Turnings and Truings

Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires

2009-11-30T21:12:00.000-08:00

The Long Gray Line waits with breath at attention for the commands of the president, but will you, the American public, really hang on every word of the president's speech tomorrow at West Point? What will you be looking for? Nuance? Restraint? That last glimmer of Hope, of that "yes, we can win this war" attitude, of the thought that perhaps, here in the darkness there is light at the end of the tunnel? That after eight years and a number of twists and turns, here while the train is stopped so we can figure out if we want to go on or back up, perhaps you will see a promise of a glint of a glimmer of the sundown of ultimate defeat after another 7 or 8 years of traveling in darkness yet to come?

Tired of Hope yet? Tired of war in the graveyard of empires? Ready to send some more marines and national guardsmen out for their third and fourth tours of duty into the mountains and deserts despite their PTSD and their IED-battered cerebellums? Ready to keep feeding the yawning maw of the military industrial congressional complex?

Well, I have seen commentary that Obama has been manipulated by the generals--and to a certain extent he has been manipulated by the sneaky leaks, by the generals trying to bring pressure to bear on his deliberations--but it seems to me that Obama painted himself in a corner when it became clear to him in Iowa last year that he just might be able to win the nomination.

There's a sucker born every minute, and the con men will always tell you that the mark has to believe. So if the generals did manipulate or pull the con on the President, it's not like they didn't have an easy and willing mark.

In order to establish his hawk credentials against McCain, he insisted that Afghanistan was the war he would prosecute with vigor. And indeed, within a week of taking office, he ordered drone attacks in Pakistan and has now in fact ordered more drone attacks than George W. Bush.

You can tell it will be an escalation--why else deliver the talk at West Point? Ever heard of a retreat speech given there? (The closest you might get is MacArthur in maudlin feeling sorry for himself as he began fading away.) And I marvel at how, after all of the sneak previews during the last week, the little peeks inside the box, they still do their PR coordination in the manner which Edward Bernays would have approved: in Parade Magazine.

Yep, tucked inside the massive advertising supplements--if you are like 95% of the newspaper readers in the country, I'm sure you know the drill--strip out the various sections from the real estate pages and the auto ads and the advertising supplements for Christmas lights and clothes, plasma TV screens and iPods, retaining less than 50% of the totality of the dead trees and there is the Parade Magazine with "A War Briefing from General Petraeus" written by Col. Jack Jacobs (U.S. Army, ret.) military analyst for NBC and shill extraordinaire for the military industrial complex. A message from General Petraeus to tug on your patriotic heartstrings, and would you believe it just happens to be right after Thanksgiving and two days before Barack Obama goes to West Point to tell us, finally, what he has decided.

We don't get the details of course, just the reassurances on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, our own "war briefing" in a publication that reaches--according to its own circulation claims for advertising penetration-- 72.7 million people, nearly half of whom are over 50. I mean, talk about getting to the really loyal and consistent voting people in this country--the people who still buy the newspaper or have it delivered to their permanent address. In the country of the sleepwalkers, the Parade Magazine reader opens his and her eyes onto the far off dirt and rock of our manifest destiny. Or maybe it's the L-tryptophan from all that turkey that really puts us in the receptive mood for the war briefing? And the blind shall see. Bring it on, but with calmness.

Sure, Petraeus readily admits that "many Americans, including some members of Congress, question whether the war in Afghanistan remains worth fighting." At which point you know that "some members" refers to the cowards and the appeasers, you know, the traitors who voted against the War Powers Resolution way back at the tunnel's entrance in 2001--well, you know what will follow, don't you? Wanna feel better over your Sunday coffee and for the rest of the week as you work off the tryptophan high? Well, Colonel Jacobs will calm your soul with the words of the General:

Once the President settles on a strategy for Afghanistan, [Col Jacobs] asked, what will America need, besides more troops and good intelligence? "Time," Petraeus replied, "and as General McChrystal observed, lots of humility."

Notice the assumption? There will be more troops, and we will need good "intelligence." But the kind of intelligence we need now is moral and ethical and practical. Real intelligence, not digitized information, or information from turncoats. Get ready for a long humble war. Sorta like Vietnam was LBJ's war. But humble? I don't think so. McChrystal led the dark and, as we now know, secret ingredient in the Iraqi "surge"--the targeted assassination program. The mask of humility hides the grin of empire. The audacity of drones. BHO's war.

Kudos: the Daily SHow

2009-10-29T15:44:00.001-07:00

John Stewart and his staff are to be congratulated for interviewing Mustafa Barghouti and Anna Baltzer this past week. For once, national television made an effort to provide a platform for the voice of the Palestinians' peaceful non-violent resistance. A significant portion of the Palestinian people have carried out non-violent resistance for years and find themselves the targets of violence from the Israeli military--a number of Palestinian demonstrators have been killed in the past year; one young American male protester is still in a coma after brain damage when he was hit by a tear gas canister. (Canisters these days sometimes get fired on a flat trajectory at body level, not lobbed into the air. Non-violence never receives the coverage that violence does, and the absence of coverage of the non-violent protests tends to perpetuate the misconception that all Palestinians are a violent. This is preposterous, of course. I am glad that both Barghouti and Anna Baltzer were able to state the case for a movement that those of us who are for justice, equality, and humanity in the Middle East have been making for many years now.

I urge all of you to access the interview through Philip Weiss's Mondoweiss website. Adam Horowitz, Weiss's associate, was in the audience and witnessed the kerfuffle that occurred during the show with a member of the audience being ushered out. But whether you access it through the Daily Show website or Mondoweiss, please make sure you check out the 10 minutes or so of the joint interview. Some people ridicule that the Daily Show is not the real news but is looked upon as a news show. In this case, it's the real news.

This is especially significant this week, which saw the J-Street convention, where there were about one thousand attendees expected, be an enormous success with over 1500 attending.

This installment of the Daily Show will be seen as a brave act years from now when progress has been made for peaceful and just co-existence, whether in two states or one.

Kudos!

After a Long Vacation

2009-09-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

I wish it were more like the sleep of Rip Van Winkle. The world has not changed. Awake and returning, I just know more about it.

For example, yesterday in the Los Angeles Times Op-ed pages, Frank Luntz--the man who successfully changed the exact phrase "Estate Tax" into the negatively charged "Death Tax" (which must have sent currents of damaging electrical energy along the decomposing spine of Thomas Jefferson)--Frank Luntz, sounding oh so sympathetic and sincere, wrote about how "The angry, fearful American" has changed from optimist to frantic raincoated Howard Beale, mad as hell and not wanting to take it any more. According to his research, 72% of Americans are mad as hell, 57% think their children will have a worse world than they, and only 33% think their children will have it better. The paper version of the op-ed was "The angry, fearful American" but on the LAT website it this has been changed to "What Americans really want." Perhaps the first title had too heavy a connotation--think of "angry, fearful Indian" or "angry, fearful Negro."

He has interviewed, he says, 6400 people from all areas and ethnic and political backgrounds, has taken instant responses over the past 100 days, and here is his conclusion: "that intense despair and loss of confidence exactly reflect what we're seeing and hearing in healthcare town halls." Further, he says, the focus on the loud extremist voices don't see the significance: "a once optimistic people now filled with rancor and vitriol." (He never mentions the incivility, the racism, or the angry charges that Obama is a Hitler, a maniacal Heath Ledger Joker, a grass skirted witch doctor, or worse, a monkey.) Politicians shouldn't criticize the outbursts, he says, they should respect them and listen to them carefully. So should business executives.

He goes on sincerely to make a few points: that his surveyed people choose as their highest priority as "restoring personal responsibility'; that wrongdoing isn't punished; that "enforcing rules and letting failures fail" would prevent mistakes; that business executive shouldn't "skunk" their employees and walk off with millions. In fact, he says, his surveys have shown him that never has the gap been so large: "employers resent the lack of loyalty and commitment from their people; employees resent the lack of job security and the need to work longer and harder for less."

I wonder what American doesn't feel similarly? My gawrsh, you think that Frank has seen the light? That he finally has become progressive, looking for ways to make the American worker more secure (by providing health care for all Americans for instance) or asking for tighter and stronger enforcement of regulations? maybe for salary caps? Yes, yes, he is looking for Bank of America to fail, right?

It's almost convincing until you realize that this is the rhetorical tactician whose twists and chiseling of words to make them emotionally loaded with fear or distortion--see "death tax" above and a bushel of other words and phrases in his recent revision of Words That Work: It's Not what You say, It's What People Hear.

And Luntz creates their fear. In the current health care debate he wrote an important memo of rhetorical prescriptions for conservatives, "The Language of Healthcare 2009." Read it through. You will find that his talking points showed up at town hall meetings all over. You can find the memo here. Try this one on for size: 'it is essential that 'deny' and 'denial' enter the conservative lexicon immediately because it is at the core of what scares Americans most about a government takeover of medical care." Sound familiar?

Or how about talking point #13: "Maximize your attacks on the Democratic plans by choosing the BEST words . . . 'Washington Takeover' beats 'Washington Control.' Takeovers are like coups--they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom. What Americans fear most is that Washington politicians will dictate what kind of care they can receive."

Luntz tips his hand when he says that an "incredible 88% believe in the adage 'live free or die'." It's at that point that I understand how selective his audience sample probably is: he's not talking to progressives, liberal democrats, or beleaguered minorities; he's not even talking to thinking independent middle class folk.

No, he's talking to the very crowds that he has helped create over the past fifteen years: mad as hell white suburbanites who feel their impending minority status creeping up, who still believe, as Mark Twain once remarked, that they are merely temporarily embarrassed financially, and that it's only a matter of time until the American greed dream will be theirs. In other words, if they were corporate executives, they would be skunking their employees and walking away with millions with no qualms.

So a piece which on the surface appears to appeal to the good nature of most Americans is merely a dramatic exercise. This is the puppet master who wrote the script surveying the puppets who learned it from their blanket emails and right wing swift-boaters. This is Frank Luntz listening to the echo and then turning to us to insist that the echo comes from a vast reality. This is seductive rhetoric here, folks. While he may have picked up buzz words that appeal to both left and right don't believe for one minute that this is anything but sophisticated manipulation at a higher level. It's still the same word game.

I'll try not to go back to sleep.

US Tax Dollars at Work

2009-07-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

This is what remains of the American International School in Gaza, bombed by an Israeli Air Force pilot sometime in the early morning of January 3, 2009. The Israeli military spokesman told Ha'aretz that the "American College" site was a munitions storage dump, and therefore the bombing was justified. No weapons remnants have been found. There were no secondary explosions or fires. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence can figure out that a munitions dump would have rendered more destruction than this. I suppose one can argue that the timing of the bombing was humane in that it took place during the night when no children were present. Actually, they failed to take into account the janitor who lived on the premises. But what's a janitor compared to imaginary munitions?

We toured the site. I walked around and saw the athletic fields--and again thought what this could look like undamaged and filled with children and teenagers.

As Amira Hass, the Ha'aretz correspondent, pointed out the "College" is a school for children in grades 1-12. According to its director, the school opened for operation the day before Ariel Sharon led his troupe of policemen to the Al Aqsa mosque, seen by many as the precipitating event of the Second Intifada. It will cost $7.12 million to bring the school back to operation, over $5 million of which will be needed to reconstruct the building itself. Of course, the Israeli government is refusing to allow construction materials to enter the Gaza Strip, but what's the problem?

According to Hass, the school was intended to attract international families moving to Gaza after the Oslo accords, but in fact it became a school for the children of the upper classes of Gaza, the political leaders. It had "a Western look and feel to it: a full day of studies, class size limited to only 20 students at most, lots of open space, boys and girls in the same classrooms, universal and liberal education, English as the language of instruction (Arabic and Islamic or Christian studies were taught in Arabic), music, computers and physical education." Though the international clientele never materialized due to the political turmoil, the local Gazans sending their children to school there suggested that the overcrowded public schools were not adequate.

Ironically, the school was trashed and vandalized in April of 2007 and January 2008 by unknown parties. The motives apparently were religious, because the school represented a departure from more traditional (and religiously based) values. You would have thought that Israel might have spared the school in order to sow ideological divisions. Hamas is ideologically opposed to the school, and yet promised to protect it after the vandalism. The school still operates in an older building in an older section of Gaza City.

About the man who was killed in the attack, the school janitor. His father lived nearby and went looking for his son immediately after the bombing. Had there been munitions exploding secondarily it might have been difficult to enter the rubble and call for his son. This was his second son to be killed. A third son was seriously injured by Israeli flechettes fired into a crowd of people, and is hospitalized in Egypt. Flechettes are little darts bundled together into a munition. This is the modern version of the thousands of arrows that you see in movies about medieval warfare. Flechettes were fired by a tank a few years ago and killed a TV journalist in his clearly identified vehicle. The Israeli military explained it by saying that the hand held camera was mistaken for a rocket launcher.

All of this material about the American International School was mentioned to Senator John Kerry when he was in Gaza. So where is Kerry when you need him? Speaking of assistance, where is the first dollar of the billions in reconstruction aid pledged by various nations to rebuild Gaza after the Israeli onslaught? Oh, that!

We send millions of dollars in aid to Israel every day, but there is no accounting. This is another example of collective punishment that we encourage by our uncritical support of the Israeli government. The auditing and accountability are long overdue.

Gaza Farewell

2009-07-17T18:01:00.001-07:00

We left Gaza on a bus to the Rafah crossing on the evening of the 16th, watching the sun set in the Mediterranean, a few people on the beach and in the surf, trying to cool off. The shore of the Gaza Strip could be developed into a resort if there were any substance to the economy. Along the shore road south of Gaza City, you can see the ruins of buildings, targets of the Israeli warships: they are, for the most part, the villas of leaders of the PA. Within the borders of Gaza City, there was an industrial zone. All of the factories have been destroyed by the Israeli onslaught. I have done risk management and safety surveys on concrete factories, and one of the factories first bombed into oblivion was a cement factory--the burned hulks of cement mixing trucks and crane pumpers lay in the yard of the factory--crumbled cement walls and twisted rebar all around. I find this significant, because I know for a fact that the Israeli government refuses to allow the delivery of construction materials into the Gaza strip as part of their siege.

When you travel through Gaza City you see wide boulevards and what could be neat paved roads on a set of gentle hills, stone buildings (unlike the concrete and brick tenements you find everywhere in Egypt--some sections of Gaza City look more like towns in the West Bank or in Amman or Damascus--but there is so pavement, only sand, no evidence of the means of creating infrastructure. The pockmarks of bullets and shells are almost everywhere--sometimes in a jagged line leading up to a window and then on the other side, the last evidence of some Israeli soldier spraying his ammo. As we are finding out now in testimony from Israeli, it may or may not have been a response to a sniper or attacker. Soldiers were instructed to shoot at any movement at all, shoot first and don't ask questions later might be the phrase.

I must be an optimist, I decided, because in looking at all of this wreckage and devastation from the Israeli attack, I kept thinking to myself that if the Palestinians were in possession of full economic independence, this might be a town to compete with Haifa or Beirut for middle class vacation hordes, or how neat this one divided boulevard might be if it were paved and the stunted palms given the water to grow. And because despite this devastation and this very high unemployment, the people welcome us, smile at us, wave at us, greet us warmly and continue in their persistence--sumud is the word for this.

We were headed back to the Rafah crossing at the end of the 24 hour limit set by the Egyptian Government (and we assume also with the consent of the Israelis and the US State Department). By ten we reached the Gaza side of the border, retrieved our passports, and then bussed over to the Egyptian side of the "no man's land" for another slow and expensive re-entry into Egypt. When you first arrive, the cost of a visa is US$20. When we left Egypt for Gaza, there was a 92 Egyptian Pounds charge (the exchange is 5.6 pounds to the dollar), and now when we return there is another exit fee of 42 pounds just to leave the terminal. They get you going and coming.

By the time the buses were loaded, head checks done, security services settled in, it was after midnight and we crossed the Sinai, over the magnificent Mubarak Peace Bridge over the Suez Canal, the cargo vessels still moving slowly through, and back to Cairo airport, a trip of over 6 hours, and this despite the police escort vehicles who quickened our passage through the checkpoints that appear on the major roads every 30 kilometers or so. At dawn we were at the airport. Some on earlier flights headed to change to later or next day departures. The rest of us ate, exchanged last minute thoughts, names and addresses, shook hands and hugged. We had done it, and now, framed by long busrides in the night, it all felt like a dream.

In the US, mid afternoon of the 17th, we passed through immigration and customs with nary an inquiry. I understand that one or two people were detained, but apparently that was easily handled. And so back in the US, we have memories, and pictures, and the determination to tell the story of the Israeli siege of Gaza, the slow dying and the collective punishment of 1.5 million people who are kept from developing their own land.

Now, exhaustion is high, but so is determination to tell the story as often as we can to the American public. The mainstream media are not telling it. The idea that brings hope to all of us is that we are on the side of fairness and justice, and that will keep us going, as it has kept the Palestinians going. Our lesser sumud. When next I see Gaza City, I hope it will be for a stroll along the beach, fisherman coming in with catches from further out than two kilometers (where the Israelis now cordon off their boats) and no rubble and destruction in sight when I look inland. Viva Palestina!

Viva Palestina Convoy at Suez Crossing

2009-07-12T02:00:00.001-07:00

From Alexandria I write, getting ready to go into a meeting regarding the pickup of the vehicles and the departure. We have been receiving contradictory information regarding what happened to the Cairo contingent of the convoy last night as they tried to cross the Suez Canal into the Sinai and head for the rendezvous point at Al Arish. Because I hear contradictory statements, I send on the official press release.

We are all hoping that this will be the last night in Alexandria, but what appears to be more important now is that we are running out of time. The return flight to the US leaves Cairo on the 17th, so we have five days to rendezvous at Al Arish, deliver the supplies across the border, and high tail it back to Cairo airport for the afternoon of the 17th.

Robert Burns' words keep repeating in my head: "the best laid plans of mice and men oft gang awry" (loose translation from the Scots); but in this case, it appears that some of the going awry is due to diplomatic machinations. The careful listing of passports that has been done all along now apparently is not good enough. That is my speculation. As I wrote in the last one--inshallah has resonance that I never clearly understood before. I hope I will be able to update this one more time, but it may well be that I will not get a chance as we drive and rendezvous.

Check the VP website below regularly for updates.

At least today is slightly overcast and less hot than yesterday, though all night long the power was out and I ended up sleeping on two chairs on the cool rear balcony of the rented apartment. Sorry for no pictures. Unfortunately my camera is incompatible with this internet computer, and the jpg. files are not transferring well from the flash drive.

So here's the latest update from the Viva Palestina group--link to the website is below the press release.

From: Kevin Ovenden Viva Palestina
coordinator:

The 100 Viva Palestina humanitarian volunteers have
decided to stay the night in their buses at the Mubarak Peace Bridge over the Suez Canal despite pressure from the Egyptian security officials to return to Cairo.

The official reason given at the checkpoint for
refusing to allow them to cross is that the officials there did not have a list of the names of the members of the convoy. Such a list was, however, at the request of the Egyptian authorities before any of the convoy members set foot in Egypt sent to the Egyptian ambassadors to Washington, D.C., and London.

The US Embassy in Cairo has now stepped in to forward
a newly provided list of those convoy members aboard the buses at the bridge to the Egyptian foreign ministry to clear the way for the convoy's passage.

Nancy Mansour Leigh, a spokeswoman for the Viva
Palestina delegation at the Suez crossing, says, "It's going to be an uncomfortable night, but it's nothing compared with what the people of Gaza must live through every day. We've already succeeded in securing internet access and are negotiating other necessary facilities. But whatever facilities are provided
or not, our determination will see us through the night and all the way to Gaza."

New York City Councilman Charles Barron is on the
scene at the Suez Canal and acting as chief negotiator with Egyptian security officials. "The Viva Palestina movement has had a great success this morning with our stand at the Suez crossing. We've now got an agreement for us to stay until the list of our convoy members reaches the foreign ministry. It shows what can be achieved with the determination and commitment of a collective body of people. We are determined to cross onto Gaza, and no matter what happens next, out of this first small confrontation, we've achieved a success for the movement
in support of the Palestinian people. The convoy is going to move on, and we ain't gonna let nobody turn us around."

British Member of Parliament George Galloway offered
these words of encouragement for the delegation being held up at the crossing:"This is an American convoy. And Americans are used to refusing to give up seats on buses in the struggle for justice. I regard everyone who's putting themselves on the line tonight at the Suez Canal for the success of this humanitarian mission as nothing short of a hero."

For more updates, visit www.VivaPalestina-US.org.

From Alexandria

2009-07-10T12:12:00.001-07:00

Called "Alex," scene of the famous Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, home of the poet Constantine Cavafy, site of the famous museum and library burned and then destroyed by earthquake--no telling how different the texture of history might have been had all the volumes of papyrus survived--site of another famous seven wonder of the ancient world, the lighthouse at Pharos--well, there is a lot of history here in this seaboard town, the Mediterranan sea pounding against the stones and concrete, umbrellas by the seashore so closely packed that no sun penetrates. Millions on the beach and millions walking the streets, riding the trolleys and the minibuses that go everywhere and no tourist can tell where. The coptic church in the sun--where the women are not covered by a hijab. Cavafy's house in the shade of the small street, the view of the old Jewish Synagogue--but we cannot visit, and "No Camera" the instruction from the white-uniformed antiquities police.

The library has long gone, but the new spectacular Library, a large cap of concrete with incised and molded characters from all languages, Arabic, Greek, Latin, looks out over the old Harbor toward the entrance of the harbor,signified by crosses, an unexpected item. From the parapets of the fortress built on the traditional site of the lighthouse, you can see the fishing fleet at anchor in the late afternoon. From down the street, the smell of fish carefully stacked and laid out by the fishmongers.

And yet now not really as a tourist, here on a mission, twiddling my mental thumbs and walking in the sun in this interesting city as I wait to get into the vehicles, still standing about as we wait for the final release, and then on through the hot delta, cross the Suez Canal, head to al Arish where the rest of the medical supplies and the other members of the convoy who have been procuring them join up with us.

The lodgings are uncomfortable and red bites on my arms, despite the DEET, suggest that I may be the freshest meat for mosquitoes and flies; or worse, fleas, or worse than that, perhaps bedbugs. A good friend who had been in Alexandria caught dengue fever here, so I hope the bug spray keeps working. At any rate, it is hot and you live for those moments in a shady passageway when the breeze flows by and brings wanted relief. Hot, but not to the point of unbearabliity. Today on a balcomy we consumed kalamata olives, local green olives, sardines, pita bread, fruit juices and non-alcoholic beer, and a lovely ripe melon.

Inshallah, as they say here, and I am learning, very quickly, why they say it, we will be in the vehicles and heading out of Alexandria soon in the direction of the Sinai. From there, the opportunity to post to this extent or even to check emails will be limited, and I hope therefore, within a few days we will be able to deliver to those who need it the braces and wheelchairs and walkers and medicine. Inshallah, of course, always inshallah.

Viva Palestina Convoy Readying to Launch

2009-07-08T12:53:00.001-07:00

The Viva Palestina Convoy members have been in Cairo since the fifth of July--having left NYC and other cities on the Fourth of July in order to declare independence from US policy of tacit support of the Israeli siege. The people of Gaza await our delivery of medical supplies and equipment. Over 180 Americans are in the convoy from all over the country with a very strong contingent of 34 from CA.

And now that the planning and various supply negotiations have been completed, we are beginning the convoy. One team remains here in Cairo to handle last minute procurement, packing, and inventory to add to the supplies already shipped from the US. Another team heads out tomorrow morning to procure the convoy vehicles, prepare and secure them for loading and transport.

British MP George Galloway, the inspiration for the convoy, has been interviewed by Al Jazeera in NYC before we left, by the AP here in Cairo when we arrived on Sunday. Wednesday at the Association of Egyptian journalists, Galloway and a contingent of 30 Viva Palestina participants answered questions regarding the convoy. Unfortunately, American media, despite some prodding by individuals, have not been very responsive up to this point, consistent with their usual ignoring of this continuing collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza for the past three years, most notoriously during the onslaught of late December 2008 and January 2009.

Cairo is a thronging city, its downtown area on both banks of the Nile incrediby interesting. Activity never stops, and traffic is relentless. Our cab today taking into the older sections of the city just narrowly brushed by two women crossing the street as the cabbie, excitedly practicing his English started waving his hand in imitation of a cowboy movie. We traipsed through the market and furniture manufacturing areas of the city, looking longingly at the fruit, but with no surplus of bottled water to rinse it thoroughly, had to pass them up. Apricots, grapes, mangoes, cactus pears in abundance--donkey carts driven by young children or old men, people drinking their water out of brown decorated pitchers. I wondered how the women in the full veils, with their dark eyes peering out of the slits slaked their thirst--did theu have to wait until they returned home? Cabs and constant honking, downtown in the modern section of the city near the airlines and banks, someone is always ready to speak to you and even more, to accompany you, show you where the bookstore or the bank is for a few piastres.

Uniformly, the people are friendly and when you do get into conversation, their favorite president, above all, is Jimmy Carter, seen by everyone as a man of peace. President Obama is appreciated for his speech in Cairo, but people we spoke to, while appreciating its sentiments, unanimously express some reservations about actions speaking louder than words. From what they can see, the actual policy has not changed very much. They are, in fact, still waiting for the deeds.

Donations can still be made at the Viva Palestina website , and if you are in tune with the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza, I encourage you to think about donating and sending this blog entry on to sympathetic friends and acquaintances. I am including the URL in case the hyperlink doesn't work, as this computer tends to slide in and out of Arabic, making the hyperlinks a bit difficult to fix firmly: www.vivapalestina-US.org). You will find on the website some pictures of our unloading some supplies at JFK on the Fourth the afternoon of our flight. Other sites with pictures and writing about the convoy are:

http://alawdavpusconvoy.blogspot.com/
and
verbage.wordpress.com .

Check them out and watch for further pictures and reports on the VP website and on this blog.

More follows from the delta and the road through the Sinai desert as we head towards Gaza and I sneak a few monents on someone's computer.

Now comes the hard and exhausting part--the heat and the sand and the mosquitos along the Meditarranean Sea desert scape, the loading and the driving and the convoy and the jump off in just a few days into the damage and heartbreaking sights: the recovering wounded, the cemeteries, the rubble of the bombed schools and hospitals and civic structures, and among it all, the people who just will not give up in their long struggle. After work, not rest but the sorrow of bearing witness. We realize that even this little penetration into that sandy prison called Gaza is just one of many things that must be done to bring justice. And we also know, as Reverend Daughtry said from his lectern, we also know that right is on our side.

From Cairo

2009-07-07T03:42:00.000-07:00

The weather, believe it or not is not as hot as expected, no higher than 100 fahrenheit, though I was expecting to have to deal with 110. Little surprises continue to occur. Traffic as rapid and chaotic and unrelenting as can be and on a road with no sidewalks you really need eyes in the back of your head--since the frantic last minute beeps and honks don't come until the car is right upon you.

There are over two hundred of us here working on various tasks in preparation for our delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the shared commitment of everyone is just accepted and part of the conversation. I am working on the media committee, and would hope that when my posts are read by my chosen friends that these entries will be passed around to all. My understanding is that the Viva Palestina website will start carrying a blog entry or journal within the next few days and I will post the link to it when it comes up.

Things are a bit hectic and I still am scrambling to find someone who can upload my pictures--though I have not had a chance to take that many of the local scenery or the heated and dusty turmail that is this gigantic city--so I can get them posted here.

