Europeans are reminded that they simply don’t understand America. At least I don’t, and I like to think that I know the United States better than many Englishmen.I first set foot in America 46 years ago during the summer before entering university, and I’ve since visited as often as I could. Although I live in the west of England, I write largely for American publications. I visit Austin, Tex., from time to time to lecture at the University of Texas and fully consider myself a long-distance Longhorns fan. (Yes, I know, news of the Red River massacre reached even Somerset, but as an Arsenal supporter, I have been emotionally conditioned for calamity.)

Mohamad Bazzi: The End of the Era of the Arab Strongmen

MOHAMAD BAZZI is an Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Assistant Professor of Journalism at New York University....Qaddafi was the last of the old-style Arab nationalist strongmen, and his death on Thursday marks the end of an era. His contemporaries were the likes of Saddam and of Assad's father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad -- military men from poor families and hardscrabble towns who fought their way to the top, riding the wave of revolutionary sentiment that swept the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s. Their inspiration was Egypt's charismatic military officer, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who overthrew the British-backed King Farouk in 1952. Nasser's rousing speeches, heard across the region via the newly invented transistor radio, kindled visions of Arab unity. It was a time of upheaval, in which the merchant and feudal elites -- the allies of the old European colonial powers -- were losing their grip. At first, Saddam, Qaddafi, and Assad seemed to embody a promising new era of populist reform.

Robert Reich: It’s Time to Break Up the Big Banks

Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." Next week President Obama travels to Wall Street where he’ll demand – in light of the Street’s continuing antics since the bailout, as well as its role in watering-down the Volcker rule – that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected and big banks be broken up.I’m kidding. But it would be a smart move — politically and economically....True, Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have prevented the fall of Lehman Brothers or the squeeze on other investment banks in 2007 and 2008. That’s why it’s also necessary to break up the big banks....

Glenn Greenwald: How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator and a current contributing writer at Salon.com. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses. His just-released book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (Metropolitan Books), is a scathing indictment of America's two-tiered system of justice.  He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

Walter Rodgers: Class warfare? What about the ignorance gap?

Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column....The class clash should not distract us from another great cleavage – the ignorance gap. That’s the difference between the learned and unlearned: those willing to listen and consider and those who refuse to do either. Ultimately, it plays out in American politics and decisionmaking – with potentially grave consequences.Americans may spend more time consuming news than they did a decade ago (this thanks to digital delivery), but are they ingesting any real understanding? Are they looking much beyond weather, traffic, and breaking news – or their own political stripe of reportage? Meanwhile, the next generation of leaders is growing up on bite-sized tweets and text messages.The world is an ever more complicated and interconnected place, from the imbroglio in Afghanistan to the euro crisis. Yet during the midterm elections of 2010, exit polls showed that foreign issues were an election concern to only 8 percent of voters.

William J. Dobson: Why Gaddafi Was the Quintessential 20th-Century Dictator

William J. Dobson, a former managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and senior editor for Asia at Newsweek International, is writing a book about dictatorships.  The Arab revolutions of 2011 have claimed their third dictator, but the death of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi is not just the end of another strongman. Even in his downfall, Gaddafi had to be different: While Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak stands on trial, Gaddafi sought to cling to power to the end and died in the streets of Sirte, his home town. His demise means more than the conclusion of his brutal 42-year reign and the beginning of Libya’s best chance at a democratic future. It is also the turning of a page in the annals of tyranny.

David Rieff: Qaddafi ... The Man Who Knew Too Much

David Rieff, author of the recently published book on political memory, Against Remembrance, is finishing a book on the global food crisis. Whether the NATO countries -- who had only a few years ago welcomed Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi back into the international fold in exchange for his renouncing his chemical and nuclear weapons programs and allowing U.S. and British experts to come and help dismantle them -- played any role in what certainly appeared in first reports from the scene to have been the summary execution of the Libyan dictator will probably never be known. What the video evidence does prove is that the Libyan revolutionary forces did not find him already dead or killed by a NATO airstrike; nor does the initial claim that he was killed in "crossfire" between insurgent forces and diehard regime loyalists stand up to even the most minimal scrutiny.

Jonah Goldberg: Debunking Myth of American Imperialism

Jonah Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author. And so it ends. The United States is leaving Iraq.I'm solidly in the camp that sees this as a strategic blunder. Iraqi democracy is fragile and Iran's desire to undermine it is strong. Also, announcing our withdrawal is a weird way to respond to a foiled Iranian plot to commit an act of war in the U.S. capital. Obviously, I hope I'm wrong and President Obama's not frittering away our enormous sacrifices in Iraq out of domestic political concerns and diplomatic ineptitude. Still, there's an upside. Obama's decision to leave Iraq should deal a staggering blow to America's critics at home and abroad.After all, what kind of empire does this sort of thing? Critics of U.S.