Red Eye on the News

2009-02-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

Even though Admiral Dennis Blair, the Obama administration's Director of Intelligence, as well as journalist Chris Hedges, both attribute the current financial crisis to Wall Street greed and political incompetence -- rather than underlying contradictions of the economic system -- they both realize that economic failure has dramatic political consequences. Based on historical precedents, as well as the underlying logic of the system, this means diverting the US military to maintaining the domestic economic and political (dis)order.

Redeye

U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning: Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig, February 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/127252/

We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgnger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington's new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s.

It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.

The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund's prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent--the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.

And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state's strategies to crush potential civil unrest and you get a glimpse of the future. It doesn't look good.

"The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications," Blair told the Senate. "The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism."

The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College in November in a monograph [click on Policypointers' pdf link to see the report] titled "Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' in Defense Strategy Development." The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States," which could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse," "purposeful domestic resistance," "pervasive public health emergencies" or "loss of functioning political and legal order." The "widespread civil violence," the document said, "would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security."

"An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home," it went on.

"Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance," the document read.

In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of Defense. They are considering it. So should you.

Adm. Blair warned the Senate that "roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown." He noted that the "bulk of anti-state demonstrations" internationally have been seen in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they could not spread to the United States. He told the senators that the collapse of the global financial system is "likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year." He added that "much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international aid or credit, or other coping mechanism."

"When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we're looking for that," he said. He referred to "statistical modeling" showing that "economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period."

Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us. Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal underclass.

The committee's Republican vice chairman, Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, not quite knowing what to make of Blair's testimony, said he was concerned that Blair was making the "conditions in the country" and the global economic crisis "the primary focus of the intelligence community."

The economic collapse has exposed the stupidity of our collective faith in a free market and the absurdity of an economy based on the goals of endless growth, consumption, borrowing and expansion. The ideology of unlimited growth failed to take into account the massive depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming and climate change. The huge international flows of unregulated capital have wrecked the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which will soon deflate), wild tech, stock and housing financial bubbles, unchecked greed, the decimation of our manufacturing sector, the empowerment of an oligarchic class, the corruption of our political elite, the impoverishment of workers, a bloated military and defense budget and unrestrained credit binges have conspired to bring us down. The financial crisis will soon become a currency crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.

The corporate thieves, those who insisted they be paid tens of millions of dollars because they were the best and the brightest, have been exposed as con artists. Our elected officials, along with the press, have been exposed as corrupt and spineless corporate lackeys. Our business schools and intellectual elite have been exposed as frauds. The age of the West has ended. Look to China. Laissez-faire capitalism has destroyed itself. It is time to dust off your copies of Marx.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

A change in U.S. policy toward Israel?

2009-02-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

The following article in the California State University Sundial calling for the United States to dissolve its "special relationship" with Israel is well-written, got some positive comments, as well as the expected ad hominum attacks on the author, Prof. David Klein.

While there is a chance that US policy will change in the direction he proposes, it is highly doubtful that it will not be enough and would be done for the wrong reasons.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, largely realizes that since 1967, and especially under presidents Clinton and Bush Jr., the U.S. government bent over too far in support of the expansionists in Israel, which means all of Israel's political parties to the right of Meretz (Israel's Kucinich types). In other words, about 90 percent of the new K'nesset either wants to keep all the settlements in occupied territories, proceed with apartheid, and maintain the seige on Gaza. The moderates among them, such as the Labor Party, want to move down the same path, but with a token bantustan on parts of the West Bank headed by the Palestinian Authority. As for Gaza, I gather the generall hoping to displace Hamas and bring in the PA to do their bidding.

This legacy causes problems for the U.S. in the Middle East when it faces an Iraq dominated by pro-Iranian Shiite parties, an Afghanistan dominated by the Sunni Taliban, a nuclear-armed independent Pakistan, and loss of any credibility for the many Arab dictatorships propped up by the U.S. So, following the arguments of Wald and Meirsheimer, authors of the Israel Lobby, they want to make some mid-course corrections and push harder for a two state solution to try get out of the maze they have created.

But, even if the Obama Administration manages to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority into such a "solution" I doubt if it will work. Israel will still be an "ethnocracy" run by a business elite, and the little Palestinian state would either be run by the repressive, corrupt, neo-liberals of Fatah or the clerical fascists of Hamas. Both of these parties already operate a modified police pre-state, with death squads, beatings, knee cappings, and incarceration for their Palestinian competitors. And, both would end up being the agents for foreign and Israeli foreign investors, NGO's, and government aid programs.

As for the one state and even the regional solutions which appeal to many progressives, the big questions are still there. Who would run the place? How would they rule it, and for whose benefit? Who would get the short end of the stick? To simply say the one state or the regional authority would be a secular democracy totally dodges these critical questions. The U.S. is such a secular, democratic, settler state, and it is hardly a great model because the democratic part is so flawed and the economic inequality is so great. Ditto for South Africa, which ended apartheid, but not racism and economic stratification.

Daily Sundial

Support for Israel must stop

David Klein / Professor of Mathematics, CSUN

Published: Friday, February 6, 2009

When an impoverished Palestinian boy confronts an Israeli tank in front of his home, how do you explain to American taxpayers that the tank is David and the boy is Goliath?

Apologists for Israel’s devastating attack on the civilian population of Gaza last month would face a task of biblical proportions, were it not for the dearth of information available to the American people.

Israel dropped hundreds of bombs and rained white phosphorus on the Gaza Strip in a three-week period beginning Dec. 27, 2008. The Palestinian population was attacked by U.S. built F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters.

The extent of the damage is staggering. At least 37 United Nations schools were destroyed or damaged during the attack. Forty mosques were destroyed. Tanks bombed hospitals and ambulances, the University of Gaza was leveled to the ground, and white phosphorus bombs obliterated the United Nation’s main food storage facility.

Refugee centers were targeted and suffered heavy casualties. Israeli soldiers killed healthcare workers whose only “crime” was attending to the wounded.

More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed and over 5,000 were crippled, many with loss of limbs or eyesight. Half the victims were women, children and the elderly.

Entire neighborhoods were demolished, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Some survivors describe Israeli tanks arriving in front of homes and ordering families to come out. As children, old people and women came forward, in some cases with white flags, they were shot and killed on the spot.

By contrast, the number of Israeli deaths was 13, including four victims of “friendly fire.”
Israel sealed off Gaza in advance of the attack. No one was allowed to leave without a foreign passport. Women, children, the elderly, and the infirm were not permitted to flee to safety. They were forced to remain in the world’s largest open-air prison with no protection from Israel’s chemical weapons, bombs, and bullets.

Gaza, with its 1.5 million people, is the most densely populated region in the world. Since 2005, well before Hamas came to power, Gaza has suffered from an Israeli military blockade that restricts food, medicine, and other vital supplies. The tunnels from Gaza to Egypt, that Israel has repeatedly bombed, provide essential routes for the transport of basic necessities.

Pro-Israel propagandists justify the attack by charging that Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, broke a six-month cease-fire by launching rockets into Israel. But the facts tell a different story. A December 2008 report entitled “The Six Months of the Lull Arrangement” stated it was Israel, not Hamas, which broke the cease-fire.

According to the Israeli Intelligence report, between June 19 and Nov. 4, 2008, “Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire.” Then on Nov. 4, Israeli forces attacked and killed seven Palestinians in Gaza.

The report further explains, “In retaliation, Hamas and the other terrorist [sic] organizations attacked Israel with a massive barrage of rockets...” Thus, even the Israeli government admits that Israel broke the truce.

In contrast, the mainstream press, which functions as the public relations arm of Israel, blames the victims of Israel’s attack for their own suffering. Not mentioned in the Israeli Defense Ministry report, however, is the failure of Israel to lift the military blockade, as per agreement of the cease-fire, in itself a war crime.

Israel’s most recent violation of the truce agreement with Hamas is not an anomaly. By a wide margin, it is Israel that most often initiates violence.

An analysis entitled “Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?” written by faculty members at MIT and Tel Aviv University, and a graduate student at Harvard, found during the span of years 2000 to 2008, “79 percent of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8 percent were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13 percent were interrupted by both sides on the same day).” Even more significant, “of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96 percent, and it unilaterally interrupted 100 percent of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.”

Zionism calls for a Jewish state. Israel defines Jewishness, in part, in genetic terms. A person is legally Jewish if his or her mother is Jewish, regardless of place of birth or religious belief.

In pursuit of a Zionist agenda, Israel has followed a 60-year program of ethnic cleansing, including expulsion of the Palestinian population, military occupation, and mass murder.
The attack of Gaza is only the latest in a long history of crimes against humanity. Ariel Sharon summarized Israel’s national goals when he said in 1983, “the only good Arab is a dead Arab.”

Spain’s highest court has recently launched an investigation of crimes against humanity by Israeli leaders stemming from a 2002 bombing of civilians in Gaza. If the identified officials fail to appear in Madrid, the High Court will likely issue international warrants for their arrest.

It is long past due for Americans, including CSUN students, to call upon our government to end its billions of dollars of support of Israel.

For references and more information, see Prof. Klein’s web page:

www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/boycott.html

Doubts about "the left" supporting Hamas

2009-02-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

Feb. 12, 2009

Response to a post from a Belgian activist about how the “left” should support Hamas as an expression of Palestinian resistance to imperialism.

The point is not whether anti-imperialists are religious or not, the question is their class politics.
In this case Hamas, based on their charter, is an expressly anti-communist organization which openly supports the capitalist mode of production. So, what does that say about the nature of their anti-imperialism?

Or, do we support all anti-imperialists regardless of their class position and type of society they would establish upon their anti-imperialist victory. And, what about their history of support from wealthy aristocrats and business interests in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as the Mossad in the 1980s?

But, let me push the question further. What is meant by the author's terms "the left", especially when the class politics of Hamas are not discussed or evaluated?

Plus, what of the role of the Israeli working class? Depending on the polls, between 5 -10 percent of the Israeli public opposed the Gaza War, and other polls indicate majority support for a two state solution. While obviously a weak solution, it could establish Hamas as the ruling party of Gaza, and possibly the West Bank, after the elimination of the Israeli occupation of those two areas. Furthermore, most Israelis, especially Israeli workers, are victimized by the Israeli state through economic exploitation, a reduced standard of living because of high military expenditures, and being conscripted for the military. How do they fit into the author's or Hamas's anti-imperialism?

And, where does one draw the line with all those who subjectively or objectively present themselves as anti-imperialists? After all, in WWII fascist Japan took up arms against British and American imperialism. They even made appeals to other countries in Asia to join their military efforts to force these Europeans and Euro-Americans out of Asia, so it could be controlled by Asians and not by foreigners. For that matter, Nazi Germany was militantly opposed to British, French, and US imperialism, and actually had some success in places like Lithuania and the Ukraine in generating support from local religious nationalists.

Red Eye

2008-12-25T11:55:00.000-08:00

Paul Richter, of the LA Times, has done a comprehensive review of the decline of the United States in comarison to its rivals, whether other great power or regional powers, such as those in Latin America. While few now differ with his observation that the US is a great power in decline, they would challenge two of his conclusions.

First, the decline of the United States is a long-term process, with the most critical events in defeat in Vietnam in 1972, not a result of the Bush administration's efforts to invade and control Iraq.

Since then wages have been static or in decline for most employees.

Second, while some liberal foreign policy analysts, like Charles Kupchan, would support the gradual retrenchment of the US empire, most of the insiders are as committed as ever to military force -- for examply in Afghanistan -- to maintain U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.

This means that decline does not usually promote disarmament, but is still one more force promoting militiarism and war. In fact, these trends were clearly underway under before Bush II, and will continue under the continuity government of Obama.

Whre will the trends lead us? Mostlikely to expanded military activity in the Middle East.

Redeye

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/mideastemail/la-fg-bush-world25-2008dec25,0,7822916.story

From the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 25, 2008

Bush a catalyst in America's declining influence

The president oversaw a period of eroding economic and political power, in which the rise of China, India and others was a major factor, but assisted by an aversion to him and his policies.

By Paul Richter

Reporting from Washington — First in a series of occasional reports on President Bush's legacy.As President Bush's term comes to a close, the United States has the world's largest economy and its most powerful military. Yet its global influence is in decline.

The United States emerged from the Cold War a solitary superpower whose political and economic leverage often enabled it to impose its will on others. Now, America usually needs to build alliances -- and often finds that other powers aren't willing to go along.In the 1990s, America exerted leadership in all the remote corners of the globe, from the southern cone of South America to Central Asia.

Now, the United States has largely left the field in many regions, leaving others to step forward. Bush has been blamed widely for the erosion of American prestige. And the decline in U.S. influence is partly the result of the reaction to his invasion of Iraq, his campaign against Islamic militants and his early disdain for treaties and international bodies.

But the shift is also a result of independent forces, though hastened by an aversion to Bush. These include the steady ascent of China, India and other developing countries that throughout the last decade have seen their economies grow, amassing wealth and quietly extending their reach. As smaller countries have built economic and political ties to these rising powers, they have worked to free themselves from exclusive dependence on the United States."There is no return to the time when the United States was the 'indispensable power,' " said Stewart M. Patrick, a former State Department official at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The world has moved on."

Now there are multiple power centers. The institutions that buttressed Western power, such as the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, are under pressure to allow rising powers more influence.A vivid illustration of the power shift came Nov. 15, when Bush convened world leaders in Washington to develop plans for dealing with the global economic crisis. In the old days, experts said, he would have limited the meeting to a few industrial powers. But Bush realized that the world economy now has a larger cast of influential players, and invited all members of the so-called Group of 20 developed and developing nations, which includes countries such as Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey.

A decade ago, the U.S. might have been able to bring enough economic pressure on its own to force an end to Iran's disputed nuclear program, said Nikolas K. Gvosdev, professor of national security studies at the Naval War College. But Iran has built economic ties to China and India, among others, so the United States has to assemble a much larger group if it hopes to force Tehran's hand."

Ten years ago, the U.S. was generally the only game in town, and it had the power to close or crack open the door to Iran," Gvosdev said. "Now other countries have more options. . . . This doesn't mean the United States is weak, but it can't unilaterally impose what it wants."

The U.S. National Intelligence Council issued a report this year, "Global Trends 2025," that notes a shift of economic power from the West to the East that is "without precedent." In 2025, the United States will "remain the single most powerful country, but will be less dominant," it predicts.Since World War II, the United States has led by its power of persuasion, as well as its economic might. But other countries' unhappiness with the Iraq war and the conduct of the Bush administration's "global war on terror," means that the "American brand is less legitimate and its persuasive powers are compromised," said Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations.

There also has been a dwindling of U.S. influence as the administration has focused most of its energy and resources on the Middle East and Southwest Asia, leaving much less for Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America and other regions. Many are going their own way, developing new ties among neighbors. Latin American countries, for example, are building an organization called the Union of South American Nations and a NATO-like defense alliance called the South American Defense Council. The United States, long dominant in the hemisphere, is pointedly excluded from both.An 8-year-old group called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with Russia, China, and four Central Asian states, has been slowly developing, in part because some members want a bulwark against U.S. involvement in the region.

Other countries are leading diplomatic initiatives that once would have been the province of the United States.Qatar has taken the lead in brokering a deal between Syria and Lebanon, and Turkey has been acting as an intermediary between Israel and Syria.

As the United States' political standing has eroded, its economy has remained powerful. Its gross domestic product of $14 trillion a year dwarfs China's $7 trillion, adjusted for purchasing power.Yet American influence on world economic policy is declining, too. One sign: the failure of the United States and its allies to sell a new agreement to the World Trade Organization in the face of opposition from China, India and other nations."

The influence of the U.S. private sector is as strong as ever," said Gary C. Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "But the United States is much less able to shape world policy these days."Many analysts expect that the economic crisis, for which the U.S. is blamed by much of the world, will convince many countries that they shouldn't emulate the loosely regulated American economic model.

Another development is the weakening of U.S. ties with Europe. Once, when they formed a common front on an issue, they had enormous leverage.The rift over the Iraq war has largely healed, but Europe continued to differ with the Bush administration on important issues, including climate change and Russia's resurgence.

Many analysts predict growing frictions over the joint effort in Afghanistan."There's a rebalancing of power away from the West," Kupchan said, "but also within the West."

paul.richter@latimes.com

Dialog with an Israeli Peace Activist

2008-11-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

Your analysis analysis of Obama is quite accurate. There is no doubt that most of those in the U.S. who call themselves "progressive" which means liberals, left-liberals, and much of what is left of the old and new lefts, are ecstatic about Obama's election. My best guess is that this enthusiasm stems from two reasons:

1) The progressives despised W at the personal and political level and think Obama is Bush's anti-thesis.

2) The progressives heard the campaign buzz-words of "Hope," "Yes, we can!" and "Change you can believe in,", learned about Obama's initial pre-Senate opposition to an invasion of Iraq, and then optimistically projected their own anti-war views onto Obama.

But, reality is already setting in. The Rahm Emanuel appointment as Chief-of-Staff is the first show to drop. He is a very right wing, militaristic Clinton Democrat, who is a hawk on Iraq and Israel.

Then, Obama assembled his team of economic advisers, and they are nearly all drawn from the worlds of finance and corporate CEO's. Even the few outsiders are from old Clinton circles, such as Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor, and LA's Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, a strong Clinton supporter whose economic approach to city government consists of hiring cops and greasing the wheels for large real estate projects.

As for the mass movement you wrote about, I agree it is truly needed, but hard to generate at this point since most of its potential leaders were and still are strong Obama supporters. I am already hearing their reasons for sticking with Obama and not engaging in protest: "McCain would have been worse." "If we criticize Obama, we undermine his mandate." Or, "We knew he was not a progressive, so what is the surprise." And, "Obama has inherited an awful domestic and international situations, so he must go slow."

If I had to guess how the next four years will unfold, I imagine Clinton facing much deeper domestic economic crises and foreign challenges to U.S. hegemony, especially throughout the Middle East. While there will be some sharp internal debates at the White House, the Clinton outlook will prevail, which means largely neo-liberal approaches to the economy: dramatic cutbacks in public services combined with a stimulus package which will funnel billions to private contractors close to the Democrats for building bridges, roads, and maybe some transit.

As for foreign policy, there will be a few cosmetic changes, such as revoking legal justifications for torture, but the big issues, such as the gargantuan U.S. military budget and the global military footprint of 1000 bases, will continue, but with selected military escalations in response to crises, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Israeli-Palestinian situation is probably the one which will generate the most internal debate. On one hand, there are those quiet and ignored voices in the foreign policy circles, like Walt, Mearsheimer, and Carter who know that the U.S. needs that Saudi peace plan to go through in order to sustain the US position in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions. On the other hand, the Rahm Emanuel types, already well positioned, will do all in their power to continue go no-where negotiations.

At this point, there is no evidence that the foreign policy realists, like Walt and Mearsheimer, who are willing to jettison the settlements in the occupied territories in order to prop up the U.S. empire have any traction in the Obama administration. Even the advocates of Walt and Mearsheimer-light, such as J Street, are, as far as I know, on the side-lines, though its director, Jeremey ben-Ami, worked for Clinton. Their highly prolific analyst, Daniel Levy, has not yet written a thing about the election.

Where to now with Obama Election?

At a very early stage in the campaign, I wrote to friends that though Obama is not a leftist or a part of the left, he must, in the given conditions be the candidate of the left in the United States. It was not the time for any third party fantasies. (This might be the place to suggest that any real genuine left initiative for presidential elections would have to base itself on a modicum of success in local and regional elections. A serious left would not go to national elections without any serious advanced preparation).

Symbolic Victory

I share the enthusiasm. Obama made his way to the presidency fighting the Clinton machine and the Mcarthyite sniping of the McCain gang. But more important, anyone who knows anything of the role of racism in US could not but be stirred with joy and satisfaction over Obama’s tremendous victory. This having been said, it is foolish to ignore the plain and simple fact that his core beliefs and outlook are no more than a variant of the dominant ideas in the Democratic Party. Here and there some good and pertinent ideas emerged in the context of the clash with the Republicans. However, there were innumerable examples of wrong and very dangerous positions (Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, the bailout, to name a few). Barack Obama knows the sweet talk. I think that I would pay for a ticket to hear him read the telephone book. But any halfway experienced political progressive knows that “Change” and Yes, We Can” are empty and even dangerous slogans, when we do not know what changes we are talking about and what exactly “we can” do. Unity, as a superficial substitute for ideology, is simply nationalist, right-wing fodder. I cringe at the ideological terminology which either ignores the poor and the working class or enrolls and submerges their identity in the ranks of the middle class. Of course, when looking at the immediate past, any decent advocate of Obama can justify all of Obama’s political weaknesses with the argument that all this was precisely what Obama needed to do to get elected. But even those, who thus argue, will agree that this kind of rationalization would be pernicious, even dangerous if it congeals into a simple minded advance justification for potential failures and disappointments of a Obama presidency. The game is on and from this point we start keeping score.

What Has Not Changed

At this time, we know that black people in the United States are suffering increasingly painful want and poverty. This is true by virtue of a social law well known to all of us. In times of want, recession and depression the poor suffer most and the largest section of the poor is black. l am relating to an euphoric article that was sent to me as one of the best things written on the Obama success. It’s essence:

But there is one thing we can proclaim today, without question: that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America means that "The Ultimate Color Line," as the subtitle of Javits' Esquire essay put it, has, at long last, been crossed. It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him. "Root'

I understand that this was written in a moment of deep emotion, but it has been seconded by many liberals and progressives.The “Ultimate Color Line” – the election of a black president seems to be important because tens of millions of (white) Americans did vote for an African American. But the sterling qualities of Barack Obama that enable so many white voters to momentarily and conditionally suspend their racism, are not the main thing. It is a liberal illusion that the election of prominent African-Americans ensures black people’s welfare and progress. The Ultimate Color Line is the gigantic real life and statistical disparity between blacks and the white population in every facet of life – income, opportunity, health, education, administration of justice, etc. Discrimination still reigns and where there is discrimination there is the old color line. Obama’s election proves nothing in this respect and promises, I fear, little. Even the victories of the civil rights movement have yet to bear ample fruit for the masses of black people.

Who Won the Election?

Not Barack Obama. He himself explained what happened. He told the people that it was not his victory, but theirs! Much depends on whether this is just an elegant politician’s way of saying thank you for recognizing my virtues. However, if this sentence is sincere and has any real meaning, it is that Obama owes his election to a mass movement at the grass roots level. And indeed, the 2008 success is the success of the grass roots mass movement.

Is this a movement created by the application of the right technical instruments and merely an arm of the effective and efficient operation put together by the Obama machine? Praise for the success of Obama’s campaign organization tends to portray it as a top to bottom creation and stresses that it is a resource that Obama can use when needed. But in our humble opinion, the movement to elect Obama is not merely an instrument to be used when required. It is a living and breathing social entity.

Obama says the election is not the main thing and he is right. But what forces does Obama take with him to DC? He has supporters in his party but these are usually subservient to Democratic Party bureaucracy which has its own interests and agenda. He has important support in the establishment sections of the business world and the academy. But once again these people usually have their own agenda. If Barack Obama has his own clear, fighting agenda, the only fully reliable ally that he has is the grass roots movement. But he can only rely on this movement if he listens well and builds up a constant, vibrant dialogue with those who worked to get him elected. It is the presence or the absence of this dialogue that will let us know where Obama is headed.

At this point the grass root movement is still celebrating, but through the clamor it hears the footsteps of the old politics: old guard appointments, consultations with representatives of the current elite establishment, foreign policy statements based on the Bush regime’s positions that seem designed to calm potential critics in the military-industrial-foreign policy complex. Every day that goes by without emerging evidence of a developing independent mass based organization working with and for Obama is a sign that Obama is not moving in the right direction. If Obama tries to govern from the center he will dissipate his strength and fall victim to those with whom he sought to curry favor. If he allows the financial experts, in his close vicinity, to advise him that government bailouts are the way to go, he will run out of money very quickly only to realize soon enough that unity between capital and labor is a fantasy. A depression means war on the working class and the poor and yes, large parts of the middle class. If you are indeed their leader, you fight back or you are trounced for having deserted those who put you in power.