One of the convoy members has been checking coverage in the local media, and while there is news here, the news in the United States has been absolutely minimal, even though press releases have been sent, inteviews have been given to the AP and to Al Jazeera. So I would suggest your going to either of those places to find some articles and then pass on to your local news outlets to see if some local cover can be stimulated for the Viva Palestina convoy. The tendency of US papers in general to ignore any news about relief to the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, is a given, and indeed one of the intentions of the convoy is to generate interest. That's why we have Americans of various faiths and origins here, most from the East and West Coasts, but a number from mid-western states as well.

As the week rogresses, computer time will diminish, but I hope to get something up every day to record the events, and will certainly continue to follow the movement to bring relief and humanitarian assistance to the long-suffering people of Gaza.

Piracy Off of Gaza

2009-07-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

For three days now I have been scouring the US press looking for updates--no, actual mention--of the piracy, complete with armed masked men boarding the ship in waters off the coast of Gaza Port. (First reports said that the ship was hijacked in International Waters, but according to one of the participants, they reckoned to have been in Gazan waters.) The ship was carrying toys, crayons, medical supplies, and some construction materials to Gaza. On board were over 20 people including Cynthia McKinney, the former Congressional Representative, and Mairead Maguire, the Irish Nobel Prize winner. The ship is the latest attempt of the Free Gaza movement to provide relief to the besieged people of Gaza.

McKinney is still in jail awaiting a "deportation order" which she has refused to sign since it was presented in Hebrew. Since the people on board were arrested by Israel and put into prison in Israel, and Israel is threatening deportation because of their "illegal entry" into Israel, the only conclusion to draw is that the state of Israel regards Gazan waters as Israeli waters, showing once again the illegality and the deliberate choke hold of control over the Palestinian people.

All of the countries whose citizens were hijacked have raised heavy objections with Israel. Except the United States, which remains very quiet in the face of this obvious international violation. It makes you wonder how much pressure is actually being brought by the Obama administration to settle the conflict. Silence and neglect seem to be the policy. It certainly is the operating policy of the Mainstream Media. Cynthia McKinney was pretty outspoken Congressperson, and the US press was quite good at demonizing and marginalizing her, so it is no surprise that her incarceration has not received any attention.

More later as I get to the Middle East and get to a computer.

Loyalty Oaths for Second-Class Citizens?

2009-05-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

Imagine, if you will, for just a moment--longer if you can tolerate it--that you are a Native American living on your impoverished reservation in the dry badlands of the upper Midwest or the desert Southwest and reading in the newspaper or seeing on television that the Senate's subcommittee on patriotism of the Senate Homeland Security Oversight committee--or whatever its name may be--has just voted to send a bill to the full committee for debate.

The bill says the following: that all Native American people, as well as Japanese Americans, African Americans, East Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans--that is to say, all Americans who are not White Christians--must swear allegiance to the United States as a "Christian Democratic nation." Further, the draft legislation has a provision that if any American called publicly for the end of the United States as a "Christian" (and "democratic") state, they would be thrown into prison for one year. The bill additionally specified that commemoration of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, or the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942-43, or the mention of slavery during Black History Month, or Commemorations of the Holocaust, were illegal.

All of us would support that truly democratic bill, don't you think? Especially strong in their support would be the governing party of the United States--let's pretend for the moment that John McCain and the Republicans had won the election. (I don't see the Democrats producing such a bill; at least not yet; no telling what might happen if we had another terrorist attack on the Democrat's watch).

Well, that is exactly the kind of legislation that has gained traction in the Israeli Knesset. According to the Jerusalem Post, the bill was sponsored by a member of the Israel Beiteinu party--the party of the racist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. It garnered 47 votes within the ruling coalition. It calls for a loyalty oath on the part of Palestinian Israelis to the "Jewish democratic" state, and provides a year of imprisonment for publicly speaking out against the state (as in calling for a single state solution or a "secular" state); it contains further penalties and jail time for commemoration of al Nakba, the events of displacement and ethnic cleansing that took place at the time of the declaration of the state of Israel.

Of course, opposition to the bill by the opposition parties has been strong and outspoken, but that the legislation is even contemplated and voted upon preliminarily, is not a good sign, and it does not speak well for Israel's self-proclaimed status as the "only democracy" in the Middle East. It's a new and more virulent form of the political infection we know in America as McCarthyism.

Lieberman's party has had on its agenda since its beginning the transfer of the Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship to other Arab countries or to the occupied territories. Of course, the presence of Palestinian citizens, who compose about 20% of the total population, has been a long-standing concern of the Israeli government. The government claims that they have full citizenship, but any one who studies the Israeli-Palestinian question learns quite early on that Palestinian Israelis have a second-class citizenship, receive far less services for their tax dollars than other Israelis, are kept in segregated neighborhoods, are spied upon and harassed in a way that other Israelis are not. The right to vote is always trumpeted as proof of equal citizenship. Any Israeli citizen speaking honestly will tell you that equality is not the case.

Over the last weekend I went to the 7th Annual Al-Awda Conference. Al-Awda is a mostly Palestinian- American group, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition. It is, so to speak, the conscience of the Palestinians in diaspora, steadfastly reminding everyone that the "right to return" to one's home is an inalienable right under international law, and constant in its reminder to all--including the PLO--that unless the right of return is an integral, primary issue to be discussed honestly and at the start of negotiations, Palestinians will not receive full justice. The Right of Return, because it is the most painful issue of all, has always been shelved for "final status negotiations." And why? Because if it is discussed honestly by Israel, Israel will be in the position of publicly having to admit that they did in fact expel, transfer, or murder Palestinians in 1947-1949. They also will have to admit to the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages in the territory originally assigned to Israel by the UN partition act of November, 1947.

One of the speakers at the Al-Awda conference, an Israeli Palestinian doctor, Hatim Kanaaneh, has lived for years in his family home in Gallilee. Dr Kanaaneh is a gentle man, whose memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, is an excellent corrective to the stereotypical view, unfortunately perpetrated by staunch champions of Israel, that all Palestinians are terrorists. For many years, Dr. Kanaaneh was involved in public health matters, and he knows well how the second-class citizenship of the Palestinian Israelis has adversely affected the overall health of his minority.

Dr. Kanaaneh's blog, with the same title as his memoirs, is a gateway to knowing what it is like to live as a Palestinian within the Israeli state. An April entry on his blog, an "Open Letter to President Barak Obama" will give you insight into just how threatening the Israel Beiteinu proposals are to Palestinian Israelis. Here are some excerpts from the full letter, and I urge you to go to the blog to read the full text:

Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who almost surely have better claim to descent from the ancient Hebrews than his. And mind you, Mr. President, my residence in the home he wants me evicted from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Mr. President, take a loyalty oath confirming your second-class status?

And:

You have to understand, sir, that I speak here of life-and-death issues for me and my family. Mr. Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, attained his impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Mr. President? I surely hope not: but the majority of Israeli citizens seem to have done exactly that.

We as Americans, pride ourselves on our democratic tolerance of free speech, we lament the thought that some citizens receive second-class treatment. Yet in this California which has just created a new class of homosexual second-class citizens, I also find a reluctance on the part of the main stream media even to acknowledge the racism and injustice and very undemocratic implications of new proposed legislation in Israel. Americans should know what is going on there and make their objections known to Lieberman's brand of discrimination.

al Nakba

2009-05-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

Sixty-one years ago today, Israel declared its statehood, and celebrates it. The Palestinian people do not celebrate. They remember al Nakba, the catastrophe.

Watch this short video from the American Friends Service Committee, "Israel Palestine: A Land in Fragments." It's a little over two minutes long. The Quakers--the American Friends--have no interest other than peace and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Their little video sums up the terrible spatial irony of the present situation. It bends over backwards to keep itself as neutral as possible at the start, but by the end the depiction of the facts on the ground tell their tale. Sixty one years of control over territory originally allocated by the UN to the Palestinian people have diminished the land so significantly that a "contiguous" territory for the Palestinian people looks now to be an impossibility. See it for yourself in the short film. The last forty-one years have done the most damage. Israel continues its strategy and tactics of creating "facts on the ground" and eating further into the land which is not theirs to eat.

Follow the links on the page to Resources on Fragmentation of the West Bank. If you feel adventurous, read the words of Palestinians telling their own stories about 1948. These people are not terrorists, not "savages," not "cockroaches," not "people who only understand violence," as some of the more partisan defenders of the Israeli position would like to have Americans believe. These are people like you and I who have been victims of a catastrophe and its ongoing aftermath.

And yet, despite the maps and the visuals and the accumulation of voices that peacefully protest for peace, the blindness to injustice continues, a deafness, deep and tinny and implacable continues, and the Israeli government continues to demolish and expand and refine this matrix of control, oppresssion, and occupation.

"Now hear this, O foolish and senseless people, Who have eyes but do not see; Who have ears but do not hear." (Jeremiah, 5:21)

Not By the Hair of my Chinny Chin Chin

2009-05-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed that when you see news clips of pigs in a current story on swine flu that they are always freely rooting about--in corrals or pens--and often times shown eating garbage. You never see the pigs as the vast majority of them exist to be slaughtered: in corporate petri dishes, crammed together and injected with antibiotics, trading sneezes and feces and infections. It's not for nothing that pork is not kosher or haram.

Wanna buy a pig? If you do, they can be bought, they are for sale--the ones with the weak leg bones--the genetic inefficient morphs if you are a Smithfield exec--which are rejected by the corporate pork factories simply because they will not be able to stand firmly as they grow heavier, crammed in next to their neighbors among the food and the feces. Pigs like that get broken bones and lay down to die and get infected. Can't waste that meat, so risk management says get rid of the weak-legged ones. Pigs also have their cute spiralling pigtails lopped off because they are likely to be torn off in rage by their maddened companions.

Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums and The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, sums it up in "The Swine Flu Crisis Lays Bare the Meat Industry's Monstrous Power":

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

So the next time you see a clip of pigs with more than 2 square yards to move around in, don't believe you are seeing anything but the spin. Ask yourself why the networks can't get footage of the REAL conditions under which "the other white meat" is produced. Of course not: it would be a threat to the pork industries' trade secrets. I'm sure the swine industry would scream if a YouTube clip of a PETA underground video were broadcast. That of course, would result in a lawsuit against the broadcaster.

That's a shame. Forty years ago a friend of mine, over a lovely roast loin of pork covered in sage and pepper and a few too many glasses of wine declaimed that "all meat aspires to the condition of pork." Like wild salmon, decent local pears and peaches, good North Atlantic Cod, vegetable slop fed pork raised on a farm by some freckle-faced 4H Club blue ribbon winner is long gone from the local stores and supermarkets. You'd have to have an expensive farm connection to obtain it. "Animal husbandry now more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm," says Davis:

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

My apologies to all my Muslim and observant Jewish friends. My origins are deep in Eastern Europe--and eating pigs is in both sides of my family's genes, and the genes cry out every once in a while for a fix, for crackling satisfaction. But I'm in the process of waterboarding those genes to make them swear that they really don't like it. At least not the factory swine. What's a Lithuanian Pole to do in this era of high return on investment?

The Crusading Troops in Afghanistan

2009-05-03T23:35:00.000-07:00

A year ago, the Los Angeles Times broke a story about how Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse and the Southern Baptist International Mission Board were poised on the border of Iraq ready to enter when it was safe, in order to carry out their proselytizing. A couple of adventuresome Christian fellows were also trekking through South Asia looking to bring the message of Christianity to these Muslim countries. You might remember how former President Bush and some higher Pentagon officials would slip, now and then, and refer to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a Crusade.

Now, from Al Jazeera's veteran reporter on Afghanistan, James Bay, we find further evidence of what must be called "institutionalized" missionary work. Bay obtained video footage taken by a former soldier at Bagram, showing that US soldiers are not only carrying out missionary work; they have been encouraged to do so by their commanders. In fact, the video is from about a year ago, which may only be coincidental with the proselytizers reported on in the LAT in 2008.

Bibles have been translated into Pashto and have been made available for distribution by our soldiers. Here's a snippet from the article:

In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him".

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says.

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

I urge you to read the article in its entirety. Those of us who have been following this issue for a number of years now should be more concerned than ever, because the actual translation and printing of the bibles into the chief Afghan language shows not only an official approval of the proselytizing, but also gives the lie to the continuing denials of the Pentagon and the Chaplains' corps that any proselytizing is going on.

"Why do they hate us?" was a question that was all the rage after 9/11. Those of us, libertarian, conservative, liberal, progressive, socialist, green, and sane--all of us questioned the crime and pointed to the United States' continuing exploitation and manipulation of other countries. This information shows that we have to add evangelical manipulation firmly into the list. This boneheaded collusion of our Armed forces with Evangelical Christianity is a further indication that apparent gaffe about Crusaders in the Middle East was something to be taken seriously.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been warning for years about the open proselytizing among our troops and how some units look upon these wars as if they were Crusades. (After adverse publicity from the MRFF, one Air Force Unit finally took the Christian symbolism off its particular attack group.) Go to the MRFF website to check out their articles and their ongoing attempts to have the United States Military actually conform in practice to their constitutional duty to separate church and state. Order a copy of Michael L. Weinstein's book, With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military (available through a link on the site) to read about why he thinks this is a very serious problem for all Americans, whether in the services or not.

President Obama's War in Afghanistan now has another element to deal with. The proselytizing is really just part of the American exceptionalism manifesting itself again. We have the religion of Democracy, the religion of unbridled capitalism, the religion of religion, the religion of advanced technology. As if we always know best what goes for other countries, the majority of whose citizens want us to get the hell out of their country and start sending them real aid and assistance and reparations.

Praise was recently given in Congress for our National Guardsmen on special agricultural duty to teach farmers in Afghanistan"modern methods of farming." Nice of them to do it, and praiseworthy, better than more drones or attack helicopters, but those fellows should be going over as true farmers only, not as part of the military. In a pinch, they will be forced to choose between the seed bag and the rifle. And the rifle will win to their detriment. That's all the Afghan farmers need, modern farming, with no money to buy fertilizer or genetically modified seed. (Perhaps it will be another replay of the "green revolution" in India, whose modern corporate farming pressures and patented corporate seed have helped to create high rates of suicide among poor Indian farmers.) Orchards and farmland in Afghanistan have been ruined by our military presence. The vast majority of the Afghan people want us to make sure the door doesn't bang us in the butt on the way out. Get the troops out, let the Afghan people call their loya jurga and carry on their own society.

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black

2009-04-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

This is the day that a black Mercedes Benz driving forty five in a twenty-five mile zone almost cuts me off. Two Armenian flags fly from the rear windows and another Armenian flag is displayed on the top, clipped into the sun-roof sliding glass. The crazy driver is a young man with a booming stereo at full blast, a cigarette in his mouth. Today is a big day in my town because it is the commemoration of the Armenian genocide--1914-1918, the first holocaust of the 20th century. The orders that Hitler gave before the invasion of Poland ended with the question, "Who. after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

And though many decades have passed since US Ambassador Morgenthau first reported to the Wilson government that genocide was taking place, and headlines in the New York Times recorded the massacres and forced migrations, the United States still has not officially recognized the Armenian genocide, acting according to Realpolitikischen principles in not wanting to upset the Turkish government, our allies and fellow NATO member. Candidate Obama clearly indicated that he was in favor of recognizing the Armenian genocide. President Obama made a speech in Turkey in which he mentioned violence in the past, but failed to call it genocide.

I'll get angry at the young and reckless driver of the Mercedes tomorrow, knowing that his stupidity is probably not connected to the flag he displayed. At least, as Samantha Power pointed out in an interview on KPFK yesterday, the idea of an Armenian Genocide is now widely accepted and understood as historical fact in the United States. It will just be a matter of time until the Turks come around. In the meantime, we have the economy to worry about, and Realpolitik.

This is the week that it was revealed that before Passover, at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Center in Israel, a volunteer docent named Itamar Shapira, 29 years old, was fired for improperly pointing out to some of his tours that a massacre of Palestinians occurred in Deir Yassin in 1948 and should also be kept in mind. Yad Vashem's statement said he was fired for using his position to advance his own "political agenda."

This is the week that President Obama spoke at the Holocaust Museum some moving words regarding the Holocaust and how all of us must not turn away when faced with crimes against humanity:

Today, and every day, we have an opportunity, as well as an obligation, to confront these scourges -- to fight the impulse to turn the channel when we see images that disturb us, or wrap ourselves in the false comfort that others' sufferings are not our own. Instead we have the opportunity to make a habit of empathy; to recognize ourselves in each other; to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance and indifference in whatever forms they may take -- whether confronting those who tell lies about history, or doing everything we can to prevent and end atrocities like those that took place in Rwanda, those taking place in Darfur. That is my commitment as President. I hope that is yours, as well.

It will not be easy. At times, fulfilling these obligations require self-reflection. But in the final analysis, I believe history gives us cause for hope rather than despair -- the hope of a chosen people who have overcome oppression since the days of Exodus; of the nation of Israel rising from the destruction of the Holocaust; of the strong and enduring bonds between our nations.

It is the hope, too, of those who not only survived, but chose to live, teaching us the meaning of courage and resilience and dignity. I'm thinking today of a study conducted after the war that found that Holocaust survivors living in America actually had a higher birthrate than American Jews. What a stunning act of faith -- to bring a child in a world that has shown you so much cruelty; to believe that no matter what you have endured, or how much you have lost, in the end, you have a duty to life.

But anyone who stands on the side of justice, who opposes crimes against human rights, and who was not in a coma through the terrible days of December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009 as cluster bombs, white phosphorus, and disproportionate massacres of Palestinian civilians took place could hardly read or hear those words with an ironic shake of the head. Nor could they think how the continuing resistance of Palestinians and their "duty to life" persists in spite of the oppression and control exerted in their apartheid existence.

This is the week that the Israeli Demolition Forces (IDF) released their preliminary self-investigation of their assault on Gaza and decided that they did nothing wrong except a "few mistakes." This is the week that it was announced that Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Gaza doctor who in January lost three of his daughters when IDF soldiers fired tank shells on his home, will share the Niarchos Prize for Survivorship with Nomika Zion from Sderot. You will note how the Jerusalem Post in reporting the announcement adds the official excuse that the soldiers who killed his daughters were "thinking there were terrorists inside." This is also the week that Dr. Mahmoud Iyad, who, during the daily four hour cease-fire watched Israeli soldiers shoot his two sons in front of him, killing one, and then watched the second one bleed to death because the Israeli soldiers would not let ambulances come, said that the IDF was lying. Dr. Lyad watched his dying son call his other brother in the United States to ask for help. We have recordings.

This is the week that the US boycotted the follow up UN Conference on Racism along with other European countries. This is the week that the garrulous President of Iran, Mahmoud AhmadiNejad gave a speech at the conference condemning Israel but also condemning the structure of the Security Council and calling for its reform, especially of the veto power. Instead of "denying the Holocaust," he talked of "the pretext of Jewish suffering" in creating the State of Israel (though he of course did not refer to a "State of Israel") and repeated that it was "in fact in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe." Perhaps that's progress of a sort, but very little. The President of Iran can be a blowhard at times, but I urge you to read the rush translation of the speech, especially if you have been criticizing the bailout of the Wall Street Bankers.

And this was the day that a genuine racist, Avigdor Lieberman, who has been elevated into a prominent position in the new Israeli coalition government, was quoted in an interview in the Jerusalem Post--to be published on Tuesday next week, the 61rst "Independence Day"of Israel--that the main obstacle to peace in the Mideast is Iran.

That's the pot calling the kettle black.

Anyone who stands on the side of justice after over sixty-one years since the UN partition vote, and who knows the ugly and internationally illegal "facts on the ground," who knows of the atomic arsenal of Israel, who knows of the continuing house demolitions and land grabs in East Jerusalem, and who keeps in mind the terrible destruction of Gaza last December and January, also knows--despite the protests of Avigdor Lieberman, that the greatest obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the government of Israel.

To borrow President Obama's words, "we have the opportunity to make a habit of empathy; to recognize ourselves in each other; to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance and indifference in whatever forms they may take."

Chalk up one for the Good Guys in Peru

2009-04-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

Justice is possible in the world. Alberto Fujimori has just been sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity. (The story is here at the Financial Times.) Since he is seventy years old now and is serving a six year sentence, it appears that he may be destined to serve the rest of his life in prison. His daughter announced she was running for president so she could pardon him, but according to the FT story, there may be no possibility of pardon for a crime against humanity.

The real heroes in this affair are the judges of Chile, who decided he should be extradited to Peru.

Anyone want to set up a ski vacation for Cheney and company in the Chilean Andes? I think it wonderful that Chile and Peru show cajones of this sort. Perhaps they could do us a favor ? Maybe we could get AIG to schedule an executive planning conference and morale building retreat down there and have Cheney and Addington as guest speakers? You think?

You cannot "move on" from crimes like torture. You cannot preserve the rule of law if you do not identify the ones who break the law--no matter how rich or prestigious or politically sacrosanct they are--and identify them, investigate them, bring evidence against them in court, and sentence them appropriately if they are found to be guilty as charged.

It's been nine years since Fujimori left office and fled to Japan. Let us hope that our investigation starts before the trail gets cold.

Right now the Republicans are so afraid of the most damning torture memos being released that they are threatening to filibuster against the nominations of Dawn Johnson to the Office of Legal Counsel and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel, as reported on Democracy Now! Both of them were critical of the abuses of the justice department under Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Mukasy. (As I write their names, I feel a great satisfaction knowing all three are out of office.)

The Democrats need to call the Republicans' blustery bluff on this one. The February 2009 International Red Cross Report on the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, released in full in the New York Review of Books this week, clearly indicates that torture was committed, and torture is an international as well as a domestic crime. Basta! with the appeasement line of "let's move forward and put the past behind us." Let the Republicans pay for their usurpation. This is not a matter of vengeance or even retribution. This is a matter of establishing justice in a society where notions of justice have been deeply distorted by the Republicans and some colluding Democrats--perhaps we can call them the "good Democrats"? Jane Harman. Jay Rockefeller. Nancy Pelosi. Now that the Democrats are in charge they do not need to aid and abet the distortions any further, especially out of cowardice. Bring on the filibuster. Let the Republicans blather in defense of their unholy law and order.

Just one excerpt of note transcribed from the ICRC report:

Basic materials such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, towels, toilet paper, clothes, underwear, blankets and mattresses wee not provided at all during the initial detention period, in some instances lasting several months. The timing of initial provision and continued supply of all these items was allegedly linked with compliance and cooperation on the part of the detainee. Even after being provided, these basic items allegedly were sometimes removed in order to apply pressure for purposes of interrogation.

In the early phase of interrogation, from a few days to several weeks, access to shower was totally denied and toilet, as mentioned above, was either provided in the form of a bucket or not provided at all--in which case those detainees shackled in the prolonged stress standing position had to urinate and defecate on themselves and remain standing in their own bodily fluid for periods of several days.

Followed by one excerpt of note from our former President at his White House Press Conference, September 15, 2006. [Stutters restored and interpolated]:

This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court's ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It's [ . . .it's . . . it's] very vague. What does that mean, "outrages upon human dignity"? That's a statement that is wide open to interpretation.

I said then and I say it again: with all due disrespect, Mr. "President," retract your head from where the sun don't shine.

General Petraeus--among others--Floats a Trial Balloon

2009-04-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

First, over the weekend the two top Israeli officials who remain anonymous talking to two equally anonymous Time Magazine reporters, they want to "clarify" that Israel did indeed attack convoys in Sudan, and making perfectly clear that this was to send a clear message to certain unspecified parties (i.e. Iran) that they can go anywhere they want.

The US doesn't condemn it, of course, because violating another country's territory is something that we have already gotten used to doing. Borders? Sovereign territory? Hey, man, WTF! we're entitle. We do kidnappings and illegal assassinations too.

And what wonderful timing--on Tuesday--Netanyahu gives his first interview to The Atlantic, in which he threatens to attack Iran unless President Obama disarms them successfully (you will find the full Atlantic article here.) On Wednesday, President Obama talked to him on the phone and said he was committed 100% to Israel's defense; and lo and behold that very day General Petraeus testifies before Congress and warns about the possibility that Israel may go off on its own and attack Iran. God almighty did you hear the Congress critters' outrage? Will you see the condemnation in the mainstream media this week? Watch for Bill O'Reilly to launch into appoplexy at the commission of another Obama crime. Well, the good general Petraeus carried water for the neocons. Why not carry it for the newly instituted racist government in Tel Aviv? It's a shame that the respected Atlantic has begun to carry the water as well.

You will hear no calls for caution, no calls for real hard evidence from the only folks that know what is going on, the AIEA (which unfortunately has its own internal problems trying to find a new director). No real diplomacy. Bush didn't question Israel's attack on Syria or call for an investigation, and the US didn't do it for this Sudan attack. (Our ambassador was apparently tipped off, however, and was telling the Sudanese about it when the missiles struck.) The more US diplomacy "changes" the more it remains the same.

At the end of his speech, Netanyahu warned that "When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran." Since the whole accusation of Iranian nuclear intentions and capability seems to be more a matter of belief than credible evidence, and since Israel has already got in its possession probably well over a hundred atomic weapons, I think that sentence provides a fine mirror:

When the paranoid believer possesses the air force and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Israel.

The problem is, of course, that the war-monger will never see the reflective irony in his statement of civic paranoia. Will someone finally demand some really hard evidence that Iran has the capability to make the bomb and not just fissionable material for its own nuclear power program? Will someone please explain how a country with one or two untested nuclear bombs would be stupid enough to risk its existence by attacking a country with at least 75 and perhaps as many as 200 nuclear weapons? When Netanyahu was asked that very question by interviewer Jeffrey Goldberg, his reply was, “I’m not going to get into that.” (Will somebody please remind Israel that they started the nuclear proliferation in the Middle East to begin with?)

To see Iran as a real nuclear warfare threat demands that you believe that Iran is truly and absolutely run by mad men. Proud, yes; wily, to be sure; but above all, practical realists. You really think they want to get hit? (I will concede that they are being incredibly foolish in their tempting the Israelis.)

It is clear to me that if the Iranians are pursuing a bomb it is out of a desperate move to place themselves in a deterrent situation, not one of suicidal foolishness.

If Netanyahu truly believes that Iran is stupid enough to attack Israel with even one weapon, then he is deeply deranged. If he fears Iran supplying nuclear weapons to terrrorists, he has a fear, but he must also know that Iran will never escape unscathed if nuclear terrorism happens in Israel--an incident which will of course, damage Palestinians as well as Israelis. I think Netanyahu is in touch with one idea: pushing things as far as he can right now to see how much he can get away with and to detract attention from his plan for denying Palestinians their state. Because I also think he is a wild-eyed one--albeit beneath a squinting gunslinger's lids. (We Americans can't perceive it because he such good command of American idiom and the bare hint of an accent. Trust me--having him as prime minister is something akin to having David Addington or John Bolton as president.)

We need to fear him much more than the Iranians. There is no more dangerous madman than the one who believes irrefutably in his own sanity.

Throwing My Shoes at PBS

2009-03-24T22:32:00.000-07:00

I never thought I would be in this space of wanting to throw my shoes at the television set when Frontline was on. For many years I have been praising the professional journalism of Frontline, talking the show up to my friends, referring to its programs to help people experience good television journalism. Its stories have been hard hitting, have been thorough, have been stunning at times.

But no more.

