Category Archives: Politics

‘The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This In Dallas’ by Leon Wolf

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(This has been a summer of blood shed, from bloodiest month of Rmadan to bloody racial discord, and it is hard to wraparound shell shocked mind and arms around these soul piercing events which have taken a life of their own.This blunt article by Leon Wolf deals with bloody racial discord and removes the scab from a wound which all of us are aware of its smoldering painful presence, but do nothing to heal it.f.sheikh)

“As the child of white parents who grew up in the rural panhandle of Texas, I was taught that police were there to help, any time I had a problem I should go to them. I should always follow their orders and show them the utmost respect. No one is more important and helpful to your community than the police.

Now imagine, for a minute, that your parents instead grew up as black people in the 50s or 60s in one of the many areas where police were often the agents of – let’s call it what it was – white oppression. How might that have changed, for understandable reasons, the way not only those people but also their children and their children’s children interact with the police? More importantly, how might it impact the belief that police will ever be held accountable for abuses of their power?”

I think the evidence would show that the vast majority of police do their jobs with the greatest professionalism possible. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer to the reality of lingering mistrust between police and minority communities, especially in certain areas of the country. And the proliferation of cell phone video recording has really confirmed (in their minds) something they have long anecdotally believed or been taught – that police often interact with minority communities in different ways than they do with the white community.

And here’s the most important part: when they do so, they never or almost never face punishment.

Look, I don’t know. I don’t want to rush to judgment on either the Baton Rouge shooting or the Falcon Heights shooting, but based upon what we have seen, they look bad. Very bad. They look, at least at first glance, to confirm a lot of biases that people have. They look like a scenario that has played out all too often that the white community either doesn’t believe ever happens (or at least believes is at most a freak occurrence) and minority communities believe is a systemic occurrence. And they look, most importantly, like many other scenarios in which officers have skated either scot free or with a slap on their wrist.

And here is the important point and the point I have been trying to make with this excessively wordy post. The most important safety valve to prevent violence like we saw in Dallas last night is the belief that when officers do go off the rails, the legal system will punish them accordingly. If minority communities (and everyone else, for that matter) believed that, resort to reprisal killings would be either non existent or far less frequent.

click here for full article

posted by f.sheikh

Brexit: Is Britain the new Pakistan

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Shared by Nasik Elahi
An article in Huffington Post

Is this title a fair reflection.  It is a headline grab but the points it makes are
important.  The future has to look more peaceful than our present or past. 
Otherwise we remain on the same treadmill of needless and endless violence.  The EU
was the first step in breaking down the past. With Brexit the promise remains
unfulfilled.  The world remains like Pakistan, perpetually on the edge.

Nasik Elahi

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/10749766.html?yptr=yahoo

“Be Careful What You Wish For” Brief Thought By F. Sheikh

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BREXIT has sent a shock wave throughout the world. Many in Britain who voted for exit did not expect or thoroughly thought about the economic chaos and collateral damage it will bring. Many voted just as a protest vote for exit but did not expect that it will pass. 57 % of the older generation, who are longing for old days, voted for the exit, whereas 57% of the younger generation voted against the exit. One young heartbroken tweeted;

“Truly gutted that our grandparents have effectively decided that they hate foreigners more than they love us and our futures,” one young Briton, Dan Boden, wrote on Twitter

But will this revolt against Globalization and inequality bring back old jobs with security, good pay and benefits may it be Britain, USA or any other country? So far leaders who are exploiting this public outrage are only capitalizing on public anger but has not offered any solution to the problem and may make the problem even worse without any thoughtful solution in place.

Globalization and technological advances are part of natural evolution and are here to stay. Immigrant labor, like capital, flows to the region where it is treated best and is part of Globalization. The challenge is for governments, capitalists markets and labor is to collaborate and provide solutions to adjust to this new phenomenon for smooth transition. Exploitation to go back in time will create more dislocations and is not the solution. So far we mostly see only exploitation and little solution.

IMF & WB vis-a-vis the underdeveloped countries.

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Imtiaz Bokhari Sahib has written to me again that he wants to continue discussion about the topic in the title. Some of the initial exchanges between some members were done via email but most TF subscribers should have received those exchanges. So Bokhari Sahib, this is in some more detail the point I have been making.

Some of you have seen recent discussion going on the TF mailing list re. the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank vis a vis Third World countries. The original article’s premise was that the above two institutions were essentially blood suckers making poor countries poorer while those poor countries were faultless victims. I did not challenge the premise that those institutions (IMF &WB and their investors) care only for their profit and not for the well being of the citizens of those poor countries. The only thing I challenged is the fact that the underdeveloped countries were made out to be faultless victims.
As a result I was asked by some to read some articles that would enlighten me. At the time I refused to read those articles because I didn’t think you could acquire commonsense by reading an article and I feel commonsense is all you need to come to the conclusion I came to. Fayyaz,Nasik and Babar Sahibs actually did – and put it in writing. But over the long weekend I had a few hours to kill and to satisfy my own curiosity I decided to do my own research on the subject. I have attached links to a few articles and to be objective I have purposely chosen articles that are highly critical of the IMF and the WB but read carefully and you’ll see that those countries were not faultless. I’ll make it easier by giving you the exact location of the lines that will prove my point.
As you can see this article is highly critical of IMF & WB but scroll down to section “How do countries get into financial trouble, the Debt Crisis” and read the third line down in the second paragraph. Corrupt and inept leaders is why the countries are poor in the first place; getting loans to fill their own pockets makes things worse. And what is a bank supposed to do when a country fails to pay back? you certainly don’t expect them to say “please consider that loan as charity, we have enough money”.
This article is even more critical of IMF & WB but go to paragraph nine and read some of the lines.
Both these authors  seem to write pages and pages about how evil the banks are (and I am not even denying that) but  very casually glide over the ineptness of the poor countries’ leaders as if it was a very, very minor cause of poor countries getting poorer. I  think the leaders of those countries are AT LEAST half the problem
Shoeb