Analysis of Obama's Rahm Emanuel appointment

2008-11-10T11:24:00.000-08:00

As explained by Prof. Steve Zunes, the appointment of Rahm Emanuel to become President-Elect Barack Obama's Chief-of-Staff is significant because of Emanuel's hawkishness on Iraq, Israel, and U.S. foreign policy in general, and his opposition to anti-war Democrats gaining influence or prominence in the Democratic Party.

So, here are several obvious questions drawn from Zunes's analysis:

1) Does the Rahm appointment confirm the analysis of those who scoffed at Obama's largely successful efforts to present himself as anti-war Democrat because of his pre-Senate opposition to the Iraq war?

2) Is it the first of what will be many more such Obama appointments and policies which continue the long hawkish trajectory of the Democratic Party?

3) At what point, if any, will those many progressives who jumped on the Obama bandwagon jump off and follow through on their proclamations to "keep Obama's feet to the fire?"

Is Obama Screwing His Base with Rahm Emanuel Selection?

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet
Posted on November 7, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106189/

I had really wanted to celebrate Barack Obama's remarkable victory for a day or so before becoming cynical again. I really did.

And yet, less than 24 hours after the first polls closed, the president-elect chose as his chief of staff -- perhaps the most powerful single position in any administration -- Rahm Emanuel, one of the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.

The chief of staff essentially acts as the president's gatekeeper, determining with whom he has access for advice and analysis. Obama is known as a good listener who has been open to hearing from and considering the perspectives of those on the Left as well as those with a more centrist to conservative perspective. How much access he will actually have as president to more progressive voices, however, is now seriously in question.

Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel is a member of the so-called New Democrat Coalition (NDC), of group of center-right pro-business Congressional Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Conference, which is dedicated to moving the Democratic Party away from its more liberal and progressive base. Numbering only 58 members out of 236 Democrats in the current House of Representatives, the NDC has worked closely with its Republican colleagues in pushing through and passing such legislation as those providing President Bush with "fast-track" trade authority in order to bypass efforts by labor, environmentalists and other public interest groups to promote fairer trade policy.

Emanuel began his political career as a senior adviser and chief fundraiser for the successful 1989 Chicago mayoral campaign of Richard M. Daley to seize back City Hall from reformists who had challenged the corrupt political machine of this father, Richard J. Daley. Emanuel later became a senior adviser to Bill Clinton at the White House from 1993 to 1998, serving as Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and then Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy, and was credited with playing a major role in shifting the Clinton administration's foreign and domestic policy agenda to the right. Emanuel was the single most important official involved in pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the bill ending Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and Clinton's draconian crime bill, among other legislation.

Leaving the administration in 1998, Emanuel worked as an investment banker in Chicago, where he amassed an $18 million fortune in less than three years prior to being elected to Congress.

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since 2004, Emanuel has promoted pro-war and pro-business center-right candidates against anti-war and pro-labor candidates in the primaries, pouring millions of dollars of donations from Democrats across the country into the campaigns of his favored conservative minions to defeat more progressive challengers.

Emanuel was a major supporter of the Iraq War resolution that authorized the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he was the only one of nine Democratic members of Congress from Illinois who backed granting Bush this unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States at the time. Even more disturbingly, when asked by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" whether he would have voted to authorize the invasion "knowing that there are no weapons of mass destruction," Emanuel answered that he indeed would have done so, effectively acknowledging that his support for the war was not about national security, but about oil and empire. Not surprisingly, he has also voted with the Republicans in support of unconditional funding to continue the Iraq War and has consistently opposed efforts by other Democrats to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from that country and related Congressional efforts to end the war.

At a time of record budget deficits, Emanuel has been a passionate supporter of increased spending for the Pentagon and has resisted efforts by fellow Democrats to trim excesses in the Bush administration's bloated military budget. For example, he has repeatedly voted against amendments to cut funding for Bush's dangerously destabilizing missile defense and even voted against an amendment to identify unnecessary Pentagon spending by examining the need, relevance and cost of Cold War weapons systems designed to fight the former Soviet Union.

A major hawk regarding Iran, Emanuel has also voted against Democratic efforts to prevent the Bush administration from launching military action against that country and has joined the administration in exaggerated claims about Iran's alleged nuclear threat. He is not opposed to nuclear proliferation if it involves U.S. allies, however. Emanuel has consistently voted against a series of Democratic amendments that would have strengthened safeguards in the Bush administration's nuclear cooperation agreement with India to prevent U.S. assistance from supporting India's nuclear weapons program.

Emanuel is also a prominent hawk regarding Israel, attacking the Bush administration from the right for criticizing Israel's assassination policies and other human rights abuses. He was also a prominent supporter of Israel's 2006 attacks on Lebanon, even challenging the credibility of Amnesty International and other human rights groups that reported Israeli violations of international humanitarian law. Emanuel's father had emigrated from Israel in the 1950s, where he had been a member of the terrorist group Irgun, which had been responsible for a series of terrorist attacks against Palestinian and British civilians in mandatory Palestine during the 1940s. Emanuel himself served in a civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early 1990s.

It is unclear how serious of a blow Obama's selection of Emanuel is to those who hoped that Obama might actually steer the country in a more progressive direction. It's easy to see it as nothing less than a slap in the face of the progressive anti-war elements of the party to whom Obama owes his election, particularly following his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as vice president. (See my articles "Biden's Foreign Policy 'Experience'" and "Biden, Iraq, and Obama's Betrayal.")

However, this does not necessarily mean that Obama as president will pursue nothing better than a Clintonesque center-right agenda. Someone with Obama's intelligence, knowledge and leadership qualities need not be unduly restricted by the influence of his chief of staff as less able presidents have. At the same time, this shocking appointment of Emanuel is illustrative of the need for the progressive base that brought him to power to not celebrate too long and to refocus our energies into pushing hard to ensure that the change Obama promised is something we really can believe in.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/106189

Excellent analysis of the political-economy of current crises

2008-10-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System

http://monthlyreview.org/081006tabb.php

By William Tabb, Monthly Review, October 15, 2008

This essay examines aspects of the global political economy that I hope will inform progressive governments and movements for social change. It evaluates the constraints and opportunities presented in the current conjuncture of world capitalist development by analyzing four areas of crisis in the contemporary world capitalist system. These are not the only contradictory elements in the contemporary conjuncture, but they are, in my view, the most salient.

The first problem is the financial turbulence that has gripped the economy of the United States and has had widespread effects. It is a crisis that further discredits mainstream Anglo-American economics. I do not know that it is the crisis of capitalism. For this to be the case it would not only have to become much deeper, but its impacts would have to be felt more dramatically as a systemic failure. Most importantly, a party formation capable of explaining how such crises are inherent in the nature of the functioning of capitalism and of inspiring a socialist alternative would have to mobilize a movement of the sort that ended apartheid in South Africa. Without the last, even a deep and painful crisis will be, at best, only the occasion for reforming and not abolishing capitalism.

A second crisis is that of U.S.-led imperialism, which has been discredited both in terms of its regime-change-wars-of-choice and the increasingly effective resistance to the international financial and trade regime we know as the Washington Consensus. Because of the incalculable harm neoliberalism has done, and continues to do, it is now ideologically on the defensive. A third point of crisis is the rise of new centers of power in what had been the peripheries of the capitalist system and the tensions this has unleashed, providing room to maneuver for countries wishing to break with the United States. A fourth area of crisis has to do with resource usage, the uneven distribution of the necessities of life, and a growth paradigm that is no longer sustainable. Here grassroots social movements in South Africa and elsewhere are leading actors in resisting privatizations and the imposition of a hyper-individualism that brings disaster for the most oppressed and exploited.

Crisis One: Financialization and Financial Crisis1

How much damage the current financial meltdown will cause remains to be seen, but the harm is already extensive. At the level of systemic crisis an important issue relates not just to the economic costs and the way rescue operations are premised on tax payer bailout, but whether financial capitalism can sustain itself. Martin Wolf, the Financial Times senior economic columnist, writes about capitalism "mutating" from "mid-20th century managerial capitalism into global financial capitalism."2 John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, argues "that although the system has changed as a result of financialization... financialization has resulted in a new hybrid phase of the monopoly stage of capitalism that might be termed ‘monopoly-finance capital.'"3 Finance has been able to restructure productive capitalism, the economy that actually produces real goods and services people consume. In a new way it appropriates more and more of the surplus created in the processes of production, not only in the core, but in what has been the periphery of the world system.

Taken as a whole the corporate profits of the financial sector of the U.S. economy in 2004 were $300 billion, compared to $534 billion for all nonfinancial domestic industries, or about 40 percent of all domestic corporate profits. They had been less than 2 percent of total domestic corporate profits forty years earlier, a remarkable indication of the growth of financialization in the U.S. political economy. This was both an economic and a political development, as the financial sector gained leverage over the rest of the economy, in effect gaining the power to dictate priorities to debtors, vulnerable corporations, and governments. As its power grew, it could demand greater deregulation, allowing it to grow still further and endangering the stability of the larger economic system.

It seemed that finance had developed a new magical M-M' circuit, in which money could be made solely out of money, without the intervention of actual production. The new secret of accumulation was presumed to be leverage and risk management, which allowed the purchase of assets that promised higher returns even if they carried a higher risk, and the borrowing of many times the amount the investor had in equity capital—perhaps ten, twenty, thirty, or in some cases a hundred times as much. When so highly leveraged, even a small rise in value could return great profit on the initial investment. Given global markets, the money might be borrowed at low interest rates in Japanese yen and invested in high return U.S. financial assets, junk bonds, and derivatives of all sorts.

So long as asset values rose, whether in bundles of mortgages in collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), or more exotic products, investors made a great deal of money. This encouraged others to copy these strategies, to bid up asset prices. The increasing value of these assets allowed even greater borrowing to purchase still more, further bidding up prices, in an upward spiral producing bubbles that eventually popped. Financialization as an accumulation strategy has brought not only severe crisis with the failure of financial markets but has put the United States in a position resembling that of a poor nation in debt to foreign creditors—its currency declining, its trade policies favoring elites, and its government demanding that some taxpayers pay more to recapitalize the financial system while providing more tax cuts to the affluent and corporations.

Toxic collateralized debt obligations are featured in most discussions, but a central aspect of financialization is the growth in debt itself: government debt (much of it the result of military spending and tax cuts and other "incentives" for corporations and the rich), consumer debt of all kinds, and corporate debt. The explosion in debt creation has powered an economy that has strong stagnationist tendencies. The irrationality of a class divided society is that profits accruing to corporations will not be reinvested to produce things people and the society as a whole need and want, because the purchasing power of the working class is kept limited and the corporate rich will not pay the taxes needed by the state sector to provide desired public goods.

There is an overinvestment in capacity to produce that cannot be utilized within an irrational social structure in which the only effective demand is that backed by adequate purchasing power. Overproduction in the midst of unmet social needs characterizes the system, as does pressure on workers everywhere to take lower compensation as a result of the class power of capital and its ability to pit workers against each other. The surplus produced and appropriated by capital cannot find outlets in production and spills over into financial speculation where it is absorbed in speculative bubbles that eventually collapse, spreading chaos and pain through the economy.

Beyond these general tendencies is the connection between financialization and rising inequalities and the declining economic fortunes of most working-class people as prices for basics—home heating oil, gasoline, health care, and food—have soared. In the United States, where the victory of shareholder capitalism has been extreme (as opposed to stakeholder capitalism in which workers, communities, and the public are also considered interested parties whose views and needs must to a greater extent be taken into consideration), workers have been squeezed the hardest.

During the Bush presidency, the United States lost one in five manufacturing jobs and that too is part of financialization and globalization. Wages have been pushed down, pension benefits curtailed, health care burdens shifted onto workers and their families, employees made to work part-time or fired and hired back as "temporary" workers, and so on—all in order to meet profit targets and to finance the huge debts companies are burdened with as a result of widespread borrowing to finance takeovers. More people are working part-time or as temporary workers and are pessimistic about the prospects of their children. They see their government captured by the corporations and the wealthy.

Widespread popular pessimism is justified because three trends interact to make the prospects of the majority of U.S. workers bleak. The first is continued globalization of the production of goods and services to lower-wage venues. Less skilled work can be done more cheaply elsewhere. Further, no amount of education can preserve many jobs that can be done by well educated workers in India, China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Second, technology increases output per worker, meaning that each worker can produce more, and when demand for output does not expand faster than their productivity, fewer workers are needed. We see this in basic industries such as auto and steel that once employed far more production workers. Third, the jobs that are expanding are mostly low paid, nonunionized McJobs. Furthermore, the unrelenting attack on unions starting with Ronald Reagan's destruction of the air traffic controller's union set the precedent for using replacement workers to break strikes, not to mention the ability of owners—thanks to National Labor Relations Board connivance—to fire workers.

Anglo-American expertise in finance was presumed to be the lever that would ensure the continued prosperity of these economies. Having pioneered the growth of financialization in their own economies, promoting growth through the creation of vast amounts of debt, and forcing its financial regime and rules on the developing world through the mediation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, capital has been expanding financial operations into the so-called emerging markets. Now we see a meltdown on Wall Street and the irony of foreign sovereign wealth funds and other investors having to rescue the pillars of the U.S. financial empire. How should we understand these contradictory developments? This is a political question. It needs to be answered like any other economic matter in which a small elite benefit at the expense of the many. Its solution should not be how to allow them to continue to do so but how to force social regulation so they cannot do so.

It is here that the loyal opposition, in the United States the Democratic Party, in Europe the social democrats, and third-way triangulators everywhere, by essentially accepting the power of capital, lose the respect of working people, who now must self-organize by creating anticapitalist parties if they are to defend their interests and change the social relations that promise only a future of further exploitation. In Die Linke, the German party formation far to the left of the Social Democrats, we see a successful example of such a party, which is becoming a force in that country's politics. As noted later in this essay, in Latin America, the continent with the longest experience with the devastation of neoliberalism, the masses have supported a variety of left parties that promise to one degree or another to break with capitalist social relations.

Crisis Two: U.S. Imperialism—Losing Hegemony

There have been two recent failures of U.S. imperialism: the discrediting of the neoliberal Washington Consensus and the revulsion against the shock and awe violence of Washington's arrogant militarism. The growing condemnations qualify, I think, as a crisis for the continued easy exercise of hegemony and for the ruling-class presumption that it has the capacity unilaterally to run the world. After the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the hubris of the Bush neocons has been discredited and their program of wars and conquest has been questioned and perhaps now rejected by most Americans.

One faction of this ruling class has seen international trade and finance regimes favoring U.S. capital as key. The other wing has been quick to threaten and take military action to reassert and impose U.S. hegemony. The U.S. ruling class always employs both strategies, but the balance between the two shifts with the state of the world and domestic politics.4 The two dominant ideological factions of this class can be characterized by looking at the most powerful cabinet figures and policies of two recent presidents. The key figure in Bill Clinton's administration was Robert Rubin, the secretary of the treasury. Under Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense was the most powerful.

Of course, the dominant figure in the administration is Vice President Cheney, a man of incomparable devious devotion to an imperial presidency and the rewarding of a small elite, willing to use whatever means necessary to intimidate and destroy opposition at home and abroad. With Clinton, although the projection of U.S. power and use of violence were important, the spreading of the Washington Consensus was the key foreign policy. Under Bush it was shock and awe. Today both strategies are proving unsuccessful to a remarkable extent. The failure of the Washington Consensus to bring development is widely recognized, and despite its imposition on dozens of countries in the 1980s and 1990s, it is now being effectively resisted around the world. Again, this is not to say that both policies have not done and continue to do great damage.

Let me comment briefly first on U.S. militarism and then more fully on the demise of the Washington Consensus. Americans were led into a war in Iraq on the basis of lies and are now unconvinced that the attack on Iraq was a good thing. There is a dawning understanding that the United States not only lost Iraq but that the situation in Afghanistan is further revealing an inability to occupy and enforce regime change and imperialist stability. The increased awareness that such adventurism is bankrupting the country while domestic priorities like health care and jobs with adequate pay need to be the priority is challenging imperial America from within to an extent not previously seen.

Many Americans may still support the assertion of national power in easy victories over weaker "enemies," but they have had their fill of long, drawn out, costly misadventures. For many, the charade of "Mission Accomplished" has produced reactions ranging from unease to hatred of those who think them stupid and so easy to manipulate. U.S. imperial ambitions in Iraq have led to much elite soul searching, and they have promoted popular opposition not only abroad but increasingly at home where the claim to be spreading democracy and fostering development are wearing thin. Globally these pretenses are thoroughly discredited. The decline of U.S. credibility and hegemonic power is a major part of what is new in the world system.

Last year on the tenth anniversary of the East Asian financial crisis, two points were widely made. The first was the acknowledgment that capital market liberalization had brought instability and not growth. Even studies by International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists came to this conclusion. A paper coauthored by the chief economist of the IMF concluded that it is difficult to make a convincing connection between financial integration and economic growth once other factors are taken into account. The sudden stop of capital inflow can be devastating. Second, neoliberal policies were hardly mistakes. It is clear that neoliberal ideologues and Wall Street interests pushed policies that harmed debtor countries while the financiers profited from financial liberalization. It is not only radical leftists who now hold this view.5

What took place in countries forced into accepting Washington Consensus neoliberal policies was a process of accumulation by dispossession—a construct introduced by David Harvey.This is a process in which working people are divested of their assets and their rights. He has in mind the privatization of water, health care, and education, goods that had been or should be entitlements. The sale of these things in private markets dispossessed those who could not afford what should have been theirs by right. The term is a propos of what has happened in the aftermath of financial crises. Global state economic governance institutions have imposed structural adjustment programs and conditionalities that, in privatizing public goods, dispossess people through debt repayment, the loss of government benefits, and the liberalization of the local economy to the benefit of foreign investors and domestic elites.

When the United States got in trouble in 2007, Washington rescued financial institutions, rather than imposing the harsh medicine it advocated and forced on others. Instead, it lowered interest rates and bailed out those responsible for the crisis. Moreover, after decades of denouncing the unsophisticated banking structures and practices and crony capitalism of the third world, the United States financial system was revealed as incompetent. The presumed sophistication of bank risk-assessment models were shown as so much hogwash. The dishonesty revealed in the subprime market was far more extensive than anything found in any developing nation. Rather than letting the value of financial assets find their equilibrium level in transparent markets, the U.S. Treasury tried to organize a cartel to prevent this process and to shore up the housing market and save the collateralized debt instruments from collapsing, much at odds with what the Treasury Department had recommended to others. As Martin Wolf wrote, "Not for a long time will people listen to U.S. officials lecture on the virtues of free financial markets with a straight face."6 Of course, countries like South Africa are left with heavy debt burdens and the neoliberal policies embraced by the Mbeki government, while the United States itself follows far different policies.

One impact of this unmasking of the interests that benefited from the Washington Consensus policies was a rush by Western leaders to invite the now more significant developing countries to take a greater role, to be given greater voting rights, and to exercise more power in the Bretton Woods institutions. By 2007, when the developing economies were accounting for a far larger share of the world economy and many were growing significantly faster than the richer economies that had long dominated these regimes, we began to hear statements such as the one from Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, that the IMF could "slip into obscurity" without radical reform.7 That the developed countries with 15 percent of the global population hold 60 percent of the voting power at the IMF and World Bank is perhaps finally no longer in their own interests.

On the diplomatic front, there have been proposals to broaden the G-8. Philip Stephens, the chief political commentator of the Financial Times, proposes expansion to a G-13 by adding the IBSA countries (India, Brazil, and South Africa), along with Mexico and China. The idea of such expansion according to World Bank President Robert Zoellick is that they are being invited to become "responsible stakeholders."8 It may be that the reorganization of the world economy is producing a more inclusive transnational capitalist class with a global interpenetration of ownership most prominently through sovereign wealth funds but more commonly through a diversification of ownership on a global scale and the increased interaction among elites.9

At the same time, discontent with growing inequalities and the arrogance of capital, local and foreign, has created local movements for fundamental change and awareness through venues such as the World Social Forum that another world is possible. There are conflicting pressures on the governments of the South, from capitalists at home, the masses below, and governments and international agencies representing foreign capital above. While there is at the moment the expectation that these governments will generally throw their lot in with the traditional imperial powers, there has been increasing popular pressure against this.

There is of course the likelihood that financialization centered in the North will continue to grow in the countries of the South, with banks and other financial institutions (many foreign-owned) appropriating a larger slice of the surplus. Such a repetition of the historic pattern of the penetration of imperialist finance in these countries will undoubtedly produce new and more severe crises and once again the people will have to bear the cost. The alternative would have to be a fundamental shift to social control over capital. We will have to use what we have learned in opposing neoliberalism to say no to the growth of high-risk finance and its depredations.

On the positive side, some third world governments have shifted in a progressive direction, sometimes in an effort to strike a better bargain for local capital, sometimes because of genuine commitment to a social agenda, and often as the result of a compromised tension between the interests at stake. In Latin America, after periods of military rule and neoliberal policy dominance, Mercosur under Brazilian leadership has put a crimp in the U.S. attempt to form a Free Trade Area of the Americas. As a single market, it is the world's sixth largest economy. With 260 million people and a combined Gross Domestic Product of over four trillion dollars, it represents a formidable development.

The more radical Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) promotes not only regional solidarity but social transformation based on socialist goals and ideals. In 2007 the Mercosur and ALBA countries created a Banco del Sur (Bank of the South) to offer an alternative development finance instrument premised on solidarity and totally rejecting Washington's thinking and controls.10 Some of the member countries have withdrawn from the IMF and the World Bank. The Banco del Sur operates on a one country, one vote principle and, building on the Venezuelan Bank for Economic and Social Development priorities, favors cooperatives and community ownership, offering below-market interest rates to public and social enterprises. With a proposed capitalization of seven billion dollars, it represents a serious challenge to the U.S.-controlled Bretton Woods Institutions as well as the Washington-dominated neoliberal Inter-American Bank.

The changes in the region have been dramatic as leftist governments have come to power. In 2005 South America accounted for 80 percent of IMF outstanding loans. Today the region's borrowing accounts for less than 1 percent of the IMF global loan portfolio. Along with the Banco del Sur there is talk of a regional monetary system so that bilateral trade can take place in domestic currencies with a goal of eventually creating a common currency for the region.

Social movements are pushing the Banco del Sur to take a more grassroots approach, to reject mega infrastructure (as pushed by Brazil) that supports monocultures including agrofuels, and instead finance local infrastructure to support food and energy sovereignty, produce generic medicines, and extend membership to other countries of the South. Such formations—always a mix of transformational and reformist elements—illustrate important historical momentum. The failures of the Washington Consensus and the increased strength of alternative centers of power, both of the left and the national-developmentalist right, are reshaping the global political economy. Also significant is the great weakening of the U.S. dollar—its former strength having been both a result and a source of U.S. power.

We are now witnessing the loss of what Charles DeGaulle once called the "exorbitant privilege" of the United States, derived from its role as issuer of the international currency. George Soros, speaking to the World Economic Forum in January of 2008, suggested, "It's basically the end of a sixty-year period of continuing credit expansion based on the dollar as the reserve currency."11 The advantage the United States has enjoyed by being able to borrow in its own currency has been undercut by abuse, outsized current account deficits, and the buildup of dollars in foreign hands. This has progressed to the point where the money creation and lower U.S. interest rates implemented by the Federal Reserve to stave off financial collapse have driven down the currency's value and encouraged further flight from the dollar.

Given the dollar's serious decline, there would be fear of free fall if not for the fact that it is not easily replaceable in the short term. While at present about a quarter of the world's monetary reserves are in euros and two-thirds are held in U.S. dollars, there are predictions from respected sources that the euro could be a more important reserve currency than the dollar within a decade. These predictions are based on rising inflation in the United States, its large current account deficits, the costs of imperial overreach, and simulation models by leading economists.12 Of course, the economic situation continues to deteriorate everywhere; at this writing Europe is facing severe economic problems, and there is a slow down in the "emerging economies" suggesting a larger crisis than has heretofore been acknowledged. A renewed strength of the dollar could be a reflection of greater trouble elsewhere rather than economic recovery in the United States.

Finance capital has expanded in parasitic form. Not only have the masses in the South suffered but the working people of the rich countries are now being told they must bail out "their" banks and other financial institutions. The class component of this redistributive model is becoming more apparent. As the international political economy becomes more multipolar U.S. hegemony will increasingly be challenged in other areas in addition to the currency issue.