Tonight, their program on the deficit, "Ten Trillion and Counting" was an abominable piece of reporting, leaving out whole sides of the story and carrying the water for the Concord Coalition and the Pete Peterson campaign and its I.O.U.S.A documentary. I have no way of proving it, but it felt as if the Peterson campaign was an eminence grise. At the very least, it seems as if the producers and the reporter of the Frontline program had thoroughly digested the Peterson campaign's message and decided to do their own variation on the theme. It's a gut instinct, because they never mentioned Peterson except in the most oblique way, by a short interview with the former controller of the US, David Walker, who is the president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and who, for a number of years now, even before his resignation from the position of the Controller, has been worrying about the deficits and the national debt.

I have recommended the I.O.U.S.A. film before, but with the proviso that the attacks on Social Security and Medicare needed to be taken with considerable skepticism. In all of the attacks on them carried out by the Peterson campaign, not one mention is ever made of the terrible imbalances and inequalities that have led us to this miserable economic situation. And although Medicare and Social Security receive the brunt of the blame for the projected increases in the debt, absolutely nothing is done to question the overall misguided priorities of our federal spending policy in other areas, particularly the bloated defense and national security budget, not to mention the persistent subsidies for the health and pharmaceutical companies, big oil, tax havens and loopholes for global corporations, and the poor oversight of the financial sector which led us into this fiscal wilderness and now is receiving our bailout money to socialize its losses.

The first half of the show, however, did a pretty good job of showing the enormous ballooning of the deficit under George W. Bush's presidency, but leaving out that in addition to the $10 trillion in debt he ran up, he also squandered the surplus anticipated after the budget cutting of the Clinton administration. While the Republicans come in for some criticism, the heavy reliance upon Republican Congressmen and Senators, particularly the self-righteous and smug Judd Gregg, leaves the viewer with the message that these voices are the voices of reason.

Then the second half begins its critical projections of how medical costs are going to swamp the economy without once even mentioning the the opposition to the current health care quagmire. Don't hold your breath if you were looking for words about the about the overblown expense components in health care, or over treatment, or failures to prioritize preventive care; or the bloated defense and national security budget, or the billions of dollars that we have shelled out to subsidize the criminal venality of the richest Wall Street and hedge fund managers, or the obscene profits made by mega corporate health care providers and pharmaceutical companies (particularly in the prescription drug bill, which was in essence, an entitlement program for big pharma).

I sent a comment in to the Frontline people, but I suspect they will not post it, so I thought I would put it up here for the record:

"The damage you have done to the journalistic reputation of Frontline by airing this program is immeasurable. Not one word about the terrible drain of the defense budget or corporate subsidies to the largest profiteers in history, not one word about the continuing avoidance of taxes by corporations and the super rich, not one word about how the social security trust fund was raided over the past two decades to "offset" previous deficits, not one word about the class inequalities that have become even greater in the past four months by bailing out the moneyed interests and large banks, minimal words about the extraordinary profits made by corporate health care and pharmaceutical interests, heavy reliance on the arguments of the Peterson campaign to reduce the deficit without any reference to it at all, nor any considered and credible rebuttal; the list can go on. In fact, to be honest, I was anticipating a sponsor advertisement from Peterson's campaign somewhere. Then I understood that this program was in essence a soft advertisement for it.

"Worst of all, you relied much too heavily on the crowd that pushes platitudes around Washington Week's round table, rather than on some credible economists or critics of the overall priorities of our economy--with the exception of Mr. Ito. Thus, there was nothing to create perspective, including the clear observation from one of your own slides that the times of the lowest federal deficit also corresponded to the times of highest taxes.

"In short, this program hardly qualifies as good solid journalism. Bring back the true Frontline spirit and stop this hogwash.

"That being said, I doubt if this will see publication in your comments section. Yet I wonder how many other faithful watchers of the Frontline series would also be in accord with my feelings. I am beyond mad. Here's throwing a few shoes at you."

No, the message of the show, on top of the current bad news this week of the bailout of toxic assets in order to keep supporting rich investors and mega-banks, was clearly that the ordinary American who has contributed faithfully to his social security and medicare trust funds should now prepare for higher taxes and shrinking benefits.

The interviews relied heavily upon conservative or centrists voices throughout. A lot of centrist journalists clarified facts or context rather than provided analysis. An inordinate amount of time was spent criticising the president for the failure of his bi-partisanship. I tallied 52 interview clips. Not one progressive voice among them--possible exception, Matt Miller, but hardly giving an alternative view, merely clarification and commentary--not one critical of the general theme of the show, which is to say, basically, the Peterson Foundation message.

Some people were interviewed for the program and had substantial things to say from the progressive side, but they got no airtime: Paul Krugman, Joe Stieglitz, James Galbraith, all were interviewed on crucial segments (on the deficit and on health care) but fell to the cutting room floor. That is to say, two Nobel economists received no exposure (except for a 1.5 second unattributed clip of Stieglitz's voice at the starting montage). Their interviews are available if you drill down in the website, and what was their message? They offered an alternative view to the panic over the debt and some alternatives, and they called for single payer health care to counter the increases in medical costs and insurance. Even Greg Ip, the writer for The Economist, had some countering arguments about the debt, but those to fell onto the cutting room floor.

This was sloppy reporting and editing to my mind. PBS should be ashamed. First of all, they should be ashamed for their almost wholesale adoption--without mention of--the Peterson message with absolutely no counter argument. Interestingly enough, Krugman, in one of his interviews, actually mentioned the Peterson campaign and criticized it quite nicely. Secondly, they should be held to account for the damage this particular show has done to the historical integrity of Frontline programming. It is second class journalism at best, supporting an unfounded assumption, then pasting in testimony to support it rather than presenting competing viewpoints.

William Greider has done a great piece on the Peterson campaign in The Nation, and I recommend it highly for a logical counter argument.

UPODATE AND CORRECTION: in the email to Frontline I erred in referring to the journalist from the Economist as Mr. "Ito"; the name should have been "Ip"; that's what you get for having spent too much time watching the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Dammit, will you put the AIG Bonuses in Perspective?

2009-03-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

The last time I used a calculator, $135 million (the amount of the AIG retention bonuses) was .073% (not 7%, not .7% but .073%) of the total $183 billion that has been given to AIG beginning in September of 2008. So what the hell is everybody indignantly yelling about the bonuses for? Why are you guys screaming about the shame of the bonuses? Start screaming about the stuff that matters.

If AIG's Liddy in his testimony was telling the truth, the biggest news he revealed was that the AIG Financial Services operation in London was in a run off situation, and that the retention bonus were to retain the folks handling the run-off. The deal makers he said, were gone. That is to say, he intended (15 years too late if you ask me) to close the business. If so, that's a good thing.

People, where in the hell is your indignation about the remaining $182,865,000,000 that AIG has sucked up so far to pay its "promises" on its credit default swaps, or, as the big shots like to say, to pay to its "counter parties"? You ever heard about the free lunch? Well, you're seeing it in action here. Privatized profits and socialized losses that were supposed to be insured.

The first infusion to AIG back in the third quarter of the year was for $85 billion, and in the last quarter of the year, they declared the largest quarterly business loss in history of $61.7 billion. It looks to me like they made a cool net of $23.3 billion. And what do you think caused the quarterly loss? Since the rest of the AIG operations--those that might legitimately be called "insurance"--were making money, where else did the loss go except to pay off the rich banks and their shareholders and the hedge funds? So now the bailout is up to $183 billion and the smart money says they will ask for more. Check out the counter parties they have paid money to, and you'll find the biggest recipient is Goldman Sachs. Ring a bell? Then there's UBS. Ring a bell with any of you Phil Gramm afficianados?

Look, when you buy insurance on something you have to have an insurable interest. Not only that, when an insurer writes insurance, it must have a modicum of reserves to anticipate losses. AIG has always been notorious in its legitimate insurance operations for always over estimating losses so that it could justify higher premiums and make more money on its investments. Did they have reserves for their credit default swaps? Nope. Why aren't we trying to find out how many of the credit default swaps that AIG sold were actually based on an actual ownership of the underlying security?I suspect that among other things, that is what Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York, is trying to determine.

You know the insurance bastards are exerting influence when the Obama administration, whose big pledge was to the veterans, proposes using insurance for their medical care. General Shinseki should resign, not push it.

I say, if a default swap was written based on ownership of a genuinely primary asset--an actual bundle of mortgages, let it stand. As for the rest, based on derivatives of an asset, or a derivative of a pool of derivatives, let it fail.

Because if you take your eye off the little gnat of the bonuses buzzing around your eyes, you'll have to pay attention to the mountain top demolition going on just a little bit further down the valley. You know who is getting all the money on this rape of the financial landscape, this boondoggle? The people who had pot full of money to start with. The people who have been taking the money all along as productivity increased and your raises didn't, and as they fiddled with inflation to decrease the cost of living allowances to your retired mom and pop, and now you as you look to retire, as they toyed around with "managed care" so they could increase your deductibles and co-pays.

Don't believe a word when they use the word "affordable" in regard to health care. That just means that the insurance companies will still be in the game. Lest you still believe in insurance companies having your best interest at heart, see "AIG" above.

Move your money to a local credit union, and if you really need a credit card, get it from them. Credit unions are able to lend money. The more you deposit the more they will be able to lend--safely. The financial grubbers and greedy guts guys who are handling this financial crisis and to whom it is now all too apparent, President Obama has his allegiance, aren't lending money.

That's because everybody in the United States (except the moneyed elite, the pundit class, the politicians, the mega corporate bosses, the rentiers) have gotten hit upside the head by the practical notions that they should have been following two decades ago. Now they understand they have enough stuff already and they want to save, repair, patch up, make do, grow their own, read a good book, go for a walk around the block rather than in Provence. What the hell do they need a new car for? They certainly don't want to put themselves in more debt when they are close to underwater in their house. Most of all, they are scared shirtless that they won't have a job by the end of the year. So save at a credit union or a local bank. Boycott Citibank and the other big ten. Drive them under. Let them tank.

Saving the banks won't rescue the economy. Producing good useful stuff will save it.

Outlawing credit default swaps on derivatives. That might save it.

Redeeming the IOUs in the social security system with legitimate bonds will save it.

Investing in energy conservation will save it.

Paying teachers better will save it. Cutting class sizes will save it.

Cutting the defense budget by a third (to start) will save it.

Providing a living wage will save it.

Unionizing will save it.

Getting the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Germany and Italy and Okinawa (for a start) will do it.

Getting rid of government insurance for new nuclear power installations will do it.

Sending the IRS after the real money and the corporate scams, not the chicken diddle, will do it. Increasing taxes to where they were when Reagan entered office will do it--though that's just a start.

Keeping the inheritance tax will do it. Or maybe making it a real "death tax": 95% for everything over $1 billion will drive more money into charities and foundations. (And it won't drive Forbes out of business. I still have six months to go on my gift subscription.)

Providing jobs for people to spend on necessities, home improvements, paying down their primary debt (house, car) will do it.

Cutting out the greedy middle men and corporate bureaucracies (worse than any government bureaucracies) in this sorry-ass scam we call health care will do it.

Putting some good usury laws back onto the books, so that when people do want to borrow they can do so without getting fleeced will do it

But above all letting the big banks go the way of everyone and every company whose liabilities exceed their assets, especially when it's due to capitalist stupidity and excess, will do it. Let them sink and crunch and break up and get transformed ("creative destruction," for all you Libertarians out there) like every other business or household that has gone bankrupt. That will really do it.

I say let them go down, let the banks go into receivership, break up the monopolies, break up the "too big to fails." Those bastards who own the banks and the hedge funds will always have enough money to survive.

Yes sir, I'm preaching class war, here, except--if we're damn lucky--it's only round five of a ten round match, and the fat cats won the first five. Let 'em have it. Either pummel the hell out of them or knock them down for the night. Even a drawling and corrupt referee might have to stop counting after 30 seconds if he knows what's good for him. Because we may be unlucky and it might really be round nine. Because we really can't tell can we? Or maybe we can't remember. If it's one thing we do know for sure, the fix has been in for a long time, Lefty, so stride on out there when the bell rings and knock that monster on its ass.

Poet of Tor House: Robinson Jeffers (1887 - 1962)

2009-03-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not feeling very optimistic. The Israeli lobby has just muscled in on Obama's National Security Council, Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to form a government which can only expand further the creeping injustice and oppression against the Palestinians, the conservative talking heads are screaming about an increase of taxes at the top margin to 39.6% (forgetting that for most of Reagan's eight years it was 50%, for Nixon, 70%, for Eisenhower 90%) and calling for Ayn Rand book clubs to rise up and rediscover John Galt.

Personally, I would like to see the moneyed elite of this country decide to go on strike, and set off to found their own gated community, preferably on one of those Pacific atolls that will be underwater in twenty years or so. The right wing screams of class warfare, forgetting once again, as Warren Buffet reminded us, that the class war has been going on for thirty years now and the moneyed class has already won. Obama has only reluctantly included single payer health insurance on the discussion table, but it is so obvious that his administration has been ensnared in the moneyed class's protectionist racket. The insurers and the pharmaceutical companies may be "fighting for their lives," as some optimistic proponent of single payer claimed, but they've got the high ground in the battle, the big guns, the money and the tanks and plenty of moxie.

It's a dark time. It's time for some dark poetry: "Shine, Perishing Republic":

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.

The poem was probably written sometime between the first World War and the 1920's since it was first published in the 1925 edition of The Roan Stallion and other Poems. We know this because Jeffers refers to his "children," most likely his twin boys, born to him and his wife Una in 1916. I have an old yellowing copy of the Modern Library's edition (1935) of Jeffers' poems which I found for two dollars somewhere in Philadelphia during the sixties. The paper, nearly brown now on the margins, has held up surprisingly well for a seventy-three year old book. Almost as old as Jeffers when he died.

For those of you who have moments of dark doubt as to the world we seem to be leaving to our our daughters and sons, the poem speaks to that darkness, with its images of rot and decay merely being the American version--sort of a cynical and condemnatory tone as opposed to Whitman's optimism. The long lines have always made me think that Whitman was in Jeffers' mind when he wrote this. The mood is flinty, unrepentant--his version of the prophet's "all flesh is grass," except he applies it to his country, warning his boys to learn well that we are not forced to become corrupt, and in such a classic American way, holding out the purity of the wilderness as the alternative. Head for the mountains when the corruption gathers at the foot of the monster.

Jeffers is not democratic; he is not progressive or liberal, he is not libertarian or conservative, and in fact, he suggests that the love of man whether from loving the acquisitive self as the unbridled capitalists do, or your neighbor as yourself as the Christians profess, will only cause the trouble:

be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.

It is such deep trouble it manages even to ensnare God, when "he walked the earth." Whether this is the image of Jesus or the image of God in the Garden of Eden, it's not a pleasant thought. As I say, this poem is for the dark moments like this, "heavily thickening toward empire."

You can imagine the poet, perhaps after a hard day constructing his stone house in Carmel, looking out at Point Lobos across Carmel Bay and sitting down to write. The house was begun by him and then finished over the years--along with a 40 foot stone tower--with the help of his twin sons, each stone fitted and cemented as Jeffers isolated himself on the West Coast in what is now, of course, the very symbolic town of wealth and privilege. From the house, called Tor House, he critically watched the country through the First World War, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, World War Two, the Korean War, and finally died there in 1962 at the beginning of the country's Vietnam misadventure in paranoid defensive colonialism. He was 75. In 1963 a posthumous volume of poetry was published, called The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. I bought that one as well, thinking at one time that I would write about Jeffers some day. The two volumes sit in my library. The longer poems are difficult to struggle through. Some of the shorter ones, like this one, "Shine, Perishing Republic," can stay with you forever.

Ambassador Freeman Withdraws

2009-03-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality of analysis available to President Obama and his administration. Still, I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

The above quote is from Ambassador Charles ("Chas.") Freeman's email to his friends explaining why he withdrew from the nomination to be the head of the National Intelligence Council. The full text of the email is here.

I have heard Ambassador Freeman on numerous occasions speak about foreign affairs, have read his speeches, and have heard him interviewed on a few occasions on Ian Masters' "Background Briefing" and "Live from the Left Coast" (a two hour radio show broadcast on KPFK in Los Angeles on Sunday mornings, 11-1 Pacific Time. It is much more valuable than all the Sunday current affairs shows.) You may not always agree with Freeman, but the man is a straight talker. He calls an occupation an occupation, an attack an attack, a charade a charade.

It is laudable that he was asked by Admiral Dennis Blair to lead the Council. However, it is very disappointing to find that the "team of rivals" concept that the President touted as he was preparing to enter office has not been put into practical application in this case. President Obama would have been well-served by national intelligence estimates prepared by a group with Freeman at the head. However, as Freeman so clearly states in his email, his tenure on the Council would have been less than efficacious given the constant second-guessing and criticism that would have attended every report. It is a good thing, however, that we have seen the Israeli Lobby once again in action, especially since the attacks on Freeman have been lead by a former executive of AIPAC, Steve Rosen, who has been indicted and is awaiting trial on charges that he spied for Israel. (For more on the extent of Israeli spying, see James Bamford's latest, The Shadow Factory, and this comprehensive, well documented essay by Christopher Ketcham, "Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States.")

We will continue to see the influential fingers of the Israeli Government and its supporters in our politics until one of these days Americans will understand that both houses of the legislative branch are beholden to another government, and so cowardly that the vast majority will not take the necessary steps to throw off the undue influence, while a vociferous minority will toady to the lobby and do their bidding. The day will come when those fingers will be bitten off. For now we have to follow these events carefully and keep the history as accurately as we can.

The "No More Taxes" Mutation in the Republican Genome

2009-02-23T00:38:00.000-08:00

Some Republican governors, led by Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana (and Sarah Palin--remember her?--of Alaska) are objecting to the stimulus package because they say it will pass the costs on to future generations and "Social Security." At least that is what Sanford said on Sunday morning. I was astounded by his sudden concern for Social Security. I was also puzzled as to why he would think that Social Security was even threatened. He didn't elaborate, only asserted. Perhaps he still thinks that we should have privatized social security in 2005.What delight that would have created right about now.

I was also concerned when these governors said that what they were going to reject was assistance to their states for unemployment compensation. I guess they think that no one in their states is losing their job.In other words, screw the people who are really struggling, but accept the tax breaks for the better off. True Republican compassion and justice. Mostly, they just want tax cuts. They have drunken the kool-aid and cannot raise themselves from their intellectual sugar high. The sugar high has permanently mutated their civics genome.

Since the American taxpayer is going to pay for the bailout over time, it makes sense that those taxpayers who will receive most of the benefit from the bank bailout and the corporate tax breaks should also pay higher taxes and absorb most of the burden. They get their bank bailout money, then they pay a good chunk back in higher taxes. Not only let the tax cuts end in 2010, but increase them even further for those making over $40,000 or maybe even $250,000. "Foul, no fair!" they would cry. "Why that would be destructive to the economy," they would object. How silly to pay us millions only to collect most of it back the way Roosevelt, that traitor to his class, did, or Eisenhower! Well sure. And the circularity would end up with the money in the government's coffers to offset buying up the "toxic assets" and for more stimulus and support for the unemployed and the homeless and the ordinary American.

So if you don't like the circularity of the bailout paying you only to be collected in higher taxes, Mr. Citibanks, then let's just stop it right now. Don't ask for the bailout, return the money you've already received, take your lumps, watch the FDIC come in and take over your insolvent bank, fire your sorry asses along with the members of your board, keep the decent employees on the payroll, break you up until you are no longer too big to fail, and look for new buyers for the fragments.

There's plenty of people out there who will buy your assets for the chance to make their money in the banking business. Only this time the banking will be sensible and local (or at most regional) and responsive to the people in your community. You know, Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, avuncular angels descending to keep the jobless from committing suicide.

The healthiest banks in the world right now, it turns out, are in Lebanon, of all places. Lebanon which once again had the crap knocked out of it in 2006 by their neighbors to the South. Why? Well, it seems the head of the Lebanese banking authority forbade Lebanese banks to buy the mortgage backed securities and other speculative instruments, let the insolvent banks go under, and required that banks not lend out more than 70% of deposits. People all over the Middle East are sending their money to Lebanon because of the stability. There's regulatory sanity for you.

Additionally the Glass-Steagall Act should be returned so that investment banks cannot mingle with commercial banks. Regulation of securities should be tightened, and full accounting for the use of the bailout money should be determined. Congress could also re-introduce the legislation that Charles Schumer managed to quash that allowed hedge-fund managers not to pay income tax, only capital gains taxes on their ill-gotten gains. While we're at it, the people of New York could recall Schumer, one of the unsung villains of the massive transfers of wealth.

Though the consensus is rising from every economist outside of the government that the insolvent banks should be placed into receivership just like Indy Mac, the consensus within the White House and on Wall Street, unfortunately, is that the Banks should be left alone to carry out their predictable shenanigans. Let's just not use the word "nationalize" shall we? Let's use the proper word, "receivership," and let the bank examiners take them over and clean them up in preparation for a sale to bankers, not marketing and sales idiots.

For my money, you can also stick it to the Wall Street traders on the floor who won't be affected by the executive caps on salary. Let them start paying more taxes on their commissions in order to lighten the burden on the 90% of the people (and their offspring) who will bear the brunt of the bailout. Let them pay transaction fees on their longs and shorts and jumps in and out of the market.

Whenever Republicans complain about taxes, they always threaten that business and talent will leave the states, like in California for the past few weeks. Perhaps we should encourage the giant bankers and even other Republicans to start thinking about leaving the country. It's time we let the plutocrats flee the US if they don't like the tax burden, especially since that burden is increasing because of the handouts they demand. Let's take over the slogans. America: support it or leave it. Let the plutocrats defect and live off their massive accumulated transfers and tax-avoidance bankrolls sitting in their Swiss Bank until they perish from the face of the earth. Deep down in the muck that has been identified in the UBS scandal is the spoor of Phil Gramm, one of the first at the trough when the bailout money was dished out by Hank Paulson, villains both in the deregulation of the derivative roulette.

Because there are plenty of people who can take their place for lesser pay, and probably run the banks as well as or better than the fools who have brought us to this mess. It would be the inexpensive way to do it, and it would be wonderful dramatic irony: the same kind of screwing that they have been pulling on their employees for decades, fire the older help and hire the neophytes.

We could call it "ethical cleansing."

Paul Krugman Loses Sleep

2009-02-21T21:29:00.000-08:00

“All participants anticipated that unemployment would remain substantially above its longer-run sustainable rate at the end of 2011, even absent further economic shocks; a few indicated that more than five to six years would be needed for the economy to converge to a longer-run path characterized by sustainable rates of output growth and unemployment and by an appropriate rate of inflation.”
--Federal Reserve Open Market Committee minutes , quoted in Paul Krugman's "Who Will Stop the Economic Pain?" (NYT, 2-21-09, posted at Alternet.)

Isn't that last sentence a doozy? I always thought that "converge" meant two things coming together. Now it's "converge to." What does that mean?

Krugman points out that eventually housing will have to catch up with population growth and autos will have to be replaced. (He quotes economically reliable website called Calculated Risk saying that it will take 27 years to replace the current fleet of autos at present day sales rates.) My independent car mechanic tells me that business has never been better. Few people are buying new cars. I have been watching the papers and Internet ads for new cars and the prices appear to be stalled at the same level for months. One new crack in the wall: dealers even have started listing the prices of the Prius and the hybrid Civics, Accords, Camrys and Altimas.

I like Paul Krugman. I'm finishing his last book, The Conscience of a Liberal this week, and he's got a lot of good prescriptions. I'd like to be optimistic, but I can't be. I'm not nearly at the mindset of the Cormac McCarthy of The Road, but I am pretty close to James Howard Kunstler:

We can't promote more mortgages for people with no income. We can't crank up a home-building industry with our massive inventory of unsold, and over-priced houses built in the wrong places. We can't ramp back up the blue light special shopping fiesta. We can't return to the heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and over-sprawled metroplexes. Mostly, we can't return to the now-complete "growth" cycle of "economic expansion." (Diary entry for February 9, 2009, "Poverty of Imagination.")

And I'm not sure that the fleet will be replaced one for one, as Krugman submits. Unemployed people will use their cars less, and the cars will last longer. Fewer people will think of rolling over their cars every three or four years. More people will turn to public transportation. The baby boomers will have entered retirement with a whoosh and with reduced savings and investments. The kids will start moving back in with their families. The houses larger than we needed if they are paid for, will start sheltering the down and out relatives or sons and daughters, and won't be sold.

If the unemployment goes on for two or three more years, the changes in average life will be massive. If economic and environmental struggle spreads, if physical events like flooding and drought begin to seriously impact our world, fewer and fewer young people will think of the future as something positive and full of possibility.

Recovery from the psychological trauma may take much longer than the pessimists on the open market committee project for the economy. Keep your fingers on the suicide and domestic mayhem pulse, keep watching for the people living in their cars in the parking lots overnight.

A reply, with hat tips to Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald

2009-02-13T15:45:00.000-08:00

Over at Best of the Blogs, a respondent to my cross-posted entry about Martin Wolf's piece in the Financial Times, timr, took issue with the "prematurity" of my criticism of the new President, so I thought I would elaborate. Please don't misunderstand me. I do hope that the president sees the urgency. Martin Wolf's piece jolted me, as I said, because he honed in on a problem that all leaders face in critical times.I'm not criticizing Obama as president. I am criticizing the weaknesses of an intellectual/political/plutocratic/privileged class to which he belongs.

This political class is incapable--with a few notable exceptions, like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold, all of whom without fail are marginalized by the other members of their class--of understanding the dilemma of people in the "underclasses." I use the word carefully, I think, because at this point it is the only appropriate word to use. It includes people, for example, in the professional and technical classes and business classes whose combined incomes exceed even a quarter of a million dollars, because even they have seen a transfer of wealth to the tiny minority of the rich and super-rich who control--I might even say enforce their beliefs--in the vast majority of major decisions in the United States.

Most of these 90% of Americans in this underclass are indeed hard-working, pay their bills, grumble about but pay their taxes, lead honest and caring lives, and value the future of their children above all. I would also include in this group those aspiring residents of America who have been branded as "illegal aliens," yet who still contribute energy and vitality to our economy and society and who may even pay social security taxes for benefits which they will never receive.

It was no coincidence that I mentioned Iceland at the end of my piece--the citizens of that country have been well-satisfied and well off for many a year, dozing in their shared prosperity, but after the bottom fell out of the tub, they took to the streets day after day with pots and pans for almost 100% peaceful demonstrations that literally drove their government out of office, installed a caretaker left-leaning government, and forced new elections.

Max is right about how most Americans are unaware of what has taken place, and for many years now I have been saying to people that Mark Twain had the best analysis of their silence and ignorance. I can't remember his exact words, but he thought that Americans never wanted to resist the power of the rich because they so firmly believed that anyone could become rich through hard work. Even the poorest of the poor could never consider themselves as poor, only "temporarily embarrassed." But I think now, as with the Icelanders, the delusion is dissipating. There will always be those extraordinary few who become exceedingly rich, but for the most of us, a comfortable and secure and happy life will be the best aspiration we can resign ourselves to. This is such an American theme. It's F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." The very rich, not the rich.

However, now, it seems, most members of that 90% can see what has taken place over the past thirty years. They see the history of expropriation by the Very Rich and the massive transfer of wealth--that is still continuing in the TARP programs, I might add--in a number of things. They all have their own examples. These are mine:

First, notice the failure of ANY politician to refer to anything but "the middle class" as being hurt by the economic adversity; almost every politician is unable to talk about the "indigent,"" the working poor," the "working class."

