Sunday Roundup - May 4, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from outside the US mainstream corporate media.  Today we look at Ukraine, Syria, global May Day celebrations, South Sudan and income disparity on 21st century America.

Ukraine

Outside the burned out trade union building in Odessa(Reuters)

With military operations by Ukrainian government forces underway against a rebel-held city, the crisis in the Ukraine has taken another step towards civil war.  The Guardian reported the Russian reaction to the Ukrainian offensive on Friday: A spokesman for Vladimir Putin said the Geneva agreement to defuse the situation in eastern Ukraine was no longer viable after Kiev launched a military operation against the rebel-held city of Slavyansk on Friday.  The Ukrainian military launched its first serious offensive to retake the city, which is being held by pro-Russia militia, early on Friday morning....Russia's foreign ministry accused the Ukrainian military of launching rocket strikes at protesters and claimed it had used ultranationalists from the group Right Sector..."As we have warned many times before, the use of the army against its own people is a crime and is leading Ukraine to catastrophe," the statement said.  The situation worsened later Friday when skirmishes broke out in Odessa between pro-Russian and anti-separatist groups.  As reported by the BBC: Pro-Russia supporters in the Ukrainian city of Odessa have voiced their anger a day after 42 people were killed.  Friday's clashes culminated in a major fire at a trade union building where most of the deaths occurred. Hundreds of people gathered there on Saturday.  The protest comes as Ukraine says it has seized a security building from rebels in the east of the country. Most of the deaths occurred when petrol bombs were thrown at the trade union building where pro-Russian protesters had sought refuge in the trade union building after their encampment was burned down.

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen,writing in The Nation , in an article to be published in the May 19 issue, wonder about Obama's indirect declaration of a new Cold War against Russia - a declaration made with little discussion or public debate and with bipartisan and media support or indifference.  No modern precedent exists for the shameful complicity of the American political-media elite at this fateful turning point. Considerable congressional and mainstream media debate, even protest, were voiced, for example, during the run-up to the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq and, more recently, proposed wars against Iran and Syria. This Cold War—its epicenter on Russia’s borders; undertaken amid inflammatory American, Russian and Ukrainian media misinformation; and unfolding without the stabilizing practices that prevented disasters during the preceding Cold War—may be even more perilous....Both sides in the confrontation, the West and Russia, have legitimate grievances. Does this mean, however, that the American establishment’s account of recent events should not be questioned?  Vanden Heuvel and Cohen point to twenty years of NATO's eastward expansion, the triggering of the Ukraine crisis by the West’s attempt, last November, to "smuggle the former Soviet republic into NATO", and the "jettisoning in February of the West's own agreement with then-President Viktor Yanukovych" which brought to power in Kiev an extremely anti-Russian and unelected regime.  Most recently, Kiev’s sending of military units to suppress protests in pro-Russian eastern Ukraine is itself a violation of the April 17 agreement to de-escalate the crisis.

Syria
Syria's government and rebels have agreed to a ceasefire in Homs to allow hundreds of fighters holed up in the old quarters of the city to leave – a deal that will bring the country's third-largest city under the control of forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad. [The Guardian, May 2]  The fighters were the remnants of the rebel forces that had controlled Homs until the Syrian government began its offensive.  This is a face-saving measure for the small hardcore group of rebels that had remained fighting, dispatching explosive-rigged cars into government-controlled areas, killing dozens of people, mostly civilians. Most recently, two car bombs on Tuesday killed more than 50 people in a government-controlled area of Homs.  

May Day (International Labor Day)

From Common Dreams post: Union leaders during May Day celebrations in Bilbao, Spain
 The banner in front reads, "Without Quality Employment, There is no Recovery'
(Photograph: VINCENT WEST/Reuters)

Except in the United States and Canada, May 1 is a public holiday that celebrates the contributions of workers around the world.  This year was no exception. From the Common Dreams post of May 1: In marches and street demonstrations, people across the world on Thursday were marking May Day, or International Labor Day, by demanding better treatment of working people and union members as they also called  for respect of democratic freedoms and equal rights.  Most marches went off peacefully but there was a confrontation with police in Turkey where the government had banned demonstrations.

South Sudan
There's a small spark of hope emerging in South Sudan.  John Kerry appears to be on the verge of getting two rival factions to agree to sit down for ceasefire discussions.  As reported in The Guardian on Friday: The peace talks could mark a turning point in nearly six months of horrific fighting largely along ethnic lines between Dinka and Nuer tribes. It began after Kiir [the country's President], a Dinka, accused Machar, a Nuer, of plotting a coup to seize power last December. A ceasefire agreement reached in January was abandoned within days.

Rise of the Oligarchs
State Department whistle-blower Peter van Buren takes a look at life on the other side of the tracks in 21st century America in a May 1 TomDispatch.com post.  As part of his journey through the country, he visits Atlantic City, New Jersey, Weirton, West Virginia, and Spanish Harlem in New York City.  What he sees and reports is not pretty - a damning reflection on the living conditions of the working class in the richest nation on earth.  Van Buren observes the cumulative effects of years of deindustrialization, declining salaries, absent benefits, and weakened unions, along with a rise in meth and alcohol abuse, a broad-based loss of good jobs, and soaring inequality...What I found in my travels was place after place being hollowed out as wealth went elsewhere and people came to realize that, odds on, life was likely to get worse, not better. For most people, what passed for hope for the future meant clinging to the same flat-lined life they now had...What’s happening is both easy enough for a traveler to see and for an economist to measure. Median household income in 2012 was no higher than it had been a quarter-century earlier. Meanwhile, expenses had outpaced inflation. U.S. Census Bureau figures show that the income gap between rich and poor had widened to a more than four-decade record since the 1970s. The 46.2 million people in poverty remained the highest number since the Census Bureau began collecting that data 53 years ago. The gap between how much total wealth America's 1% of earners control and what the rest of us have is even wider than even in the years preceding the Great Depression of 1929.  With the Supreme Court decisions allowing an ever-increasing role for money in shaping our politics and, let's face it, money wins elections, I'm afraid the interests of the 99% will not come to the forefront anytime soon.