Crisis Three: The New Centers of Power

Let me turn then more broadly to the world historic phenomenon of the rise of non-Western economic and political players. In 2006, for the first time, emerging markets accounted for over 50 percent of global output. If they continue to grow at the rate they have, forecasts project a very different world by mid-century. Their rise will, I expect, prove as significant as the emergence in the late nineteenth century of Germany, Russia, and Japan. A 2006 study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers projected that in the year 2050 the Chinese economy would be almost as large as that of the United States in dollar terms, and that India would be the third largest. A year later Goldman Sachs researchers predicted China would pass the United States in 2027 and India's economy would become larger than that of the United States before 2050. Investment bankers predict Brazil's economy in 2050 will be as large as Japan's, and the Indonesian and Mexican economies will be larger than those of the United Kingdom and Germany.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers' researchers expect the "E-7" (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey) will be about 25 percent larger than the current G-7 and will be driving the growth of the global economy. Whatever one may think of the details of such projections, there is little doubt that momentous changes in relative nation-state economic standing are in the offing. The role these new economic powers play in the international political economy will matter significantly. Whether they will be prone to new crises brought on by increased financialization of the sort now plaguing the United States will also be important. Greater financialization and fragility creates new dependencies and therefore new possibilities for global crisis.

The importance of China is hard to overstate. It has already made advances in a number of parts of the world. For example, at its recent summit with forty-eight African leaders, Hu Jintao pledged to double assistance to the continent, cancel debt owed by thirty-three countries, and provide five billion dollars in concessional loans and credits. The Chinese president has also been traveling in Latin America, which is increasingly orienting its trade to Asia. Other developments in Asia, such as the move by the region's finance ministers toward creating a common currency, also have major implications for the dollar.

In Asia itself there are major historical changes underway. A recent Foreign Policy essay begins: "Northern Asia is in transition. After 60 years of U.S. domination, the balance of power in the region is shifting. The United States is in relative decline, China is on the ascent, and Japan and Korea are in flux. The implications for Washington are profound."13 What has been called a "Beijing Consensus" based on respect for sovereignty and mutual economic benefit is widely appealing as an alternative to Washington's version of spreading democracy and the "free" market by cruise missiles and economic threats. Nonetheless, China is an exploitative power repressive to its working class. It is a transitional capitalist economy in which the children of high party officials have appropriated the social wealth as a result of the defeat of socialism.

The point is not that these emerging state powers are progressive but rather that a multipolar world offers other countries some space they did not have when U.S. hegemony was unquestioned. There is emerging what Conn Hallinan calls a "consortium of convenience,"14 the drift toward a partnership among China, India, and Russia, which, if it matures, could shift global power from Washington. Russia is selling advanced military systems to both India and China and cooperating on energy. Daniel Drezner, writing in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations, describes "a coalition of the skeptical," which includes states ranging from Argentina to Pakistan and Nigeria, and a revitalization of the nonaligned movement in an anti-Americanism that is taking on renewed salience.15 It is possible then that we are entering a period where there will be more room for progressive states to maneuver.

The need for access to energy on the part of India and China is a factor in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) formed in 2001, which includes China, Russia, and the "stans" (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan). India has joined SCO and Iran, Pakistan, Mongolia, and Afghanistan have been given observer status. (The United States was pointedly denied observer status.) The SCO has declared that the United States should leave the Middle East and is emerging as a counter to NATO.16 While a country like India plays all sides in global maneuvering, it has invested tens of billions in gas and oil interests in Iran. Such actions, driven by the need for energy supplies, impact the prospects for U.S. violence toward Iran and the future of U.S. military bases in Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan. China, which in a few years will be the biggest consumer of energy in the world, has been exceedingly active all over the planet in search of energy supplies and indeed other commodities.

There is as well the emergence of a new "Seven Sisters," a term Enrico Mattei coined to describe the seven Anglo-American companies that controlled oil in the Middle East after the Second World War. Today it is not ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and the others but Russia's Gazprom, CNPC of China, Venezuela's PDVSA, Brazil's Petrobras, Saudi Aramco, and Petronas of Malaysia that are the seven giant producers. Resource nationalism is likely to grow in importance as these state-owned companies squeeze the Anglo-American companies to force additional concessions. The politics of the new Seven Sisters is, of course, diverse; the Saudis, a staunch U.S. ally, are the most powerful. That Venezuelan oil is controlled by the Chávez regime, which is trying to lead the nation toward a twenty-first century socialism, is an important development, as are new nationalizations in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Putin's takeover of Gazprom symbolizes a reawakened Russian bear.

Crisis Four: Resources and Sustainability

The final and perhaps greatest crisis is that of the availability and distribution of such critical resources as oil, food, and water. The sustainability of human life is simply not consistent with inherently wasteful capitalist growth.

The International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook tells us that 50 percent more energy will be needed in 2030 than in 2005 (after adjusting for efficiency improvements) and that almost three-fourths of this increased demand will come from developing countries, with China and India alone responsible for 45 percent of the increase in demand. After 2015, China is expected to be the planet's biggest carbon dioxide emitter, ahead of the United States, followed by India as the third largest emitter. (Other studies show China is already the biggest contributor of greenhouse gases.)

There are two political issues of some significance here. The first is that the United States and other rich countries have used the lion's share of the world's resources for a long time. Social justice requires not simply that the developing countries help ration future use of nonrenewable resources but that those who have long overconsumed bear a greater than proportionate share of the cost of such a transition. Second, there must be new patterns of human development premised on ecological concerns as well as social justice and these must take a more prominent place in the work of international councils, which now seem to accept that the only important thing is terrorism. A sixth of the world's population enjoys an energy-intensive lifestyle. As the numbers aspiring to this type of consumption grows, the planet's problems will increase. The American Dream will become much more expensive and finally unsustainable. It cannot be widely shared along present production and consumption patterns. Not only are billions of people not benefitting from global capitalism, but those who do are adding pressure to the resource base of the planet.

Today a quarter of all deaths in the world have some link to environmental factors and most of the victims are poor people who are already vulnerable due to malnutrition and lack of access to medical care. Malnutrition is likely to become a more serious issue as food prices continue to rise. Seventy-five percent of the world's poor people are rural and most of them depend on agriculture. Since it is hard for them to make a living, there is massive migration to the cities of the developing world. A billion people now live in the slums of these growing cities where they scavenge a living or eke out a marginal existence as street vendors. Agronomists tell us that almost every country in the world has the soil, water, and climate resources to grow enough food for its people to have an adequate diet.17 However, this would require serious land reform and technical and financial support. In very few places are such policies practiced, and food insecurity is said to affect close to half of humanity.

On the more hopeful side, we are seeing countries reject the World Bank's insistence that they not subsidize agriculture. Malawi, which for years hovered at the brink of famine, with five million of its thirteen million people needing emergency food aid after a disastrous 2005 maize harvest, decided to subsidize its poor farmers and was soon exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of maize thanks to the help it gave the farmers, whose yields grew dramatically. The United States, while willing to provide food aid from its agricultural surplus (grown with huge federal subsidies to U.S. farmers), refuses to assist farmers in poor countries. Even as it insists that they follow the free market, the United States undermines the ability of third-world farmers to compete by dumping free or low-cost agricultural exports in their countries.

There is a growing use of maize to produce ethanol and soy beans for diesel fuel, as well as an increased desire of large numbers of the newly affluent to consume meat. Increasingly, grains feed animals and not people. China's average caloric intake from meat consumption, for example, has doubled since 1990, and given that it takes ten pounds of grain to produce one pound of pork and double that for beef, such a growing demand has consequences for those who find the staples of life becoming too expensive for their own survival. The food-price index computed by The Economist magazine went up by 30 percent in 2007 and will go up by far more in 2008. Indeed, the United Nation's World Food Program issued an extraordinary emergency appeal on March 23, 2008, to governments to increase their collective donations by at least a half-billion dollars to fund the higher cost of their feeding seventy-three million people in close to eighty countries. They noted a 20 percent jump in food costs in just three weeks along with the impact of the increase in oil prices on shipping costs. Grain prices are rising at an annual rate of 80-90 percent. Rice prices surged 30 percent in one day in late March 2008, having doubled in the less than three months since the start of the year, provoking protests among the poor in some Asian countries where rice is a dietary staple.

At the same time, what has been called the American diet of refined white flour, corn sweeteners, and corn-fed animal fats is replacing traditional diets for too many of the world's people. Refined sugars create obesity and promote diseases such as diabetes by replacing the complex nutrients of traditional foods. The uncontrolled profit motive is destroying health and increasing medical costs dramatically as it poisons its customers with adulterated and unhealthy foods. Each of these broad areas of crisis is brought about by the normal activities of capitalists in a system that accepts the right to profit at virtually any cost. The mass media and the political system strive at all times to keep the public from understanding the heavy burden on global humanity that these systemic priorities impose.

Conclusion

In my remarks I have stressed four areas of crisis of the contemporary world system: the financial crisis, the loss of relative power by the United States, the rise of other centers of accumulation, and resource depletion and ecological crisis. The U.S. strategy remains to project military power to control oil and other resources. The other wing of the eagle is relying on appropriation of surplus through financial vehicles, but this hardly exhausts its tactics. It also demands the enforcement of protected monopoly rents by international patent and licensing regimes to protect intangible property rights, from Microsoft Windows to Big Pharma claiming ownership of the human genome. The extension of property rights and the enclosing of the scientific commons need to be (and are being) opposed by developing countries, which pay exorbitant licensing fees and are not allowed to use what in the past would be common knowledge inheritance.

Just as high-risk finance needs to be limited and socially controlled, science should be liberated so that technological progress is not artificially constrained and monopoly rents cannot be demanded. For the developing world, the strategies of both wings of the imperial eagle have been exposed.

The Washington Consensus has been discredited, and although the damage it causes continues, it has not achieved Washington's goals. There has been a uniting of much of the world into a coalition of the unwilling. If serious left-wing governments took power in many countries of the South, there could be dramatic reconstruction of the global political economy. However, those who now run these countries are hardly revolutionaries. We can expect elements of collaboration, cooperation, and contestation depending on what pressures these elites are subject to. A progressive South Africa could help shape an alternative to the Anglo-American capitalist world system and influence new centers of power that claim to represent the interests of the Global South and someday may have governments that actually do so.

Notes
1. This section draws on William K. Tabb, "The Centrality of Finance," Journal of World-Systems Research, XIII (2007), 1.
2. Martin Wolf, "Unfettered finance is Fast Reshaping the Global Economy," Financial Times (June 18, 2007).
3. John Bellamy Foster, "The Financialization of Capitalism," Monthly Review (April 2007): 1.
4. William K. Tabb "The Two Wings of the Eagle," in John Bellamy Foster and Robert W, McChesney, eds., Pox Americana: Exploring the American Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
5. Kenneth Rogoff, Eswar Prasad, Shang-Jin Wei, and M. Ayhan Kose (2003) "The Effects of Financial Globalization on Developing Countries: Some Empirical Evidence," http://www.imf.org/research.
6. Martin Wolf , "Why the Sub-Prime Crisis is a Turning Point for the World Economy," paper presented at the Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre, Nottingham University, March 5, 2008, http://globalisationandeconomicpolicy.org. The Powerpoint presentation, which is available on the Web, has a number of useful graphs and tables.
7. Krishna Guha and Chris Giles, "IMF wants more say for rising economies; Asian countries would have greater influence," Financial Times, April 5, 2008.
8. Philip Stephens, "A Table for Thirteen," Foreign Policy (January/February, 2008): 65.
9. Willaim K. Tabb, "Globalization Today; At the Borders of Class and State Theory," Science & Society (January 2009).
10. Mark Engler "Latin America Banks on Independence," In These Times (February 2008): 43.
11. Craig Karmin and Joanna Slater, "Dollar's Dive Deepens as Oil Soars," Wall Street Journal, February 29, 2008.
12. Jeffrey Frankel, "The Euro Could Surpass the Dollar Within the Next Decade," (March 18, 2008), http://www.voxeu.org. 2008.
13. Jason T. Shaplen and James Laney, "Washington's Eastern Sunset; The Decline of U.S. Power in Northeast Asia," Foreign Policy (November-December 2008): 82.
14. Conn Hallinan, "Challenging a Unipolar World," Foreign Policy in Focus, January 21 2008, http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4904.
15. Daniel W. Drezner, "The New New World Order," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2007).
16. William K. Tabb, "Fumbling Through the Great Game in Eurasia: the British and U.S. spreading ‘Freedom' through Invasion, Occupation, and Regime Change," Z Magazine (November 19, 2006).
17. Fred Magdoff "The World Food Crisis," Monthly Review (May 2008)

From:	Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL:	http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19135

2008-09-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

In the past few days we have all received many articles and posts about Sarah Palin. No doubt she is scary, but quite frankly, Obama's proposals on Pakistan and Afghanistan, which are to the right of Bush's, are much scarier. Likewise, Obama's position on Iran is as threatening as Bush's. The attached article from www.antiwar.com explains Obama's stance, in case you are not familiar with it.

Furthermore, Obama's positions are in sync with the leadership of the Democratic Party, as well as much of the party's active base. In Denver, his bellicose remarks about Afghanistan and Iran got a great reception from the delegates. Furthermore, these hawkish positions, sadly, do not phase most of the anti-war base of the Democratic Party, which is still caught up in Obamamania.

If you are not yet scared, please review the attached. Apologies for any double emails.

Why Obama Is Wrong

by William S. Lind, www.antiwar.com, September 18, 2008

http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=13473

A few weeks ago I wrote a column explaining why Senator John McCain is wrong on Iraq. In contrast, Senator Barack Obama is largely right on Iraq. Whether he would follow through on his plan for withdrawing U.S. troops is another question. The Democratic foreign policy establishment is no less Wilsonian than its Republican counterpart, and once it has used antiwar voters to gain power it will want to show them the door as soon as it dares.

But if Obama is right on Iraq, he is wrong on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. His prescriptions for each are so close to the policies of the Bush administration that if McCain is McBush, Obama appears to be O'Bush. It seems many voters' desire to climb up out of the Bush league altogether is doomed to frustration.

On Afghanistan, Obama wants to send in more troops and win the war. But more troops doing what U.S. troops now do – fighting the Pashtun and calling in airstrikes on anything that moves – guarantee we will lose the war. As was the case in Iraq, the first necessary step is to change what our troops are doing. From what I have seen, Obama has said nothing on that score, probably because his position on Afghanistan is mere posturing intended to show he will be "tough on terrorism."

Obama's position on Pakistan is even more dangerous. In August of 2007, Obama called for direct U.S. military action in Pakistan, with or without Pakistani approval. Speaking to the Woodrow Wilson Center, he said, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." President Bush took Senator Obama's recommendation this past July, authorizing such actions.

This is an example of the classic strategic error of sacrificing a more important goal to one of lesser importance. Not even outright defeat in Afghanistan would do America's interests as much damage as would the disintegration of the Pakistani state and the transformation of Pakistan into another stateless region. The state of Pakistan is already dangerously fragile, and actions such as cross-border raids by American troops will diminish its legitimacy further. No government that cannot defend its sovereignty will last. Ironically, if Pakistan collapses, so does our position in Afghanistan, because our main logistics line will be cut. In effect, Obama wants to hand al-Qaeda and the Taliban a double victory.

In June of this year, Obama spoke to the annual AIPAC conference. What he said there about Iran put him once again firmly in the Bush camp:

"As President, I will use all elements of American power to pressure Iran. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon….

"There should be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action to defend our security and our ally Israel. Do not be confused.
"Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation. If we must use military force, we are more likely to succeed and have more support at home and abroad if we have exhausted our diplomatic options. That is the change we need in our policy."

In other words, the change we need in our policy is to offer a bit more diplomatic kabuki before we attack Iran.

As I have said repeatedly and will keep on saying, an attack on Iran could cost us the whole army we have in Iraq. It could set the region on fire, from Afghanistan to the Nile. It could create an oil crisis with severe economic consequences at a time when the world economy is tottering. It is, in short, madness. But it is also what Obama promised AIPAC.

Here we see the central reality of American politics shining through the smoke and mirrors. America has a one-party system. That party is the Establishment Party, and its internal disagreements are minor. Both McCain and Obama are Establishment Party candidates. They agree America must be a world-controlling empire. Both men are Wilsonians, believing we must re-make other countries and cultures in our own image. Neither man conceives any real limits, political, financial, military or moral, on American power. McCain and Obama vie only in determining which can drink more deeply from the poisoned well of hubris, around which, unremarked, lie the bones of every previous world power.

Such is the "choice" the American people get in November.

Role of Clinton and Bush Administration in Georgia

2008-09-02T11:43:00.000-07:00

Michael Klare continues to be one of the best analysts on how energy conflicts are driving inter-imperialist contradictions in the early 21st Century. The one spot, though, where Klare falls short is how proposal for energy cooperation between the U.S. and Russia. Unfortunately, the history of the modern world indicates at both the theoretical and historical level that such interludes of cooperation always breakdown. They are just the prelude to economic and political competition which leads to military conflict.

It also interesting to note that while The Nation's Tomgram attributes the problems encountered by the U.S. government in Georgia to the Bush Administration, most of Klare's analysis focuses on the Clinton Administration.

Tom Dispatch posted 2008-09-02 11:12:38

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Bush Administration Checkmated in Georgia

It's now hard to remember that, when the Bush administration arrived in office in 2000, its hardcore members were all old Cold Warriors who hadn't given up the ghost. If the Soviet Union no longer existed, they were still quite intent on rolling back what was left of it, stripping off Russia's "near abroad," encircling it militarily, and linking various of its former Eastern European satellites and socialist republics to NATO, as well as further penetrating and, after 2001, deploying troops to the oil-rich former SSRs of Central Asia.

As Stephen Cohen wrote in a pathbreaking piece in the Nation, "The New American Cold War," back in 2006, even as the Bush administration began to claim that the U.S. had an overriding national interest in scores of nations around the planet (including Iraq and Iran), there was "a tacit… U.S. denial that Russia [had] any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or contiguous former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia." As had been true in the 1990s under the Clinton administration, the new administration was eager to kick a former superpower when it was down on its luck and just beginning to emerge from its era of "catastroika."

While George Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and declared him a soulmate, his vice president and various neocon allies were spoiling for a fight. And this isn't exactly ancient history either. As David Bromwich pointed out recently in a canny piece at the Huffington Post, Cheney essentially threw down the gauntlet to Russia in a speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May 2006 in which he "threatened Russia with a new Cold War if Russia did not capitulate to American demands of cheap oil for Russia's pro-American neighbors."

How the worm turns. A very energy-rich worm, as it happens, at a time when control over energy resources and their delivery is what makes the world spin. The events in Georgia this August, analyzed below by Michael Klare, author of the new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (which explains just how the world turns), were but another reminder that the officials of the Bush administration have proven bush leaguers when it comes to assessing how power really works in the world. They were, from the beginning, fantasists in love with the supposedly unique power of the American military to cow the planet. For all the talk now about being at the beginning of the Cold War (Act II), this is also fantasy, as well as "home front" spin in an election year, and manna, of course, for worried U.S. arms makers. (The brief war in Georgia, reported the Wall Street Journal, was seen by some Wall Street stock analysts as "a bell-ringer for defense stocks.")

Right now, the Bush administration continues to have its hands militarily more than full just handling a low-level war in Iraq and a roiling one in the backlands of Afghanistan (and Pakistan). At the moment, it couldn't fight a "new Cold War" if it wanted to. Not only is the world no longer America's backyard, but for much of the world, when an American president says, "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the twenty-first century," and the Republican Party candidate for president adds, "But in the twenty-first century, nations don't invade other nations" -- as each did in regard to the Russian war in Georgia -- it's only an indication of just how out of touch they are. (At least UN ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was careful to qualify his version of this statement geographically: "The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe -- those days are gone.")

For all their bluster, they now find themselves strangely powerless in a world that is increasingly anything but "unipolar." Tom

Putin's Ruthless Gambit
The Bush Administration Falters in a Geopolitical Chess Match
By Michael T. Klare
Many Western analysts have chosen to interpret the recent fighting in the Caucasus as the onset of a new Cold War, with a small pro-Western democracy bravely resisting a brutal reincarnation of Stalin's jack-booted Soviet Union. Others have viewed it a throwback to the age-old ethnic politics of southeastern Europe, with assorted minorities using contemporary border disputes to settle ancient scores.

Neither of these explanations is accurate. To fully grasp the recent upheavals in the Caucasus, it is necessary to view the conflict as but a minor skirmish in a far more significant geopolitical struggle between Moscow and Washington over the energy riches of the Caspian Sea basin -- with former Russian President (now Prime Minister) Vladimir Putin emerging as the reigning Grand Master of geostrategic chess and the Bush team turning out to be middling amateurs, at best.

The ultimate prize in this contest is control over the flow of oil and natural gas from the energy-rich Caspian basin to eager markets in Europe and Asia. According to the most recent tally by oil giant BP, the Caspian's leading energy producers, all former "socialist republics" of the Soviet Union -- notably Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan -- together possess approximately 48 billion barrels in proven oil reserves (roughly equivalent to those left in the U.S. and Canada) and 268 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (essentially equivalent to what Saudi Arabia possesses).

During the Soviet era, the oil and gas output of these nations was, of course, controlled by officials in Moscow and largely allocated to Russia and other Soviet republics. After the breakup of the USSR in 1991, however, Western oil companies began to participate in the hydrocarbon equivalent of a gold rush to exploit Caspian energy reservoirs, while plans were being made to channel the region's oil and gas to markets across the world.

Rush to the Caspian

In the 1990s, the Caspian Sea basin was viewed as the world's most promising new source of oil and gas, and so the major Western energy firms -- Chevron, BP, Shell, and Exxon Mobil, among others -- rushed into the region to take advantage of what seemed a golden opportunity. For these firms, persuading the governments of the newly independent Caspian states to sign deals proved to be no great hassle. They were eager to attract Western investment -- and the bribes that often came with it -- and to free themselves from Moscow's economic domination.

But there turned out to be a major catch: It was neither obvious nor easy to figure out how to move all the new oil and gas to markets in the West. After all, the Caspian is landlocked, so tankers cannot get near it, while all existing pipelines passed through Russia and were hooked into Soviet-era supply systems. While many in Washington were eager to assist U.S. firms in their drive to gain access to Caspian energy, they did not want to see the resulting oil and gas flow through Russia -- until recently, the country's leading adversary -- before reaching Western markets.

What, then, to do? Looking at the Caspian chessboard in the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton conceived the striking notion of converting the newly independent, energy-poor Republic of Georgia into an "energy corridor" for the export of Caspian basin oil and gas to the West, thereby bypassing Russia altogether. An initial, "early-oil" pipeline was built to carry petroleum from newly-developed fields in Azerbaijan's sector of the Caspian Sea to Supsa on Georgia's Black Sea coast, where it was loaded onto tankers for delivery to international markets. This would be followed by a far more audacious scheme: the construction of the 1,000-mile BTC pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia and then on to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Again, the idea was to exclude Russia -- which had, in the intervening years, been transformed into a struggling, increasingly impoverished former superpower -- from the Caspian Sea energy rush.

Clinton presided over every stage of the BTC line's initial development, from its early conception to the formal arrangements imposed by Washington on the three nations involved in its corporate structuring. (Final work on the pipeline was not completed until 2006, two years into George W. Bush's second term.) For Clinton and his advisors, this was geopolitics, pure and simple -- a calculated effort to enhance Western energy security while diminishing Moscow's control over the global flow of oil and gas. The administration's efforts to promote the construction of new pipelines through Azerbaijan and Georgia were intended "to break Russia's monopoly of control over the transportation of oil from the region," Sheila Heslin of the National Security Council bluntly told a Senate investigating committee in 1997.

Clinton understood that this strategy entailed significant risks, particularly because Washington's favored "energy corridor" passed through or near several major conflict zones -- including the Russian-backed breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With this in mind, Clinton made a secondary decision -- to convert the new Georgian army into a military proxy of the United States, equipped and trained by the Department of Defense. From 1998 to 2000 alone, Georgia was awarded $302 million in U.S. military and economic aid -- more than any other Caspian country -- and top U.S. military officials started making regular trips to its capital, Tbilisi, to demonstrate support for then-president Eduard Shevardnadze.