Second, notice the sudden and recent silence about "class warfare." That has always traditionally been used to silence any claims for social justice or economic equality. The reason, I think, is that the plutocracy now understands that the stealthy class warfare going on for three decades under another name, has been won. However, one thing has changed. The underclass is finally beginning to see and understand that they are the Gazans in this class warfare, victims of high-tech swindling (repeal of Glass-Steagall, revision of the bankruptcy laws, high commissions and bonuses for shilling the derivatives) and collateral damage (job shopping in foreign countries, tax breaks and off shoring profits for corporations, the debt economy, the decline of manufacturing and its creation of real wealth, the necessity for two income families to work in order to make the ends meet, etc. )

The list goes on, and my anger rises the more I add to it. Some of them have even been burned by the economic versions of white phosphorus, the new DIME (dense inert metal explosive) weapons, or the economic cluster bombs that are still in wait out there disguised as Pepsi cans or Kentucky Fried chicken wings, or the water tables below Hanford, Washington, or diesel pollution near the Port of Long Beach. You know, the "externalities" that the good people of Eastern Connecticut don't have to put up with as they pack their bags for the corporate jet trip to Telluride.

You remember how the Republicans always framed their exploitative legislation in benign terms--Clear Skies Initiative, No Child Left Behind, Healthy Forests Initiative? In the same way they always framed any moves for social and economic justice as "class warfare."

Third, notice the continuing emphasis by the Republicans (and the acquiescence of most Democrats) on tax breaks. Do you really think that a tax break of $400 is going to stimulate the economy? Notice as well the Republicans' continuing insistence on eliminating the inheritance tax, which will benefit only the top 1/30th of the top 1%. That is to say, the Very Very Rich, the moneyed class that has been driving this transfer of wealth. In their insistence on tax cuts Republicans may think they have solid economic principles at work, but it really is the attempt even in this crisis of capitalism feeding on itself, to squeeze every last drop from the great udder of the financial debt and derivative structure.

They have driven this expropriation by lobbying, influence peddling, political contributions, class collusion, "knowing who to talk to" when they were doing something shady or "aggressive," and by the continuing and dominating use of the legal profession and the big accounting firms far more effectively than any "trial lawyers" or "regulators" did in return.

But to get back to President Obama. If I might, I'd like to make an analogy here, and one that the President is very fond of using these days, when he implicitly or explicitly compares himself to Abraham Lincoln.

President Obama's strong belief in the capitalist tenets and his ability not to rethink them and let go of them, is quite similar to the belief that Lincoln held for most of his life, that Negroes were in fact inferior to whites, so much so, that for the years leading up to emancipation, he still held to the idea of massive transfers of slaves to Liberia or South America or the Caribbean. It was a vision one can only call benign ethnic cleansing. Yet this was in parallel to his insistence that "all men are created equal" and that liberty should be extended to all. Lincoln eventually gave up that idea of transfer, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and enabled black men to fight in organized units for the Union, even though he feared that there would be a massive desertion of racist troops from the Union forces.

So I think that the President has a similar dilemma of belief--he understands the inequities in this economic system, what I have called "Americanism" in my post, but he still can't give it up. (The belief in American exceptionalism that drives his foreign policy is related to this as well, so well discussed by Andrew Bacevich in his last book, The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism.) President Obama may be forced to give it up, eventually, and the sooner he does, the better for all of us--the overwhelming majority of Americans--with the understanding, of course, that it will also be to the detriment of the moneyed class that is still in charge, conceptually, politically and economically.

I just think that by drumming this dilemma home to him, by beating our pots and pans, we may just make him understand that we really have entered a crisis, as Tom Paine would call it, a "time that tries mens' [and women's] souls."

[originally posted at Best of the Blogs]

Martin Wolf on "depressing timidity"; or Welcome to Laputa

2009-02-13T00:03:00.000-08:00

For two days I have been rereading Martin Wolf's logical and jolting commentary in the Financial Times, "Why Obama's new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks." Wolf asks a hard question, "Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed?" His reasoning? Obama has not realized that these are not normal times, and that "Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much."

His evaluation of the stimulus plan is, to my mind, spot on: the president hopes for the best rather than preparing for the worst, and what is even more telling, Wolf adds, is "that it is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80 years' economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome."

So what exactly, is the worst that we are facing? In essence, it is that the "a sizeable portion of financial institutions are insolvent: their assets are, under plausible assumptions, worth less than their liabilities." Wolf is not the first to suggest this. Commentators from both edges of the marginalized political spectrum--Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Saunders, Ron Paul, Nouriel Roubini, James Galbraith, Paul Krugman, Kevin Philips, Joe Stiglitz, Paul Craig Roberts, Michael Hudson, just to name a few--have suggested as much for many weeks--no months--now. Wolf's point is that anything less than responding to this worst case scenario will bring utter failure.

And even deeper, Wolf thinks that "it also seems it has set itself the wrong question. It has not asked what needs to be done to be sure of a solution. It has asked itself, instead, what is the best it can do given three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from congress." If I had to add my own constraints to this list, they would have to be no relief for all mortgage holders, no failure of the "too-big to fail banks," no return of Glass-Steagall, no strings attached.

Obama has not only surrounded himself with conventional people who helped create or midwifed the current mess, he has unfortunately listened to them and been persuaded by them. His bi-partisanship is only one manifestation of his conventionality. And in this sense he has fallen victim to his own tendency to play to the center, to appease, not to break with convention and not even to bring into the mix the credible voices of critics who have been saying that the Emperor of Americanism has no clothes. It is said that an argument ensued in the inner sanctum of the royal chambers of Laputa, and Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers shouted down Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod and prevailed. Of course, what do the pols know, who are concerned already with re-election, compared to the poobahs of the predator state? Yet, one short look at Geithner's inadequate testimony before Congress yesterday shows that he has just not been able to think outside of his self-imposed box.

In one of the delicious ironies--and Naomi Klein (see The Shock Doctrine) would raise her fist in accord, Wolf points out that if Lawrence Summers or Tim Geithner were advising the US as if it were a foreign country, they would point out the dire situation "brutally."

Wolf's opinion piece is so accurate and devastating, that I have to think that the new President's bi-partisan approach is symptomatic of a much deeper issue, the inability of all politicians, no matter how well-meaning or intelligent, to deal with the economic facts as they appear, to expect the worst outcome, and to understand that we have in fact entered some extraordinary, almost revolutionary times.

The issue, I think, is this: can any politician even hope to escape the mental constraints imposed by 1) not being a member of the poor, the working poor, the working class, or the middle class; 2) of being an adherent to Americanism, the religion of capital (and Capitol!).

I use the words "adherent" and "Americanism" because I want to stress that the thinking over the past two weeks of every politician I have heard or whose words I have read, be they Republican or Democrat, assumes a concern for the American economy that leaves reality somewhere outside of the discourse. There are exceptions who prove the rule, but they are marginalized and perceived as "cranks" by the Capitol press corps. These politicians, men and women, walk around conversing with themselves over the subtleties or contradictions of their beliefs, like characters in a Swiftian satire, needing acolytes to bop them upside the head every so often with an air-filled bladder. The inhabitants of the flying island of Laputa talking not music and fine arts, but finance and economy and free markets and bonuses and pretending that they actually represent the inhabitants down below.

They still think they are live in an economy which has a bad case of the flu rather than congestive heart failure. And indeed, to them, it probably IS a bad case of the flu but they have plenty of time to stay in bed and drink plenty of liquids, a doctor who feels privileged to be their doctor, and spouses who don't have to work, or when they do, may make more as a lobbyist than they. It's not only politicians. It's the media as well, particularly the "molders of opinion" who tend to think they know what middle-America wants and needs. The David Brookses of the airwaves.

Their talk appears to me to be religious--in the root sense of the word: "religare" to "restrain," to "tie back." The bondage of religious belief. These men and women are so constrained in their thinking that they spout dogma, not think hard thoughts grounded in their constituents' reality.

They are unable to imagine a world without employment, without status, without influence, without savings, without investments, without assets, without solid education, without influential contacts, without a roof over their heads, without food on the table, without tolerance of their cheating on income tax, without bonuses, without good medical care, without a raise, without money to send their children to the best school they can, without security, without privilege, without health and safety protection on the job. In short, though they may have come from a working class or middle class background, they have so "escaped it" and so left it behind them, that they are incapable of imagining or remembering viscerally what it feels like to be an American who is destitute, poor, working class, or two-earner middle class, dependent upon begging or employment for their survival.

I almost want to say that because they are the 24-7 recipients of the benefits of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," they cannot begin to imagine what it is like not to exist within their bubble of warmth and safety. For them, the Declaration of Independence has been brought to fruition. For 90% of Americans, it is still an aspiration or a dream deferred.

Because the politicians and their minions exist in a world of more than adequate compensation, of full benefits, of excellent retirement pensions, full medical care and enough income not to worry about deductibles or co pays. They believe in capitalism and "free unregulated markets" so much that they incapable of seeing that the markets are not free except for those who create and run the markets. They still believe that the America of their dreams, like the ending of a Frank Capra movie where all comes round to peacefulness again, is still existing, humming along, and that their bliss is the bliss of all Americans. One might even say that they are "religiose." That is to say excessively or sentimentally religious but with a dash of "otiose," futile, functionless with no useful result.

As long as they float on their flying island--and by "they" I include the Charlie Gibsons and the Bill O'Reillys, the George Wills and the Tom Friedmans, the Katie Courics and the Rush Limbaughs, the political appointees and the lobbyists and consultants--they will never be able to formulate a plan than does anything but rescue and continue to reward the inhabitants of Laputa in their mag-lev island thrumming over all the cities and towns of distress and foreclosure, debt and hot dogs and beans, suicide and anger.

Perhaps its time not to bop them with the air-filled bladder but to wake them up with hard edged noise, to start banging pots and pans like the citizens of Iceland. There's an island for you!

On Daschle, on Killifer, on Gethner and Stevens . . .

2009-02-05T01:12:00.000-08:00

. . . because it really is a type of repetitious scenario, trotted out periodically, this waiting for the gift of health care that supposedly comes down the chimney with what everyone needs.

Originally, I thought to comment on the post about Daschle and Killifer's removal due to tax irregularities, but the Daschle story brings up the speculation on what Daschle probably would have done had he overcome the scrutiny and become Obama's leader of the medical reform program. Now, thank Galen, Obama will be forced to find someone who may bring imagination, sympathy, and courage, not immobility and cowardice, to the problem.

Someone like Howard Dean, a former governor, an actual physician, who has dropped out of the Democratic picture although he had the imagination and courage to come up with the 50 state strategy. That vision managed to increase the voting margins even in the red states. But of course, Dean would not have had the political bent for compromise, and the whack-job image of him perpetrated by the national news media would have lingered. He would have failed before he took the oath of office. Nor do I think that the shill for the pharmaceutical establishment Obama has nominated for surgeon general will have the imagination and common sense of a Jocelyn Elders or C. Everett Koop.

First, some general thoughts on the matter of Daschle's tax "mistake." The fact is that the more money you make, the more aggressive your accountant tends to be. Democrat or Republican, there is an institutionalized practice of "pushing the deduction envelope" and the smart accountants know what the IRS parameters are for various deductions (home office and business miles for the little guys, shelters, shadow corporations, and income substitutions and deferrals for the plutocrats), and all of this is made easier by the IRS regulations constantly being blunted away from large corporate interests and high income audits as part of the philosophically imbedded "Wealth Transfer, Augmentation, and Preservation Act" integrated by Congress by design into every tax bill since Ronald Reagan's first oath of office.

(I should also point out that the insurance business is one of the more skillful at being able to hide all sorts of money making mechanisms by use of the concept of "incurred losses," and that insurance companies on the whole have been very profitable investments over the years. We should remember that AIG is going down the tubes because of their creative Drexel Burnham Lambert refugees who started their Financial Services legerdemain of credit default swaps. The actual property casualty and leasing operations were still very profitable.)

The abuse of the tax system goes on eternally on both sides of the aisle in Congress. Many of the guys in the Senate are millionaires, some obscenely so, like Bill Frist, whose riches come entirely health care and health insurance enterprises. (Have we already forgotten the former senior senator from Alaska? Have we forgotten Sarah Palin's fiddling with the perks?) Read David Cay Johnston's Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch if you are interested in the gruesome details, or follow his columns in the WSJ.

On the whole, it's good to see that Obama is taking the tax integrity matter seriously. Daschle was an important person, in Obama's compromise philosophy, for working out a deal on health care. That Obama was willing to take him out of consideration (I know, I know, it was his decision, and honest Tom Daschle made the decision himself) speaks to a core of integrity that is needed.

The real problem is that any plan Daschle engineered would have been a compromise against common sense and reality. I think we would have received a miserable deal under Daschle's leadership, similar to the miserable prescription drug program passed under Bush.

Why I think that can be illuminated by reference to AARP. Those of you who belong to that now 50+ year-old voting bloc, have been inundated with their countless mailings for their insurance programs (auto, homeowners, umbrella, wrap-around and supplemental Medicare, disability, term life, long-term care, etc). You may have also been solicited by their "United We Can" campaign for a reform of health care. You may have even been suckered into contributing to it.

However, did you ever notice that in all of their many articles on health care reform they always leave out a universal, single payer proposal? It's not even given a nod. Of course, the reason is not hard to see: they make a nice chunk of their income from their relationship with insurers. Now, it may not be a substantial chunk, and I have no interest tonight in reviewing their financial statements, but their consistent failure even to include a single payer option indicates clearly that they cannot think outside of the insurance box.

Daschle, for all of his knowledge, is too close to the insurance companies. (Let's just tail him over the next few months, shall we, and see the direction in which he heads.) Insurers will be the biggest obstruction to moving toward a decent health care system. They think that they are fighting for their existence.

In a just world, that should indeed be the case. Any health care plan that would extend coverage to all Americans at a reasonable cost--whether to the taxpayer or the government--must destroy insurance as we now know it, and turn it into a basically non-profit enterprise for basic coverage, and for-profit for cosmetics and frills desired by the better off earners and plutocrats.

The massive lay-offs now accumulating and accelerating will probably result in well over a quarter of the population having no health care by the end of 2009, and the belt-tightening at surviving companies after the layoffs will result in another third being severely under insured or having such high deductibles and premium payments (especially through the so-called Medical Savings Accounts) that medical expenses will start overwhelming their budgets.

I do not think that cost containment, managed care, computerized records, tax breaks or subsidies for those who cannot buy health care (one essential of the Obama plan) will be viable. When nearly forty per cent of the people in the United States are shut out of the system, the demonstrations, angry meetings, and confrontations will begin. The demonstrations will be especially telling if people finally understand what a great plan the members of congress receive.

This will be a signal issue in the economic recovery, though I don't think Obama knows it yet, nor does he know that he will have to steamroll the Republican rump opposition in order to get any useful and caring plan completed. And the biggest obstacle he has to overcome--in his own mind to start with--is that Americans must be taught to understand that there is nothing wrong with demanding health care. They must be convinced that it is a basic human right rather than a privilege or a commodity.

A Nation of Laws or Men?

2009-01-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

It is very good to see the listing of executive orders and memorandum that have begun to accumulate after the first two days in office for the new President.The deadline to close Guantanamo, the lobbyist regulations, FOIA access, halt to Bush's last-minute EPA actions, and most especially, the reversal of Executive order 13233 of November 1, 2001, which essentially reinstates the National Archives regulations regarding Presidential Papers passed by Reagan. This should mean, I hope, that further information about Iran-Contra may come to light, even though the key criminals in that slimy scheme were pardoned by Bush 41 immediately upon taking office. Of note is that Obama's executive order specifically includes the Vice Presidential papers (something left out of Reagan's original orders.) Of course, the original law provides a wait of 12 years after any President leaves office.

Here's the White House web site with all the orders and memoranda.

Eric Holder's nomination is apparently being held up over the question of torture--apparently in a last-ditch effort by the Republicans (John Cornyn and Arlen Spector)--to get him to back off on proceeding with investigation of war crimes. I don't think they have to worry. I will be very surprised, despite Harry Reid saying that he is funding an investigation by Carl Levin into torture, if the investigation gets off the ground. I know there is sentiment here for 'moving on" but I truly feel that this is a watershed moment for whether or not we are "a nation of laws not men."

Some commentator--I can't remember who--pointed the night before the Inauguration, that President Obama's credibility would be weakened in his future trips abroad when he asserts that we were back to being a nation of laws, if we had failed to carry out our obligations under treaties fully approved by the Senate and one domestic law. These clearly impose on us the obligation to investigate, prosecute, and punish those who order and/or perform torture.

Going, Going, Almost Gone

2009-01-18T03:33:00.000-08:00

I understand that the White House has been vacated by the Bushes, who have gone to Camp David until the Inauguration. On that morning they, along with the Obamas, will be hosted at a tea in the White House by Senator Diane Feinstein, one of the pains in "Obama's Achilles Heel" and also the person in charge of the Inauguration ceremonies.

I would imagine that the only thing left to damage the outgoing chief executive's reputation is the stuff of the pardons he will sign between now and Tuesday morning. A Friday--especially on a holiday weekend--has always been the usual time for the announcement of skullduggery during the last eight years, but mum's the word so far. Anyone want to take bets on when he will release the pardons? Maybe he is using the tranquility of Camp David to finally make up his mind. Maybe he will sleep the whole weekend and forget to do it? Maybe he is so proud and ensconced in his self-congratulatory bubble that he thinks pardons will not be needed?

In a great post on his No Comment blog at Harper's online, entitled "An epitaph for the Bush years," Scott Horton uses as his starting point a passage from St. Augustine, which I remember reading back in my Catholic High School in Parkersburg, WV. It was a "civics" class. Remember those?

If it does not do justice, what is the government but a great criminal enterprise? For what are gangs of criminals but petty little governments? The pack is a group which follows the orders of its leader according to a social compact of sorts, sharing the spoils along the rules upon which they agree. Through a process of gradual accretion, the gang may acquire bodies and territory, establish itself in some place, and soon be possessed of all the attributes of statehood—then it may be known as a state, acquiring this title not by being any less avaricious but rather by having achieved impunity. Alexander the Great’s conversation with a pirate he had captured reflects this well. The king asked what possessed him to infest the sea as he did, and the pirate replied: “No differently from you when you pursue your crimes in the world. I act with a small ship, so I am called a pirate. You command a fleet and are called emperor.” –Augustine of Hippo, De civitate dei contra paganos lib iv, capp iii- iv (ca. 410)(S.H. transl.) in vol. 2 of the Loeb Classical Library edition, pp. 12, 16.

"Having achieved impunity" so far, I wonder what this manchild's fate in the near term will be?

An 18 Minute Education

2009-01-16T23:58:00.000-08:00

If you want a solid, well-informed review of American foreign policy at this transitional point, listen to this interview with Eric Margolis, the American journalist who remembers more about foreign affairs than any pundits in the MSM or Beltway Village. His description of western policy in the Middle East: “Incredibly arrogant, incredibly ignorant.” His take on Egypt, on Obama’s dilemma in Afghanistan, and on the current Middle East crisis are neutral and clear.

Margolis has an intellect of high order, knows his history, speaks several languages, has traveled and reported widely, and is very articulate. 18 minutes listening to him will do everyone well. At the end of the interview he suggests where to get good information about US foreign policy.

Margolis’ website is: http://www.ericmargolis.com/

Cut and paste to the interview in case the hyperlink above does not work at

(http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/01/14/lew-rockwell-interviews-eric-margolis/) .

At Last, A Real Discussion

2009-01-16T23:55:00.000-08:00

A big hat tip to Glenn Greenwald at Salon for posting in two parts (about 16.5 minutes total) a frank and rational discussion about the Middle East crisis on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (without Joe Scarborough). In addition to the MSNBC moderators and Pat Buchanan, the other participants are Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations and Queen Noor of Jordan (the California-born widow of King Hussein and step-mother of King Abdullah).

Quote from the Queen: “These people [the Palestinians] are not free and that is why there is radical resistance and not peaceful resistance.”

In addition to solid fact-based discussion, we have an admission from MSNBC that the Palestinian side of the story is never told on mainstream television, and the clear concensus that the American President will be the catalyst in bringing both sides to a peace agreement. Please watch it and pass the link on to your friends. For peace, in peace.

Jeff Halper on reframing the Israeli talking Points--Part 2

2009-01-14T22:54:00.000-08:00

Here is the last portion of Halper's points. Some of them are long, but make crucial observations on the issue of Israeli forces "philosophy" of warfare which makes the question of Hamas shielding itself with civilians a moot point.

Israeli PR: Only Hamas violated the cease-fire, and thus it carries full responsibility. An alternative framing: Israel and Hamas agreed to a truce (through Egypt) by which Israel would allow the opening of the Gazan border crossings (at least partially) in return for a end to rocket fire on Israel. Hamas largely, though not entirely, kept its part of the bargain; Israel almost never did. Killings of Palestinians from the air continued, and on the American election day in early November it attacked the tunnels (which functioned as alternative means of supplying Gaza in the absence of open borders, which would have allowed control over the movement of arms), killing a number of Hamas people. In response Hamas launched rockets and….the truce began breaking down.
Israeli PR: There is no humanitarian crisis; Israel is only attacking the "infrastructure of terror."
Alternative View: Being the elected government, all the infrastructure, from traffic cops (non-combatants under international law) to schools to military installations, "belong" to Hamas. It is clear that Israeli attacks go beyond "the infrastructure of terror." Gazan sources claim that some 5000 homes have been demolished and the Islamic University has been severely damaged. According to the UN OCHA report of January. 5, the tenth day of the war: #1)More than a million Gazans still have no electricity or water, and thousands of people have fled their homes for safe shelter; #2) Gaza's water and sewage system is on the verge of collapse, 75% of Gaza's electricity has been cut off; #3) The sewage situation is highly dangerous, posing serious risks of the spread of water-borne disease; #4)Hospitals are unable to provide adequate intensive care to the high number of casualties. There is also an urgent need for more neuro-, vascular-, orthopedic- and open heart surgeons.

Israeli PR: Israel only targets Hamas fighters. An alternative framing: Who's a "Hamas fighter?" The graduating class of traffic cops that was slaughtered in the first aerial attack on Gaza? Professors and students who attend the "Hamas" Islamic University? Family members of Hamas military figures? People who voted for Hamas? Attacking a grassroots political-religious-social movement engaged in military resistance to occupation in densely crowded urban settings makes it either impossible or inconvenient for an invading army to distinguish between civilians and fighters.

Israeli PR: Civilians may die, but it's because Hamas hides its fighters and weapons factories among ordinary people. An alternative framing: Gaza being such a barren, exposed and tiny area (360 sq.km./223 sq. miles, half the size of London), separating civilian from military areas, though desirable, is impossible, especially since, in concept, Hamas is a people's militia. It's worth noting, however, that Israel's military headquarters are located in the center of Tel Aviv, the military headquarters over the West Bank are in the densely populated Neveh Ya'akov neighborhood of Jerusalem, Israel's center for biological and chemical warfare is located in the town of Ness Tziona, close to Tel Aviv, its main weapons development centers or in Haifa, and most settlements in the West Bank have military camps embedded within them – or vice versa.
- Hamas, of course, as both a government and a military organization, carries responsibility for protecting the civilian population and keeping the fighting away from them. In a situation where this is impossible, as in Gaza, an invading force like Israel should avoid engagement, or engage only when legitimate military and political aims (such as defense) are genuinely endangered – which is not the case here. Israel has political and negotiating options that can end both the immediate threat of rockets and the longer-term conflict, but it chooses not to use them.
- A terrifying development: According to the Israeli press, Israel has decided to ignore the distinction between civilians and combatants which lies at the root of international laws of warfare. Citing what the IDF calls the "Georgia rules," the two military correspondents of Ha'aretz (Jan. 6 and 7) explain:
[IDF Chief of Staff Gabi] Ashkenazi had said in earlier discussions that use of major fire power would be inevitable even in the most densely populated areas. The Israeli solution was thus to be very aggressive to protect the lives of the soldiers as much as possible. These are 'Georgia rules,' which are not so far from the methods Russia used in its conflict last summer. The result is the killing of dozens of non-combatant Palestinians. The Gaza medical teams might not have reached all of them yet. When an Israeli force gets into an entanglement, as in Sajaiyeh last night, massive fire into built-up areas is initiated to cover the extraction. In other cases, a chain of explosions is initiated from a distance to set off Hamas booby-traps. It is a method that leaves a swath of destruction taking in entire streets, and does not distinguish military targets from the homes of civilians….
- - The incident in which some 40 Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel Defense Forces mortar shells hit an UNRWA school in the Jabalya refugee camp Tuesday surprised no one who has been following events in Gaza in recent days. Senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower. "For us, being cautious means being aggressive," explained one. "From the minute we entered, we've acted like we're at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground ... I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock. Maybe someone there will sober up before it continues."
  - What the officer did not say explicitly was that this is deliberate policy. Following the trauma of the war in Lebanon in 2006, the army realized that heavy IDF casualties would erode public (and especially political) support for the war and limit its ability to achieve its goals. Therefore, it is using aggressive tactics to save soldiers' lives. And the cabinet took this into account when it approved the ground operation last Friday, so it has no reason to change its mind now.
  - Nor is it likely that Tuesday's incident, with its large number of civilian deaths, will result in an immediate cease-fire…. Until Tuesday's incident, the world appeared relatively indifferent to Palestinian civilian casualties. On Monday, 31 members of the Samouny family were killed when a shell hit their house in Gaza City; that same day, 13 members of the Al-Daiya family where killed by another Israeli bomb. Yet international media coverage of these incidents was comparatively restrained.
  - This is an absolutely unacceptable development in modern warfare – particularly urban warfare which involves and entraps large populations of civilians – and must be condemned and rejected by the international community. If the Israeli-Georgian "rules" become a de facto norm of warfare, the entire edifice of human rights and international which has been constructed over the past 60 years will collapse and we will enter into a new age of barbarism. Again, All attacks on civilians must be opposed, whether sanctioned or not by military doctrine.

Israeli PR: Hamas is a global problem, part of Islamist fundamentalism together with Iran and Hezbollah. An alternative framing: Hamas was allowed by Israel to develop as a political force in Occupied Palestine in the late 1980s in order to counterbalance the secular PLO, which Israel regarded then as its real enemy but today considers a "moderate" force which should be supported in order to counterbalance Hamas(!). It has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, but is a particularly Palestinian phenomenon that arose in response to increasing Israeli repression, the loss of Palestinian land, rights and honor, and the corruption and high-handedness of the ruling Fatah party. It cannot be conflated with the Shi'ite Hizbollah (which emerged in Lebanon only in the wake of threw 1982 war), al-Qaida (which has a completely different global agenda and ideology) or Iran (in which the theocrats were an organized but quite small political force until the U.S. overthrew Iran's democracy in 1954 and installed the repressive regime of the Shah – for whom Israel trained his dreaded SAVAK security police, noted for their widespread torture of "dissidents"). Painting Hamas as part of a global conspiracy when it's a product of the Occupation itself is disingenuous and a gross distortion of history. Indeed, as the history of Hamas, Hizbollah and the Iranian clerics shows, Israel itself had played a significant role in the rise of political Islam.

An alternative framing: have to get beyond such simplistic and self-serving terms as "terrorists" and "terrorism" – especially since the Western politicians that use them refuse to apply them to themselves, as in the case of Israel in Gaza. It will do no good to dismiss Hamas as a "terrorist organization." The issues, grievances and demands upon which it arose must be addressed. From the point of view of its voters, who include many who do not share Hamas's religious or political agenda, Hamas is a quintessential liberation movement, a Palestinian liberation movement. Attempts by Israel to delegitimize Hamas and disassociate it from the Palestinian people, even to have the gall to suggest that the carnage created by Israel in Gaza will benefit the people by "releasing them from Hamas's grip," only serve – as they are intended to do – to neutralize Hamas as an effective source of resistance to Israel's Occupation.

Israeli PR: In attacking Hamas in Gaza, Israel is only doing its part in the West's War on Terror.
An alternative framing: This brings us to why Israel actually attacked Gaza and why the slaughter has gone on far beyond Israel's declared goal of ending the rocket fire through negotiations. Immediate causes played their role, to be sure. Public pressure to end the rocket fire, especially in an election period, could not be ignored, nor the need to assert national pride. But this does not explain the immense scale of the operation; the rocket firings were the immediate trigger (and Hamas may have erred in its brinksmanship), but not the true reasons, which were several.

First, the invasion of Gaza was an exercise in pacification. On one level, it is an attempt to destroy Hamas as a political force, the only effective Palestinian resistance to Israel's ability, through the Annapolis Process, of imposing an apartheid regime on Palestine. On another level it seeks to pacify the Palestinian people by delivering "a message:" If you keep resisting, this is what is waiting for you. You have no hope to force Israel to withdraw from its settlements and expanded borders. Second, it is an attempt to resuscitate Israel's image as an effective ally in the War on Terror after the humiliation of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. This is crucial for Israel's security politics, especially vis-à-vis the US, and the Palestinians are paying the price for Hizbollah's success. Third, it is an exercise in urban warfare, an opportunity to field-test new weaponry and tactics of counterinsurgency in dense urban environments that can be exported – both as part of Israel's security politics (earning its place with the Big Boys at the table of the War Against Terror) and as part of its economic export strategy (60% of Israeli export firms deal in security). "Tested in Gaza" (or Nablus or Fluja) is one of Israel's most effective marketing pitches.

Gaza demonstrates in microcosm the shift in Israeli priorities and policies as its long-standing commitment to hold onto the Occupied Territories for both nationalist and security reasons comes into conflict with its broader regional and global agendas, centered today around its campaign to neutralize Iran's nuclear potential. The Saudi Initiative, endorsed by the Arab League, holds out the tantalizing offer of Israeli integration into the Middle East – meaning that Israel, whose foreign policy interests match those of the "moderate" Arab states, could assume a regional role. But because of public opinion in the Arab and Muslims worlds, this offer is good only if Israel relinquishes enough of the Occupied Territories that the Palestinian leadership could sign off on an agreement. Hence Israel's courting of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Egyptian President Mubarak and even Assad of Syria and the Saudis. And hence Israel's readiness to offer Abbas yet another "generous offer – short, however, of dismantling its major settlement blocs, relinquishing control over "greater" Jerusalem or giving up control of the border with Jordan, for which no Israeli government has a mandate. Caught between the necessity of maintaining its settlements – a position Netanyahu still endorses – and its desire to assume a role as one of regional hegemons, Israel is trying to find a way to finesse its way through. This explains Olmert's sudden readiness to change direction and talk of the necessity for a two-state solution, as well as the hasty Annapolis Process. Hence Abbas and Mubarak's support for Israel's action in Gaza (with mild, perfunctory criticism of its excesses). Their virtual collaboration with Israel raises even further in the eyes by many Palestinians and other Arabs the standing of Hamas as the only genuine source of resistance.

So there are high stakes involved in the Israeli-Hamas war, which diminish the seemingly decisive role the firing of rockets into Israel had. We do not believe that Israel can either impose an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people nor sustain its Occupation. If anything, as is becoming obvious, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, emblematic as it is throughout the entire Muslim world and beyond (among, for example, progressives civil society on every continent), will impact negatively on European and especially American efforts to stabilize the global system, and in particular the volatile Middle East where the US remains bogged down. It is our role as proponents of human rights, international law, decolonization, the integrity of cultures and a just peace in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere to highlight the injustice and unsustainability of Israel's Occupation both on the ground and globally, the quicker to bring it to an end. May the suffering of the both peoples in this war on Gaza, one oppressed and the other held hostage to an image of the Palestinians as "permanent enemies," be the last straw. A just peace in Palestine will relieve a major obstacle towards global justice.

A Reframing Message from Jeff Halper of ICAHD

2009-01-13T23:42:00.001-08:00

Jeff Halper is Minnesota born, an Israeli citizen for the past three decades, and the founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an Israeli peace group that concentrates on helping to rebuild Palestinian houses that have been destroyed by the Israeli government over the past twenty years either arbitrarily or in retaliation. It is one of the more egregious sins of the Israeli government. (Information about ICAHD can be obtained by clicking on the ICAHD widget on the right of this blog or by clicking on the hyperlink above.) The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions is based in Jerusalem and has chapters in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Halper is an outspoken critic of the right wing government of Israel, and he, along with other members of the Israeli Peace Movement, has been attempting to counter the propaganda machine of the government in the latest continuing atrocity against Gaza. Halper is a great proponent of the work of George Lakoff, whose work on "framing" and diction has been so useful in arguing against the Republican and Neo-C0nservative elements in the US. thought I would post his complete commentary taking on the Israeli public relations distortions and manipulations.

I will give Halper's ten important reframings in two installments. The second will be posted tomorrow. Here is his introduction, the first four Israeli Government talking points and Halper's commentary for reframing:

ISRAEL IN GAZA: A CRITICAL REFRAMING

Israel's core messages, listed below, argue for the justice of its invasion of Gaza in late December, 2008, cast Israel as the victim and endeavor that its "war on Hamas" not be seen against the background of prolonged occupation, closure and sanctions, but of the broader Western "War on Terror." The alternative view presented below argues otherwise.

As Israelis committed to human rights, international law and a just peace as the only way out of our interminable and bloody conflict with the Palestinians, we contend that security cannot be achieved unilaterally, especially as Israel shows no signs of fully relinquishing its 41 year Occupation so that a truly sovereign and viable Palestinian may emerge. In that context, Israel's attack on Gaza can be considered merely another attempt to render its Occupation permanent by destroying any source of effective resistance.

The immediate pretext of Israel's attack, rocket fire from Gaza into Israel, does not explain the disproportionality of its attack, especially given the unrelenting sanctions, attacks and assassinations carried out by Israel throughout the cease-fire. Indeed, we argue that Israel could have avoided all attacks upon it over the last twenty years, as well as the rise of Hamas to power, if it had accepted the PLO's offer of a two-state solution proffered already in 1988 and has entered into negotiations in good faith. Instead, Israel, the strong party in the conflict and the sole Occupying Power, chose to dramatically increase its settler population, construct a permanent infrastructure of separation and control, remove "Greater Jerusalem" from Palestine and encircle the West Bank with its expanded borders: that of the Separation Barrier incorporating Israel's major settlement blocs and the "security border" of the Jordan River.

Israel is not a victim; it is the active perpetrator of a permanent apartheid regime over all of Israel/Palestine. It is toward that goal that Gaza is being violently pacified today, Israel's killing with impunity scores of Palestinian civilians constituting nothing less than State Terrorism.

The following pages present the essential elements of the Israeli government's framing of its assault on Gaza, followed by a critical re-framing that introduces context, policies and aims which the government's version purposely omits.

Israeli PR : Like all countries, it has a right and duty to defend its citizens. An alternative framing: To pursue offensive policies of prolonged occupation as well as sanctions, boycotts and closures which rob another people of its rights, aspirations and very livelihood, and to then refuse to truly engage with that people's elected leaders (a policy preceding Hamas's rise to power), is what puts your own people at risk. To expect your citizens to live in security while a million and a half subjugated people just a few kilometers away live in misery is both unrealistic and presumptive. Israel will only be able to defend its citizens – which is indeed its duty – if it addresses the causes of their insecurity, which is a 41 year-old occupation which the oppressed will resist, by "legitimate" means or not.
Israeli PR: Israel had no choice but to attack in response to the barrage of 8,500 Hamas rockets fired from Gaza into Israel over the past eight years that have killed 20 Israeli civilians. An alternative framing: Israel had a choice. In the past three years alone Israel – together with the US, Europe and Japan – imposed an inhumane siege of Gaza while conducting a campaign of targeted assassinations and attacks throughout the cease-fire that left 1,700 Palestinians dead. This war is no "response:" it is merely a more deadly round of the tit-for-tat arising out of a political vacuum. Hamas firings on Israel were for the most part, if not exclusively, responses to Israeli actions either not reported in the press or discounted as legitimate unilateral action – such as assassinating leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian organizations, often with a high toll in civilian casualties. To present the "barrage" as an independent variable disassociated from wider Israeli policies that led to them is disingenuous. Indeed, had there been a genuine political process which offered the Palestinians hope for self-determination, the rocket firings could have been avoided altogether.
Israeli PR: Hamas is a terrorist organization that refuses to recognize Israel or enter into a political process. An alternative framing: "Terrorist" is a problematic term. States always use it to delegitimize and demonize non-state actors who resist their oppressive policies, as apartheid South Africa did, for example, with the ANC. The term assumes that states, bad as they may be, have the right to employ military force as they see fit. If, however, we take "terrorism" to mean the killing, harming or intimidation of non-combatant civilian populations, then states are far more terroristic, kill far more innocent civilians, than do non-state groups. In the eight years since the second Intifada broke out (September 2000), almost 500 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians while almost 5000 Palestinians have died at the hands of Israelis. All attacks on civilians are unacceptable, no matter how just the cause. Yet it is only the Palestinians to whom the term "terrorist" is applied.

An alternative framing: Presenting Hamas as merely a "terrorist organization" removes the political element from their struggle and presents them as a criminal organization. This not only distorts reality in a fundamental way but, by preventing negotiations, it ensures the perpetuation of mutual suffering. Hamas has its military wing – though nothing compared to the Israeli army – but it is essentially a grassroots religious-political movement that democratically won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and earned the right to establish a government – which was denied it by Israel, the US…and the Fatah part of the Palestinian Authority. It does deny Israel's legitimacy, as any colonized people would, and there is no reason why it should accept the loss of 78% (or more) of its historic homeland. But Hamas has agreed, as a signatory to the "Prisoners' Document" and in repeated public pronouncements, to respect the outcome of negotiations of other Palestinian parties (like Fatah) with Israel, if they result in a complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. So despite its militant and scary image, despite the fact that it will not legitimize what it considers another people's colonization of its homeland, Hamas does accept, as a practical political matter, a two-state solution. Given the fact that negotiations with Israel since the Madrid Conference of 1991 have yielded nothing – indeed, Israel's massive settlement enterprise has perhaps eliminated the possibility of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel – Hamas's resort to armed resistance is understandable. All attacks on civilians are prohibited in international law. In this regard both Hamas and Israel engage in terrorism, with the later taking by far the greatest of civilian dead, injured and traumatized.
Israeli PR: There is no occupation – in general, but specifically in Gaza. Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005 with the "disengagement." Gaza could have flourished as the basis of a Palestinian state, but its inhabitants chose conflict. An alternative framing: Israel claims there has never been an occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza; instead, these are "disputed" territories with no clear claimant – and certainly not the Palestinians who, in Israel's view, do not constitute a people with rights of self-determination in the Land of Israel and who never exercised sovereignty over any part of Palestine. This position is rejected utterly by the international community. Indeed, the Road Map initiative uses the term "occupation" explicitly. Neither does it accept Israel's claim that the occupation of Gaza really ended with "disengagement" in 2005, since occupation is defined in international law as exercising effective control of a foreign territory, which Israel obviously does over Gaza.

To then argue that Gaza could have developed under these conditions is unfair and unreasonable. Neither Israeli control exerted over Gaza since 1967 nor the economic closure imposed upon it in 1989 ever ceased, even if Israel removed its settlers and army. Gazans were never allowed to open their sea or air ports, nor were any conditions conducive to economic development allowed to develop. And then, in early 2006, less than six months after "disengagement," Gaza was sanctioned and hermetically isolated by Israel and the international community as punishment for voting the wrong way. John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, wrote that this was the first time in history the oppressed was sanctioned and the Occupying Power freed of any responsibility. Economic development, not to mention a political process which might have prevented the violence on both sides, was actively prevented by both Israel and its international supporters, which share responsibility for the present tragedy in Gaza.

Let us also remember Israel's special responsibility towards the people of Gaza. These "civilians" are, for the most part, refugees driven from their homes in Israel in 1948 and their descendants, people dying and suffering at the hands of Israel for the past 41, if not 60, years. This adds a particular poignancy to the assault – yet another assault.

Remainder follows tomorrow.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is not self-defence – it’s a war crime

2009-01-12T02:47:00.000-08:00

I post this letter in its entirely from the Times of London. The letter is signed by lawyers and academics, and the signatures can be seen appended here.

ISRAEL has sought to justify its military attacks on Gaza by stating that it amounts to an act of “self-defence” as recognised by Article 51, United Nations Charter. We categorically reject this contention.
The rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas deplorable as they are, do not, in terms of scale and effect amount to an armed attack entitling Israel to rely on self-defence. Under international law self-defence is an act of last resort and is subject to the customary rules of proportionality and necessity.
The killing of almost 800 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and more than 3,000 injuries, accompanied by the destruction of schools, mosques, houses, UN compounds and government buildings, which Israel has a responsibility to protect under the Fourth Geneva Convention, is not commensurate to the deaths caused by Hamas rocket fire.
For 18 months Israel had imposed an unlawful blockade on the coastal strip that brought Gazan society to the brink of collapse. In the three years after Israel’s redeployment from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. And yet in 2005-8, according to the UN, the Israeli army killed about 1,250 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children. Throughout this time the Gaza Strip remained occupied territory under international law because Israel maintained effective control over it.
Israel’s actions amount to aggression, not self-defence, not least because its assault on Gaza was unnecessary. Israel could have agreed to renew the truce with Hamas. Instead it killed 225 Palestinians on the first day of its attack. As things stand, its invasion and bombardment of Gaza amounts to collective punishment of Gaza’s 1.5m inhabitants contrary to international humanitarian and human rights law. In addition, the blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel, are prima facie war crimes.
We condemn the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel and suicide bombings which are also contrary to international humanitarian law and are war crimes. Israel has a right to take reasonable and proportionate means to protect its civilian population from such attacks. However, the manner and scale of its operations in Gaza amount to an act of aggression and is contrary to international law, notwithstanding the rocket attacks by Hamas.

As I write, the death toll nears 1,000 and the injured 4,300. Let us call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations for peace and a just settlement for the Palestinian people.

The Right to Defend

2009-01-12T02:17:00.001-08:00

I am not trying to convince anyone that Israel has no right to defend itself against attack. It does. All countries do. That is why we are in trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan, though we have refused to admit it (and continue to do so). Nor am I particularly defending Hamas, but I am defending the Palestinians' rights to defend themselves against aggression. After all, if Israel has a right, doesn't the Palestinian state, as politically inchoate as it is, also have a right?

Someone took it a step further and mentioned Israel's right to "total war." And what exactly does that mean? Bomb them back into the stone age? Annihilate them all? I mean, genocide? Isn't that in fact getting a bit too close to Rwanda, say, or (dare I bring it up?) the final solution?

I mean, we do have International laws about occupying the other country's land, and I don't think that "total war" is one of the allowable actions. For sixty years now, documented Israeli aggression has been the case. The facts don't lie. Be assigned a major portion of a country and move the inhabitants under the auspices of a world governing body; do it violently and with well-planned ethnic cleaning and population transfer, then occupy the rest and continue to get a pass on violations of Geneva Conventions, and whenever you are put at the point of really serious negotiations, start a war . . . well, no wonder Israel continues to get bitten.

Knowing what I do about that history from both sides I am more and more impressed with the persistence of most of the Palestinians to keep on demanding justice apart from any violence that their more radical groups have committed. They protest like hell non-violently all the time. Moderate Israel's problem is that they keep hoping the Palestinians will pack up and leave. Radical Israel's problem is they can't finish the ethnic cleansing, population transfer, and total takeover neatly and without really pissing off the rest of the Middle East. You would think that 60 years would have taught them.

Any one of us Americans, if we were Palestinians, would have gone over the deep end by now if we found ourselves getting reamed with the settlements, olive tree uprootings, house demolitions, arrests without charges, destruction of farmland, checkpoints, military violence or military inaction when violence takes place, a separate set of laws applied, appropriations of land, the illegal blockades, the collective punishments and that's off the top of my head and excludes extreme military actions, assassinations, and violence that never gets justice.

As an exercise in empathy, anyone who wants to educate himself should watch this short movie called "Ex-Communicated: Enclosure Landscapes in Palestine," produced by a Professor of Communications down at UC San Diego, Gary Fields. It is not a screamer, just a well-documented report. Fields is calm and careful and unemotional and presents facts you can see for yourself. And believe me, most Israelis and almost all Americans don't know about this. Walk a mile in their shoes. Imagine trying to live as if you were a Palestinian. Empathize, please.

I can guarantee that if you empathize at all with any folks who get screwed by all kinds of powerful people, you will be as pissed as anyone can be about oil prices. I seriously think you will not find an Israeli documentary trying to justify the settlements, the ecological damage, the settlers' violent behavior, the midnight digs to cover a third rate road or the "flying check points." Try to carry on a business or send your kids to school under those conditions. We are trained through repetition and severe omission to empathize with the Israelis, but very little empathy for Palestinians is expressed in the mainstream media.

As the death toll nears 1,000 from this stupid violence from Israel, peace be with you. I devoutly wish for a ceasefire and peace, but I think Israel has unleashed the dogs of war and will not, in the long run, win.

Well-Meaning Peace Proposals, alas . . .

2009-01-07T23:10:00.000-08:00

In a well-intentioned but in the end, historically deficient article, "Obama and Gaza: Exiting the Vortex of Violence," Bernard Weiner proposes that the incoming Obama Administration act as an interlocutor and "honest broker" then admits to skepticism on that account. He then proceeds to offer a peace program led by "a respected outside force"--the EU? the Obama Administration? And despite his skepticism, appears to settle on President-elect Obama, for he ends his proposal with the statement that "The candidate of 'change' and 'hope,' and love of children, simply cannot let that happen."

I laud any efforts and arguments for peace, but the actual practicalities of the matter and the history should be telling Mr. Weiner that he needs to rethink his position. Otherwise, his proposal falls into the same bucket as the hopeful dreams of some Obama supporters as early as a year ago that their candidate would be a champion for solving the essence of all of our problems in the Middle East. In other words, his hope triumphs over experience and is sadly another example of muddle-headed thinking.

The article was originally presented on Mr. Weiner's website, The Crisis Papers and was reprinted, where I found it, on OpEd News. Some laudable refinements were offered by a commentator, William H. White. I urge my readers to go to the the OpEd site so they can read the comments by Mr. White.

For me, it is a frustrating example of good intentions nullified by acceptance of many of the assertions of the Israeli and AIPAC-dominated US Government position. So while I appreciated the sentiments and the desire for a solution and a relatively fair solution at that, I could not let the article go without attempting to point to the overwhelming evidence. The obstacle to peace and justice is not the intransigence or insanity of "both sides" but clearly the Israeli government. I commented on the article with the following post: "Obama and Gaza: a Reply."

The sincerity of your proposal is touching and there is little wrong with it--or with Mr. White's excellent refinements including the plebiscite. But unfortunately you have bought into the notion that both sides are equal here.

You are forgetting, for example, that a proposal to recognize Israel and provide for security and economic consideration has been on the table from the surrounding Arab states since 2002. One of its central points--in addition to that regarding Jerusalem--is that Israel retreat to the 1967 line (note, NOT the 1948 Green Line). Israel has rejected that Arab states' proposal. You forget that Israel is the occupying and asymmetrically much stronger military and technological power of the two.

You also buy into the Israeli version of the Palestinians' government, forgetting that the PLO is not the Democratically elected government: Hamas is. The dissolution of the Hamas dominated government by Mr. Abbas was in violation of the rules of procedure of the government. You fail to mention that Israel agreed, under this recently expired ceasefire, to stop the embargo and blockade, which it failed to do. In addition Israel took advantage of our US elections to attack within Gaza on November 4th, 2008. So if Hamas violated the ceasefire, the facts clearly indicate that Israel violated it as well, and arguably even more severely. You also forget that Hamas has in fact accepted--though they do not like it--the fact that the legitimate representatives of the Palestinians did accept the existence of the state of Israel, and in fact proposed long term (10, 25, 100 year) ceasefires provided that Israel withdraw to the 67 borders, remove the settlements, and open the borders of Gaza for free commerce. Further, while the firing of the rockets from Hamas or rebel elements is in fact a crime, it is also a fact that even international law says that a country under occupation can in fact fight back against the occupier. And make no mistake about it, since 1948, Israel has been the occupier and has considerably expanded its occupation and aggrandizement of Palestinian territory and resources.

Finally, you must understand that most of what you are proposing here reinvents the wheel, so to speak, and reinvents it In FAVOR OF PALESTINIAN POSITIONS. If Israel has consistently rejected these or ignored them in the past, what naïvété suggests to you that they will accept yours now, no matter how sane, moderate, logical, or just? What makes you think that some outside force--the bald eagle of justice, perhaps--can assist both sides into seeing the logic and justice of your proposals? Or that this outside agency will keep Israel from continuing and expanding its brutal, demeaning, violent occupation and stranglehold, and now murder of residents of occupied territory?

All of these things you propose are in fact tending to a just settlement, but the problem is that: 1)Israel refuses to recognize the Palestinian state or the injustice of their occupation of the severely diminished territory of that Palestinian state; 2) has slowly and surely occupied much of the valued land and water rights belonging to another people; 3) will extend a "right of return" to anyone in the world who claims and proves Jewish descent, while refusing to accept the "right of return" of the Palestinian people or their descendants who lived there to begin with. With the final bit of irony, this includes the nearly 1 million ethnically cleansed Palestinians (or their descendants) in the Gaza strip, now being murdered and wounded, those who originally inhabited towns now re-named Ashkalon and Sderot after the purges of 1948 and 1967.

After 60 years of this occupation and state violence, one can only assume that Israel does not want anything for the Palestinian people except what they accuse the Palestinians of wanting: to force the other people off the land.

Only the United States, by denying its foreign aid to Israel and acting in concert with the common will of the community of nations, can bring the slightest leverage on this problem. Given that it will veto security council resolutions calling for a ceasefire, we are at an impasse. The United States government--and I fear its next administration as well as its outgoing--has no wisdom in this matter. If it did, it would communicate at the very least to Israel that the current violent murder of Palestinian citizens will do nothing but perpetuate the hatred of and threats to Israel for many years to come.

I praise the points of your proposals, but have to bring you face to face with reality: the rejection of similar proposals over the past two decades and intransigence of the overwhelmingly stronger party in the conflict. That party is Israel, which insists on defending itself by claiming victim hood. It is understandable that the Israeli government might live under that delusion, though I think that its motives are cynical and aggrandizing, not defensive or delusional. If we Americans are truly for peace and justice, we should not live under that propagandist delusion ourselves. Boycotting Israel, and threatening to stop foreign aid and arms shipments is the only way to make Israel realize that it must take some enormous first steps to ensure its peace and security.

Upcoming information on the National Debt

2009-01-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

Though the attention to the accelerating (not just accumulating) national debt is not misplaced, non-partisan attention might be useful. My own problem with the attention is that Medicare and Social Security--as the despicable Lawrence Summers insists on doing--become the targets of the concern. That means that the real drivers of the deficit are ignored: the bloated, unaudited, pork-barrel military/security/industrial budget, the decline in corporate income taxes particularly for the largest corporations, and the movement away from producing real wealth and into a casino economy, just to name ones that come immediately to mind.

So I suggest you take time to watch "I.O.U.S.A" this weekend. Information from the email announcement follows: CNN/U.S. will air the broadcast premiere of the acclaimed documentary I.O.U.S.A. on on Saturday, January 10 at 2:00 p.m. EST and on Sunday, January 11 at 3:00 p.m. EST. Accompanying the documentary will be an unscripted panel discussion with policy leaders about various economic solutions currently under consideration. Panelists are: Pete Peterson, Chairman of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and former U.S. Commerce Secretary; Dave Walker, President and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and former U.S. Comptroller General; Alice Rivlin, noted economist and former Director of the Office of Management and Budget; and Bill Bradley, a Managing Director of Allen & Company and former U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate, in discussions about issues raised in the film and their ties to current economic events. You can watch a 30 second version of the movie at IOUSAthe Movie.com and get further information about the creators.

Some Back Story on Recent Palestinian History

2009-01-05T23:35:00.000-08:00

I have been beset with some very annoying nerve and eye problems over the past week--probably eyestrain—that have limited my time severely on the computer and in my library.

Tonight I am trying a foray onto the computer once again. So I apologize that I have been unable to post some more in the debate on Best of Bloggers that has apparently been touched off by my first post. I am also sorry about some of the virulence that has appeared. Unfortunately, in this political climate, the virulence will out. I am for peace above all, and will continue writing letters to my foolish representatives and continuing to demonstrate here in the area, probably tomorrow and certainly Wednesday as part of a silent candle light vigil in front of the Israeli consulate.

Let me try to refer you to some interesting pieces of background and commentary.

First, let me recall Josh's original entry which I responded to in my first post. In that, Josh suggested that Israel was acting by using the tail-end of George Bush's presidency to cover their actions. With the recent revelations in Ha'aretz that UN Ambassador Khalilzad has been explicitly instructed by the State Department to "torpedo" any Arab bloc resolutions calling for a cease fire, it appears not only that Israel is using Bush, but that the Bush administration in its last days is allowing Israel to continue its aggression. It is the same pattern shown in Lebanon in 2007; the world cries out for a cease fire and the US and the UK did nothing for days but buy time for Israel to strike all over Lebanon, not just in the south.

Josh also suggested that Israel wanted to "clean the slate" and that Obama might well respond negatively to actions carried out by Israel after he takes office. I still hold to that bet with Josh. I don't think the Obama policy will bring the "Change We Can Believe In" to the Middle east. Obama has commented on the Mumbai attacks and on other domestic issues, but he has been hiding behind the catchphrase that there is only one President. His silence, I am afraid, is becoming, in a classic way, complicity.

You may find Gareth Porter's post on the history of the PLO and Hamas since the 2006 election to be of interest. I post it here because we need to keep the background in mind as we are witnessing this continuing onslaught of the Israeli Army into Gaza.

Briefly, Porter reminds us, that Hamas' victory in the Palestinian elections in January of 2006 was met immediately with resistance by the United States, and that rather than trying to work with the government we got, regime change was our tactic. The article is especially interesting because it brings up once again a hot potato of news (that broke in Vanity Fair) that Hamas took over the Gaza strip after it discovered US, Israeli (and probably Egyptian) support for a coup against Hamas. Discovery of that led to Hamas' violent takeover of the Gaza strip and also for Mahmoud Abbas's unconstitutional dissolution of the government.

But that is just history. I have been rereading Gandhi recently, and think of his famous saying, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." If in fact you agree with the forces for peace, ceasefire, and negotiation at this point, you will find Norman Solomon's take on this Gandhian saying logical and laudable: "What about a hundred eyes for an eye?" Solomon's piece starts with a reference back to one of my heroes, I.F. Stone, at the time of the 1967 war:

Israelis and Arabs "feel that only force can assure justice," I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. And he wrote: "A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them."

In this regard, you may find the analysis of Paul Woodward at War in Context also relevant and stimulating:

Once this is over, will the residents of Sderot be able to slumber peacefully knowing that they live on the doorstep of anarchy?