In those years, Clinton was the top chess player in the Caspian region, while his Russian presidential counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, was far too preoccupied with domestic troubles and a bitter, costly, ongoing guerrilla war in Chechnya to match his moves. It was clear, however, that senior Russian officials were deeply concerned by the growing U.S. presence in their southern backyard -- what they called their "near abroad" -- and had already had begun planning for an eventual comeback. "It hasn't been left unnoticed in Russia that certain outside interests are trying to weaken our position in the Caspian basin," Andrei Y. Urnov of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared in May 2000. "No one should be perplexed that Russia is determined to resist the attempts to encroach on her interests."

Russia Resurgent

At this critical moment, a far more capable player took over on Russia's side of the geopolitical chessboard. On December 31, 1999, Vladimir V. Putin was appointed president by Yeltsin and then, on March 26, 2000, elected to a full four-year term in office. Politics in the Caucasus and the Caspian region have never been the same.

Even before assuming the presidency, Putin indicated that he believed state control over energy resources should be the basis for Russia's return to great-power status. In his doctoral dissertation, a summary of which was published in 1999, he had written that "[t]he state has the right to regulate the process of the acquisition and the use of natural resources, and particularly mineral resources [including oil and natural gas], independent of on whose property they are located." On this basis, Putin presided over the re-nationalization of many of the energy companies that had been privatized by Yeltsin and the virtual confiscation of Yukos -- once Russia's richest private energy firm -- by Russian state authorities. He also brought Gazprom, the world's largest natural gas supplier, back under state control and placed a protégé, Dmitri Medvedev -- now president of Russia -- at its helm.

Once he had restored state control over the lion's share of Russia's oil and gas resources, Putin turned his attention to the next obvious place -- the Caspian Sea basin. Here, his intent was not so much to gain ownership of its energy resources -- although Russian firms have in recent years acquired an equity share in some Caspian oil and gas fields -- but rather to dominate the export conduits used to transport its energy to Europe and Asia.

Russia already enjoyed a considerable advantage since much of Kazakhstan's oil already flowed to the West via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which passes through Russia before terminating on the Black Sea; moreover, much of Central Asia's natural gas continued to flow to Russia through pipelines built during the Soviet era. But Putin's gambit in the Caspian region evidently was meant to capture a far more ambitious prize. He wanted to ensure that most oil and gas from newly developed fields in the Caspian basin would travel west via Russia.

The first part of this drive entailed frenzied diplomacy by Putin and Medvedev (still in his role as board chairman of Gazprom) to persuade the presidents of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to ship their future output of gas through Russia. Success was achieved when, in December 2007, Putin signed an agreement with the leaders of these countries to supply 20 billion cubic meters of gas per year through a new conduit along the Caspian's eastern shore to southern Russia -- for ultimate delivery to Europe via Gazprom's existing pipeline network.

Meanwhile, Putin moved to undermine international confidence in Georgia as a reliable future corridor for energy delivery. This became a strategic priority for Moscow because the European Union announced plans to build a $10 billion natural-gas pipeline from the Caspian, dubbed "Nabucco" after the opera by Verdi. It would run from Turkey to Austria, while linking up to an expanded South Caucasus gas pipeline that now extends from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Erzurum in Turkey. The Nabucco pipeline was intended as a dramatic move to reduce Europe's reliance on Russian natural gas -- and so has enjoyed strong support from the Bush administration.

It is against this backdrop that the recent events in Georgia unfolded.

Checkmate in Georgia

Obviously, the more oil and gas passing through Georgia on its way to the West, the greater that country's geostrategic significance in the U.S.-Russian struggle over the distribution of Caspian energy. Certainly, the Bush administration recognized this and responded by providing hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the Georgian military and helping to train specialized forces for protection of the new pipelines. But the administration's partner in Tbilisi, President Mikheil Saakashvili, was not content to play the relatively modest role of pipeline protector. Instead, he sought to pursue a megalomaniacal fantasy of recapturing the breakaway regions of Abhkazia and South Ossetia with American help. As it happened, the Bush team -- blindsided by their own neoconservative fantasies -- saw in Saakashvili a useful pawn in their pursuit of a long smoldering anti-Russian agenda. Together, they walked into a trap cleverly set by Putin.

It is hard not to conclude that Russian prime minister goaded the rash Saakashvili into invading South Ossetia by encouraging Abkhazian and South Ossetian irregulars to attack Georgian outposts and villages on the peripheries of the two enclaves. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly told Saakashvili not to respond to such provocations when she met with him in July. Apparently her advice fell on deaf ears. Far more enticing, it seems, was her promise of strong U.S. backing for Georgia's rapid entry into NATO. Other American leaders, including Senator John McCain, assured Saakashvili of unwavering U.S. support. Whatever was said in these private conversations, the Georgian president seems to have interpreted them as a green light for his adventuristic impulses. On August 7th, by all accounts, his forces invaded South Ossetia and attacked its capital city of Tskhinvali, giving Putin what he long craved -- a seemingly legitimate excuse to invade Georgia and demonstrate the complete vulnerability of Clinton's (and now Bush's) vaunted energy corridor.

Today, the Georgian army is in shambles, the BTC and South Caucasus gas pipelines are within range of Russian firepower, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia have declared their independence, quickly receiving Russian recognition. In response to these developments, the Bush administration has, along with some friendly leaders in Europe, mounted a media and diplomatic counterattack, accusing Moscow of barbaric behavior and assorted violations of international law. Threats have also been made to exclude Russia from various international forums and institutions, such as the G-8 club of governments and the World Trade Organization. It is possible, then, that Moscow will suffer some isolation and inconvenience as a result of its incursion into Georgia.

None of this, so far as can be determined, will alter the picture in the Caucasus: Putin has moved his most powerful pieces onto this corner of the chessboard, America's pawn has been decisively defeated, and there's not much of a practical nature that Washington (or London or Paris or Berlin) can do to alter the outcome.

There will, of course, be more rounds to come, and it is impossible to predict how they will play out. Putin prevailed this time around because he focused on geopolitical objectives, while his opponents were blindly driven by fantasy and ideology; so long as this pattern persists, he or his successors are likely to come out on top. Only if American leaders assume a more realistic approach to Russia's resurgent power or, alternatively, choose to collaborate with Moscow in the exploitation of Caspian energy, will the risk of further strategic setbacks in the region disappear.

Michael T. Klare is professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books).

Master Plan or Screw Up? Georgia U.S. Government Strategy

2008-08-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

This is the best article yet about U.S. and Russian competition over Georgia. If you harbored any doubts that this is one small battle in the great energy wars which have already begun, read on. And, if you have any expectations that U.S. policy win this region would shift in an Obama administration, you should also read on. Key sections highlighted.

Master Plan or Screw Up? Georgia and U.S. Strategy

By MIKE WHITNEY, Counterpunch, August 14, 2008

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney08142008.html

The American-armed and trained Georgian army swarmed into South Ossetia last Thursday, killing an estimated 2,000 civilians, sending 40,000 South Ossetians fleeing over the Russian border, and destroying much of the capital, Tskhinvali. The attack was unprovoked and took place a full 24 hours before even ONE Russian soldier set foot in South Ossetia. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Americans still believe that the Russian army invaded Georgian territory first. The BBC, AP, NPR, the New York Times and the rest of the establishment media have consistently and deliberately misled their readers into believing that the violence in South Ossetia was initiated by the Kremlin. Let's be clear, it wasn't. In truth, there is NO dispute about the facts except among the people who rely the western press for their information. Despite its steady loss of credibility, the corporate media continues to operate as the propaganda-arm of the Pentagon.

Former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev gave a good summary of events in an op-ed in Monday's Washington Post:

For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground....What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas....Mounting a military assault against innocents was a reckless decision whose tragic consequences, for thousands of people of different nationalities, are now clear. The Georgian leadership could do this only with the perceived support and encouragement of a much more powerful force. Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of NATO membership, emboldened Georgian leaders into thinking that they could get away with a "blitzkrieg" in South Ossetia...Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenseless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity."

Russia deployed its tanks and troops to South Ossetia to save the lives of civilians and to reestablish the peace. Period. It has no interest in annexing the former-Soviet country or in expanding its present borders. Now that the Georgian army has been routed, Russian president Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin have expressed a willingness to settle the dispute through normal diplomatic channels at the United Nations. Neither leader is under any illusions about Washington's involvement in the hostilities. They know that Georgian President Mikail Saakashvili is an American stooge who came to power in a CIA-backed coup, the so-called "Rose Revolution", and would never order a major military operation without explicit instructions from his White House puppetmasters.

The Georgian army had no chance of winning a war with Russia or any intention of occupying the territory they captured. The real aim was to lure the Russian army into a trap. US planners hope to do what they did so skillfully in Afghanistan; lure their Russian prey into a long and bloody Chechnya-type fiasco that will pit their Russia troops against guerrilla forces armed and trained by US military and intelligence agencies. The war will be waged in the name of liberating Georgia from Russian imperialism and stopping Putin from achieving his alleged ambition to control critical western-owned pipelines around the Caspian Basin.

In June, former foreign policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, presented the basic storyline that would be used against Russia two full months before the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. The article appeared on the Kavkazcenter web site. Brzezinski said the United States witnessed "cases of possible threats by Russia, directed at Georgia with the intention of taking control over the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline".

Brzezinski: "Russia actively tends to isolate the Central Asian region from direct access to world economy, especially to energy supplies..If Georgia government is destabilized, western access to Baku, Caspian Sea and further will be limited".

Brzezinski's speculation is part of a broader scenario that's been crafted for the western media to provide a rationale for upcoming aggression against Russia. Brzezinski is not only the architect of the mujahadin-led campaign against Russia in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but also, the author of "The Grand Chessboard--American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives", the operating theory behind “the war on terror” which involves massive US intervention in Central Asia to control vital resources, fragment Russia, and surround manufacturing giant, China.

"The Grand Chessboard" is the 21st century's version of the Great Game. The book begins with this revealing statement:

"Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power.....The key to controlling Eurasia is controlling the Central Asian Republics."

This is the heart-and-soul of the war on terror. The real braintrust behind "never-ending conflict" was actually focussed on Central Asia. It was the pro-Israeli crowd in the Republican Party that pulled the old switcheroo and refocussed on the Middle East rather than Eurasia. Now, powerful members of the US foreign policy establishment (Brzezinski, Albright, Holbrooke) have regrouped behind the populist "cardboard" presidential candidate Barack Obama and are preparing to redirect America's war efforts to the Asian theater. Obama offers voters a choice of wars not a choice against war.

On Sunday, Brzezinski accused Russia of imperial ambitions comparing Putin to "Stalin and Hitler" in an interview with Nathan Gardels.

Gardels: What is the world to make of Russia's invasion of Georgia?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Fundamentally at stake is what kind of role Russia will play in the new international system.(aka: New World Order) Unfortunately, Putin is putting Russia on a course that is ominously similar to Stalin's and Hitler's in the late 1930s. Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has correctly drawn an analogy between Putin's "justification" for dismembering Georgia -- because of the Russians in South Ossetia -- to Hitler's tactics vis a vis Czechoslovakia to "free" the Sudeten Deutsch. Even more ominous is the analogy of what Putin is doing vis-a-vis Georgia to what Stalin did vis-a-vis Finland: subverting by use of force the sovereignty of a small democratic neighbor. In effect, morally and strategically, Georgia is the Finland of our day.

The question the international community now confronts is how to respond to a Russia that engages in the blatant use of force with larger imperial designs in mind: to reintegrate the former Soviet space under the Kremlin's control and to cut Western access to the Caspian Sea and Central Asia by gaining control over the Baku/Ceyhan pipeline that runs through Georgia.

In brief, the stakes are very significant. At stake is access to oil as that resource grows ever more scarce and expensive and how a major power conducts itself in our newly interdependent world, conduct that should be based on accommodation and consensus, not on brute force.

If Georgia is subverted, not only will the West be cut off from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. We can logically anticipate that Putin, if not resisted, will use the same tactics toward the Ukraine. Putin has already made public threats against Ukraine."

Brzezinski, Holbrooke and Albright form the "Imperialist A-Team"; these are not the bungling "Keystone Cops" neocons like Feith and Rumsfeld who trip over themselves getting out of bed in the morning. They know what they are doing and they are good at it. They're not fools. They have aligned themselves with the Obama camp and are preparing for the next big outbreak of global trouble-making. This should serve as a sobering wake-up call for voters who still think Obama represents "Change We Can Believe In".

Richard Holbrooke appeared on Tuesday's Jim Lerher News Hour with resident neocon Margaret Warner. Typical of Warner's "even-handed" approach, both of the interviewees were ultra-conservatives from right-wing think tanks: Richard Holbrooke, from the Council on Foreign Relations and Dmiti Simes from the Nixon Center.

According to Holbrooke, "The Russians deliberately provoked (the fighting in South Ossetia) and timed it for the Olympics. This is a long-standing Russian effort to get rid of President Saakashvili."

Right. Is that why Putin was so shocked when he heard the news (while he was in Beijing) that he quickly boarded a plane and headed for Moscow? (after shaking his finger angrily at Bush!)

Holbrooke: "And I want to stress, I'm not a warmonger, and I don't want a new Cold War any more than Dimitri does....The Russians wish to re-establish a historic area of hegemony that includes Ukraine. And it is no accident that the other former Soviet republics are watching this and extraordinarily upset, as Putin progresses with an attempt to re-create a kind of a hegemonic space."

It is impossible to go over all of Holbrooke's distortions, half-truths and lies but, what is important is to recognize that a story is being constructed to demonize Putin and to justify future hostilities against Russia. Holbrooke's bogus assertions are identical to Brzezinski's, and yet, these same lies are already appearing in the mainstream media. The propaganda "bullet points" have already been determined; "Putin is a menace","Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet empire", "Putin is an autocrat". (Unlike our "freedom loving" allies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt!?!) In truth, Putin is simply enjoying Russia's newly acquired energy-wealth and would like to be left alone.

So why are Brzezinski and his backers in the foreign policy establishment demonizing Putin and threatening Russia with "ostracism, isolation and economic penalties?" What is Putin's crime?

Putin's problems can be traced back to a speech he made in Munich nearly two years ago when he declared unequivocally that he rejected the basic tenets of the Bush Doctrine and US global hegemony. His speech amounted to a Russian Declaration of Independence. That's when western elites, particularly at the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Enterprise Institute put Putin on their "enemies list" along with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Castro, Morales, Mugabe and anyone else who refuses to take orders from the Washington Mafia.

Here's what Putin said in Munich:

The unipolar world refers to a world in which there is one master, one sovereign---- one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making. At the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.… What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilization.

Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems. Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centers of tension. Judge for yourselves---wars as well as local and regional conflicts have not diminished. More are dying than before. Significantly more, significantly more!

Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.

We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?

In international relations we increasingly see the desire to resolve a given question according to so-called issues of political expediency, based on the current political climate. And of course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this – no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course such a policy stimulates an arms race.

I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security.

Every word Putin spoke was true which is why it was not reprinted in the western media.

“Unilateral and illegitimate military actions”, the “uncontained hyper-use of force”, the “disdain for the basic principles of international law”, and most importantly; “No one feels safe!”

Putin's claims are all indisputable, that is why he has entered the neocons crosshairs. He poses a direct challenge to what Brzezinski calls the "international system", which is shorthand for the corporate/banking cartel that is controlled by the western oligarchy of racketeers.

Was the Georgian attack last Thursday a set-up, organized in Washington? Unfortunately for Bush, the wily Russian prime minister is considerably brighter than anyone in the current administration. Bush's plan will undoubtedly backfire and disrupt the geopolitical balance of power. The world might get that breather from the US after all.

Israel's Role in the Russia-Georgia War

2008-08-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

The Electronic Intifada has a superb article on the Israel-Georgia connection. The next four years will see many more small and large wars in the Middle East, such as South Ossetia, because of the critical importance of the region's oil, gas, and pipelines. Israel's role will be murky, but luckily websites like Electronic Intifada, can be expected to ferret out the details.

Tel Aviv to Tbilisi: Israel's role in the Russia-Georgia war
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 12 August 2008

Israelis wave both Georgian and Israeli flags as they chant anti-Russian slogans during a demonstration outside the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv, 11 August. (Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images)

From the moment Georgia launched a surprise attack on the tiny breakaway region of South Ossetia last week, prompting a fierce Russian counterattack, Israel has been trying to distance itself from the conflict. This is understandable: with Georgian forces on the retreat, large numbers of civilians killed and injured, and Russia's fury unabated, Israel's deep involvement is severely embarrassing.

The collapse of the Georgian offensive represents not only a disaster for that country and its US-backed leaders, but another blow to the myth of Israel's military prestige and prowess. Worse, Israel fears that Russia could retaliate by stepping up its military assistance to Israel's adversaries including Iran.

"Israel is following with great concern the developments in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and hopes the violence will end," its foreign ministry said, adding with uncharacteristic doveishness, "Israel recognizes the territorial integrity of Georgia and calls for a peaceful solution."

Tbilisi's top diplomat in Tel Aviv complained about the lackluster Israeli response to his country's predicament and perhaps overestimating Israeli influence, called for Israeli "diplomatic pressure on Moscow." Just like Israel, the diplomat said, Georgia is fighting a war on "terrorism." Israeli officials politely told the Georgians that "the address for that type of pressure was Washington" (Herb Keinon, "Tbilisi wants Israel to pressure Russia," The Jerusalem Post, 11 August 2008).

While Israel was keen to downplay its role, Georgia perhaps hoped that flattery might draw Israel further in. Georgian minister Temur Yakobashvili -- whom the Israeli daily Haaretz stressed was Jewish -- told Israeli army radio that "Israel should be proud of its military which trained Georgian soldiers." Yakobashvili claimed rather implausibly, according to Haaretz, that "a small group of Georgian soldiers were able to wipe out an entire Russian military division, thanks to the Israeli training" ("Georgian minister tells Israel Radio: Thanks to Israeli training, we're fending off Russian military," Haaretz, 11 August 2008).

Since 2000, Israel has sold hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and combat training to Georgia. Weapons included guns, ammunition, shells, tactical missile systems, antiaircraft systems, automatic turrets for armored vehicles, electronic equipment and remotely piloted aircraft. These sales were authorized by the Israeli defense ministry (Arie Egozi, "War in Georgia: The Israeli connection," Ynet, 10 August 2008).

Training also involved officers from Israel's Shin Bet secret service -- which has for decades carried out extrajudicial executions and torture of Palestinians in the occupied territories -- the Israeli police, and the country's major arms companies Elbit and Rafael.

The Tel Aviv-Tbilisi military axis appears to have been cemented at the highest levels, and according to YNet, "The fact that Georgia's defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli who is fluent in Hebrew contributed to this cooperation." Others involved in the brisk arms trade included former Israeli minister and Tel Aviv mayor Roni Milo as well as several senior Israeli military officers.

The key liaison was Reserve Brigadier General Gal Hirsch who commanded Israeli forces on the border with Lebanon during the July 2006 Second Lebanon War. (Yossi Melman, "Georgia Violence - A frozen alliance," Haaretz, 10 August 2008). He resigned from the army after the Winograd commission severely criticized Israel's conduct of its war against Lebanon and an internal Israeli army investigation blamed Hirsch for the seizure of two soldiers by Hizballah.

According to one of the Israeli combat trainers, an officer in an "elite" Israel army unit, Hirsch and colleagues would sometimes personally supervise the training of Georgian forces which included "house-to-house fighting." The training was carried out through several "private" companies with close links to the Israeli military.

As the violence raged in Georgia, the trainer was desperately trying to contact his former Georgian students on the battlefront via mobile phone: the Israelis wanted to know whether the Georgians had "internalized Israeli military technique and if the special reconnaissance forces have chalked up any successes" (Jonathan Lis and Moti Katz, "IDF vets who trained Georgia troops say war with Russia is no surprise," Haaretz, 11 August 2008).

Yet on the ground, the Israeli-trained Georgian forces, perhaps unsurprisingly overwhelmed by the Russians, have done little to redeem the image of Israel's military following its defeat by Hizballah in July-August 2006.

The question remains as to why Israel was involved in the first place. There are several reasons. The first is simply economic opportunism: for years, especially since the 11 September 2001 attacks, arms exports and "security expertise" have been one of Israel's growth industries. But the close Israeli involvement in a region Russia considers to be of vital interest suggests that Israel might have been acting as part of the broader US scheme to encircle Russia and contain its reemerging power.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been steadily encroaching on Russia's borders and expanding NATO in a manner the Kremlin considers highly provocative. Shortly after coming into office, the Bush Administration tore up the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and, like the Clinton administration, adopted former Soviet satellite states as its own, using them to base an anti-missile system Russia views as a threat. In addition to their "global war on terror," hawks in Washington have recently been talking up a new Cold War with Russia.

Georgia was an eager volunteer in this effort and has learned quickly the correct rhetoric: one Georgian minister claimed that "every bomb that falls on our heads is an attack on democracy, on the European Union and on America." Georgia has been trying to join NATO, and sent 2,000 soldiers to help the US occupy Iraq. It may have hoped that once war started this loyalty would be rewarded with the kind of round-the-clock airlift of weapons that Israel receives from the US during its wars. Instead so far the US only helped airlift the Georgian troops from Iraq back to the beleaguered home front.

By helping Georgia, Israel may have been doing its part to duplicate its own experience in assisting the eastward expansion of the "Euro-Atlantic" empire. While supporting Georgia was certainly risky for Israel, given the possible Russian reaction, it has a compelling reason to intervene in a region that is heavily contested by global powers. Israel must constantly reinvent itself as an "asset" to American power if it is to maintain the US support that ensures its survival as a settler-colonial enclave in the Middle East. It is a familiar role; in the 1970s and 1980s, at the behest of Washington, Israel helped South Africa's apartheid regime fight Soviet-supported insurgencies in South African-occupied Namibia and Angola, and it trained right-wing US-allied death squads fighting left-wing governments and movements in Central America. After 2001, Israel marketed itself as an expert on combating "Islamic terrorism."

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez recently denounced Colombia - long one of the largest recipients of US military aid after Israel -- as the "Israel of Latin America." Georgia's government, to the detriment of its people, may have tried to play the role of the "Israel of the Caucasus" -- a loyal servant of US ambitions in that region -- and lost the gamble. Playing with empires is dangerous for a small country.

As for Israel itself, with the Bush Doctrine having failed to give birth to the "new Middle East" that the US needs to maintain its power in the region against growing resistance, an ever more desperate and rogue Israel must look for opportunities to prove its worth elsewhere. That is a dangerous and scary thing.

Rolling Stone on "Candidate for Sale."

2008-08-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

Following up on previous discussions, if one subscibes to the lesser-evil approach to elections, how can you be sure? While many liberals and left liberals impose their hopes on Obama's promises, Matt Taibbi argues in the August 21, 2008, Rolling Stone that the enormous, overlapping campaign funding which the two leading candidates are receiving from corporate American, espcially Wall Street, ensure the continuation of what is politely called business-friendly public policies. Others call it wealthfare or socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/22210615/candidates_for_sale

MATT TAIBBI, Rollingstone.com, August 21, 2008

Candidates for Sale

What do Obama and McCain have in common? The same big donors, who will expect to have their way no matter who wins.

Remember the total, hideous, inexcusable absence of oversight that has been the great hallmark of George Bush's America for almost eight years now? Well, now we're getting to see that same regulatory malfeasance applied to yet another cornerstone of our political system. The Federal Election Commission — the body that supposedly enforces campaign-finance laws in this country — has been out of business for more than six months. That's because Congress was dragging its feet over confirmation hearings for new FEC commissioners, leaving the agency without a quorum. The commission just started work again for the first time on July 10th under its new chairman, Donald McGahn, a classic Republican Party yahoo whose chief qualifications include representing Tom DeLay, the corrupt ex-speaker of the House, in matters of campaign finance.