And when Hamas has finished counting its dead, will those in its ranks who until recently were voices of pragmatism, favoring political engagement, be capable of or even willing to try and make themselves heard?

Let us wish very hard and work very hard for the patience to convince our new American leaders to step in for once, as peacemakers, demand an end to the violence, insist on real negotiations, and begin by insisting that both Hamas and Israel take seriously the Arab State's proposal that has been on the table since 2002, and spurned by Israel and Hamas both.

Israel Attacks Gaza, Demonstrations in Los Angeles

2008-12-31T13:08:00.001-08:00

This week I was invited to blog over at The Best of the Blogs, and put up my first post there after returning yesterday from the protest demonstrations in Los Angeles at the Federal Building in Westwood and on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Israeli Consulate. The piece is entitled "Los Angeles Protests Against Israel's Attacks on Gaza." I will also add Best of Blogs to the sidebar. Check out the site. In future I will cross link when I put up a post there, but for today, here's the essay:

Los Angeles Protests Against Israel's Attacks on Gaza

I just returned from two demonstrations this afternoon and evening down in Los Angeles, the first, at the site of the 17 story Federal Building a few blocks from the UCLA campus brought out about 150-200 protesters at one of the country's busiest intersections, received some media coverage from local stations, and, since Mike Farrell was there, an on-site interview. Thousands of cars pass the corner every rush hour. I was disappointed that more horns weren't sounded. Some people looked absolutely dumbfounded.

The second demonstration, near the edge of Beverly Hills, on the south side of Wilshire Blvd. across from the Israeli Consulate, was loud, raucous, full of energy and chanting, Palestinian flags waving, a few lighted votive candles in plastic cups, red and black kafiyehs (almost as many worn as scarves by non-Muslim women as by the men) and women with head covering--I would estimate at least two thousand protesters. Many teenagers and small kids, families, grandfathers and grandmothers.

On the north side of Wilshire about a hundred counter protesters waved Israeli flags and--to their credit, also held some signs calling for Peace Now and a Ceasefire. Los Angeles police had closed off this extremely long block of Wilshire and were out in full force. (Beverly Hills cops had a contingent stationed on their border about a quarter of a mile away, night sticks at the ready, no doubt anticipating some violence. They were disappointed and joking with each other when I walked back to my car after nearly three hours of protest--and the protest was still going on.)

I want to make sure that the contrast between the two is held in mind, because it says something very important about the our perception, here in the US and especially here in California, of the Palestinian-Israeli situation. At the end of this post, I will return to this matter.

In full disclosure, I have connections with both Jews and Palestinians. I have old friends who are strong believers in Israel's right to exist and who will reject out of hand any criticism of its actions. Their adherence to Israel has a dark underside, however, as I have discovered over the years. I also know and am good friends with Jews who are strongly against and critical of the policies and actions of the Israeli government. They are also set firmly against the US's unblinking, uncritical, and unwavering support for all Israeli actions. My Palestinian friends are mostly Christian Palestinians, which I have found gives me some interesting insight into the situation.

Yesterday, when Jerry and Josh extended their invitation to me to post on Best of the Blogs, I was attempting to prepare--unsuccessfully, as it turned out--a sign for today's protests. Had all gone well, I would have transferred to a large Styrofoam poster board images from Picasso's "Guernica" and the slogan "No More Guernicas." Since the Israeli attacks on Gaza, Picasso's image of that devastated Basque village has been haunting more people than I.

The Picasso images are etched into our collective consciousness. The Palestinian images will not be unless you take the time to search for them. They won't appear in the mainstream media. Check out Al Jazeera English if you want to be "fair and balanced." I know a little bit about the circumstances of Picasso's protest, and I feel quite sure that for Picasso the monumental painting probably flowed from similar outrage I had been feeling over the past few days. (As it turned out, I couldn't finish the poster, but there was a fellow about my age sitting at the first protest who carried a sign, "Guernica, Srebeniça, now Gaza! When will it End?" So the point was made at least verbally.)

I was stewing in my anger and glad for the opportunity to join in some public protest when I checked out Josh's post, "Is Israel Using Bush for Cover This Time?" and so the rest of my comments respond to his post--with more information about today's protest actions:

Josh's post inspired a few thoughts while I was contemplating Picasso's "Guernica":

The Gaza=Guernica analogy is not an original comparison--the Guernica air massacre as well as the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto-- comes from Ali Abunimeh on the Monday, December 29, 2008 Democracy Now! broadcast. I encourage you to listen to the eye-witness accounts and Abunimeh's and Gideon Levy's comments. I myself haven't felt rage like this since the first images of civilian casualties came across the internet after the first "shock and awe" attacks on Iraq in March of 2003. I feel the intrinsic truth of Abunimeh's analogies and find it hard to fault the reasoning:

--Guernica for the bombing of civilians with the partial intention of testing munitions and techniques (the Israelis are using the latest US ordinance including mini-bunker busters).

--Warsaw for the compression of the resistance into a small space, the starving and the closing of escape routes and then the systematic invasion and house to house massacres. For unless there is a cease-fire, I suspect that tanks and armored foot soldiers from the IDF will follow through the fences. Of course, the implicit analogy with the perpetrators of both mid twentieth century catastrophes leaves the completion of the IDF=Luftwaffe/SS equation unstated, but in this case, I think it's well-deserved. Such extensive killings have not been done by Israel since 1967, perhaps 1948.

It is clear, if you follow the actual historical events since the start of the ceasefire, that Israel has been successfully goading Hamas through its embargoes, restrictions, closures, collective punishment and actual attacks, hoping for the rockets to come in response. The cease-fire was always fragile, but Israel of course, was the first to violate the cease-fire with the November 4th attack on a tunnel, killing six (and using the US Elections as a partial press cover). And of course, along with the continuing humanitarian crimes from the border closure and refusal to let food and medicine into Gaza, the Kassams come in retaliation.

The Palestinian people have not been well-served by their officials, though indeed enough betrayals and concessions by their leaders have been made over two decades that I now truly believe that Israel has not received these concession in good faith. The Israeli leaders and conservative political parties have other aims in mind, going back to the late thirties: how to gain possession of all of Palestine. The departing moral coward Ehud Olmert made a revealing speech to that effect last month when he referred to the actions as a "pogrom." If Israel had acted in good faith twenty years ago, thirty years ago, today we might be celebrating the third decade of a wary or an uneasy economic relationship in a two-state solution, rather than despairing at the cruelty of the Israeli government, the bankrupt morality of the United States foreign policy, the collusion of Egypt, and the absolutely knee-jerk predictability of the most radical and violent factions of Palestinian resistance.

Josh, your comments on the situation in Gaza are perceptive (though I would argue that your use of the word "stunt" is perhaps too lightly chosen given what's going on) and is probably an accurate read, but as Gideon Levy has said to Amy Goodman, the calculations in terms of the Israeli domestic politics are a pretty complicated part of the equation that we know little about.

I do think you give Obama and his foreign policy team too much leeway. I am willing to bet you a good bottle of California wine that after he takes office his public position will be in line with the Bushites' of yesterday and today. That is, it will be just as dilatory and morally reprehensible a response as was the Bushites' and the Brits' response to Lebanon II in 2007, failing to condemn and call for a cessation of violence on both sides and failing even to comment on Israel's overwhelmingly disproportional aggression. As of Tuesday afternoon over three hundred Palestinians have been killed, over 600 wounded.

I will gladly lose the bet on the wine; but I think I will not. My reasoning? Obama set a little noted pattern in his response to the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia this past August. He at first called for both sides to cool down and to get the UN involved. Very statesmanlike, I thought. Then he backtracked and eventually fell in line with John McCain and the US State Department, in condemning Russia and completely ignoring the facts, which were that Georgia had miscalculated, started the war, and then got their ass kicked. The REAL sequence of events has been conclusively documented by now, but anyone who watched the foreign press knew immediately that Sakashvili was the culprit, probably goaded on by Randy Scheuneman, McCain's Senior foreign policy adviser and lobbyist for the Georgian Government itself. With Hillary Clinton as Obama's appointment to the State department (and if she is confirmed, can the blinkered and morally crippled Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk be far behind?) and Rahm Emanuel (Israeli and American citizen both) as the chief of staff, I will be very surprised if Obama exhibits any of his earlier sympathies for the Palestinian friends he had in Chicago before he started running for office.

It would be nice to think that he consults at least once a year with his old friend Rashid Khalidi, but I wouldn't hold my breath. (If only someone consulted with Khalidi once a decade!)

Yet, as we all know, these politicians who blindly support Israel, no matter how horrific the action, really know what's going on. They know what Israel is doing to both the Hamas members and the grandmas and babies and young teenagers. They know how out of proportion it is. "Speaking truth to power" as the misty-eyed liberals pride themselves on doing, is not something to be proud of. The powerful ones know what the truth is. They don't care, or if they care they just don't have the political guts or the moral courage even to let on that they know or that there is another side to the argument.

You would search for a long time to find any mention in the American press of these initial recent Israeli attacks as being made when children were coming home from the first shift at school, or that since then the University, mosques, hospitals and markets have been targets as well (the rubric is to call them all "Hamas targets" or "terrorist targets," and the robotic American Press dances to the rubric). In the mean time, if you want to see the truth, check out the International Press, or Al Jazeera English, or go on You-Tube and look at some videos.

That ain't lipstick on a pig, folks, that's real blood coming from the head of the little boy (see the original picture on the Democracy Now! link). And back to the videos, that little 8 year old girl looks gray because she lost a lot of blood. The baby's shrapnel wound is real and bleeding into the tiny shirt. Of course, according to Tzipi Livni's and Ehud Barak's and Bibi Netanyahu's logic just prior to becoming collateral damage these little terrorist brats set off Kassam rockets, didn't they? Need a little Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now here, do we? The horror, the horror!

My favorite from today is that Bibi observed how at least a million Israelis were threatened by the Kassams, without the slightest nod to the truth that 1.5 million Palestinians are crammed into a 139 square miles, the densest population on the earth, and are being hit pretty viciously with rockets and shells hundreds of times more accurate than Kassams. Those of you from gun-toting backgrounds will probably know the phrase about shooting fish in a barrel. It's applicable here. It's also wonderful to know that we citizens of the US are paying a good bit of cash for those weapons and helicopters and jets.

There was a tiny demonstration in Anaheim on Sunday to protest the Israeli aggression (Anaheim is about 40 miles away in Orange County which has a very large Muslim and Arabic population). I didn't check emails until late Sunday evening and missed the information and couldn't drive down. Word was it was a feeble demonstration. So I am glad I got to both demonstrations in Los Angeles. They weren't feeble.

An interesting observation--local Muslim and Palestinian groups (also ANSWER and the Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid-Los Angeles--radical Israeli citizens and Jewish American Anti-Zionists, in favor, as am I, of boycotts against Israel), demonstrate in front of the Israeli consulate at 4:30 and asked for signs and flags in solidarity, while the LA Jews for Peace and ICAHD folks demonstrate out in Westwood at the Federal Building at 3:30 and specifically ask for "NO FLAGS please since our message is internationalism and humanism, not nationalism." Unfortunately, the Palestinian flags showed up, one of them waved by a new acquaintance--a Nigerian woman who was just made an American Citizen last Friday. She was so mad that she hadn't able to vote, so after I congratulated her, I told her she'd have a real choice in four years.

The two demonstrations show a major split in the protest. My heart is with the anti-Zionists and the boycott and the loud and impassioned demonstration across from the Consulate, where I spent most of my protest time--though I knew more people at the humanism rally out near the monolith of the Federal building, the stone side wall windowless and towering 17 stories high, the perfect image for this blank-faced government that won't acknowledge, not to mention respond to, the case for the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians who suffer the indignities and violence of subjugated life under the Occupation. My heart used to be with the humanists and internationalists, but I have spent too long watching the news and reading the history.

Many of the humanist people--Jewish and non-Jewish alike--but less so this past year, still cling to the idea of a "two state solution." The more one despairs of Israel ever accepting the proposals that have been made, the more one watches the settlements expand and replicate with no disapproval from our government, the more one sees the appropriations of territory in Jerusalem, the house demolition, the settler on Palestinian violence, the less one believes in a two-state solution. Of course, that is the problem--some members of the Jewish groups asking for partisan politics are justifiably afraid to be branded as being "pro-Palestinian"or "anti-Semitic" if they criticize Israel and lose what they hope is their "leverage" on the majority (and quite silent) Jewish community in the US. The pro-Zionist community in Los Angeles is very strong and probably duplicates the AIPAC-dominated climate in Washington, DC or New York City. Or perhaps the advocates of the non-political stance hope to "make a point" with this corrupt and cynical outgoing government as if it gave a good goddamn.

On the Palestinian side of the boulevard, as far back from the curb and the waving Palestinian flags as he could get, stood a thin and slight fellow wearing a yarmulke and holding a sign with this message: "Here is one Jew who supports justice for the Palestinians against a murderous Zionist State." And as I found out earlier in the day, on the other side of Wilshire Boulevard, though I could not identify him in the darkness, was one of my oldest and dearest friends, former mentor and colleague, at whose house my family attended Seder, and who told me on the phone he didn't have time to see me at his office this afternoon. He was headed out to an appointment, he said, to counter-demonstrate in front of the Israeli Consulate. He hoped I would be safe and not get hurt. I hope he was the one holding the sign calling for a ceasefire.

Christmas Eve Wishes and Memories

2008-12-24T16:44:00.001-08:00

I am having family over for a tradition Polish Vigil dinner. Have a great Christmas and best wishes for the New year! let's hope things begin to turn this ponderous USA barge around toward justice, peace, right commonwealth, universal health and recovery from the destructive greed of the plutocrats.

During my childhood, we always celebrated with a non-meat dinner--in that sense very similar to the traditional Italian Christmas eve seafood dinner--called Wygilia, the "vigil"; I have forgotten some of the symbolism, but there is supposed to be at least 13 ingredients (for the 12 apostles and Christ, she said, though how that got dragged into a Christmas vigil I don't know; sort of like instant "future shock"? As in Joseph to himself: "I don't think he'll be a cabinet maker, from all of this portentous stuff; stock broker? rabbi? start his own business . . . ?

I remember my mom spending days in the kitchen to prepare dozens of pierogi, and while I don't have her original recipes (or her skill), I have taken my recipes from a Polish cookbook I bought years ago in a second hand shop (The Art of Polish Cooking by Alina Żerańska, Doubleday: 1968). Here's the menu we have been doing for a number of years since my wife and I decided to restart the tradition after moving to California.

Appetizer: Pickled Herring in sour cream served with boiled, buttered, and parsleyed small red potatoes and pickled beets on the side.

First Course: Mushroom and barley soup (I make it with a combination of white mushrooms and dried wild mushrooms. Broth is made from celery, parsley root, carrots and onions) Finish with sour cream and fresh dill.

Second: Kapusta (stewed sauerkraut--finely sliced onions cooked in a little oil, then button mushrooms (criminis if you can get them, and one year I used shiitakes) and s-kraut added; stew for two hours. I always add a little vermouth.)

Third: breaded fish fillets--sauteed in butter--flounder was always traditional--my Dad loved to go flounder fishing in the winter.

Fourth:Pierogi (I always forget to order ahead from our little Polish restaurant in the area ["You must give us three weeks!" the owners always lament when I try to wheedle them at the last minute], so I end up, as I will this year, using Mrs. T's potato and onion.) My mom used to make them by hand in batches: homemade dough and fillings of egg-yolk and farmer's cheese; mashed potatoes and onion; prune. After she boiled them and they came to the surface, she'd finish them in a big pan of slow cooked, thin-sliced and caramelized onions.)

Fifth: Compote (dried fruits: prunes, pears, apricots, apples, raisins boiled with sugar and water; I usually add a cinnamon stick, some nutmeg, vanilla, cognac or armagnac, lemon slices and orange peel.) Poppyseed roll or Christmas Babka (large golden raisins inside and cinnamon sugared crust) served on the side. I'm afraid I can't bake like my wife could when she was here with us, so I settle for a Pannetone from Trader Joe's.

Tea and/or coffee.

I usually serve a freezer-chilled Riesling with the dinner. My maternal grandparents (this was back in the fifties) used to drink shots of krupnik or prune vodka or Four Roses (!) for toasts.

Oh, and then the ritual toasts: because it was Catholic, of course, we used to obtain sheets of the Eucharistic unleavened bread wafers, though I've forgotten the name. (We have a Polish church here in the area, but I stopped getting it from them years ago--they still send around holiday fliers for orders.) Everyone got a square, and starting with the oldest down to the youngest (kids excepted--they always got confused) a wish or a toast or a blessing, followed by an exchange of a small piece of the bread, kisses on the cheek or lips (depending, of course . . .). And usually drinks aplenty, with mom rushing back and forth to make sure all was in order.

The compote I made last night. I'll buy the fish fillets today and be cooking all afternoon-- oh if only I had remembered to order the pierogi!

Have a wonderful holiday. Don't watch any version of A Christmas Carol except the one with Alistair Sim.

How Casual and Matter-of-Fact the Insanity

2008-12-21T00:44:00.001-08:00

You really have to read these things out loud sometimes and wonder how any one sleeps without nightmares. There is an analysis in Ha'aretz on line by Aluf Benn, "Budget will decide whether Israel attacks Iran."

Here's the nut graph:

The budget will decide whether Israel will seriously consider a military option against Iran. A decision focusing on defense and deterrance will mean that Israel has given up on attacking Iran. The dilemma becomes more serious in the context of economic recession, which limits the government's ability to expand the defense budget.

You really have to read it to get the dry and serious flavor, like first year business school comes to world holocaust to do a case study. It's a paragraph from a Pinter play. The ultimate bean-counter's insanity. These are the people--the Israelis--with, it is estimated 200 nuclear weapons ready to be dropped on Iran, which is apparently struggling to make its first--or at least suicidally wants to give the impression it is.

And even if they do, does Israel really think that Iran will attack with only one bomb? There, that'll show you, you evil Zionist louts, you are toast! Like, Iran wasn't even capable of calculating that if once they used the one bomb, they would be incinerated completely? Like, you would think that someone there in Tel Aviv is thinking to himself, maybe we should think about this a bit more . . . ? Or maybe, you know, it might be good if we talked this over some more, maybe in a town meeting or in a logic and ethics class . . . ?

It's at moments like this, contemplating the bean counting about nuclear war as if it were a monthly report to the executive committee that I understand that human beings--almost all men and more women than I want to believe--are essentially mad.

Solve the economic crisis--letter to The Whiner

2008-12-17T18:06:00.001-08:00

Cut the interest rate by law on all loans in effect to 4%.

Distribute, in 100 Billion chunks, the remaining bailout money to every citizen in the United States either as unemployment checks and/or in the form of US Treasury currency warrants to be spent only at grocery stores, farmers' markets, local restaurants, second-hand clothing stores, and other non-chain stores. That will give a kick to the economy, freeing up money for paying other bills.

Finally, provide single payer health care for all residents of the United States.

No recovery can start at the top. The rich will only hoard. The poor, the working class and the middle class will feel free to spend, thereby creating demand. We'll deal with the artificial social welfare of the war on drugs problem and the military-industrial-congressional complex next fiscal year.

The Real News Network: Check it out

2008-11-24T22:11:00.001-08:00

If you are thinking of making an end-of-the-year contribution to NPR or PBS, consider shifting some of that money to The Real News. The hyperlink will bring you to the home page. Sample the stories. The editing is sharp, the video quality is excellent.

Started by Canadian (!) broadcaster Paul Jay--an excellent interviewer, by the way--it's an attempt to provide context for news stories. It's based totally on listener support--no corporate sponsors, no commercials, no government support. Many of us have have watched Public Television and Radio over the years becoming less hard hitting as more and more "soft" and "humane" commercials have begun to seep into the breaks between programs. My favorite example is "Washington Week" on PBS with Gwen Ifil. You will be hard pressed to hear any reporting in this Friday evening round table about the influence of lobbyists, or environmental damage and lax EPA oversight since major support for the program comes from the National Mining Association.

Like Pacifica, it will be seen as "left wing" but I'd like to think of it as "independent"--see for yourself how Jay came up with the name for this listener-supported network in this interview.

Contribute if you can. This looks like a worthy enterprise. In addition to my continuing support for Pacifica, I have decided to shift my contributions to them and have attached a letter with my contribution forms to the local PBS and NPR stations telling them why I have decided to switch:

Dear (General Manager):

For a number of years now--well over a decade--I have become very dissatisfied with coverage of national and foreign news on your station. It is obvious to me that as you rely more and more on corporate sponsorship, your capacity to report fully and accurately has diminished, and that you no longer seek viewpoints and information from sources that provide information that might contradict or modify the corporatist and official viewpoints.

A recent example has been the coverage of the invasion of South Ossetia by Georgia in early August, 2008, or the current failure to cover the international outcry against Israel's continuing violence against and collective punishment of the Palestinian people. The viewpoint of labor or minorities is rarely, if ever, presented to balance the corporate viewpoint, and your reliance upon conservative think tanks has increased.

Now I can take some action against your failure to uphold journalistic standards. Effective immediately I will no longer be contributing to your station. I will instead contribute to a new listener- and viewer-supported internet enterprise, The Real News. This excellent group was founded by--ironically--a Canadian broadcaster, Paul Jay. I urge you to begin viewing The Real News to bolster your own coverage of national and international stories.

Immediately remove my name from your mailing and subscriber lists. You can be sure I will continue to listen or to watch (station call letters) for signs of improvement, and if improvement ever comes, perhaps I may even subscribe once again. You have my best wishes for a full recovery.

Sincerely yours,

The Great Paralysis in its 61rst Year

2008-11-20T20:48:00.001-08:00

Some good advice for the president-elect was published Thursday in the Financial Times. In an article entitled "Obama Urged to Prioritise Mideast," Rouala Khalaf reports how the Saudi Foreign Minister urged Barack Obama to get to work right away on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Saud al-Feisal said: "The issue of the Middle East is of paramount importance to all the problems in the region."

It sure would be nice right about now if Obama called his old pal Rashid Khalidi to ask him what he thought. I don't think that's going to happen. I do hope Obama understands that the Foreign Minister from Saudi Arabia is speaking the truth. He probably does know it. But I doubt seriously if he will try to tackle that problem directly. He's now trapped in the metaphysics of American Destiny and American Loyalty and American Allies. Before we know it, the Annapolis conference will be two years dead and nothing much will have happened during the first Obama year just as it didn't happen during the last Bush year. . . .and so it goes. Oh, Kurt Vonnegut, once more cynicism overcomes optimism.

It's a terrible madness, this refusal to act with skill and insight and humanity on a deadly and dangerous problem that has been around for 60 years. See you next November, 2009. Mission Unaccomplished. Year 61 of the Great Paralysis.

Send a message to Change.gov

2008-11-12T23:32:00.001-08:00

I have never been so pleased by an election before. However, I am 64 years old, and my life has paralleled the long and terrible situation in Palestine. Before I die I hope to see some version of peace, equality, and real justice come to that land.

The choices being made by the new President indicate, sadly, that he will probably not seek justice in Palestine, that he will continue the bankrupt policies of the outgoing administration, which is essentially to allow Israel to continue its violations of international law.

Unless the work of peace is pursued, there will be no justice, there will be no peace in our time, there will be no humane governing of the area. The old man Ehud Olmert--better late than never, as my departed mother used to say--has decided to speak now that he knows he has no more to lose. The man was a moral coward before he spoke and should not be given credit for speaking the truth. Where is his apology to the Palestinian people? Where is his charge to the negotiators to act in the spirit of peace and reconciliation?

In a perfect world, our new President must speak the truth to Israel and bring equity to the oppressed people f Palestine. Immediately he should threaten to withhold all funding for the State of Israel unless it begins steps to withdraw the illegal settlers and stop the siege of Gaza.

The spirit of Martin Luther King is pointing the way, but I am quite sure that President-elect Obama is not following in that direction.

Robert Parry: "Beware the Lessons of '93"

2008-11-11T18:34:00.001-08:00

This is really important, I think, and anyone who was a strong Obama supporter should keep this in mind. The President-elect tends to look for compromise and to "reach across the aisle." He--and we-- should not forget the lessons from the early Clinton years of what the other side always will do to the reach across the aisle: they will spurn it.

This is excellent historical reporting from Robert Parry:

Can the Republicans Change? Amid the global euphoria surrounding Barack Obama’s victory – and the hopeful talk about a new bipartisanship in Washington – the Democrats are forgetting a powerful truth: modern Republicans are tied inextricably to slash-and-burn politics. Even if some Republicans did want to shift toward a more bipartisan approach – after more than three decades of successfully using "wedge" tactics and armed with a right-wing media infrastructure built to destroy opponents – such a change might be impossible. The idea of transforming modern Republicanism into some less partisan form might be like trying to train a boa constrictor which fork to use at the dinner table. (continued at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/111108.html)

YIPPEEEEEE!!!

2008-11-05T22:39:00.001-08:00

My good friend in Sacramento writes very late on election night: YIPPEEEEEE!!! What a wonderful night for this country, heh?

You know it! (I almost said You betcha!) I was at a party up in Republican territory in La Canada/Flintridge and the 10 of us went out on the lawn at 8:03 and yelled our heads off! I had been there since about 4:30 watching the returns with the host and another fellow, and as the momentum kept building and the other party goers arrived it was incredible. Then the polls closed at 8 PM and in 30 seconds the announcement came across.

McCain had a very commendable speech, I thought--like the old McCain from the 90's--and Obama's was superb. I will never forget for the rest of my life seeing Jessie Jackson in the audience crying with the knowledge of what had taken place. Now all we have to do is wait for the other 25% of the hard core bastards to shrivel up and melt away. I rarely indulge in schadenfreude, but the thought of George W Bush having to live in denial about his crimes and misdemeanors for the rest of his life is almost delicious in irony. He's a dry drunk. He'll show the same behavior towards his presidency and be as unrepentant as Nixon. I visited a couple of conservative websites today and already they are gearing up for the attack. See below #2 which I received from a political acquaintance today:

#1. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, "My Campaign Memories"

What makes the Obama story so powerful isn't just the fact that as a half-white, half-black man, his public journey to the top visibly tied together some of the more painful frayed ends of our past. It's that he ran his race with dignity and honor against people who didn't return the favor, facing a succession of opponents who feared losing more than shame and gave in to pretty much every possible temptation to go low and appeal to the worst in us.
I didn't always see it at the time. But thinking back on it now, I realize what an extraordinary accomplishment his getting this far has been. A man who wasn't great would have blown this a hundred times along the way. So would a person who wasn't extremely lucky. The historical seas literally parted for this Obama guy, with inconceivable idiocy and villainy littering the political shores on either side of him as he ascended to the pantheon of all-time American heroes simply by walking straight ahead and not being a dick. [snip]
Year after year, even the president of our country has been consistently too small and too cheap to stand up and face his problems like a grown-up, forever passing the buck to this or that group of Americans. If it wasn't Reagan crying about "freeloaders" or George H.W. Bush blasting the "apologize for America" crowd, it was the Clintons whining about the "vast right-wing conspiracy." [snip]
Let's hope that it says as much about us as it does about the presidency.

The full article has a great illustration of Obama as a Zen master with his eyes closed and forefinger and thumb touching.

2. Email from Bob Meltzer

Last night we won a major battle. The fight, however, continues. The right wing still has far too much power in this country.
Most of us are old enough to remember 1994. That is the year when, after being the minority party in Congress for forty years, the Republicans swept into power. Not only did they sweep into power, they came in with the most ideologically right wing group this country has ever seen. They stayed in power for a dozen years, successfully imposing much of their right wing agenda on the rest of us.
Why did this happen? The year 1994 was a year of peace and prosperity.
There was no catastrophe anywhere in the world to warrant such a legislative change.
What happened was the election of centrist Democratic Bill Clinton in 1992. The right wing responded by using their control of the media to bash Clinton day and night. Dittoheads with fire in their eyes took over the water coolers in all offices around the country and ceaselessly expounded their hate of Bill Clinton.
Yet the progressives were complacent. There was no major grassroots movement behind President Clinton, while the Democrats in Congress were
weak and fearful (sound familiar?) Could something like this happen to Barack Obama? It WILL happen if we let it.
So today we party and celebrate. Tomorrow we take a reality check and prepare for the next battle. We must keep up the momentum. In the coming
years, President Obama will need us more than ever.

Gary Younge on the Problem of Voting

2008-10-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

Gary Younge is a journalist for the Guardian (UK) born in Barbados, and writes out of New York. I agree about the recent email about the young Obama workers trying to pull a fast one and voting not in their home districts, but where they were registering voters, though I have not had a chance to follow up on it and see what the penalty was was. Gary Younge, however, writes of my greatest fear, presented more eloquently than I could ever do.

You would think that a country that can put a man on the moon and have the greatest military technology in the world would have figured out a way to run a true democratic vote, but it's not happening. Even the Election Assistance Commission which was supposed to look into this stuff failed to report the entire story, and we know conclusively now that most of the 12 US attorneys were fired because they looked into voter fraud and found nothing there. And that's a from a Republican who supports McCain: David Iglesias, from New Mexico, one of the fired US attorneys.

After reminiscing about the problems with the franchise in South Africa, Younge then turns to the anticipated long lines in our upcoming election. Here are some selections from Younge's article, "Black America may get a president before black Americans get to vote," published in The Guardian on October 27, 2008:

In Jackson County, West Virginia, people have been hitting the touch-screen for Barack Obama and finding they have voted for John McCain. In Florida they are testdriving the third ballot system in three election cycles. Election workers are struggling. Those who thought they would vote early and avoid the queues are waiting in line for three hours.

Added to the technological flaws with machines and lack of technical training for those operating them are technocratic electoral laws that aren't fair, don't work and in any case aren't being heeded. According to the New York Times, tens of thousands of eligible voters in six battleground states have been illegally removed from voter rolls or will be prevented from voting in ways that violate federal law. In Wisconsin, one in five voters' names on the registration database did not completely match names on other state records, including four of the six former judges charged with overseeing the elections. Both presidential candidates may have been wasting their time wooing Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher - aka Joe the plumber - at the last debate. He is registered as Worzelbacher, and therefore may find himself ineligible to vote.

[snip]

While this is happening everywhere [snip], it is compounded by a protracted Republican effort to disenfranchise Democratic voters under the guise of combating voter fraud. Voter fraud is a serious issue. The trouble is it barely exists. In the six years since the Bush administration has made it a priority, barely 100 people have been convicted and fewer than 200 have been charged. The overwhelming majority were either people who thought they were eligible but weren't (immigrants, felons etc) or those registering fictitious people.

"If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant," Richard Hasen, election law expert at the Loyola Law School, told the New York Times last year. "But what we see is isolated, small- scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent."

But that hasn't stopped Republicans trying. Five of the 12 US attorneys who were fired last year, in the scandal that led to the resignation of US attorney general Alberto Gonzales, were axed because they refused to pursue the issue of voter fraud with sufficient vigour. It also explains the Republican attacks on the community group Acorn, which pays people to register voters in low income and minority areas. Some of Acorn's workers made up names. That should be and has been condemned. But there is no evidence that it has resulted in a single fraudulent vote ever being cast since Acorn began its large-scale voter registration drives four years ago.

[snip]

The practical consequences of this interference, manipulation and, at times, intimidation is twofold. It disenfranchises people who either don't have the time, inclination or wherewithal to stand up to officialdom. And it creates huge lines while others stay and fight. A Democratic party survey from 2004 found half of the state's African-American voters in Ohio reported some problems at the polls on election day. On average, black voters waited in longer lines than whites, were more likely to be asked for identification when they got there and felt more intimidated.

It remains one of the paradoxes of this election that black America may yet get a president before black Americans have fully secured their right to vote.

Even if Obama succeeds, who can tell whether the votes have been accurately counted? Perhaps a majority will really have been a significant majority? There was so much gaming of the elections in 2006, who knows if the Democratic majority in the House wasn't really under counted? If McCain wins, will we really know for sure that he did? Either side's victory is lessened by the inconsistency of voting laws, the unreliability and secrecy of computer systems, and the efforts to deny the franchise to people. There is much to be done in this country, and making the voting systems uniform, transparent, non-partisan, and just is one of the structural constitutional issues we must address.

As always, this matter will be put on the back of the top shelf after the election.

An encounter after Iftar (إفطار‎)

2008-09-24T15:18:00.001-07:00

I have a friend who invited me to join him at the Annual Interfaith Dinner towards the end of September. This is a traditional evening meal, Iftar‎, which breaks the fast done every day during the Islamic month of Ramadan. Among Muslims, this is usually a communal event, and it begins immediately after sunset (in this case, Pacific time).

I meet friends at the sign in. They are all happy and cheerful, very talkative. As am I. Non-believer that I am, I tried to fast, but of course woke up after sunrise and so didn't have breakfast in the dark. By noon I had to eat something--a salad--telling myself that since I had some health problems, I might have been excused, were I a Muslim. At any rate, I was very hungry and wondered if my talkative side was spurred by my comparably insufficient but real hunger pangs. Or perhaps the low blood sugar. A friend and I stood at the assigned table and waited the 15 second countdown, staring at the bowl of dates in the center of the table. Medjools. My favorite, and I say so my friend , a Palestinian Christian. She tells me that a date is the traditional food to break the fast with.

This is an Interfaith Event, so Roman collars and yarmulkes and head coverings on some of the women. These, along with some accents, are signs only--the important thing is that everyone is personable, reasonable, talkative or not talkative. In short, just the kind of folks you would expect at a fancy community dinner at the Anaheim Sheraton right up the road from Disneyland. The dinner will be enjoyable, to be sure, and the many testimonials and messages of interfaith cooperation are to be expected. Officials from the cities of Anaheim and Los Angeles, from Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim organizations will speak.

After the dates break the fast, comes a time of worship for the Muslim attendees who respond to the call to prayer. A few people stand nearby to watch and listen to the prayers, yarmulkes and collars among them. While worship takes place at the other side of the hall, I meet some of the non-Muslim folks who share the table with us.

One is a representative of a very conservative Republican group. Its executive director, in fact. He has been invited to the dinner by a mutual friend, S., a director of an Islamic organization. This man is personable enough, though he talks more with my Palestinian friend than with me. He asks questions about the dinner and she tells him. I found out later that he wanted to initiate a dialogue with her about Muslims. And terrorism. And Jihad. He says he wants to find out more about these things.

The conservative Republican is not impressed by the interfaith testimonials, I guess, for in a follow up communication with my friend (she and I are part of a project for educating people about the Middle East), he asks her to watch the movie Obsession.

This cranky film is currently being distributed free in all the battleground states during the election in order to raise fears--not questions, mind you, just fear--about Barack Obama's middle name, "Hussein." Some right wing think tank is putting up the money from what I can gather, and the usual distorted message is in it: after a careful disclaimer that not all Muslims are terrorists, the movie then goes on to insist on a great terrorist conspiracy to take over the United States and the rest of the "free world" in order to spread an Islamic Theocratic hegemony.

The right wing in specific, but Republicans in general, will not jump off this hobby horse.

She responds to him very clearly and sincerely, but it is not enough. He has to "gently challenge" her response. Here are some of his challenges, and I must comment on his points as I present them:

First, he wants her to watch the film because she "in in that world" and he wants to understand it and bring that understanding to others in his circle who want to "better understand it." [Note that although he knows she is a Christian, he also knows she is a Palestinian, so therefore she is automatically in the world of the Jihadi terrorists; note too that although his people want to know more information, he implies that they already understand it.]

Second, he thanks her for the time, and yet challenges her [Remember, she is Christian, so ask yourself why he is asking her to give him understanding about the Islamic faith rather than asking her to perhaps refer him to some Muslim acquaintances.] He does this because the people who watch and appreciate the movie Obsession he tells her, have a "pretty good idea of what the religion is about. Most are religious people. Many have read some of the Koran, as well as The Looming Tower and books like the Al Queda Reader, Londonistan, Now They Call Me Infidel, and America Alone. These are all best sellers for good reason."

[I cannot help but wonder just exactly what parts of the Qur'an they have read. The more pacific and humanistic, I am sure, though a look at the movie will tell you that the references to the book are all to the more violent ones, as if the killings and the massacres in the Old Testament represented the Jewish or the Christian religion.]

Third, he says that these folks have "done their homework" and refers to a question he asked at the dinner: "where are the moderate Muslims out in the streets demonstrating against those who seem to have hijacked what is a peaceful religion?"

[Because of course, it is not enough that Muslims all over the world have condemned violence and terrorism, but that the press here in the United States has failed to publicize the condemnations, which are readily available. A lot of responses have not received any mainstream press or media attention even though they existed. A Google search would produce documents aplenty. That is, if you have the impulse to search. That is, if once you have searched, you have the intellectual curiosity to read them. That is, after you have read them, if you have the intellectual courage to temper your original assumptions. They have an essential belief, despite their howling that the media is liberal, that all the information gets out. It doesn't. No, he wants the people who are stereotyped and victimized by short-sightedness, to mobilize. Perhaps he wants Muslims to march in the streets as those millions of Christians did after the terrorist shootings and bombings of abortion clinics? There were so many of them arrested during their demonstrations. The jails could not hold all those Christians.]

Fourth, he then goes on to insist that a full 10% of the Muslim world is committed to terrorism and points to the many instances of violence worldwide. He exaggerates, of course, not having "done his homework" about the very small number of terrorists compared to the number of Muslims.

[According to the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, there were about 50,000 Al Qaeda terrorists--up from 20,000 in 2001--among an entire worldwide Muslim population of 1.5 Billion people. This is so minuscule a percentage that your calculator will not have enough places to provide the percentage. You will get the message "CALC ERR." One thirty-thousandth or thereabouts? His exaggeration is absurd, of course,and shows the essential fearful nature of his position and those of his "well-informed friends." Where there is fear there is hyperbole. Always. He is of course, asking for public action as a way of "proving" sincerity. The written word is not enough. The testimony at the very interfaith council meeting he attends is not enough to convince him that all the Muslims he sees tonight are non-violent, condemning violence quite rationally, and exhibiting their commitment to interfaith dialogue and cooperation. This crowd of two hundred is not enough to even suggest to him that he is acting on paranoiac hyperbole.]

Almost as a gratuitous insult and sign of his ignorance, he says that his "folks" will also want to know to what "radical aspects of Christianity and Judaism" my friend had referred to in their conversation at the table. (Remember, we are working on a Middle East Peace Education project. We at least know about the condition of the Palestinians since 1947.) He suggests that when she talks about violence she is referring to the "Crusades of hundreds of years ago," or the "Bombing of abortion clinics by people who are not really Christians" without noting the irony of his statement. [If it is enough for him to say that the Christian bombers are "not really Christians" why is it not sufficient for Muslims to say that terrorists are not true believers in peaceful Islam?]

Finally, he refers to the use of rockets by Hamas being "defended against" by Israel. [Though he does not acknowledge the many transgressions of international law, targeted assassination, continuing settlement in the West Bank, or the collective sanctions against the residents of Gaza that have been carried out by Israel in recent months, sometimes in retaliation, but most of the time which CAUSE retaliation. Here again, the ignorance of Americans from the failure of our Media to cover the facts on both sides is to blame. Only a person who had "never even begun to think" that Palestinians have been mistreated by the Israeli Government and its supporters would immediately assume that Hamas was the only violator here. As always, the ignorance of these people is breathtaking.]

Unfortunately, he exhibits what I have come to believe is a festering brew of sincere ignorance and innocent arrogance. People who think like this do not perceive themselves as arrogant, or innocent, or ignorant.

Of the books he has said his folks had read, only one, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright has any kind of respect as being solidly researched. It was the first book to actually track down the biographical information about the hijackers of 9-11-2001. Wright is a reputable journalist, but I am afraid that his thorough research has been used by conservatives to strengthen their argument that Islam is a violent religion. Wright's book was a best seller for many months after it came out.

As for the other books, they may be bestsellers on some right wing or conservative book club, but not bestsellers on the NY or LA Times book lists, and you can almost tell from their titles which ax they have to grind.

Here in the US we have to deal an utter ignorance of the community they are fearful of, the usual racist mindset that insists that the people who are being discriminated against must be the ones to bend over backwards to assuage the ignorant fears of the people oppressing them (compare the old argument during the height of the militant civil rights era that the mainstream black community had to go slow, not rock the boat, and condemn the militancy of the more radical members of the group.)

It's not enough to have an Iftar dinner during Ramadan and show the man how ordinary and civilized--though different--the people at the dinner might be. No, he wants demonstrations and speeches by these people against the "terrorism" about which he has already made up his mind is a "central tendency" in Islam. I'm sure he was disappointed because there were no such diatribes at the dinner, not understanding what the Interfaith Council is all about, and not understanding that the notions of understanding and cooperation and common unity coming from the notion of all the "people of the book" are what was being celebrated. No diatribes against terrorism, of course, means that they implicitly and silently support terrorism.

He and his compatriots have already decided that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Perhaps slow and steady education might help out, but I think that the essential problem is the mental mind set of the people he represents. They have no irony, they have no inner need to question their own assumptions, since they never understand that they are assuming. They do not have, for instance, that lovely impulse to want to understand that sent Malcolm X on his Haj and moved him from a narrow definition of Islam to a wider one.

What, you may ask, was the original response of my friend to his invitation to watch Obsession? Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that my friend had written to him the following:

For a film to focus strictly on one aspect, and of all aspects the most violent, and be distributed to people who most likely have no other knowledge of the religion I find to be very disturbing since it promotes a sense of hate and fear, dehumanizing the other, and not helping the work towards peace in anyway but instead promoting more violence. People need to be shown not just one aspect of a religion but all aspects, majority of which are very loving and peaceful.I have personally witnessed the extreme elements within the three monotheistic religions and the one thing I have learned is to never dehumanize the other, to work toward resolution in a non-violent manner for if I don't then there will be no hope for a peaceful future. This is something I always practice in all work.

You would have thought that this spontaneous eloquence on her part would have given him the impulse to reflect. Or even ask her to tell him more. No such luck. This encounter makes me see that overcoming ignorance and fear is the essential task of Interfaith Dialogue. He wants our mutual friend S. to speak to them, and I can only hope that when S. does he succeeds in his peaceful and gentle manner in convincing them of the truth regarding violence on both sides in Israel and Palestine. He wants "constructive dialogue."

If any one can do it, it will be our placid and sincere friend S.

More to post if I can when I find out how his talk with this group goes. In the meantime, I have bought some medjool dates and will have them for dessert.

Re: explanation for current economic mess

2008-09-23T01:56:00.001-07:00

Friend DP sends me an article he got from a friend blaming the crisis for the financial meltdown primarily on the Democrats. My friend DP knows this is one-sided as it comes from a McCain supporter who works with him. DP needs a rebuttal, so I will give it a shot.

The article is "How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis" by Kevin Hassett. According to the article Democrats are all at fault because they supported Fannie and Freddie and the Republicans tried to "regulate" them. In fact, this guy says, John McCain supported the regulatory attempt.

Hassett's thesis:

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

And he puts the turning point at 2005. Remember that. 2005.

Now this is hardly my area of expertise, and this fellow Hassett is a director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg News columnist. Who am I to even take him on? But he has an axe to grind, since he is an adviser to Senator John McCain in this election.

Definitely not my area of expertise, but pretty quickly I find a bit of a primer and send it back to DP to give the other side of the equation:

An excellent review of Fannie Mae, short-selling and government economic regulation in "Shorts and Fannies: A brief History" by Robert Kuttner, July 22, 2008, American Prospect (web only).

And this also from the American Prospect (web only) to counter the charge and spread the blame around a bit: "The Conservative Origins of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis," by John Atlas and Peter Dreier.

Third, an article in which a famous Dem calls for regulation at a time well before the pivotal point in Hassett's article: "Getting Tough with Fannie" by Robert Reich, September 29 2004 (web only). Note the date on this one--before the crucial date of 2005.

I'm pressed for time with another project, but refer him to indexes in American Prospect, the Center for American Progress, The Nation, the Progressive Magazine, and I'm sure that Paul Krugman at the NYT would have something on this. I mean not my area of expertise, but I know immediately from reading the Hassett article that he's being disingenuous and therefore not giving the full truth.As I read, I get more and more annoyed. Even I know the guy is hyperbolating.

First, though Hassett talks about the bill to regulate Fannie and Freddie getting hung up in committee, but he doesn't give a breakdown of who was on the committee that voted the legislation down. He lists no names at all, no votes. Disingenuousness Number One is obvious: in 2005 the Republicans were still in control of congress, which means THEY ran the committee. Greenspan testified in 2005 to Congress, so why didn't the Republican-dominated Congress take some action? Further, if Greenspan thought they were out of line, where in the hell were the Republican-apointed regulators to get in there and kick ass? Nowhere, of course. The regulators were deregulating or not enforcing just as Bush/Cheney et al wanted them to do.

Now Disingenuousness Number Two from Hassett when he refers to the bill to regulate Fannie and Freddie:

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

Republicans, "tied in knots" by the minority Democrats? Yeah, right, the Republicans were in charge but they really weren't in charge! They had the majority. Note the slippery comment in Hassett's next Paragraph: "The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations . . " So who were these few Republicans? Again, the Republicans were in sharge, so why couldn't the Republicans-in-charge of Congress even bring it to the floor? Hassett sounds factual, but deep down he's not fessing up to the real truth. I hate to suggest that this same kind of omission operates all the time in Republican circles, but then on the other hand, it usually does.

The only conclusion to draw is that the Republicans didn't want to reform it. Here's a quote from an article reguarding regulation of GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises--to which Fannie and Freddie belong) in March of 2006, which, notice, is SEVEN months BEFORE the 2006 election, so the Republicans are STILL in charge:

The House passed a GSE reform bill, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005 (H.R. 1461), in November. However, the Senate's reform bill--the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 (S. 190)--has been bogged down since it moved out of committee along a strict party-line vote over the issue of GSE mortgage portfolios (see Mortgage Banking, September 2005, p. 8; and December 2005, p. 10). Among other things, H.R. 1461 would give the new regulator the authority to set a clear definition of the secondary mortgage market and of mortgage loan origination, effectively establishing a "bright line" between the primary and secondary mortgage markets, which the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) supports. Despite the committee's fulsome intended agenda, the work accomplished last year by the committee gives GSE reform a "leg up," making the chances of moving a bill good, according to Banking Committee Communications Director Andrew Gray. Senator Shelby thinks the environment is right for moving a bill," Gray told Mortgage Banking. [My bold]

IT MOVED OUT OF COMMITTTEE. So in other words the Republicans got their way. So why couldn't the Republicans move it onto the floor of the Senate or through a conference committee and onto the President's desk for signature? I notice in the link in Hassett's article that

1) The bill had only two co-sponsors when introduced right at the beginning of the congresssional session in 2005 and that

2) it took McCain a full 16 months to sign on to the bill--just about the time that it was going down the crapper, and two months after the news clip info above.

So here's a questions for Mr. Hassett: where was Senator McCain all those months? And where were the other Republicans who were so hot to trot for keeping the Democrats from resisting the reform? Where was their co-sponsorship? Remember, this is Hassett's own link to the bill's sponsors:

COSPONSORS (3), ALPHABETICAL [followed by Cosponsors withdrawn]: (Sort: by date)Sen Dole, Elizabeth [NC] - 1/26/2005 Sen McCain, John [AZ] - 5/25/2006 Sen Sununu, John E. [NH] - 1/26/2005.

As for GREENSPAN, whose profligate interest rate lowering was being done year after year after year because he knew that the only thing to keep the economy going was to make money easier to borrow in order to continue inflating the housing bubble and have all that bubble refinance money and second mortgage to keep the economy going, well, Greenspan was just covering his ass in this congressional testimony.

Never forget, mes amis progressives: Greenspan under Reagan successfully proposed and engineered increasing the FICA tax on Social Security and stepping it up into the nineties, at which point if it had continued commensurate with inflation and cost of living and wasn't capped at $96,000 per year to give the rich guys a tax break, some surplus would have continued; however, after Clinton left office--recall Al Gore talking about lock boxing the social security funds in 1999?--the social security surplus was raided and spent by Reagan and Bush One, and Clinton, and Bush Two.

And of course, historically, in the late eighties and nineties, the big push to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into stock companies for the second mortgage market was on. Fannie became a GSE in order to lower the debt on the books under "Guns and Butter" Lyndon Johnson, Freddie later on. Rather than staying non-profit, they became a big profit "free market" in the best of all worlds: buying up all that securitized mortgage flop doodle and selling it to investors worldwide and the execs taking their big salaries; and everyone knew that if the two entities went down, the government would rescue them.

Privatization of profit and socialization of risk indeed. What do you think Bush et al were telling the Chinese and the Saudis and Kuwaitis to buy when they got annoyed that the ROI (return on investment) was so low on US Treasury bonds and they were trying to invest the dollars they had accumulated? Why, let's have you buy Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From an article titled "Us Taxpayer Bailout of China Over Fannie Mae" July 11, 2008:

The top five foreign holders of Freddie and Fannie long-term debt are China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. In total foreign investors hold over $1.3 trillion in these agency bonds, according to the U.S. Treasury's most recent "Report on Foreign Portfolio Holdings of U.S. Securities."

That is to say, the Chinese actually loan us most of the money we use to then buy our war material or other cash expenditures. The recent tax rebate incentive package meant to stimulate the U.S. economy (by getting us all to run out and buy $600 worth of Chinese crap at Walmart), was financed by, guess who? The Chinese!

China does not loan the U.S. money the way a bank loans money to an individual person. Instead, what China does is buy up U.S. debt in the form of mortgage-backed securities. China does this, not because China loves us so very much, but because, until recently, U.S. mortgage-backed securities were a great investment. The entire world widely assumed (until very recently) that U.S. homes only ever appreciate in value. Mortgage backed securities were a safe bet, and China made money buying them.
The fact that Chinese investment also allowed the U.S. financial system to function so that banks could extend credit to U.S. citizens and factories who then could buy up Chinese products by the ton, thus making a perfect economic circle, was frosting on the Chinese cake.
Found in "What does China Have to Do with the Fannie Freddie Bailout?"

And then this: "China's investment in the ailing U.S.: Will Washington's big creditor turn away?" by Edward M. Gomez, a former U.S. diplomat and staff reporter at TIME in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 09 2008:

First:

China is deeply invested in U.S. government debt; as of just over a year ago, "China owned $376 billion of debt issued by U.S. government agencies, principally Fannie and Freddie...." Late last month, China's central bank, the People's Bank of China, announced that "it had slashed its exposure to Fannie and Freddie to $12.67 billion...from $17.3 billion at the end of June."

and Second:

As the New York Times put it in a news report published late last week that made news in its own right, with other financial-news pages picking up the story, "China's central bank is in a bind. It has been on a buying binge in the United States over the last seven years, snapping up roughly $1 trillion worth of [U.S.] Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those investments have been declining sharply in value when converted from dollars into the strong yuan, casting a spotlight on the central bank's tiny capital base. The bank's capital, just $3.2 billion, has not grown during the buying spree...." As a result, now the People's Bank of China needs "an infusion of capital." It cannot just print more money, because that move would provoke inflation. "Instead, the People's Bank of China has begun discussions with [China's] finance ministry on ways to shore up its capital....The central bank's predicament has several repercussions. For one, it makes it less likely that China will allow the yuan to continue rising against the dollar....This could heighten trade tensions with the United States."

Is it any wonder that the stock in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have tumbled with that much pulled out? This is the big secret of the Bushies and the McCainiacs. We won't even talk about how Christopher Cox at the SEC has let all the illegal naked short selling go on for years and years because the regulator doesn't believe in regulation. (Wink wink nod nod as Monty Python would say.) And how naked short selling contributed to the plunges in stock of the investment banks that went under. Perhaps McCain can yell at the Chinese and fire them?

The fact of the matter is, for seven and a half years there has been no regulation of the sub prime mortgage-backed securities swindle despite calls from people on the left for reigning it in. So I read Hassett's article through and think about it and it looks reputable, but it's just partisan spin and slander with a veneer of supposed objectivity.

And finally where's this guy Hassett from? the American Enterprise Institute? give me a break. These guys are free market hypocrites of the worst sort. That Hassett is also John McCain's adviser tells you what axe he has to grind. His weaselly references obscures that it was the Republicans in 2005 who were were unable to get the bill onto the floor. Further, catch this bit of slyness: he has a link in his article to the membership of the Senate Banking Committee, but it's to the 2008 Democrats-led committee, not the Republican-dominated committee in 2005. That gives the impression that Chris Dodd (the current Chair) is in charge, when in 2005 it was Richard Shelby (who right now, to give him credit, is one of the few Republicans to think that Paulson is pulling a fast one).

Why didn't Hassett list all the committee members in 2005? If he did, he'd have to fess up to the fact that it was the Republicans who didn't want to reform the GSEs. He'd have to spread the blame on both parties (see quotes above) and therefore his thesis would have leaked like a cheesecloth diaper. This guy is willing to shade the truth for the sake of his argument, and while it appears to be "fact based" it just isn't.

Guys like Hassett are mental, ethical, and economic con men. And he writes for Bloomberg, for chrissake. So who is going to contradict him as his headlines reinforce the preconceptions of all the Capitalist kool-aid drinkers who read headlines only because they took an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course back in the 70s?

Yet, I believe this one article will get a lot of play over the next few days as the McCainiacs push it everywhere and no big media folks will bother to criticize it. Watch--he is the kind of guy NPR will have on in the next two days or so. And since Franklin Raines is black and did his shenanigans, they will try to show that he is Barack Obama's best buddy and thereby smear Obama with guilt by association a la the Reverend Wright template (I think Obama knows Raines, but don't know for sure.

I left that last one for my friend DP to check out. That was about the best I could do. I procrastinated on my pressing project, and by then I was pissed at Republican advisers to John McCain as well. So I went to bed.

A Message from my Friendly Capitalist

2008-09-22T16:03:00.001-07:00

I have this very good friend--been a registered Independent for years--an old business friend of mine. We worked together for years at a couple of firms, we live in the same town and get together much less than I would like but regularly.

He took a bit of an offense at me sending around the Bernie Sanders piece the other day:

Is this the beginning of the liberals denouncement of their involvement? If so--it is very frightening. Why politicize this mess? The facts are, Congress--including Sen Sanders-- has not performed its most important and fundamental responsibilities--oversight and bring forth updated bills and regulations that could have simply stopped this greed.

What he does not remember, but should, because he is an independent like Sanders, is that Sanders has tried to exercise the oversight and perform. He's chewed bureaucratic butts for years. However, he read Sanders' proposal for an alternative plan as an attempt to cast blame and politicize the financial mess. I didn't read it that way at all. My friend wants us to "stop this divisive behavior and work together NOW."