Apart from the obvious absurdity of not having a functioning election-policing mechanism in an election year in the world's richest democracy, the late start by the FEC makes it almost impossible for the agency to do its job. The commission has a long-standing reluctance to take action in the last months before a vote, a policy designed to help prevent federal regulators from influencing election outcomes. Normally, the FEC tries to root out infractions and loopholes — fining campaigns for incomplete reporting, or for taking shortcuts around spending limits — in the early months of a campaign season. But that ship sailed way too long ago to take the stink off the 2008 race.

"The time for setting the ground rules was earlier," says Craig Holman, a lobbyist with the watchdog group Public Citizen. "There isn't time to do much now."

That's especially true given the magnitude of what we're dealing with here: the biggest pile of political contributions in the history of free elections, nearly a billion dollars given to presidential candidates in this season alone. Because the FEC has been dead in the water for so long, it's likely that we'll still be in the dark about a large chunk of this record manure pile of campaign contributions when we go to vote in November.

But that doesn't mean that a little sifting through campaign records doesn't tell us quite a lot about who's backing whom in these races. The truth is that the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain are being inundated with cash from more or less exactly the same gorgons of the corporate scene. From Wall Street to the Big Oil powerhouses to the military-industrial complex, America's fat-cat business leaders know that the Animal House-style party of the last eight years that made almost all of them rich with bonuses, government contracts and bubble profits is about to come to an end, and someone is going to have to pay to clean up the mess. They want that someone to be you, not them, and they've spared no expense to make sure both presidential candidates will be there to bail them out next year.

They're succeeding. Both would-be presidents have already sold us out. They've taken the money and run — completing the cyclical transformation of the American political narrative from one of monopolistic Republican iniquity to an even more depressing tale about the overweening power of corporate money and the essentially fictitious nature of our two-party system.

In layman's terms, we've gone from being screwed to being fucked. Who knows — maybe Barack Obama will surprise us if he wins the election. But if you look at the money, it doesn't look good.

Thanks in part to the dormant FEC, corporate America has had even easier access to the candidates than usual in its effort to buy off the next government before the crash. In fact, this election has seen some excellent new innovations in the area of campaign-fundraising atrocities. Chief among them is the rise of so-called "joint committees."

It used to be that campaigns could raise a maximum of $2,300 from each individual. Now, both candidates — but especially McCain, who far outstrips Obama in this area — routinely hold fundraisers in which individuals can give far more to a joint committee. Technically, the candidate still pockets only $2,300 in contributions. The bulk of the money raised — in McCain's case, a whopping $70,100, or 30 times the previous limit — goes to the state and national arms of the candidate's party, which can then spend the unprecedented haul on behalf of the candidate. "This allows CEOs to walk in the door and drop $70,100," says Holman. "It basically allows campaigns to exceed the spending limits."

McCain has raised more than $63 million via these joint committees, thanks to more than 1,000 "megadonors" who have each given at least $25,000 to his campaign effort. Obama, by contrast, has some 471 megadonors — and a close examination of their backgrounds underscores some of the differences in corporate America's attitudes toward the two candidates.

One of McCain's chief sources of corporate money is the private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, memorialized for its takeover of RJR Nabisco in the movie Barbarians at the Gate. Through the pretext of joint committees, 10 KKR executives have given McCain $285,000, and it's not hard to figure out why. Two of McCain's key campaign proposals — lowering the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and making purchases of industrial equipment fully deductible — would save a single KKR subsidiary, Energy Future Holdings, $49 million.

"Just in his tax policies alone, McCain is saving corporate America $175 billion a year," says James Kvaal, who analyzed McCain's tax policy for the nonprofit Center for American Progress.

McCain has also raked in big contributions from two other giants of the buyout world: the Carlyle Group (famous for its close ties to the Bush administration) and the Blackstone Group (whose co-founder, Pete Peterson, wrote a $28,500 check to McCain after he took home almost $1.8 billion from a public offering last year). McCain has also received monstrous sums from hedge-fund managers, attracted by his pledge to keep the tax rate on their earnings at only 15 percent. Executives and family members in a single hedge fund, Knott Partners, have contributed some $225,700 to McCain's campaign.

Then there's the predictable influx of cash from would-be military contractors. John Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy whose firm builds the Superferry transport vessel, not only donated $28,500 of his own money, but bundled at least $250,000 for McCain from other donors. Donald Bollinger, who is a contractor on the controversial Littoral Combat Ship, gave $27,300 and bundled a whopping $500,000. Anyone want to bet on a decrease in Naval appropriations in a McCain presidency?

McCain has also received big money from telecommunications magnates. The senator has always been a friend to the industry: Back in 2003, just four days after AT&T sent him a check for $10,500, he sponsored a bill to ban state and local taxes on Internet service. Since 2007, McCain has taken in some $1.3 million from the communications industry. Just four members of the McCaw family, which owns the telecommunications firm Eagle River, have kicked in $123,200. McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, was a former lobbyist for BellSouth, Verizon and SBC Communications. His deputy campaign manager, Christian Ferry, was a partner to Davis at Verizon. One of his chief advisers, Charlie Black, is the head of the lobbying firm BKSH and Associates, which represents AT&T. His Senate chief of staff, Mark Buse, worked for AT&T Wireless. All told, of 66 current and former lobbyists working for McCain, some 23 come from the telecommunications industry.

Given McCain's telecom backing, it's not surprising that the senator has had one of his characteristic changes of heart. As recently as last November, McCain was staunchly opposed to retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies that took part in Bush's illegal spying on American consumers, saying their actions "undermine our respect for the law." Now, jammed to the gills with telecom cash, McCain calls himself an "unqualified" supporter of immunity, praising the telecom industry's warrantless wiretapping as "constitutional and appropriate."

All the same, plenty of other evidence suggests that much of Wall Street is betting on an Obama win. In fact, some observers believe that KKR announced a multibillion-dollar public offering this summer because it expects McCain to lose. "They're doing the public offering now so that the compensation can be taxed at the lower rate while Bush is still in office," says a strategist for a major labor union. "They're betting Obama is going to win, and they're getting their money while they can."

Other companies are getting in on the ground floor with the new chief by stuffing money in his ears. Overall, Obama is flat-out kicking McCain's ass when it comes to Wall Street contributions, raking in nearly $9 million from securities and investment executives, compared to $6.2 million for McCain. Obama has received more contributions from Goldman Sachs than from any other employer — more than $627,000 at this writing — not to mention $398,021 from JP Morgan Chase, $353,922 from Lehman Brothers and $291,388 from Morgan Stanley. Even among hedge-fund executives, who have an unequivocal interest in electing McCain, Obama is whipping the Republican, collecting $500,000 more than McCain. All of which begs the question: Why would corporate giants like these throw so much weight behind a man who promises to strip them of billions in tax breaks?

Sadly, the answer to that question increasingly appears to be that Obama is, well, full of shit. He has made no bones about his plans to raise income by soaking the rich, promising to roll back the Bush tax cuts for people making over $250,000, increase the top tax rate on capital gains to 25 percent and raise the top rate on qualified dividends. He has also pledged to deliver a real stomach punch to hedge-fund managers, raising the tax rate on most of their income from 15 percent to 35 percent.

These populist pledges sound good, but many business moguls appear to be betting that the tax policies, like Obama himself, are only that: something that sounds good. "I think we don't want to make too much of his promises on taxes," says Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. "Not all of these things will happen." Noting the overwhelming amount of Wall Street money pouring into Obama's campaign, even elitist fuckwad David Brooks was recently moved to write, "Once the Republicans are vanquished, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that capital-gains tax hike."

Those worried that Obama might be all talk when it comes to needed reform had a real scare in July, when the senator failed to show up to vote for the Stop Excessive Speculation Act, a bill designed to curb rampant oil speculation. Oil speculators provide the perfect microcosm of what happened to the economy under Bush. Back in 2001, investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan got together and created an online exchange called the ICE for trading energy commodities. The ICE ended up buying the British-regulated International Petroleum Exchange; it then opened trading windows in the U.S., allowing Wall Street investment banks to make oil-futures trades on American soil, on their very own commodities exchange, without any federal regulation whatsoever.

"In financial terms, they were playing blackjack at tables where they themselves were the dealers, in casinos they themselves owned," says Warren Gunnels, a senior policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It was crazy." Trading on the ICE had a massive impact on U.S. gasoline prices, and more than one legislator wondered if energy speculators were manipulating the market, as energy traders like Enron had been before. The speculation bill was designed to regulate the ICE and place limits on trades. But on the day before Obama returned from his eight-day, eight-country, megadazzling international photo op, Democrats failed by a vote of 50-43 to force a vote on the bill, as heavy lobbying by investment banks like Goldman Sachs torpedoed the effort.

Not only did Obama not show up to vote, he appeared at a public forum three days later flanked by Jon Corzine and Robert Rubin, two former Goldman executives, to discuss how to revive the economy. Here you have the basic formula of campaign contributions in a nutshell: Powerful investment bank gives big money to candidate, needed reform requires candidate to cross said investment bank, candidate pussies out and finds way to be gone at the moment of truth, candidate resurfaces later in arms of aforementioned investment bankers.

Obama's absence on oil speculation was eerily reminiscent of his previous decision to change his mind about giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies for spying on Americans. Obama withdrew his pledge to filibuster the immunity bill right around the time the Democrats announced that AT&T would be sponsoring the Democratic convention. So no filibuster on retroactive immunity from the top Democrat — but conventiongoers in Denver will get tote bags emblazoned with the AT&T logo. So that's something.

Look, we all knew this was coming. Once Obama vanquished Hillary Clinton, it was inevitable that his campaign would start roping in the Clinton moneymen for the fall confrontation with McCain. Among those snagged by Obama were Iranian millionaire and former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman Hassan Nemazee, venture capitalist Alan Patricof and the touchingly plugged-in Wall Street power couple Maureen White (First Boston) and Steven Rattner (Morgan Stanley). Rattner and White, the former chief fundraiser for the DNC, are longtime friends of the Clintons; she quit the DNC in 2006 to build Hillary's war chest, while he backed Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont and flirted with a Mike Bloomberg presidential run. Such are the people who are now whispering in Obama's ear.

Over the summer, the Obama camp has relentlessly pushed the notion that its record fundraising is mainly the result of small online donations. The first presidential candidate to raise so much money that he could afford to eschew the spending limits that would be imposed if he accepted federal matching funds, Obama claims that he opted out of public funding so that he could have a campaign "truly funded by the American people." And indeed, he has a record number of small donors, with some 45 percent of his campaign cash coming from contributions smaller than $200.

Which is a great percentage — but it's only eight points better than John Kerry in 2004 and only 14 points better than George Bush that same year. In truth, Obama is still raising tons of money from big corporate donors. In June alone, as Obama was raking in more than $30 million from small donors, he also bagged $6 million in a single fundraiser at Ethel Kennedy's home in Virginia and another $5 million at an event in Hollywood. But time and time again, you see Obama aides boasting about how the day of the big-dollar donor is over. "More people are involved, and I think that necessarily dilutes the impact of any individual — which is probably a good thing," one prominent Obama supporter recently declared. This staunch champion of the small donor happened to be none other than James Rubin, son of former Goldman Sachs co-chairman Bob Rubin.

Obama's decision to embrace Clinton's moneymen coincided with his decision to attend a public forum on economic policy with an A list of Clinton-era economic advisors, including Rubin and Corzine. "The message is that he's going to be a friend to Wall Street, just as Bill Clinton was a friend to Wall Street," says Pollin. "Wall Street will want to be at the head of the table."

By now it should be clear what type of service Wall Street will demand. The financial disaster dumped on us by eight years of Bush's mismanagement has left America with the prospect of short-term solutions in the form of massive government bailouts, and long-term solutions in the form of reform and regulation. A big chunk of the $1 billion in cash that will be spent on the presidential race this year represents Wall Street's desire to make sure that both candidates can be counted on to make the short-term bailouts large and passionate, and the reforms gentle and halfhearted. "They want to make sure there's socialism when they need it — bailouts — and capitalism when they need that," says Pollin.

Both candidates are already falling all over themselves to signal their business-friendly approach to the economy. McCain entered this election with a reputation as a strict Goldwater conservative. "I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly," he declared. McCain also sounded off in the past about troubled quasi-governmental lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, pledging to "make them go away" and to strip them of their right to lobby.

But this year, McCain — perhaps emboldened by the $238,100 he got from seven JP Morgan Chase executives or the $500,000 bundled for him by Chase executive James Lee Jr. — caved in and supported Chase's outrageous government-backed acquisition of Bear Stearns. He also backed the recent bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — no surprise given that former Fannie Mae lobbyists are serving as his chief of staff and the head of his vice presidential vetting panel.

Obama also supported the Freddie Mac-Fannie Mae rescue, and that, too, is no surprise, given that he hired one former chairman of Fannie Mae to chair his vice presidential vetting panel and hired another former Fannie Mae chairman to serve as his consultant on housing issues. Most of us will never get within a hundred miles of a single Fannie Mae chairman, but Obama has already hired two — and he isn't even president yet.

This, folks, is the way of the world. Forget all the promises to make the rich pay their fair share. As the candidates get closer to office, the actual paying customers move to the front of the line.

Sadly, both candidates have an extensive history of being dependable pals of campaign contributors. Back in 2000, when Obama was a state senator in Illinois, an entrepreneur named Robert Blackwell Jr. hired him to be his lawyer, paying him a monthly retainer of $8,000 — big money for a part-time legislator with an annual salary of just $58,000. A few months later, Obama sent a letter urging state tourism officials to give a grant to one of Blackwell's companies, the amusingly named Killerspin, to fund a table-tennis tournament. Killerspin received $320,000 in public funds; Obama pocketed $112,000 in fees from Blackwell.

So far this year, Blackwell has bundled more than $100,000 for Obama's campaign. Looks like there's going to be a shitload of table-tennis tournaments all across America next year.

McCain also likes to write letters for big contributors. In 1998, four months after BellSouth contributed $16,750 to the senator, he sent a letter to the FCC asking it to give "serious consideration" to the company's request to enter the long-distance market. He later wrote letters on behalf of Paxson Communications, which donated $20,000 and let him use their company jet, as well as Ameritech and SBC Communications, which raised $120,000 for McCain at a time when they were seeking permission to merge.

McCain's still sticking by that gang. Former Ameritech chairman Richard Notebaert bundled more than $100,000 for him this year, and two of McCain's key fundraisers, Peter Madigan and Tim McKone, hail from SBC. The point is that politicians are intensely loyal to the people who give them money — and not anywhere near as loyal to the promises they've made to suckers like us. No matter who's in the White House, the direction of the government has remained remarkably stable. Clinton's treasury secretary, Rubin, was a Goldman Sachs man; Henry Paulson, the current secretary under Bush, is also a Goldman Sachs man. It'll probably be a Goldman man again next year. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In sickness or in health, the faces may change, but the money remains. "It's not an accident that both administrations picked for leading economic advisers people from Goldman Sachs," says Pollin.

The really distressing thing about all of this is the signal it sends to Americans. Goldman Sachs posted a record profit of $11 billion last year, much of it from betting against the subprime mortgage market they themselves helped to fuck up. That little energy exchange Goldman set up, the ICE, made a profit of $240 million last year, as gas prices skyrocketed. It may suck to be you right now, but all that pain isn't so bad if you are a big oil speculator.

When you live in million-dollar Manhattan townhouses and make billions in profits betting on the pain of the ordinary foreclosed homeowner, you shouldn't get to run around on TV with the prospective president on your arm. You should be hung by your balls. But that's not the way it works, and despite what you might have heard about "change," it probably never will be.

For all the excitement that Barack Obama has garnered, and all the talk about a new day in Washington, it would be tragic if the real legacy of his election victory was to finally expose the essentially unchanging, oligarchic nature of our political system. It's the same old story: Money talks, and bullshit walks. And don't be surprised if we're the ones still walking after November.

[From Issue 1059 — August 21, 2008]

Obama and the Empire by Bill Blum

2008-08-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

One of the better pieces to date on the like foreign policy of the presidential front runner, Barack Obama, once his administration assumes power. For those who find Blum's analysis discouraging, please remember that elections only take several days per year, which leave about 363 days for "extra-parliamentary" politics!

Obama And The Empire

By William Blum, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20438.htm

05/08/08 "ICH" -- - The New Yorker magazine in its July 14 issue ran a cover cartoon that achieved instant fame. It showed Barack Obama wearing Muslim garb in the Oval Office with a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. Obama is delivering a fist bump to his wife, Michelle, who has an Afro hairdo and an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. An American flag lies burning in the fireplace. The magazine says it's all satire, a parody of the crazy right-wing fears, rumors, and scare tactics about Obama's past and ideology.

The cartoon makes fun of the idea that Barack and Michelle Obama are some kind of mixture of Black Panther, Islamist jihadist, and Marxist revolutionary. But how much more educational for the American public and the world it would be to make fun of the idea that Obama is even some kind of progressive.

I'm more concerned here with foreign policy than domestic issues because it's in this area that the US government can do, and indeed does do, the most harm to the world, to put it mildly. And in this area what do we find? We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don't do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state; totally ignoring Hamas, an elected ruling party in the occupied territory; decrying the Berlin Wall in his recent talk in that city, about the safest thing a politician can do, but with no mention of the Israeli Wall while in Israel, nor the numerous American-built walls in Baghdad while in Iraq; referring to the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez as "authoritarian", but never referring similarly to the government of George W. Bush, certainly more deserving of the label; talking with the usual disinformation and hostility about Cuba, albeit with a token reform re visits and remittances. But would he dare mention the outrageous case of the imprisoned Cuban Five[1] in his frequent references to fighting terrorism?

While an Illinois state senator in January 2004, Obama declared that it was time "to end the embargo with Cuba" because it had "utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro." But speaking as a presidential candidate to a Cuban-American audience in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not "take off the embargo" as president because it is "an important inducement for change."[2] He thus went from a good policy for the wrong reason to the wrong policy for the wrong reason. Does Mr. Obama care any more than Mr. Bush that the United Nations General Assembly has voted -- virtually unanimously -- 16 years in a row against the embargo?

In summary, it would be difficult to name a single ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) that Obama has not been critical of, or to name one that he has supported. Can this be mere coincidence?

The fact that Obama says he's willing to "talk" to some of the "enemies" more than the Bush administration has done sounds good, but one doesn't have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It's only change of policy that counts. Why doesn't he simply and clearly state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else?

As to Iraq, if you're sick to the core of your being about the horrors US policy brings down upon the heads of the people of that unhappy land, then you must support withdrawal –- immediate, total, all troops, combat and non-combat, all the Blackwater-type killer contractors, not moved to Kuwait or Qatar to be on call. All bases out. No permanent bases. No permanent war. No timetables. No approval by the US military necessary. No reductions in forces. Just OUT. ALL. Just like what the people of Iraq want. Nothing less will give them the opportunity to try to put an end to the civil war and violence instigated by the American invasion and occupation and to recreate their failed state.

George W. Bush, 2006: "We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done as long as the government wants us there."[3]
George W. Bush, 2007: "It's their government's choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave."[4]
Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, 2008: "said his government was 'impatiently waiting' for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops."[5]
Barack Obama, 2008: We can "redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months."[6]

Obama's terms of withdrawal equals no withdrawal. Literally. Has he ever said that the war is categorically illegal and immoral? A war crime? Or that anti-American terrorism in the world is the direct result of oppressive US policies? Instead he calls for a troop increase and "the first truly 21st century military ... We must maintain the strongest, best-equipped military in the world."[7] Why of course, that's what the people of the United States and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rest of the people in this sad world desperately desire and need -- greater American killing power! Obama is not so much concerned with ending America's endless warfare as he is with "succeeding" in them, by whatever perverted definition of that word.

And has he ever dared to raise the obvious question: Why would Iran, even if nuclear armed, be a threat to attack the US or Israel? Any more than Iraq was such a threat. Which was zero. Instead, he has said things like "Iran continues to be a major threat" and repeats the tiresome lie that the Iranian president called for the destruction of Israel.[8]

Obama, one observer has noted, "opposes the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance the global strategic interests of American imperialism."[9]

He and his supporters have made much of the speech he delivered in the Illinois state legislature in 2002 against the upcoming US invasion of Iraq. But two years later, when he was running for the US Senate, he declared: "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage."[10] Since taking office in January 2005, he has voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward. He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her complicity in the Bush Administration's false justifications for going to war in Iraq. In doing so, he lacked the courage of 12 of his Democratic Party Senate colleagues who voted against her confirmation.

If you're one of those who would like to believe that Obama has to present moderate foreign policy views to be elected, but once he's in the White House we can forget that he lied to us repeatedly and the true, progressive man of peace and international law and human rights will emerge ... keep in mind that as a US Senate candidate in 2004 he threatened missile strikes against Iran[11], and winning that election apparently did not put him in touch with his inner peacenik.

When, in 2005, the other Illinois Senator, Dick Durbin, stuck his neck out and compared American torture at Guantanamo to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings", and was angrily denounced by the right wing, Obama stood up in the Senate and ... defended him? No, he joined the critics, thrice calling Durbin's remark a "mistake".[12]

One of Obama's chief foreign policy advisers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a man instrumental in provoking Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, which was followed by massive US military supplies to the opposition and widespread war. This gave rise to a generation of Islamic jihadists, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and more than two decades of anti-American terrorism. Asked later if he had any regrets about this policy, Brzezinski replied: "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."[13]

Another prominent Obama adviser -- from a list entirely and depressingly establishment-imperial -- is Madeleine Albright, who should always wear gloves because her hands are caked with blood from her roles in the bombings of Iraq and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In a primary campaign talk in March, Obama said that "he would return the country to the more 'traditional' foreign policy efforts of past presidents, such as George H.W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan."[14] Use your imagination. Bloody serial interventionists, all.

Why have well-known conservatives like George Will, David Brooks, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, and others spoken so favorably about Obama's candidacy?[15] Whatever else, they know he's not a threat to their most cherished views and values.

Given all this, can we expect a more enlightened, less bloody, more progressive and humane foreign policy from Mr. Barack Obama? Forget the alleged eloquence and charm; forget the warm feel-good stuff; forget the interminable clichés and platitudes about hope, change, unity, and America's indispensable role as world leader; forget all the religiobabble; forget John McCain and George W. Bush ... All that counts is putting an end to the horror -- the bombings, the invasions, the killings, the destruction, the overthrows, the occupations, the torture, the American Empire.

Al Gore and John Kerry both took the progressive vote for granted. Neither had ever been particularly progressive themself. Each harbored a measure of disdain for the left. Both paid a heavy price for the neglect. I and millions like me voted for Ralph Nader, or some other third-party candidate, or stayed home. Obama is doing the same as Gore and Kerry. Progressives should let him know that his positions are not acceptable, keeping up the anti-war pressure on him and the Democratic Party at every opportunity. For whatever good it just might do.

I'm afraid that if Barack Obama becomes president he's going to break a lot of young hearts. And some older ones as well.

Writer Norman Solomon has written: "These days, an appreciable number of Obama supporters are starting to use words like "disillusionment." But that's a consequence of projecting their political outlooks onto the candidate in the first place. The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place."

NOTES

[1] William Blum, "Cuban Political Prisoners ... in the United States" -- http://members.aol.com/bblum6/polpris.htm

[2] Washington Post, February 25, 2008; p.A4

[3] New York Times. December 1, 2006, p.1

[4] White House press conference, May 24, 2007

[5] Washington Post, July 9, 2008

[6] Obama's website: www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq/

[7] Speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, April 23, 2007

[8] Haaretz.com (leading Israeli newspaper), May 16, 2007

[9] Bill Van Auken, Global Research, July 18, 2008 -- http://www.globalresearch.ca/

[10] Chicago Tribune, July 27, 2004

[11] Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2004

[12] Congressional Record, June 21, 2005, p.S6897

[13] For the full Brzezinski interview see http://members.aol.com/bblum6/brz.htm

[14] Associated Press, March 28, 2008

[15] See, for example, Peter Wehner, "Why Republicans Like Obama", Washington Post, February 3, 2008, p.B7

illiam Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire, Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Monthly Review article on futility of nationalist solutions to Israeli-Palestinina morass

2008-08-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

This article was just published on the Monthly Review's website. It lays out a case for moving beyond the nation state, as well a Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, as path out of the current morass of Israel/Palestine. The author argues that there is no solution to this situation within capitalism and that nationalism and nation states are part of the problem, not a solution or antithesis to it. In other words, Palestinian nationalism and proposals for a Palestinian state are not an effective response to a combination of imperialism, class oppression, and apartheid.