And I have to love him when he writes:

There will be plenty of time to direct blame and analyze who those persons and companies are who were behind this Greed--right Angelo? [A reference to one of the greedy guts guys, Angelo Mozilo, one of the founders of Countrywide Financial] When the dust settles let's get all of the profiteers (so called executives) and get the tax payers' money back and file criminal actions against the despicable bunch of thieves. Signed, your friendly capitalist.

I gotta tell you it's delightful to see a capitalist write like this. So I wrote back to my friendly capitalist as follows:

I don't agree here--Sanders is one of the few people who has been against the madness all the way through, and has been quashed or shoved aside. This seems to me to be more populist than partisan. He's been pissed at Dems as well. The problem, as you and I agreed the other day is that the Dems are culpable as well--it gives me the willies (pun intended) to see that Robert Rubin and Larry Summers are big Obama advisers NOW and they were the ones who pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall constraints in the second Clinton term--a few days after which Rubin resigned and took over CitiCorp, and then proceeded to merge it with Travelers.

Or Joe Biden pushing for that miserable revision of the Bankruptcy codes when the information about 25-30 % of the bankruptcies were due to medical catastrophes. Or Phil Gramm, who snuck in the 1999 budget the Enron loophole and the big loophole in the 2000 budget (that Clinton signed) to allow for subprime derivatives and CDOs and CMOs to exist without regulation of any kind. That's Gramm as in McCain's choice for Treasury secretary! and he's still advising McCain under the table, from what I can gather. So he got shunned after his "Nation of Whiners" comment two months ago. He's been a big shot at USB (Bank of Switzerland) since he retired from the Senate. And guess who came knocking at the door last night to get money from the bailout plan? USB.

These guys are pirates, and that's why I like Independent Bernie Sanders. You told me you've been registered as an independent as well. Meet Bernie. Best Senator around.

I think Bernie Sanders was pissed because Paulson (who came from Goldman Sachs, just like Rubin, came to Congress with an arrogant proposal that had NO real accountability (6 month reports to congress) and no recognition that abuses needed correction.

I think that what Sanders is trying to do is get some leverage on the matter and attempt to figure out a way to get some recompense for the bailout.

It's systemic--and actually, a risk avoidance philosophy is to bear part of the blame: suck people in on no down payments and balloons and assure them that the prices will keep rising and then jettison the mortgages to third and fourth parties, slice and dice--and destroy the relationship between debtor and lender that really kept it all in check.

I wouldn't worry about blame games--the guys who are responsible will get their fannies spanked and be embarrassed in Congressional hearings and then go to Greenwich for the weekend cocktail party at their country estate.

Believe me, I'm at the point of lesser of two evils--as you well know--and have been there for a good number of months. My prime reason for going with Obama is the Supreme Court appointments and some semblance of deliberation about foreign policy. The way McCain has gone into his temper tantrums this week about firing Christopher Cox at the SEC (and I really don't think he even understands why Cox should have been fired to begin with) and clearly showed that he doesn't even know who the prime minister of Spain is or that Spain is in Europe, not the Western Hemisphere, does not give me confidence.

I researched that the Navy's health service down in Pensacola has had a continuing study of Vietnam POWs which indicates serious longevity and health impacts for all of them, way worse than the general population, and when you take into consideration that McCain's grandfather died at 63 and his dad at 70, it makes me think about those actuarial tables more than ever.

Obama in contrast, held off deliberately until he could see the details of the plan and consulted with his old grey guys--Paul Volcker and Warren Buffet among them, before he said anything. That contrast tell me a lot. early middle age over old farts with a temper any day.

I still don't think I will convince my friendly capitalist to vote for Obama.

Go Bernie GO!

2008-09-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

At last, a voice of reason emerges with a real plan rather than this bailout for the greedy guts guys:

Here's step Number One:

I have proposed a four part plan to accomplish that goal which includes a five-year, 10% surtax on the income of individuals above $500,000 a year, and $1 million a year for couples; a requirement that the price the government pays for any mortgage assets are discounted appropriately so that government can recover the amount it paid for them; and, finally, the government should receive equity in the companies it bails out so that when the stock of these companies rises after the bailout, taxpayers also have the opportunity to share in the resulting windfall. Taken together, these measures would provide the best guarantee that at the end of five years, the government will have gotten back the money it put out.

In addition--step Number Two is to repeal the deregulation that caused this mess; Three, create millions of jobs for the working families; and Four, break up the companies determined to be "too big to fail."

Read: "The Middle Class Must Not Be Forced to Bail Out Wall Street" by Sen. Bernie Sanders!

Progressives take note:

Have you noticed how politicians on both sides only refer to the "middle class"?

I doubt seriously that any of these ideas will be adopted by Obama if he wins, but nonetheless:

Go Bernie Go!

Re: Chicago Boyz

2008-09-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

So my friend DP writes in an email:

Be vigilant! The financial crisis is likely another application of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" and the crisis will likely be used by this administration to put into place further laws and bailouts that will benefit the wealthy and hurt main street. Just wanted to throw this out to the group to get your reaction.

So I react:

BUT: Let's not forget that Obama's top economic financial advisers are Chicago School boys, so if they win caveat emptor and beat up on the Dems very hard--even to the point of demonstrations and hard lobbying--during November!! (December will be too late. Get some good guys in there and make sure Robert Rubin doesn't get back in to do his black fuggle magic.)

I supply a list of the Obama economic advisers and some dots to connect. First, from the NYTimes:

The Democrats, besides talking about a broader range of subjects, also have the freshest face among the top campaign advisers — Barack Obama's lead economist, Austan Goolsbee, a 37-year-old star professor at the University of Chicago (who writes a monthly column for The New York Times). The two men met when Mr. Obama was teaching at the law school there, and they both seem to favor achieving Democratic goals through market-oriented policies. As Mr. Goolsbee has written: "Moral exhortation doesn't change people's behavior. Prices do."

And next, a list from the blog Economists for Obama:

Jason Furman (director of economy policy)
Austan Goolsbee (senior economic policy advisor), University of Chicago tax policy expert source
Karen Kornbluh (policy director)
David Cutler, Harvard health policy expert
Jeff Liebman, Harvard welfare expert
Michael Froman, Citigroup executive
Daniel Tarullo, Georgetown law professor
David Romer, Berkeley macroeconomist
Christina Romer, Berkeley economic historian
Richard Thaler, University of Chicago behavioral finance expert

Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary source
Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary
Alan Blinder, former Vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve
Jared Bernstein, Economic Policy Institute labor economist
James Galbraith, University of Texas macro economist

Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve 1979-1987
Laura Tyson, Berkeley international economist, Clinton economic adviser
Robert Reich, Berkeley public policy professor, former Secretary of Labor
Peter Henry, Stanford international economist
Gene Sperling, former White House economic adviser

and a few snide comments from The Unrepentant Marxist:

--David Cutler: Harvard economist who believes that high health costs are good for the economy
--Jeffrey Liebman: another Harvard economist and former Clinton adviser who favors privatizing social security
--Austan Goolsbee has been a columnist for Slate.com and the NY Times, as well as a standup comedian. His economics are not meant as a joke, as I understand it. His columns are written very much in the same vein as fellow U. of Chicago neoclassical economist Steven Levitt's Freakonomics," examining everyday problems such as "Why you get stuck for hours at O'Hare." Most are fairly uncontroversial except for the swipe he took at Michael Moore's "Sicko", whose single-payer recommendations violate his free market principles.

And very serendipitously, I can remind him to see Bill Moyers interviewing Kevin Phillips, who wrote the book that lays out the problems: Bad Money

And finally remind him that if he looks up these folks you will see it's not quite as bad as the idiot republicans on McCain's campaign like Phil ("a nation of whiners") Gramm, now off the team for that comment, but a sure bet to be McCain's Secretary of the Treasury (shudder).

However, these include (Rubin, Sumnmers) some of the Democrats who during the Clinton administration accelerated the pump and dump economy of the last 28 years--especially Robert Rubin--and his "Rubinomics." The only people worth their salt are Galbraith and (not on this list) Joe Stieglitz and Warren Buffet; but of these last three, Galbraith is apparently only marginally close to Obama, Buffet has become a "senior adviser" (along with Paul Volcker) and the guys at the top of the list are all "free market" koolaid drinkers, none of whom really believes in a national health care program.

As I said, caveat emptor. Especially if you plan on getting sick or breaking your hip.

A history lesson. . . . or a black comedy

2008-09-19T15:37:00.001-07:00

It is difficult when loved ones send xenophobic, racist diatribes to you. What can you say? The latest I received from a far away relative was a piece called "What Thomas Jefferson Learned, a History Lesson." I don't need to excerpt it. The argument can be summed up easily: the Barbary War had a lesson for Americans: all Muslims are bloodthirsty interested only in killing, especially killing good Christian Americans. Keith Ellison, the Congressman from Minnesota is a Muslim, and don't be deceived: he is a secret terrorist and swore his oath of office on a Koran that belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

That was too much for me, and I lost my composure--it was late in the evening, my eyes were tired--and before I knew it had flung back to the loved one my own anger, trying to convert him to the correct and liberal, democratic, progressive, tolerant, human, rational way of thinking.

I pointed out that Ellison is an American citizen, Catholic educated, and from a family who has lived in the US longer than ours. Look at this information from Wikipedia, I said:

Ellison's family has been in America since 1742. Keith Ellison, the third of five sons, was born and raised a Roman Catholic in Detroit, Michigan by his parents Leonard and Clida Ellison, a psychiatrist and a social worker respectively. Ellison and three of his siblings became lawyers while the other became a doctor. One of his brothers is also the pastor of the Baptist "Church of the New Covenant" in Detroit, and the family has been involved in the civil rights movement, including the work of his grandfather as a member of the NAACP in Louisiana. Ellison's youth was influenced by the involvement of his family in the civil rights movement, including the work of his grandfather as a member of the NAACP in Louisiana. He graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy in 1981 where he had been active in sports and the student Senate. At age nineteen, while attending Wayne State University in Detroit, Ellison converted from Catholicism to Islam.
^{(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Ellison)}

I found it interesting that Ellison could have left the very faith that we--my relative and I--had been brought up in and that my relative still wholeheartedly embraced. I reminded him that the Constitution of the United States requires that "no test"of religion be a requirement for public office. See article 6. Furthermore, the same amendment says you do not have to swear on a bible, only that you have to take an oath "or Affirmation."

I wanted my relative to get real, to stick to the issues instead of these paranoid fantasies of fear. His email presumed that a particular Muslim personage in the 18th century spoke for all of Islam back then and still speak for all of Islam today, and presumes that chosen phrases from some of the Barbary pirate's statements reflect current Islamic thought. All of which is to say that the writer of this piece knew very little about Islam and assumes that the most radical voices like Bin Laden, who have been rejected by mainstream Islam, especially in the United States, represent all Muslims.

On this basis of that paranoid thinking, as Ellison himself pointed out, Christians are terrorists because Timothy McVeigh was associated with a fundamentalist Christian sect. I asked if he had ever read anything by Keith Ellison. Had he ever heard him speak? I pointed out that Ellison was just another politician from the liberal side of the spectrum, from a fairly liberal state, who's most concerned about the abuses of power that this current administration has perpetrated. [I should tell you here that he never responded to any of this information.]

What was of more concern to me was this: did my relative really think that terrorist criminals will be able to take over this country, rape our women, marry our little girls, and carry out a radical Muslim coup?

Did he think that, if the United States forces and their coalition of the willing in Iraq find it impossible to take over a country of 26 million (less 2.5 million refugees and 2.7 million internally displaced) with a force of 160,000+ troops and 100,000 hired mercenaries, that a few thousand criminals hiding in Pakistani caves had their tanks and airplanes poised in Mexico and Canada and readying for a takeover? Did he truly think that the conquest would succeed?

And I told him that if he truly feared that a Muslim conquest of this country was a possibility, I questioned his hold on reality. The terrorists were criminals, I said, and we have wasted 7 years and many many lives trying to fight them as if they were a belligerent country. I questioned Bush and Cheney's hold on reality as well.

Just prior to receiving this fantasy of Muslim conquest, I had sent him something rational and relevant from a conservative writer. Maybe, I suggested, he could send me some real political argument sometimes, like a conservative piece in support of McCain? or a rational argument from somebody in the middle or on the left why Obama will be bad for this country. Those I would gladly read, but not this stuff.

The more I read articles by writers on the far right of the political spectrum and so called "independent" white voters, the more I understood that some folks just don't want some "uppity Negro" as president. In other words, too many Americans are being motivated by racism rather than reason.

And as I wrote I thought that until our generation finally died off the United States will never be able to overcome its racist attitudes.

[But as I think about it now, I believe that even the death of our generation will not rid the nation of racism. This doesn't bode well for any American.]

The paranoia is almost cartoonish. Certainly it is black comedy, the new remake of the sixties movie: "the Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming!" The problem is, my relative wants to bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran, heh heh, just like his candidate.

I realized that all too many Americans, my close family relation being included, need an enemy outside of us. Once that enemy is established, they enter their bubble.

Well, of course, my passionate email reply didn't help at all. My relative just got angry and insisted that we would never see eye to eye. He still sends me xenophobic things. Racist things. Sentimental things from the fifties. Quizzes about Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody.

A good friend of mine tells me to just let it go, not to read the emails from the loved one far away. To understand that I am the one in control of my anger. True, true, I say. And yet--I think I want to proselytize. My relative thinks I am blind to the danger of the Muslim conquest of America and the illegal alien hordes flooding into this country. And I ? Well, I am no longer a religious person, but I can understand missionary zeal.

I know that he is worshipping a false idol. A missionary zeal indeed. But I don't believe in the power of prayer to convert him. And the religious metaphor is probably a bad one to use. But this does make me understand missionaries. And so we will always be at loggerheads.

It doesn't do either of us any good to rant. I should just have posted my thoughts on the blog and let it go, let it go . . . into the ether of the internet where probably no one will read this anyway, rather into the inbox of the relation so far away.

A Conservative's Turn and Truing

2008-09-19T13:56:00.001-07:00

Just ran across one of the first indications that Obama may be getting some traction among thinkers when I read: "A Conservative for Obama: My party has slipped its moorings. It's time for a true pragmatist to lead the country," by Wick Allison. Former editor of the National Review, one of the original Goldwater youth conservatives, Allison sketches out his long conservative history to explain why Obama strikes a chord in him he "hasn't felt since Reagan."

Three excerpts:

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don't work. The Bush tax cuts-a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war-led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his "conservative" credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

and:

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world "safe for democracy." It is John McCain who says America's job is to "defeat evil," a theological expansion of the nation's mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth. . . . This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

And finally the endorsement:

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. . . . I disagree with him on many issues. But those don't matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama's books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Now, I think that's a pretty good endorsement. I will have a lot to disagree with Obama about, particularly Afghanistan, but it's the sheer intelligence you have to admire, especially after the lack of it we have had to inure ourselves to for the past 8 years.

Slowly, Iraqi Refugees and their Story Receive Attention

2008-09-04T17:44:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, Aaron Brown, in his new reincarnation on PBS, had an excellent documentary on the plight of the Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria. In my own small way, I have been making joint presentations with a colleague at small community meetings talking about our visit for almost two weeks in May, to Jordan and Syria. Some traction, I thought, is being gained.

Now, the latest issue of The Progressive (volume 72, no.9) has arrived, and the cover story is about the refugees. As we all know, the Progressive, Democracy Now!, or Wide Angle on PBS are hardly a presence in the national media. But who knows what further publicity the story will receive. We must keep paying attention to these refugees, who, I can tell you, dress like you and me, have sons and daughters like you and me, have no work, have aspirations for safety and success and a peaceful home in a country where they can make a living and raise their children in peace.

Many thanks to The Progressive and Elizabeth DiNovella for giving attention to this terrible situation, which would be similar to having 60 MILLION Americans (think Texas and California) fleeing to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean or internally migrating to other states. The United States has done little to alleviate the suffering and deprivation of the majority of these refugees in Jordan and Syria, nor has the Iraqi government, with all of its surplus, assisted its citizens.

Let us hope that the people of America will understand the situation and speak out for correction and reparations.

Welcome to the greasy chute

2008-08-20T14:32:00.001-07:00

The Georgian crisis provided Senator Obama--"our candidate"--with the perfect opportunity to be a statesman, tell everyone to calm down, and call for some foreign policy initiatives for peace and mediation and global discussion rather than absolute limpness and passivity.

Even after a vacation week to think about it, he was unable to provide a call for "change." This tells me that his foreign policy advisers--and they are legion, close to 300 by an estimate I saw-- are going to caution the same old baloney Democratic strategy--which by default is cowardly
acceptance of Neo-conservative crony capitalism, plutocracy, American Exceptionalism, Empire, and as we now are learning, the first benign stages of fascism. Have you heard about how the City of Denver is preparing to handle "protest"? And you thought NYC was bad 4 years ago.

When I was in Denver recently, at the end of July, I heard rumors that the Denver Police were going to park the protesters in "protest pens." Now we have discovered through the Denver underground and above ground press that the Colorado National Guard has commandeered some motels on the outskirts of downtown to use for barracks, and that a detention center has been prepared (thanks to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! for reporting this) in an old warehouse owned by the city of Denver. In the warehouse are pens made of cyclone fencing topped with razor wire and posted signs that tazers are used in the facility. The warehouse has no air conditioning.

In fact, the warehouse was empty because the city, which stored voting machines in it, had to move the voting machines because they would get overheated. I'm telling you, these are the first sign of benign fascism. We will have an American twist to it. Welcome to the the greasy chute, Citoyens!

Jonathan Turley: The Fix is in for a "Pirate Victory"

2008-07-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

Well, as the really patriotic defenders of the Fourth Amendment feared, the criminals in our government--and I include the Senators who failed to uphold their oath of office--have won.

I excerpt here Glenn Greenwald's comments and refer you to a You Tube clip, an interview with Prof. Jonathan Turley, who points out that a Federal judge just a few days ago in his opinion indicated clearly that President (yeah, I know, my maw churns with bile at the word) George W. Bush is an admitted multiple felon.

First Glenn Greenwald:

With their vote today, the Democratic-led Congress has covered-up years of deliberate surveillance crimes by the Bush administration and the telecom industry, and has dramatically advanced a full-scale attack on the rule of law in this country. As I noted earlier today, Law Professor and Fourth Amendment expert Jonathan Turley was on MSNBC's Countdown with Rachel Maddow last night and gave as succinct an explanation for what Democrats -- not the Bush administration, but Democrats -- have done today. Anyone with any lingering doubts about what is taking place today in our country should watch this:

Go to YouTube for the video of Rachel Maddow on Countdown last night and her interview with Professor Jonathan Turley.

And Greenwald continues:

What is most striking is that when the Congress was controlled by the GOP -- when the Senate was run by Bill Frist and the House by Denny Hastert -- the Bush administration attempted to have a bill passed very similar to the one that just passed today. But they were unable to do so. The administration had to wait until Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats took over Congress before being able to put a corrupt end to the scandal that began when, in December of 2005, the New York Times revealed that the President had been breaking the law for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law.
Yet again, the Democratic Congress ignored the views of their own supporters in order to comply with the orders and wishes of the Bush administration.

And later: "Somehow, at some point, someone somewhere convinced [Democrats] that the best way to avoid appearing weak is to be as weak as possible."

Read Greenwald's complete article HERE.

Some observations:

1. The weak Democrats can go to hell.

2. Most citizens of the United States, including some good friends of mine, could give a rat's ass about the fact that their President is a self-admitted lawbreaker, or that the government now has the means to spy on them, their credit transactions, their emails, their telephone conversations, their text messages. They don't have anything to hide. They won't understand until a double entendre, or an incautious joke, or a monetary transaction gets looked at by a Homeland Security bureaucrat and they get called on the carpet, or fall under suspicion of being "up to something."

3. Few Americans understood that the first FISA bill in 1977 was the start of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment. In other words, we are at the bottom of the slippery slope.

4. The telecoms have spent millions to grease the palms of Democrats and Republicans alike. Change your phone to Qwest if you have their service. They refused to break the law when Bush told them to, and they refused almost nine months BEFORE 9/11/2001. So much for the national security arguments.

5. No, I revise my invective: screw the Democrats. Only 28 of them understood the meaning of their oath of office.

6. Clearly, we need to watch out for Obama. Despite his explanations and rationale for why he supports the bill, he's no fool. It gives him power to break the law if or when he is elected president. Don't rely on his good faith or integrity. He voted for it. Worse, he know it was going to fail. What would he have lost by voting against it or trying to make the arguments he gave at the end of 2007 when he didn't have the nomination? Obviously the telecoms' high regard. Just another politician. Screw him too.

6.1: Senators voting against and upholding their oath of office: Akaka - Biden - Bingaman - Boxer - Brown - Byrd - Cantwell - Cardin - Clinton - Dodd - Dorgan - Durbin - Feingold - Harkin - Kerry - Klobachur - Lautenberg - Leahy - Levin - Menendez - Murray - Reed - Reid - Sanders - Schumer - Stabenow - Tester - Wyden. Hillary Clinton voted against it!

7. Upon further reflection, fuck the Democrats. Especially the ones in the House who brought the legislation under the cynical leadership of Steney Hoyer, and violated their oath of office.

8. It will be a long haul until we purge the Congress of all of these slimy bastards.

9. Think of one good reason why Nancy Pelosi took "impeachment off the table," and why the nuclear option is still "on the table."

10. Reread Tom Paine over the summer. Or read him.

With apologies to William Butler Yeats

2008-07-09T00:03:00.000-07:00

ON JULY 4TH, AMERICA CELEBRATED THE RULE OF LAW. ON JULY 9TH, THE SENATE WILL VOTE TO BURY IT.

Those words form the banner headline of a full-page ad that will appear in the Washington Post tomorrow.

And then sometime tomorrow--barring a miracle--the Senate of the United States will probably vote to subvert the Constitution rather than fearlessly defend it. Senators who have fallen under the corruption of political expediency, and who should, if they were faithful to their oath of office vote 100-0 against the FISA bill, will vote to pass the abomination.

Goodbye true Democracy. We are no longer a nation of laws but a sham Democracy with some sort of quasi-king who breaks the law, baldly admits it with a sneer, tells the American public he will continue to break it, and expects others to break the law at his mere suggestion. Back in the 50's this would have been seen as creeping totalitarianism.

The tyrant, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward Washington. Watch it and weep.

A Sad Day for Democrats and Obama Supporters

2008-06-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

Remember this day. On this day, the Democrats proved for the umpteenth time what a party of collusion rather than opposition thay have become when they passed the FISA bill containing what amounts to an amnesty provision for telecom companies.

Worst of all, Senator Obama, whose word is rapidly becoming more assured as the voice of the party, came out and said he accepted the compromise bill. He said he would fight the amnesty provision in the Senate, but I don't think this is anything but cover. Read his words:

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives -– and the liberty –- of the American people.

This is a politician's bullshit. Notice that he doesn't say that amnesty is wrong any more. He sees that the bill gives the Presidency another little fillip of tyranny and he will not look that gift horse in the mouth. It's a sad day.

In my own Congressional District, I was very fearful that Adam Schiff would end up capitulating with the spineless. He did indeed vote for the bill, and I publish here the letter I sent to him quoting from his own letter to me back in the spring when I had written to him concerned about giving amnesty to the telephone companies who went along with George Bush's violations of the law. (Remember, Bush himself admitted he broke the law in a press conference and said that he would continue to do so. ) This amnesty provision will--unless there is a brave FISA judge out there--almost automatically dismiss any lawsuits permanently. It's a very sad day. My letter will sum up the reason for my sadness.

326 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Representative Adam Schiff

Re: Your Vote on the FISA and Telecom Amnesty Bill

Dear Congressman Schiff:

I have just reviewed the record of the vote. Your name was in the Yeas. Disturbing.
Let me quote from your letter to me of April 9, 2008:

On March 14^th, the House voted to pass a bill—the FISA Amendment Act of 2008—that did not include immunity for the telecom companies. The final vote in the House was 213-197 and I voted in favor of this legislation.

However, the suggestion of the Administration that we can only [be aggressive in combating terrorism]by subverting the law and giving up our constitutional right is seriously misguided.

Yet despite this, the bill you voted for today—against your apparent position of understanding that the Administration was wrong—is not in the interests of the citizens of this country. I can anticipate receiving rhetoric from you to justify your vote, and further obfuscation that will essentially repeat the rationalizations of your ''seriously misguided” colleagues Hoyer, Emmanuel, and Speaker Pelosi. Some Democratic opposition you have become. Save the rhetoric, please.

It is clear that you now would let this administration escape liability for its unconstitutional acts. You now would let the predictable assurances of Attorney General Mukasy that a telecom company had “acted in good faith after assurances from the Justice Department” completely preclude any possible discovery proving that the Administration had broken the law. In short, you now have become a party to the collusion. All your talk now about wanting to preserve FISA as the exclusive remedy will not hold water. The fact is that telecom immunity could still have been excluded if you and other overly compliant congressmen had truly wanted to protect the Fourth Amendment. In other words, as Senator Bond said today, "When the Government tells you to do something, I think you all recognize, uh, that that is something that you need to do." A nation of sheep.

In all of our history,with its few instances of impeachment and threatened impeachment, this President alone has been more culpable than any other and liable for impeachment. Yet Congress has not had the courage to hold him accountable as the Constitution provides. In this one instance when we clearly know by his own admission that the President broke the law and would continue to break it, your action today has let him pass unscathed. The proof? Other telecom companies refused to comply!

I am deeply disturbed by your lack of courage and leadership on this matter. You have not only betrayed my trust in you but have betrayed your own principles. You have not done your duty.

Sincerely,

To be sure, it's a sad day for the Fourth Amendment and a sad day for all of us who understand that this President has moved us further and faster in seven and a half years from a democratic republic than any one would have thought. Damn the Democrats who have gone along with this terrible capitulation to the politics of fear, paranoia, and vengeance.

Where the Truth Was

2008-05-30T23:24:00.000-07:00

Back from Jordan and Syria on Monday night, finding it harder to get rid of the jet-lag this time, and madly trying to catch up on emails and the news. Details of the trip will follow in new posts as I begin to come to terms with the mass of information and impressions and put together some sensible presentations and pieces.

This week I have been lightly following the media brouhaha about Scott McClellan's book, which appears to be a bit of a weaseling indictment. McClellan apparently tries to tell how the members of the Bush administration--and the president himself--carried on a propaganda campaign and broke the law, while still insisting that he is loyal to Bush and that Bush is a good man. I don't think you can have it both ways.

Occasionally I get into arguments with some of my friends who are disillusioned about the war in Iraq. They usually end up asking me how it was that I argued against the war at the start. They find it hard to remember that the information was out there all along that questioned the Bush Administration's propaganda campaign.

For those of you who want a quick reference about the lies that were made in the run up to the Iraq war, you can't do better than this commentary from McClatchy's great reporters, Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay. At the time they were working for Knight-Ridder, which was bought by McClatchy.

They begin by commenting on Scott McClellan's new book, then launch into a point by point reminder of what was out there in print, for all to read. Much of the anti-war community understood this and used the reporting of Landay and Strobel to counter the shill and the hype of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon and their ilk. (Gordon still gets his stories spoon fed by the Pentagon). The commentary is here and also contains some links to important stories on the run-up to the war, including Bill Moyers' important documentary on the peddling of the war.

The McClatchy papers are the most consistently honest about foreign policy. They do real journalism, and have established themselves as the starting point.

If you get in the habit of reading them first, then watching the news, you will have an experience of good reporting separating itself from the bad.