What is lacking in the essay, however, is the role of imperialism, especially, but not only that of the U.S. With repressive regimes, including Israel, propped up by outside powers throughout the Middle East, the prospects for a socialist post-nation state comprising Palestinians and Israelis is not particularly rosy.

Reclaiming the Commons in Palestine/Israel: Ya Basta!/Khalas!

From the Monthly Review’s website.

by Bill Templer, URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/templer230708.html

The regime that will succeed the nation-state will not be the fruit of preconception or social engineering, but of sociological and political imagination wielded through transformative actions. -- Gustavo Esteva

Que se vayan todos ('Let's get rid of them all'). -- message written on the walls of Argentina

The No-state Solution

Even as the neo-liberal turn takes fierce hold on the Palestinian economy, the unending impasse in Palestine/Israel points up an ever more apparent fact: the nation-state is unworkable in its conventional capitalist sense. Palestine exemplifies the dead end of thinking that the state is any kind of a 'solution.' My reflections on the impasse in Palestine/Israel are in the spirit of Andrej Grubacic:

what is needed, not just in the Balkans, is an alternative to nationalism, colonialism and capitalism. [. . .] It should be a politics of a Balkan federation. A participatory society, built from the bottom up, through struggles for the creation of an inclusive democratic awareness, participatory social experiments, and an emancipatory practice that would win the political imagination of all people in the region.

Rage and Outrage in Ni'lin

Now, in the midst of the stench of the tear gas in Ni'lin, the hail of bullets against the peaceful, as hundreds resist the building of the Wall and the murderous Ihtilal (Occupation cum Suffocation), we have to understand the enemy is not just the Israeli state and the plutocracy and power it represents. Not just the Zionist state. It is this nation-state itself: we need to move beyond its violence and blindness, hype and illusions. Jamal Juma' (2008) of the key initiative Palestinian Grassroots Anti Apartheid Wall Campaign writes: "Nil'in will soon be ghettoized and isolated from the rest of the West Bank, with its main entrance being a tunnel running under the segregated settler-only road. Not only will this involve the confiscation of a further 200 dunams, but it will also effectively give the Occupation military full control over movement in and out of the area." 

Neve Gordon reminds us that what is happening in Ni'lin is singular resistance, "popular acts of civil disobedience that persist despite the ruthless repression of an occupying power." And that this is 'ta'ayush,' radical solidarity: "scores of Jewish Israeli and international activists are standing beside the Palestinians residents as they try to stop military bulldozers from destroying Ni'lin's land." But what he does not say is that this is part of what should become a mass movement of resistance for another kind of society, the groundswell for radical transformation of the whole society and economy on both sides of this divide.

Thoughts on such transformation are not non-existent. Joel Kovel's (2007) vision looks to a socialist alchemy of change, one centered on a single post-capitalist state, 'Palesrael.' The Haifa Conference on the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State in Palestine in June 2008, organized by Abnaa elBalad and other groups, highlighted the urgency of new thought on the single state solution, although a socialist vision for moving forward was perhaps not clearly enough projected. Eitan Bronstein and Norma Musih also contemplate such a vista of radical change, imagining what a state might be after massive refugee return:

We propose thinking about a form other than the familiar nation-state -- one that will not have to define itself in defensive terms against an external enemy but will instead be defined by the communities of which it is composed.

They do not say socialist commonwealth, though they may dream it. What else can work? As in Chiapas, a Zapatista-like bottom-up movement to capture the imagination and energy and activism of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians has to be built. At the June conference in Tel Aviv on implementing the massive return of Palestinian refugees, Uri Gordon was one of the few panelists to stress the need for a socialist (and social-anarchist) transformation at the grassroots to create a viable foundation for any kind of a single state of Palestinians and Jews and the building of a movement to catalyze that. Uri warned about the dangers of continuing a capitalist neo-liberal structure for any such polity. This seems only obvious. Yet a recent interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, for instance, makes no reference to socialist transformation as part of a solution in Palestine. We have to undo this silence.

Thinking outside the Capitalist and Statist Box

A sustained dialogue about options within and beyond a one-state solution is needed. But beyond all talk, it requires energizing a movement that dares to project beyond principled opposition to the viciousness and brutality of the Occupation and its outrages 24/7. Building that movement. The morass in Palestine/Israel is almost an icon of the need for such thinking. And any solution that builds toward a new architecture of a cooperative commonwealth, based on decentralized structures at all key scales from neighborhood on up (cf. Getting Free), will necessarily look likewise to transforming the greater transnational neighborhood, Mashriq and Maghreb. As Moshe Machover has often stressed, the encompassing vision has to be socialist liberation across the whole region, a dynamic federative socialist structure beyond the turf of Palestine.

How can the Palestinians who are now in forced Diaspora return in massive numbers? New ideas are advanced by Bronstein and Musih, and there was a lot of concrete talk at the recent Tel Aviv conference on the Refugee Right of Return. But how can there be any return to anything other than a space transformed by a new sense of mutual aid? How can Jewish Israelis can be awakened from decades of moral and just plain physical blindness? Inside the Israeli Leviathan, New Profile has been tackling that job of changing hearts, minds, and mindsets for over a decade, laying a foundation for a paradigm shift in thinking and feeling. But it won't come without a radical socialist movement.

ADRID, the Association for the Rights of the Internally Displaced, is organizing and agitating for a just society for all citizens of the Israeli state, and challenging Israeli apartheid. It is associated with Ittijah, an umbrella of Arab initiatives for change inside the Israeli Leviathan. But a movement is needed that dares to say socialism. That dares to say: capitalism khalas, enough. Violence khalas. Otherwise talk about a 'single democratic state' is grand naiveté. We need to get a ball of discourse rolling in a slightly different direction. NO to Occupation. NO to capitalism. NO to Zionism in any form. And NO to a politics centered solely on resistance. YES to people's dignity on both sides of this divide. YES to equity and solidarity. YES to a massive return of all refugees, the key catalyst for changing the nature of the Zionist state (Kovel, 2007).

Commenting on Zapatismo in Mexico, Gustavo Esteva, however, stresses the tentativeness of what vision should be, rooted in what ordinary people are doing and thinking:

It seems to us to be as insane as it is ridiculous to propose that some ideological or doctrinaire vision of that 'at large' should be a prerequisite for us to get moving, that every political initiative must define beforehand its final goal or the abstract future condition of the world. Those who live with their feet on the ground don't hang themselves with abstract 'at larges' or final finalities.

Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth

The goal of a libertarian-socialist multicultural and multi-faith Commonwealth could begin to energize new forms of decentralized direct democracy, people's participation and horizontalism, neighborhood autonomy as it moves beyond received notions of a capitalist 'state' run by a corporate ruling class -- in Israel a veiled dictatorship of 15 families over the Israeli economy, media, and politics.

Of, course, it's easy to say we need a mass movement striving to create a mosaic society of ta'ayush, Arab-Jewish synergy, founded on autonomy, authentic direct democracy, mutual aid. But beginnings can be forged, at the most grassroots, place-based local scales. In people's own neighborhoods, workplaces. Central here is creating a dynamism of a

"prefigurative politics" that involves constructing concrete alternatives, especially in terms of social relations. Prefigurative politics thus combines reference to both dual power strategies and to realising a libertarian and egalitarian ethos in the movement's own structures, social dynamics and lifestyle (Gordon, 2008).

Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods

One window looks to the kind of neighborhood Household and Home Assemblies that James Herod envisions in Getting Free: Creating an Association of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods (2007). That could begin to generate a whole geometry of people's initiatives from the bottom up, a network of dual power, the incubators of a new society of ta'ayush and power to the people -- not just slogans, but concrete scaffolding for transformation. Adel Samara argues that the secular democratic state conceived without concomitant radical social and economic transformation "will serve the Zionist and Arab Comprador solution." I agree. But change is a process, not an event. And has to be bottom-up. Could the turmoil in Ni'lin also generate the seeds for that neighborhood organizing? Only they can do it.

Paradigms from other corners can be examined and learned from. The ongoing re-establishment of the SDS in North America is a kindred potential paradigm for ideas for participatory social activism, with a strong left-libertarian socialist thrust. What the Power to the People campaign in the U.S. has been doing over the past half year is in part building that kind of movement, now newly linked with Hip Hop social activism. And it has put two black women -- Cynthia McKinney and Latina Rican Hip Hop activist Sister Rosa Clemente -- on the Green Party ticket to stand in the electoral arena, challenging the corporate plutocracy and its parties:

we are supporting our commitment to the building of an uncompromising, unswerving, people's movement [. . .] We are refusing to collaborate with this Empire's system of oppression. Rather, we are working to dismantle it and build a fundamentally and systemically different system that addresses human needs, not human greed.

The GPUS has a clear statement on the need for exploring equitable alternatives to a 'two-state' solution and is the only major formation on the U.S. left to issue such a declaration.

Zapatismo and Beyond

Look to the Global South. Social pragmatist paradigms for such organizing initiatives are now multiplying in Latin America, within Zapatismo in Chiapas, the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil, the rise of the indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Ecuador, and elsewhere, and as a complex of autonomous movements across Argentina, a "socialism of the people, participatory and decentralized" (Sitrin, 2006). What can be applied to spur movement building on the ground in Palestine and inside the Israeli Leviathan? As Holloway sees it, the imperative everywhere is horizontalidad:

Probably we have to think of advancing through experiments and questions: "preguntando caminamos" -- "walking we ask questions" -- as the Zapatistas put it. To think of moving forward through questions rather than answers means a different sort of politics, a different sort of organization. If nobody has the answers, then we have to think not of hierarchical structures of leadership, but horizontal structures that involve everyone as much as possible. What do we want? I think we want self-determination -- the possibility of creating our own lives, the assumption of our own humanity. [. . .] The drive to collective self-determination should be the guiding principle, the utopian star that lights up our questions and our experiments. That means, of course, an anti-state politics.

Those horizontal structures are already forming in spaces of resistance like Ni'lin. In Palestine under the boot, and the Israeli soldiers' state, that would require a massive popular movement to "reclaim the commons" among ordinary Jews and Arabs, energizing a new ensemble of struggles for direct and inclusive democracy and participatory economy, including dynamic inclusion of large numbers of returning refugees. It means bringing people in the neighborhoods into a new kind of political and economic decision-making in their own streets and communities, a pro-active role in the management of their own affairs, their work places. The progressive dismantling of all forms of Zionist ideology and domination -- within workable proposals for new forms of political life, based on local control, autonomy and creative resistance. Buoyed by a utopian realism, with practical, workable paradigms that can be learned from in the Peoples' Global Action and World Social Forum, catalyzing an alchemy of social transformation bottom-up in Israel/Falastin, centered on human dignity and autonomy. Don Gregorio, a Yaqui Indian in Mexico, put it well: "Autonomy is not something we ought to ask for or that anyone can give us. It is something we have, despite everything. Its other name is dignity."

It entails a transformation in the reality of the Arab Palestinians who are now Israeli citizens, third-class. Wakim Wakim, of ADRID, projects that clearly:

we need a revolution of thinking within the 1948 borders, to ensure the rights of all of us based on legal arrangements, mutual citizenship, a constitution, a separation of religion and state, a new legal system to adapt to the new reality, et cetera. An entirely new definition of a collective identity is all of our responsibility.

It takes a little more to 'up the anti' and start talking about a socialist revolution in thinking and grassroots organizing. There is no alternative to this. Kovel (2007) is guarded: "perhaps it will never come, given the awesome wealth and power at the command of the empire, and its craven press, cowed public, and corrupted political consciousness. Or perhaps it will. . . ."

One Big Union

Grassroots working-class syndicalism among Palestinians and Israelis, forging new bonds of solidarity, is one pathway out of the morass of the 'national question' -- and the immense ever widening gap between poor and rich in Israeli-Jewish society. It can become a hands-on incubator for overcoming mutual distrust.

As the Palestinian economy is transformed to "formalize a truncated network of Palestinian-controlled cantons and associated industrial zones, dependent upon the Israeli occupation, and through which a pool of cheap Palestinian labour is exploited by Israeli, Palestinian and other regional capitalist groups," an imperative is grassroots radical labor organizing. One option that can appeal to workers and the many unemployed is to create IWW-like base groups in both communities. Not a small political party, but a horizontally structured independent movement -- oriented to people's everyday problems to make ends meet and have a say, and broader issues of self-determination and vernacular dignity. Building, from the bottom up, a scaffolding for organizing and change, aspiring to "a world in which production and distribution are organized by workers ourselves to meet the needs of the entire population, not merely a handful of exploiters." A Wobbly union is one such non-hierarchical vessel for nurturing autonomy and workers' collective action. It is potentially robust, concrete, a structure that workers and working families can understand. Gregory W. Esteven is right on in his perception:

I've long thought that the Industrial Workers of the World's objective of organizing skilled and unskilled labor together, across national boundaries, was ahead of its time. Far from being relics of a bygone era, the work they are doing now is cutting edge. They have a better understanding of the present conjuncture than many mainstream unions, which have been slow to adapt to the realities of the postindustrial economy.

Now is the time, across Palestine, from the river to the sea, and out into the region. Here is a small paradigm.

Piqueteros against the System

Or imagine a movement like that of Argentina's piqueteros across Israel and Palestine: protesters, many unemployed and underemployed workers, large numbers of landless Bedouin from 'unrecognized' settlements in the Negev (al-Naqab) and Galilee (al-Jalil), staging marches again and again against the government to draw attention to the people's plight, mounting the barricades against the plutocracy that rules them. And massive non-violent struggle across the entire topography of the Occupation. Taking the resistance in Bil'in and Ni'lin as paradigms. As Chomsky recently stressed: "a non-violent struggle would have had considerable prospects for success. I think it still is the only prospect for success."

Authentic organization springs from struggle, not vice versa -- sustained struggle, and not just in resistance to the Occupation. Samara asks: "For those who are busy marketing the S[ingle] D[emocratic] S[tate] today: [. . .] What is their practical program? On what basis are they going to mobilize the masses?" It makes little practicable sense to argue a single democratic state unless a new conception of polity and socialist economy is its guiding vision of transformation. Only within such a framework can they move toward 'advocacy' -- spelling out "a realistic path from here to there" -- not simply 'proposal' (a distinction stressed by Chomsky).

Nodes for Anti-authoritarian Spaces

Nodes for an anti-authoritarian groundswell are imperative. Some are already budding. The social-anarchist space now opened on the Israeli left by the libertarian affinity group One Struggle (Ma'avak Ehad) needs to be broadened and extended into Palestinian society. The need is for popularizing its anti-authoritarian values into a grassroots movement to prioritize equity, diversity, solidarity, and self-management within and across the communities in this internecine struggle.

Anarchists Against the Wall is another paradigmatic space. In its fierce commitment to direct action, AATW could serve as a mini-paradigm of joint Palestinian-Israeli action, its praxis perhaps a template for future more systematic radical organizing of workers (and students as workers-to-be), One Big Union 'from the river to the sea.' AATW is involved in both direct action and demonstrations against the Wall, including in the villages of al-Ma'asara, south of Bethlehem, Beit Ummar, north of Hebron, Bil'in, and recently, almost daily, facing the brutal repression by the IDF in Ni'lin in the West Bank and elsewhere. Some sense of the terrible repression of peaceful demonstrators is visible here: <www.awalls.org/topics/niilin>. Here is a recent petition against human rights abuses there: <www.petitiononline.com/nilin/petition.html>. Add your signatures.

AATW is committed to a joint struggle of Palestinians and Israelis. Its contribution, an unprecedented mode of joint Arab-Jewish sumud (steadfastness), is widely recognized in both the Palestinian and Israeli media and is regularly reported on A-Infos. They recently issued a call for support of the legal defense of hundreds of arrested activists. Donate if you can: <www.awalls.org/donations>.

Profil Hadash is another such node. Its charter stresses:

We, a group of feminist women and men, are convinced that we need not live in a soldiers' state. [. . .] We understand that the state of war in Israel is maintained by decisions made by our politicians -- not by external forces to which we are passively subject. [. . .] We will not go on enabling them by obediently, uncritically supplying soldiers to the military which implements them.

Its work in struggling against militarism as an ideology and everyday mindset in a soldiers' state is exemplary.

Of core importance is the initiative Zochrot, foregrounding for Israeli-Jewish consciousness the Nakba and the multiple evil and injustice it has wrought.

Among Arab Palestinians, ARDIB, the groups inside Ittijah and other activist initiatives, such as the huge resistance mounted by the Ni'ilin Popular Committee against the Apartheid Wall, and the movement Abnaa elBalad are all such nodes of resistance and transformation. But sustaining them needs, we would argue, a socialist vision. And active discussion, people's think-tanks. As Yael Lerer (Balad Party) said at the June 2008 Tev Aviv conference on implementing refugee return: "We should have think-tanks inside every kibbutz. Start planning within our own communities, with other communities. This is exactly the activity that needs to start happening, with or without the approval of the government." I would add: think-tanks in every neighborhood inside the Israeli state, from Metulla to Eilat.

A Hundred Flowers Can Bloom 

A hundred schools of thought can contend in this pluralistic mix of ideas for transformation. We're at an incredible juncture in the capitalist world system, maybe a socio-seismic shift. The chances for fundamental social and economic transformation in this planetary crisis are multiplying. Esteven senses that: "What comes next we cannot be sure, but it seems that the time to revive the socialist project has arrived, and it must be one adapted to the needs of the 21st century." Building a profound sense of social empathy and solidarity with ordinary people in their oppression is part of what we are about. That is what Zochrot is addressing, hands-on: "Only when Jews come to see the Palestinians who live here, and those who were expelled, as people worth living with can we hope to live here fairly and equitably."

Geographer David Harvey (2000) has noted that there's a time and place "where alternative visions, no matter how fantastic, provide the grist for shaping powerful forces for change. I believe we are precisely at such a moment. Utopian dreams . . . are omnipresent as the hidden signifiers of our desires" (p. 195). Que se vayan todos.

References

Gordon, U. (2008). Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Juma', J. (2008). Open Letter to Shawn Brandt, Tyendinga Mohawk Community. June.

Kovel, J. (2007). Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. Pluto Press: London.

Sitrin, M. (2006). Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. San Francisco: AK Press.

Bill Templer is a linguist based in Southeast Asia.

URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/templer230708.html

Obama Promises 10,000 More Troops for Afghanistan

2008-07-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

The traditional trajectory in presidential campaigns is for candidates to veer to the left during the primaries, to the center during the presidential election, and then to the right when their administration takes power. Obama is following this pattern with great precision, and those liberals who still believe he is anti-war have one more indicator of the war-mongering which is to come during the next four years.

We already know he wants to escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to expand the overall size of the Army and Marines, to keep all options on the table regarding Iran, to expand the Pentagon budget, to support the Israeli government to the hilt, and to maintain the U.S. government's enormous foreign U.S. military footprint, with a focus on the Middle East.

But what else? What then does veering further to the right mean when Obama is elected.
Red Eye's predictions:

1) Maintaining large troop levels in Iraq. Getting out will be an interminable process.
2) Military incursions into Pakistan.
3) Major increases in military budgets.
4) Preparations for revived military conscription.

Published on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 by the Guardian/UK

Obama Promises 10,000 More Troops for Afghanistan

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/15/10365/

by Ewen MacAskill

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama yesterday pledged to increase US troops in Afghanistan by a third if he becomes president, sending 10,000 more to reinforce the 33,000 already there.0715 03 1

He was speaking after the US lost nine soldiers at the weekend in the deadliest attack on its forces in the country since 2005.

Obama has promised, soon after becoming president in January, to begin scaling back the 156,000 US troops in Iraq and Kuwait, and to shift the focus to Afghanistan.

He is to fill out his plans in a foreign policy speech in Washington today ahead of his first visit to Iraq and Afghanistan since he launched his presidential bid early last year.

Details of his trip have been kept secret for security reasons but a senior Palestinian spokesman, Saeb Erekat, disclosed yesterday that Obama would be in the region next week, with a meeting in the West Bank on July 23 with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, said today’s speech “will focus on the global strategic interests of the United States, which includes ending our misguided effort in Iraq”. He added that a gradual, phased withdrawal of US troops “will allow the US to properly address the growing threat from a resurgent al-Qaida in Afghanistan”.

Previewing the speech in an article written for the comment page of the New York Times yesterday, Obama wrote: “As president, I would pursue a new strategy and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more non-military assistance to accomplish our mission there.”

He said that ending the war in Iraq is “essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and al-Qaida has a safe haven”.

In a separate comment on the campaign trail, Obama said the killings on Sunday reinforced the need to switch resources from Iraq to Afghanistan.

“I continue to believe that we’re under-resourced in Afghanistan,” he said. “That is the real centre for terrorist activity that we have to deal with and deal with aggressively.”

As well as visiting Iraq and Afghanistan, he is to go to Germany, France and Britain and call on Germany and France, in particular, to increase their involvement in Afghanistan.

His Republican rival, John McCain, is also to discuss Afghanistan this week. Randy Scheunemann, a senior McCain foreign policy adviser, noted yesterday that Obama had voted in the senate last year against increased resources for US troops in Afghanistan.

“Senator Obama is not trying to have it both ways, he’s trying to have it every way,” Scheunemann said.

Although eclipsed by the US’s economic slide as the main election issue, the war in Iraq remains one of the clearest points of division between Obama and McCain, who is committed to remaining in the country until stability is achieved.

Obama, in the New York Times article, reiterated his promise to have all US combat troops out by the summer of 2010, with a “residual” force left in place to fight al-Qaida and train Iraqi forces.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

What can be done in response to Peak Oil?

2008-06-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

WHAT CAN BE DONE IN RESPONSE TO PEAK OIL?

How should we respond to the dire predictions that Peak Oil will be a powerful catalyst for energy war, social dislocation, and massive upheaval?

First, we need to understand what we mean when we say that Peak Oil is a catalyst. It is not a cause of energy wars in Middle East, which have been underway from the late19the century. Nor is it a direct cause for the Middle East arms race, which can be traced back to the 1950s. Furthermore, waves of starvation in poorer countries, the flow of capital to energy producers, climate change, and similar global phenomena do not require a serious gap in oil supply and demand to take place. They all preceded Peak Oil, some by a century. But, the rate of these changes is accelerated by Peak Oil. It puts history on the fast track.

Second, we cannot precisely predict how each trend will accelerate and then influence the others – since they are interconnected.

For example, the ongoing, escalating, and future energy wars to gain hold of a dwindling oil supply and soaring oil profits, in turn, burns up more fuel. As a result, the overall supply goes down, the current price goes up, the atmosphere heats up even more, and the amount of public resources available to develop new sources of energy, to make the use of existing energy more efficient, and to replace outmoded energy infrastructure with new designs and technologies, are all put on the back burner.

On the other side, as the social consequences of Peak Oil continue to unfold, they in turn influence other outcomes. For example, when more money is paid to oil producers, there is also less available for personal consumption because the direct price of transportation, heating and cooking fuel, and driving all go up. Similarly, the indirect energy costs, in the form of the decline of the dollar, as well as open and hidden transportation surcharges, fuel inflation and, therefore, reduce living standards. They amount to a further transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, and from countries like to the US to oil and gas suppliers like Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Voila, the hard times and inequality imposed by the financial resources required to fight energy wars – such as the $3 billion price tag for the Iraq War – are magnified by the austerity resulting from increased energy costs.

This means that political opposition to war and militarism could be paired with opposition to growing inequality and deprivation. This combination is a serious threat to those in power, who understand the fragility of their system much more than progressives do. Peak Oil could produce extraordinary opportunities for activists of all political stripes, whether fascists on the right desperate to save the market system, to communists on the left, happy to dig the grave of capitalism.

Given what we do know about energy wars and social dislocation, and what we do not know about the uneven and intertwined trends accelerated by Peak Oil, there are some technical and political responses which should be pursued.

Life style changes: Many people turn to changes in life style, such as working more at home, carpooling, driving a hybrid, avoid styrofoam cups and excessive packaging, and washing clothes in cold water. While none of these “green” changes in behavior hurt, they are only a small part of the solution. They all rely on existing technologies and are, in essence, a way for most people to tighten their belt when the cutbacks of the war machine or energy inflation erode their living standards.

Still others put their faith in the market. They argue that high oil prices mean that alternative energy technologies, such as wind and solar, become profitable, hence investors will flock to them, especially if they get tax break and public subsidies. Yes, this is happening at a small scale, but it overlooks six barriers.

The profit margins of oil and gas are much greater, and it will attract much investment, which could, in a rational system, be spent on less profitable alternative energy.

The history of oil and gas within the market system is endless wars to control supply and profit.

Many alternative energy sources, such as coal, tar sands, and oil shale are dirty. They heavily pollute the air, causing more global warming, as well as water supplies.

Some alternative energies, such as ethanol, use corn, which in turn reduces grain supplies and causes starvation.

New, breakthrough technologies will require a dozen Manhattan Projects, the accelerated government research and development to develop nuclear weapons during WWII. The private sector does not have the resources or the organizational capability for such an undertaking.

Once breakthrough technologies for fusion, solar power, wind and tidal power, hydrogen engines, and other alternative technologies (e.g, new building materials with integrated photosynthetic or photovoltaic properties) are developed, it will take trillions in new investments to rebuild transportation systems, housing, and entire sustainable cities to make them viable. Market economies based on profit and wars are not capable of such an undertaking, especially if it must be done in a matter of decades instead of centuries.

Conclusion:

This is why there is no solution to the overlapping problems ushered in by Peak Oil within the market system. Capitalism may be the root cause, but unlike the myths fostered by neo-liberalism, capitalism cannot be tweaked to clean up its own mess.

This is why we have concluded that the first step to address the consequences of Peak Oil is to take on capitalism itself. This does seem like a daunting task because it is daunting. But we need to understand that the conditions of expanded energy wars combined with ravished economies have, historically, ushered in periods of great social change.

As demonstrated in WWI, when the Russian and Bolshevik revolutions took place, and WWII, when the Chinese revolution took place, two new large scale economies emerged which thought they could rebuild human society based on production to meet human needs, not to produce profits in the market place.

The failure of these revolutions in the form of their reversion back to capitalism does not mean it is impossible to escape from capitalism and the destruction it spawns through such phenomena as Peak Oil. But it does mean that the two cases we have before us, the Soviet Union and China, need to carefully analyzed. It is certainly possible that the doomsday scenarios of Peak Oil will usher in such revolutions, and it will then be incumbent on those new societies to avoid the mistakes which lead to the return of capitalism in Russian and China.

While such an extraordinary undertaking strikes many an insurmountable, a world ravaged by worsening energy wars and massive human suffering is likely to change that pessimistic assessment.

2008-06-15T21:49:00.001-07:00

John Pilger has offered still further reasons for the liberals, left-liberals, and progressives who have been swept up in Obamamania. As in his previous column, he lays out a methodical case why Obama, as President, would continue a long tradition of Democratic Party presidents whose administrations fully pursued U.S. imperial interests.

Obama is a truly Democratic expansionist

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2008/06/pilger-obama-truly-bush

John Pilger, New Statesmen, June 12, 2008

Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating bullshit on a grand scale

In 1941, the editor Edward Dowling wrote: "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it." What has changed? The terror of the rich is greater than ever, and the poor have passed on their delusion to those who believe that when George W Bush finally steps down next January, his numerous threats to the rest of humanity will diminish.

The nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, "marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history", is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullshit on a grand scale. Race, gender, appearance, body language, rictal spouses and offspring, even bursts of tragic grandeur, are all subsumed by marketing and "image-making", now magnified by "virtual" technology. Thanks to an undemocratic electoral college system (or, in Bush's case, tampered voting machines) only those who both control and obey the system can win. This has been the case since the truly historic and exciting victory of Harry Truman, the liberal Democrat said to be a humble man of the people, who went on to show how tough he was by obliterating two cities with the atomic bomb.

Understanding Obama as a likely president of the United States is not possible without understanding the demands of an essentially unchanged system of power: in effect a great media game. For example, since I compared Obama with Robert Kennedy in these pages, he has made two important statements, the implications of which have not been allowed to intrude on the celebrations. The first was at the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the Zionist lobby, which, as Ian Williams has pointed out, "will get you accused of anti-Semitism if you quote its own website about its power". Obama had already offered his genuflection, but on 4 June went further. He promised to support an "undivided Jerusalem" as Israel's capital. Not a single government on earth supports the Israeli annexation of all of Jerusalem, including the Bush regime, which recognises the UN resolution designating Jerusalem an international city.

His second statement, largely ignored, was made in Miami on 23 May. Speaking to the expatriate Cuban community - which over the years has faithfully produced terrorists, assassins and drug runners for US administrations - Obama promised to continue a 47-year crippling embargo on Cuba that has been declared illegal by the UN year after year.

Again, Obama went further than Bush. He said the United States had "lost Latin America". He described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua as a "vacuum" to be filled. He raised the nonsense of Iranian influence in Latin America, and he endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of a regime, whose president and leading politicians are linked to death squads, to invade its neighbours on behalf of Washington. He also endorsed the so-called Merida Initiative, which Amnesty International and others have condemned as the US bringing the "Colombian solution" to Mexico. He did not stop there. "We must press further south as well," he said. Not even Bush has said that.

It is time the wishful-thinkers grew up politically and debated the world of great power as it is, not as they hope it will be. Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama's difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is. However much the colour of his skin draws out both racists and supporters, it is otherwise irrelevant to the great power game. The "truly exciting and historic moment in US history" will only occur when the game itself is challenged.

Pilger - Obama's speech to AIPAC is the tip of the iceberg

2008-06-08T23:10:00.000-07:00

For some, Barack Obama's recent speech to AIPAC was an unexpected eye-opener. Contrary to the dovish aura he casts in the electoral campaign, his remarks to AIPAC presented the political views of Israel's Likud party, a conservative block closely allied with the U.S.'s neo-cons.

In the following column, journalist and film-maker John Pilger not only describes Obama's backward views on Israel, but demonstrates that these are fully consistent with the rest of his and his advisers' foreign policy positions on Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan.

If you are one of those millions drawn to Obama because you think he is progressive and a sharp contrast to John McCain, please read Pilger's column in careful detail. It makes the best case yet that Obama is as hawkish as the rest of the Democratic Party, holding only minor disagreements with McCain on nearly all foreign policy questions.

After Bobby Kennedy

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/05/obama-pilger-mccain-kennedy

John Pilger, New Statesman, 29 May 2008

Bobby Kennedy's campaign is the model for Barack Obama's current bid to
be the Democratic nominee for the White House. Both offer a false hope
that they can bring peace and racial harmony to all Americans.

In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It
is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected
president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968.
Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the
Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times.
He would "return government to the people" and bestow "dignity and
justice" on the oppressed. "As Bernard Shaw once said," he would say,
"'Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things
that never were and ask: Why not?'" That was the signal to run back to
the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.

Kennedy's campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a
senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the
expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to
end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war's conquest of other
people's land and resources, but because it was "unwinnable".

Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be
liberalism's last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as
a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy
liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the
hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager
for "leadership" and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting
propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate
system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed
through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own
ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of
the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the
streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn
together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had
supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but
this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene
McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war
ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another
term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously
exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for
politics that represented them, not the rich.

"These people love you," I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where
the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a
great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.

"Yes, yes, sure they love me," he replied. "I love them!" I asked him
how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his
political philosophy? "Philosophy? Well, it's based on a faith in this
country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want
to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the
world, as Thomas Jefferson said."

"That's what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?"

"How . . . by charting a new direction for America."

The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may
well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed
language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best
damned democracy money can buy.

Embarrassing truth

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how,
regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw
nearer to each other. They already concur on America's divine right to
control all before it. "We lead the world in battling immediate evils and
promoting the ultimate good," said Obama. "We must lead by building a
21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people
[emphasis added]." McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing "terrorists" he
would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn't quarrel.

Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv,
unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In
opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel's
starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and
Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a
statement that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" to
now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the
failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis
added]." Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal
military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has
furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says
absurdly, "is a threat to all of us".

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost
united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years
(instead of "100 years", his earlier option). Obama has now "reserved the
right" to change his pledge to get troops out next year. "I will listen
to our commanders on the ground," he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser
on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in
Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to
support Bush's demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has
called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers
embrace McCain's proposal for an aggressive "league of democracies", led
by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.

Amusingly, both have denounced their "preachers" for speaking out.
Whereas McCain's man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic
white holy-rollers, Obama's man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing
truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a
consequence of the violence of US power across the orld. The media
demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the
Bush lie that "terrorists attacked America because they hate our
freedoms". So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was
rooted not "primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel", but
in "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam". Journalists
applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.

The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating
calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner,
founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: "There is a sense of
dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a
resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges
America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon 'the
better angels of our nature'." At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane
confessed: "I know it shouldn't be happening, but it is. I'm falling for
John McCain." His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings
for McCain, he wrote, were like "the war that must occur inside a
14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than
to girls".

The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their
support for America's true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite
claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors,
Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG,
Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit
Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. "Seven
of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors," wrote the investigator Pam
Martens, "consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street
firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated
in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages." A report by
United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss
to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between
$164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people
of colour in the United States. "Washington lobbyists haven't funded my
campaign," said Obama in January, "they won't run my White House and they
will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president."
According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top
five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate
lobbyists.

What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as
Robert Kennedy's. By offering a "new", young and apparently
progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a
member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That
was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory
will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice
movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If
that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

Piracies and dangers

America's war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly
authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which,
the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state
department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or ubversion
against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia
and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight
proxy wars for control of Africa's oil and other riches. With US missiles
soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia's borders, the Cold War is
back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the
presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.

Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream
America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the
normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their
troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their
Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily
brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and
read.

On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches
British liberalism's equivalent last fling. Most of the "philosophy"
of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and
Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in
their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class- based
economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the
British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory,
distinguishable from Blair's new Labour only in the personality of its
leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as
Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.

U.S. Military Set for a Long Campaign in Africa

2008-06-07T17:05:00.000-07:00

Economic competition with the European Union, China, and Russia for Africa's natural resources, consumer markets, and cheap labor is quickly evolving into political and military competiton. For those who think that such competition, with their likely evolution into energy wars, is restricted to the Middle East, only need to look south and west, into Africa.

U.S. Military Set for a Long Campaign in Africa

Business Day (Johannesburg), June 5, 2008

http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200806050366.html

By Wilson Johwa, Business Day, Johannesburg, South Africa

STRIDENT hostility towards a US military command centre for Africa (Africom) has prompted the US defence establishment to lobby civil society and key stakeholders in Africa, in a bid to garner support for the centre's planned relocation on African soil. Africom's establishment was announced early last year when US President George Bush argued the need for a unified military command for Africa, excluding Egypt. Previously, the US military divided its African responsibilities among four independent military headquarters, including the US Central Command responsible for its contingent in Djibouti.

Based in Stuttgart, Germany, Africom's intention was that within a year, in October, it would move to a location in Africa where military functions would run alongside development and relief work. Yet the prospect of a US base did not appeal to African states, including SA, which rejected the idea.

Last year, the newly appointed first commander of Africom, Gen William Ward, failed to meet Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota during his visit to drum up support for the planned command. "SA wants absolutely nothing to do with it, not even talking to the Americans about it," Richard Cornwell of the Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS) says. Among other African countries, only Liberia has expressed a willingness to host the proposed centre, which the US said would focus on preventing war rather than on fighting.

However, it has emerged that the centre has been struggling to secure a home on the continent, partly because US-funded aid agencies are averse to working side by side with troops due to the increased risk to development workers and the military's lack of training in meaningful development. As a result, the centre was forced to scale back its plans. Africom will now stay in Germany indefinitely while five smaller regional offices have been put on ice as the military searched for places to locate them.

Africom sees its mission as conducting noncombat evacuations, support for peacekeeping operations and training, waging the global war on terror, and humanitarian relief operations. Resistance in Africa is forcing the US to look at different options. For instance, the office of the secretary for defence for policy aimed to support Africom by establishing a civil-military forum (CMF), managed by the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies (ACSS). Run by the defence department and based at the National Defence University in Washington, ACSS's objectives include building an understanding and support for the war on terror, establishing networks and maintaining relationships with African civilian and military professionals, together with conveying US policy perspectives to African leaders.

It was envisaged that the CMF would become "a place of mutual respect, facilitating dialogue and fostering relationships" between Africom and other members of the civil-military community, particularly international organisations focused on Africa . Former US ambassador to Kenya Mark Bellamy was tasked with developing the CMF concept as well as providing overall management of the CMF effort at ACSS. In another strategy aimed at preparing for Africom's presence in Africa, consultants were contracted to look at "potential fluctuations in the investment, business and political climates in Africa" due to a possible US military presence. The focus of the exercise was to "identify key stakeholders that would benefit or suffer losses economically, financially, socially, politically or in terms of influence" from a decision to base the Africom headquarters or other US military presence in their region of influence in Africa.

Apparently, the "stakeholder survey" entails naming individuals and organisations in the five African regions that would support a US military facility or those that would be disadvantaged, potentially opening the possibility of influencing them directly. But a spokesman for New York-based Ergo Advisors says its brief is merely to show the pros and cons of Africom's presence in whatever country is chosen as host.

The head of the ISS, Mike Hough, says the US's push to tap into Africa's oil resources, together with a desire to counter the growing Chinese influence, make it unlikely it will abandon its planned Africa command centre. When it eventually comes, Africom is less likely to be in southern Africa than in east or north Africa. However, although unlikely, US priorities might change when Bush leaves office early next year. "The one thing that one doesn't know is if the Democrats will take a different line," Hough says.

2008-06-07T00:11:00.001-07:00

google562ddc1a20d5e60a.html

Further discussion on Obama as a hawk

2008-06-05T16:39:00.000-07:00

Some respondents to the previous post share Red Eye's view that an Obama
administration, despite the dovish impression he gives to doves, will continue
the long trajectory of increased U.S. government militarism, especially in the
Middle East, including an alignment with the Likud in Israel. Others believe
-- mostly on their hopes rather than on any hard evidence -- that Obama is
really a sheep in wolf's clothing. Once elected, he will unveil his hidden,
dovish self and ramp down U.S. militarism.

While I understand this hope, I think it is based on wishful thinking. This
should be clear to those who take a careful look at Obama's actual
positions, his foreign policy advisers, his big givers, and the job he will
inherit. After all, Obama would be the Chief Executive and
Commander-in-Chief of an enormous, but rapidly declining empire. It is
armed to the teeth and intent or remaining the planet's hegemonic power,
especially when it comes to oil.

Furthermore, Obama, like the other candidates, proposes an expansion of the
military in terms of troops and budget. He also will be the leader of a party
which has a long history of foreign wars (WWI, Korea, Cold, Vietnam, Kosovo)
and domestic repression (WWI Sabotage act, WWII concentration camps for
Japanese, post-war witch hunts, Cointelpro, Patriot Act, Homeland Security).
Finally, he will inherent the Carter Doctrine (Persian Gulf oil is a vital US interest,
and the US government will use military force to secure it), as well as most of
Carter's and Clinton's foreign policy teams.

Face it, the Democratic Party' establishment (funders, think tanks,
officials, pundits) are extremely hawkish, and they have catapulted Obama
to be their nominee in just a few years. The doves, like Kucinich, are a
tiny fringe. They may have widespread support from the party's base, but no
influence when it comes to foreign and military policy.

Conclusion? Without an enormous mass movement similar to the 60s and early
70s, the "change" just won't happen. A few pleasant words pitched at
progressive voters influenced by ahistorical hopes, negative campaigning
(Republicans are bad), and wedge issues (abortion, guns, sustainability),
may win "lesser evil" votes, but they will not produce a qualitative change
in foreign policy.

Obama's Speech to AIPAC

2008-06-04T15:15:00.001-07:00

Here is Barack Obama's speech to AIPAC on June 3, 2008, about his explicit Israel policy and implicit Palestine policy. It is hard to discern any change in his remarks regards US government policy toward Israel, Iran, or much else in the Middle East. The one exception could be a collapse in Iraq will force his administration change policies and pressure Israel harder for a two state solution in order get Sunni support for U.S. military actions in the Persian Gulf. For those who believe his campaign rhetoric of change, this ought to be one more warning to brace yourself for disappointment. The most hawkish sections of the speech have been highlighted below.

The real message of this talk is that the settlements and the occupation -- which are not discussed -- will continue directly with strong U.S. government support or through some willing Palestinian Authority bantustan. The rest of U.S. government policy in the Middle East would also continue, perhaps with the hope that some troops (actually 100,000 more per Obama's proposals) can be moved from Iraq to take on the Afghan occupation, Iran, or Pakistan.

Obama's AIPAC Speech and Rahm's Endorsement

http://www.observer.com/2008/reaction-obama-aipac

Right after Barack Obama's speech to AIPAC this morning he was endorsed by Rahm Emanuel, a leading member of the House.

(The Illinois congressman has largely stayed out of the election because he is a friend of Obama's and also has close ties to the Clintons.)

Emanuel, who belongs to an Orthodox Jewish congregation in Chicago, then accompanied Obama to a meeting with AIPAC's executive board, Mark Halperin reports.

Here is full text of Obama's speech, as prepared for delivery:

Remarks at AIPAC Policy Conference

Senator Barack Obama

June 4, 2008

As Prepared for Delivery

It’s great to see so many friends from across the country. I want to congratulate Howard Friedman, David Victor and Howard Kohr on a successful conference, and on the completion of a new headquarters just a few blocks away.

Before I begin, I want to say that I know some provocative emails have been circulating throughout Jewish communities across the country. A few of you may have gotten them. They’re filled with tall tales and dire warnings about a certain candidate for President. And all I want to say is – let me know if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening.

But if anyone has been confused by these emails, I want you to know that today I’ll be speaking from my heart, and as a true friend of Israel. And I know that when I visit with AIPAC, I am among friends. Good friends. Friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow, and forever.

One of the many things that I admire about AIPAC is that you fight for this common cause from the bottom up. The lifeblood of AIPAC is here in this room – grassroots activists of all ages, from all parts of the country, who come to Washington year after year to make your voices heard. Nothing reflects the face of AIPAC more than the 1,200 students who have travelled here to make it clear to the world that the bond between Israel and the United States is rooted in more than our shared national interests – it’s rooted in the shared values and shared stories of our people. And as President, I will work with you to ensure that it this bond strengthened.

I first became familiar with the story of Israel when I was eleven years old. I learned of the long journey and steady determination of the Jewish people to preserve their identity through faith, family and culture. Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds.

The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black, he was from Kenya, and he left us when I was two. My mother was white, she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways, I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional and cultural identity. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea – that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

I also learned about the horror of the Holocaust, and the terrible urgency it brought to the journey home to Israel. For much of my childhood, I lived with my grandparents. My grandfather had served in World War II, and so had my great uncle. He was a Kansas boy, who probably never expected to see Europe – let alone the horrors that awaited him there. And for months after he came home from Germany, he remained in a state of shock, alone with the painful memories that wouldn’t leave his head.

You see, my great uncle had been a part of the 89th Infantry Division – the first Americans to reach a Nazi concentration camp. They liberated Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald, on an April day in 1945. The horrors of that camp go beyond our capacity to imagine. Tens of thousands died of hunger, torture, disease, or plain murder – part of the Nazi killing machine that killed 6 million people.

When the Americans marched in, they discovered huge piles of dead bodies and starving survivors. General Eisenhower ordered Germans from the nearby town to tour the camp, so they could see what was being done in their name. He ordered American troops to tour the camp, so they could see the evil they were fighting against. He invited Congressmen and journalists to bear witness. And he ordered that photographs and films be made. Explaining his actions, Eisenhower said that he wanted to produce, “first-hand evidence of these things, if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

I saw some of those very images at Yad Vashem, and they never leave you. And those images just hint at the stories that survivors of the Shoah carried with them. Like Eisenhower, each of us bears witness to anyone and everyone who would deny these unspeakable crimes, or ever speak of repeating them. We must mean what we say when we speak the words: “never again.”

It was just a few years after the liberation of the camps that David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the Jewish State of Israel. We know that the establishment of Israel was just and necessary, rooted in centuries of struggle, and decades of patient work. But 60 years later, we know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and as President I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.

Not when there are still voices that deny the Holocaust. Not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel’s destruction. Not when there are maps across the Middle East that don’t even acknowledge Israel’s existence, and government-funded textbooks filled with hatred toward Jews. Not when there are rockets raining down on Sderot, and Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school.

I have long understood Israel’s quest for peace and need for security. But never more so than during my travels there two years ago. Flying in an IDF helicopter, I saw a narrow and beautiful strip of land nestled against the Mediterranean. On the ground, I met a family who saw their house destroyed by a Katyusha Rocket. I spoke to Israeli troops who faced daily threats as they maintained security near the blue line. I talked to people who wanted nothing more simple, or elusive, than a secure future for their children.

I have been proud to be a part of a strong, bi-partisan consensus that has stood by Israel in the face of all threats. That is a commitment that both John McCain and I share, because support for Israel in this country goes beyond party. But part of our commitment must be speaking up when Israel’s security is at risk, and I don’t think any of us can be satisfied that America’s recent foreign policy has made Israel more secure.

Hamas now controls Gaza. Hizbollah has tightened its grip on southern Lebanon, and is flexing its muscles in Beirut. Because of the war in Iraq, Iran – which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq – is emboldened, and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation. Iraq is unstable, and al Qaeda has stepped up its recruitment. Israel’s quest for peace with its neighbors has stalled, despite the heavy burdens borne by the Israeli people. And America is more isolated in the region, reducing our strength and jeopardizing Israel’s safety.

The question is how to move forward. There are those who would continue and intensify this failed status quo, ignoring eight years of accumulated evidence that our foreign policy is dangerously flawed. And then there are those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region. These voices blame the Middle East’s only democracy for the region’s extremism. They offer the false promise that abandoning a stalwart ally is somehow the path to strength. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.

Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.

That starts with ensuring Israel’s qualitative military advantage. I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat – from Gaza to Tehran. Defense cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As President, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade – investments to Israel’s security that will not be tied to any other nation. First, we must approve the foreign aid request for 2009. Going forward, we can enhance our cooperation on missile defense. We should export military equipment to our ally Israel under the same guidelines as NATO. And I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world.

Across the political spectrum, Israelis understand that real security can only come through lasting peace. And that is why we – as friends of Israel – must resolve to do all we can to help Israel and its neighbors to achieve it. Because a secure, lasting peace is in Israel’s national interest. It is in America’s national interest. And it is in the interest of the Palestinian people and the Arab world. As President, I will work to help Israel achieve the goal of two states, a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security. And I won’t wait until the waning days of my presidency. I will take an active role, and make a personal commitment to do all I can to advance the cause of peace from the start of my Administration.

The long road to peace requires Palestinian partners committed to making the journey. We must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements. There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations. That is why I opposed holding elections in 2006 with Hamas on the ballot. The Israelis and the Palestinian Authority warned us at the time against holding these elections. But this Administration pressed ahead, and the result is a Gaza controlled by Hamas, with rockets raining down on Israel.

The Palestinian people must understand that progress will not come through the false prophets of extremism or the corrupt use of foreign aid. The United States and the international community must stand by Palestinians who are committed to cracking down on terror and carrying the burden of peacemaking. I will strongly urge Arab governments to take steps to normalize relations with Israel, and to fulfill their responsibility to pressure extremists and provide real support for President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad. Egypt must cut off the smuggling of weapons into Gaza. Israel can also advance the cause of peace by taking appropriate steps – consistent with its security – to ease the freedom of movement for Palestinians, improve economic conditions in the West Bank, and to refrain from building new settlements – as it agreed to with the Bush Administration at Annapolis.

Let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper – but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

I have no illusions that this will be easy. It will require difficult decisions on both sides. But Israel is strong enough to achieve peace, if it has partners who are committed to the goal. Most Israelis and Palestinians want peace, and we must strengthen their hand. The United States must be a strong and consistent partner in this process – not to force concessions, but to help committed partners avoid stalemate and the kind of vacuums that are filled by violence. That’s what I commit to do as President of the United States.

The threats to Israel start close to home, but they don’t end there. Syria continues its support for terror and meddling in Lebanon. And Syria has taken dangerous steps in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, which is why Israeli action was justified to end that threat.

I also believe that the United States has a responsibility to support Israel’s efforts to renew peace talks with the Syrians. We must never force Israel to the negotiating table, but neither should we ever block negotiations when Israel’s leaders decide that they may serve Israeli interests. As President, I will do whatever I can to help Israel succeed in these negotiations. And success will require the full enforcement of Security Council Resolution 1701 in Lebanon, and a stop to Syria’s support for terror. It is time for this reckless behavior to come to an end.

There is no greater threat to Israel – or to the peace and stability of the region – than Iran. Now this audience is made up of both Republicans and Democrats, .and the enemies of Israel should have no doubt that, regardless of party, Americans stand shoulder-to-shoulder in our commitment to Israel’s security. So while I don't want to strike too partisan a note here today, I do want to address some willful mischaracterizations of my positions.

The Iranian regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race, and raise the prospect of a transfer of nuclear know-how to terrorists. Its President denies the Holocaust and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.

But just as we are clear-eyed about the threat, we must be clear about the failure of today’s policy. We knew, in 2002, that Iran supported terrorism. We knew Iran had an illicit nuclear program. We knew Iran posed a grave threat to Israel. But instead of pursuing a strategy to address this threat, we ignored it and instead invaded and occupied Iraq. When I opposed the war, I warned that it would fan the flames of extremism in the Middle East. That is precisely what happened in Iran – the hardliners tightened their grip, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected President in 2005. And the United States and Israel are less secure.

I respect Senator McCain, and look forward to a substantive debate with him these next five months. But on this point, we have differed, and we will differ. Senator McCain refuses to understand or acknowledge the failure of the policy that he would continue. He criticizes my willingness to use strong diplomacy, but offers only an alternate reality – one where the war in Iraq has somehow put Iran on its heels. The truth is the opposite. Iran has strengthened its position. Iran is now enriching uranium, and has reportedly stockpiled 150 kilos of low enriched uranium. Its support for terrorism and threats toward Israel have increased. Those are the facts, they cannot be denied, and I refuse to continue a policy that has made the United States and Israel less secure.

Senator McCain offers a false choice: stay the course in Iraq, or cede the region to Iran. I reject this logic because there is a better way. Keeping all of our troops tied down indefinitely in Iraq is not the way to weaken Iran – it is precisely what has strengthened it. It is a policy for staying, not a plan for victory. I have proposed a responsible, phased redeployment of our troops from Iraq. We will get out as carefully as we were careless getting in. We will finally pressure Iraq’s leaders to take meaningful responsibility for their own future.

We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That starts with aggressive, principled diplomacy without self-defeating preconditions, but with a clear-eyed understanding of our interests. We have no time to waste. We cannot unconditionally rule out an approach that could prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. We have tried limited, piecemeal talks while we outsource the sustained work to our European allies. It is time for the United States to lead.

There will be careful preparation. We will open up lines of communication, build an agenda, coordinate closely with our allies, and evaluate the potential for progress. Contrary to the claims of some, I have no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking. But as President of the United States, I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place of my choosing – if, and only if – it can advance the interests of the United States.

Only recently have some come to think that diplomacy by definition cannot be tough. They forget the example of Truman, and Kennedy and Reagan. These Presidents understood that diplomacy backed by real leverage was a fundamental tool of statecraft. And it is time to once again make American diplomacy a tool to succeed, not just a means of containing failure. We will pursue this diplomacy with no illusions about the Iranian regime. Instead, we will present a clear choice. If you abandon your dangerous nuclear program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, there will be meaningful incentives – including the lifting of sanctions, and political and economic integration with the international community. If you refuse, we will ratchet up the pressure.

My presidency will strengthen our hand as we restore our standing. Our willingness to pursue diplomacy will make it easier to mobilize others to join our cause. If Iran fails to change course when presented with this choice by the United States, it will be clear – to the people of Iran, and to the world – that the Iranian regime is the author of its own isolation. That will strengthen our hand with Russia and China as we insist on stronger sanctions in the Security Council. And we should work with Europe, Japan and the Gulf states to find every avenue outside the UN to isolate the Iranian regime – from cutting off loan guarantees and expanding financial sanctions, to banning the export of refined petroleum to Iran, to boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization.

I was interested to see Senator McCain propose divestment as a source of leverage – not the bigoted divestment that has sought to punish Israeli scientists and academics, but divestment targeted at the Iranian regime. It’s a good concept, but not a new one. I introduced legislation over a year ago that would encourage states and the private sector to divest from companies that do business in Iran. This bill has bipartisan support, but for reasons that I’ll let him explain, Senator McCain never signed on. Meanwhile, an anonymous Senator is blocking the bill. It is time to pass this into law so that we can tighten the squeeze on the Iranian regime. We should also pursue other unilateral sanctions that target Iranian banks and assets.

And we must free ourselves from the tyranny of oil. The price of a barrel of oil is one of the most dangerous weapons in the world. Petrodollars pay for weapons that kill American troops and Israeli citizens. And the Bush Administration’s policies have driven up the price of oil, while its energy policy has made us more dependent on foreign oil and gas. It’s time for the United States to take real steps to end our addiction to oil. And we can join with Israel, building on last year’s US-Israel Energy Cooperation Act, to deepen our partnership in developing alternative sources of energy by increasing scientific collaboration and joint research and development. The surest way to increase our leverage in the long term is to stop bankrolling the Iranian regime.

Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation. But that only makes diplomacy more important. If we must use military force, we are more likely to succeed, and will have far greater support at home and abroad, if we have exhausted our diplomatic efforts.

That is the change we need in our foreign policy. Change that restores American power and influence. Change accompanied by a pledge that I will make known to allies and adversaries alike: that America maintains an unwavering friendship with Israel, and an unshakeable commitment to its security.

As members of AIPAC, you have helped advance this bipartisan consensus to support and defend our ally Israel. And I am sure that today on Capitol Hill you will be meeting with members of Congress and spreading the word. But we are here because of more than policy. We are here because the values we hold dear are deeply embedded in the story of Israel.

Just look at what Israel has accomplished in 60 years. From decades of struggle and the terrible wake of the Holocaust, a nation was forged to provide a home for Jews from all corners of the world – from Syria to Ethiopia to the Soviet Union. In the face of constant threats, Israel has triumphed. In the face of constant peril, Israel has prospered. In a state of constant insecurity, Israel has maintained a vibrant and open discourse, and a resilient commitment to the rule of law.

As any Israeli will tell you, Israel is not a perfect place, but like the United States it sets an example for all when it seeks a more perfect future. These same qualities can be found among American Jews. It is why so many Jewish Americans have stood by Israel, while advancing the American story. Because there is a commitment embedded in the Jewish faith and tradition: to freedom and fairness; to social justice and equal opportunity. To tikkun olam – the obligation to repair this world.

I will never forget that I would not be standing here today if it weren’t for that commitment. In the great social movements in our country’s history, Jewish and African Americans have stood shoulder to shoulder. They took buses down south together. They marched together. They bled together. And Jewish Americans like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were willing to die alongside a black man – James Chaney – on behalf of freedom and equality.

Their legacy is our inheritance. We must not allow the relationship between Jews and African Americans to suffer. This is a bond that must be strengthened. Together, we can rededicate ourselves to end prejudice and combat hatred in all of its forms. Together, we can renew our commitment to justice. Together, we can join our voices together, and in doing so make even the mightiest of walls fall down.

That work must include our shared commitment to Israel. You and I know that we must do more than stand still. Now is the time to be vigilant in facing down every foe, just as we move forward in seeking a future of peace for the children of Israel, and for all children. Now is the time to stand by Israel as it writes the next chapter in its extraordinary journey. Now is the time to join together in the work of repairing this world.

"Indefensible Spending" on the U.S. military budget

2008-06-02T22:51:00.000-07:00

Robert Scheer's ed-op piece in the Sunday, June 1, 2008, LA Times is useful, important, but also revealing for what it does not say.

The article is useful because it makes it abundantly clear that all three presidential candidates and both major U.S. political parties are totally wedded to a massive military budget which precludes maintaining or expanding essential domestic programs. This means that education, health, job, housing, transportation, and much more are all on the chopping block to sustain the military budget.

It is useful because it represent Scheer's return to the LA Times, a paper which fired him several years ago because of his consistently left-liberal column. But, his return should not be misinterpreted as an about-face by the centrist newspaper suddenly careening to the left. A careful reading of Scheer's piece explains why.

At no point in the following article does Scheer state the obvious, that much of the U.S. military budget is devoted to securing the energy of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, as well as the shipping, pipeline, and air links to these areas. A good map of the greater Middle East quickly reveals that this is where two-thirds of the worlds proven oil reserves are located, and where the U.S. government has built a large network of bases since the Carter administration. It is also where the U.S. government is now fighting two energy wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and where it is gearing up for expanded military activity in Pakistan and Iran.

These sins of omission amount to a silent approval for these massive military operations. Else where on Red Eye on the News, Michael Klare estimates that these military outposts and adventures cost approximately $150 billion per year, with the Iraq and Afghan occupations adding on another $200 billion. If Africa, Asia, and Latin America are added in, it is clear that the U.S. military is not simply an ATM for military suppliers. It is essential for the protection of U.S. corporate investments in far flung corners of the globe.

What is needed, therefore, is not just the first step of eliminating bogus weapons systems, but the elimination of "necessary" weapons systems, as well. When Scheer takes on this larger part of the military budget, then we will know that he is opposed to the empire, not just to Pentagon boondoggles that stand in the way of an efficient imperialism.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-scheer1-2008jun01,0,7121603.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Indefensible spending

America's massive military budget is irrational, costly and dangerous. Why isn't it a campaign issue?

By Robert Scheer

June 1, 2008

What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago?

You wouldn't know it from the most-exhausting-ever presidential primary campaigns, but the 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars) to defeat a ragtag band of terrorists than it spent at the height of the Cold War fighting the Soviet superpower and what we alleged were its surrogates in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The Pentagon's budget for fiscal year 2008 set a post-World War II record at $625 billion, and that does not include more than $100 billion in other federal budget expenditures for homeland security, nuclear weapons and so-called black budget -- or covert -- operations.

And what are we spending all this money on? We are talking high-tech war toys designed to fight a Cold War enemy that no longer exists, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, with its estimated total price tag of $300 billion, and Virginia-class submarines at $2.5 billion each. Who cares that the terrorists lack submarines for the Navy to battle deep in the ocean, for which the Virginia-class submarine was designed?

Then there are the F-22 Raptor jet fighters that no longer fill a credible military purpose but will take $65 billion out of taxpayers' pockets. The Raptor includes stealth technology and elaborate electronics designed to counter threatened leaps in Soviet war-fighting capability. In 2005, Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, wrote that the Raptor "is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon."

Since President Bush's first year in office, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Department has doubled its future planned investment in those ultra-pricey weapons from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion.

When pressed on why the massive weapons arsenal we already possess, which was credited with intimidating the Soviet Union into surrender, isn't sufficient to keep the peace in a suddenly unipolar world, defense hawks sometimes cite what they claim is an emerging threat from China. "The Chinese are designing new classes of submarines with increased capabilities," said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). "If we do not move to produce two submarines a year as soon as possible, we are in serious danger of falling behind."

That is nonsense. China is not even a serious regional power, as the Pentagon's 2007 report to Congress makes clear: "The intelligence community estimates China will take until the end of this decade or later to produce a modern force capable of defeating a moderate-size adversary." The report noted that "China's military is focused on assuring the capability to prevent Taiwan independence," but this last week the military threat to Taiwan gave way to a historic peace opening, with the first visit by the head of Taiwan's ruling party to the mainland since the 1949 revolution.

Oh, and here's another thing. Those Virginia-class submarines that Lieberman says are so important to our national security and for which he lobbied so hard? General Dynamics' Electric Boat Co. has received multibillion-dollar contracts to build them. The company is based in Connecticut, suggesting that the real goal here was to find an enemy -- any enemy -- that would justify spending U.S. tax dollars on weapons produced in his home state.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been on a madcap spending spree on wars and weapons having little, if anything, to do with combating terrorism, nothing to do with the imaginary threat from China and everything to do with sustaining an enormously bloated defense industry threatened with extinction because of the demise of the communist enemy. The fact is, the end of the Cold War was a welcome development for everyone except for those in the military-industrial complex whose profits and jobs, as President Eisenhower famously warned, are rooted in every congressional district.

As President George H.W. Bush noted in his 1992 State of the Union address, "communism died this year," and, he promised, "we can stop making the sacrifices we had to make when we had an avowed enemy that was a superpower. Now we can look homeward even more and set right what needs to be set right." Toward that end, he ordered his secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, to initiate a 30% cut in defense spending. Gloom and doom in the military-industrial complex was palpable.

But then came what defense industry lobbyists and their many allies on both sides of the aisle in Congress came to treat as the gift of 9/11, offering dramatic imagery of a new global enemy. Fortunately for those who profit from a permanent war economy, few in government or the media were inclined to challenge the enemy bait-and-switch game that unfolded. The defense industry and the Pentagon bureaucracy that services it were all too happy to accept whatever war they could embrace, even if the new "global war on terrorism" that President George W. Bush launched was to be fought against an enemy armed primarily with weapons that could be purchased for a few dollars at Home Depot.

The Soviets had developed the most modern arsenals, and the 9/11 hijackers were armed with box cutters, so how could we justify spending more to defeat Al Qaeda than we ever did to combat the communist enemy? That is the third-rail issue that politicians and the media dread touching because of the national security hysteria generated after the 9/11 attacks. Yet no presidential candidate can be serious about cutting the federal debt, improving education, holding down taxes or paying for any of the other things that the candidates of both parties promise without cutting military spending.

Without slashing the inflated military budget, the next president, who will inherit at least a $400-billion current-accounts deficit along with debt service on seven years of profligate military spending, will not be able to finance any of the domestic reforms that both the surviving Republican candidate and his two Democratic opponents advocate.

Maybe one can make a case that it is appropriate that more than half of the discretionary funds in the 2009 budget go to defense, and all the other federal programs for science, education, infrastructure, global warming and nonmilitary international programs compete for the rest. But isn't it bizarre that the biggest peacetime military budget in U.S. history -- 35% higher than when Bush came into office and larger than the military budgets of all other nations combined -- is not even discussed in the current presidential contest?

That is because politicians from both parties are complicit in the waste of taxpayer dollars on weapons systems that deliver jobs to their home districts and profits to their defense industry campaign contributors. It is a disease of our political system predicted by two of our great wartime generals-turned-president. First was George Washington, warning in his farewell address that once a nation embarks on the path of imperial adventure, the irrationality of false patriotic appeals would trump reason. What better time to recall Washington's historic caution to the nation "to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."

In Eisenhower's farewell address, he warned that "in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

There is no better evidence of the prescience of Washington and Eisenhower than the fact that the most obscenely bloated military budget in U.S. history is not an issue in the current presidential campaign. Sadly, defense spending has become enshrined in our political system as a totem to be worshiped rather than a policy program to be critically examined.

Robert Scheer, who wrote an Op-Ed column for The Times for 13 years, is the editor in chief of Truthdig (truthdig.com) and the author, most recently, of "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America," to be published this week by Twelve Books.

DECISION LOOMS: ESCALATE, OR RETREAT & RETRENCH?

2008-05-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

War Times review of the many foreign policy reversals facing the U.S. government throughout the greater Middle East is important but also misleading. It is important because the next presidential administration will not only inherit this downward spiral, but a detailed blueprint on how to address it from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution. Their panels and researchers, described on their respective websites, are fully bipartisan and will reach a full Democratic-Republican consensus by January 2009.

But, this also indicates why the following article is misleading. It presents each of these U.S. foreign policy failures as strictly the undertakings of the Bush administration. This is simply not correct. Each of these policies was based on precedents from the Clinton and Carter administrations. For example, the Carter Doctrine declared that the oil of the Persian Gulf is a strategic US interest and stated the US would use military force to secure it. Since then all US policy in the Middle East has been bi-partisan, which is why Congressional Democrats continue to fully fund the Iraq and Afghan occupations, as well as support for the enormous network of US bases and fleets in and surrounding the Middle East. They are also on board for US arms shipments to the region: $20 billion for Saudi Arabia, $15 billion for other pro-US Sunni states, and $30 billion for Israel.

Washington's Wars and Occupations:
Month in Review #37

By Max Elbaum, War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, May 28, 2008

DECISION LOOMS: ESCALATE, OR RETREAT & RETRENCH?

Across the Middle East, the Bush-Neocon post-9/11 project faces failure.

In the last month alone, Washington has had to endure one humiliation after another:

*In Lebanon, the pro-U.S. government (prodded by Israel and/or Washington) announced a set of steps aimed at Hezbollah. Hezbollah and the broader Lebanese opposition movement - which together represent the majority of Lebanese - resisted. When the dust had settled the proposed steps were retracted and, as the New York Times headline put it, the agreement ending the fighting "Leaves Hezbollah Stronger."

*In Pakistan, the new government defied U.S. "advice" and signed a peace agreement May 21 with indigenous militant leaders in the so-called "tribal areas" bordering Afghanistan. Only the day before the Bush administration had declared that even negotiating with these militants would give "breathing space" to terrorists. Washington's anxiety here is directly connected to worries about growing Afghan opposition to the U.S. military presence there.

*Adding insult to injury, even a personal request from Bush himself couldn't get Washington's Saudi Arabian clients to agree to increase oil production.

All this underscores the fact that Bush's Iraq adventure, largely designed to show the world that the U.S. can do anything it pleases, instead ended up revealing - and exacerbating - U.S. weakness.

As a result, bitter divisions have opened up in the policy-making elite. The die-hards - now rallying around John "Stay-100-Years-in-Iraq" McCain - still think military force can win "victory." They continue to press for escalation, up to and including an attack on Iran. The "realists" - a broad layer that stretches from key advisers to Barack Obama to Republican Senators like Chuck Hagel - think some kind of retrenchment is imperative. They envision at least partial withdrawal from Iraq and diplomatic engagement with Iran in order to stave off even deeper undermining of U.S. power.

The scale of disasters confronting Washington (and the timing of U.S. electoral cycles and White House transition) means the decision-making window for this choice consists of the next ten months. We may see a new reckless act - such as an attack on Iran - that will make the invasion of Iraq seem like it was a "reality-based" decision. Or the world, the country, and the antiwar movement will be confronted with all the complexities of a wounded imperial power attempting to retrench but not yet ready (that's where mass pressure comes in!) to leave Iraq (much less the entire Middle East) to the people who live there.

"OVERPLAYED THEIR HAND"

At the beginning of this month, Washington and Tel Aviv clearly thought they were going to get somewhere in Lebanon. They launched an orchestrated campaign via the Lebanese government's announcement that it was going to (1) dismantle Hezbollah's telecommunications system, which had been a key factor in successful resistance to Israel's 2006 invasion; and (2) remove a figure sympathetic to the anti-Israel resistance from head of security at Beirut airport. As the government anticipated, Hezbollah resisted with blockades and protests. Then pro-government militias resorted to arms and a prepared-ahead-of-time propaganda campaign began accusing Hezbollah of provoking the conflict and armed battles.

Within days it was clear they had miscalculated. The pro-government militias (many of whom were little more than mercenaries) collapsed and often fled. Few outside the Western and Israeli media - and certainly not the Lebanese majority - bought the U.S./Israeli "blame Hezbollah" crusade. As the New York Times admitted May 22, the government and its backers "overplayed their hand."

The upshot was an agreement May 21 in which the government had to do even more than retract its original provocative decrees. In what the Times called "a significant shift of power in favor of Hezbollah and its allies" the opposition won the power to veto any cabinet decision and agreement on a new government. Within days General Michel Suleiman - long supported as a compromise candidate by Hezbollah against government resistance - was elected President.

PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN

Blatant defiance of Washington by Pakistani officials has become the norm since Bush's chosen dictator, Pervez Musharraf, suffered a huge electoral setback last February. The country's new parliamentary majority - which is laying the groundwork to completely oust its lame-duck President - has the heretical idea that it should make peace rather than war with its own citizens. Bush and the Neocons hate such "appeasement" policies (more on "appeasement" below). But they no longer can do much about them.

Washington's weakness in Pakistan is directly linked to the deterioration of the U.S. position in Afghanistan. It's right in the New York Times (May 22) for anyone who is willing to read a few paragraphs down from the misleading headlines:

"Increasingly, the question before the allies is how much longer it will take in crucial provinces to lock in tentative gains and bring real security and strong government. As important is whether that can be done before the war wears down relations within the American-led alliance, and between it and the Afghan people. Progress is so slow that Afghans often wonder aloud whether the U.S. actually wants the Taliban to win. 'No one claims this is going to be a year of full stabilization or even declining violence, let alone an end to the conflict,' said Christopher Alexander, deputy special representative for the U.N. in Afghanistan."

IRAQ FAILURE - IRAN IN THE GUNSIGHTS?

President Bush is still in a parallel universe about Iraq: "We are on our way to victory,'' he said in a May 22 speech that McCain immediately echoed. The reality lived by Iraqis is totally different.

Iraqis face an occupying power killing and demeaning them daily. A recent outrage even made the U.S. press: "U.S. Airstrike Kills 8 Civilians" read the
headlines in many U.S. newspapers May 23. The dead included two children and an elderly man; police officials said these unarmed civilians were killed while running away from a U.S. air attack. What seldom makes the press is the underlying trend: this spring has seen a dramatic increase in the use of helicopter-fired missiles and U.S. air power in general, including in densely populated urban areas. What is reported here as occasional "unfortunate accidents" or "collateral damage" is seen by millions of Iraqis as an integral feature of foreign occupation.

So are incidents like the admission that a U.S. sniper used a Koran as target practice near Baghdad. U.S. officials said the sniper was disciplined and removed from Iraq. But the Iraqi cabinet called for him to be prosecuted and anger surged among the population at large.
.
Against such a day-to-day backdrop, it's not surprising that reports began to surface May 23 that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - the most respected and powerful religious/political leader in Iraq - has begun to issue private fatwas (religious edicts) affirming the legitimacy of armed attacks on occupying troops. Middle East expert Juan Cole, in a must-read discussion of Sistani's new stance May 23 - go to http://www.juancole.com/

Though it won't admit it, the administration is very worried. Following his usual response to trouble, Bush identifies a scapegoat/enemy and signals that military force is the way to "solve" the problem. Iran has been the enemy of choice for months now, and once again it is pump-up-the-volume time. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told reporters last week that the U.S. was entering a period of "increased pressure" on the Iranians. Israeli Army radio reported that a senior Bush staffer told Israeli officials that both Bush and Dick Cheney support military action against Iran. The White House denied the report. But at the same time it flaunted Bush's bellicose speech before the Israeli parliament in which he compared any willingness to negotiate with Iran to "appeasement" of the Nazis in the 1930s.

Bush's speech was clearly a threat directed against Iran. But it also was intended to impact U.S. domestic politics. Bush aides admitted it was a volley against Barack Obama's pro-negotiation position, and the President's theme was immediately picked up by McCain. "Appeasement-baiting" will be added to the general racist, anti-Muslim, fear-mongering arsenal that the "escalate-to-victory" crowd is resorting to in face of a U.S. public that has turned decisively against the Iraq war.

ISRAEL, SYRIA, AND THE NAKBA

Ironically, the first major player to defy Bush's anti-appeasement diatribe in practice was the Israeli government. Israel acknowledged that it was engaged in negotiations with "terrorist-supporting" Syria within days of Bush's remarks.

Tel Aviv's decision doesn't indicate that it has all of sudden realized that it is unjust to occupy other peoples' land. Israel's chokehold on the Palestinians remains and new settlement activity in the occupied West Bank continues. But there is calculation that talks in order to (as Israeli spokespeople put it) "wean Syria away from Iran and from its support for Hezbollah and Hamas" might work better than another war.

This too is a response to failure. Israel failed in its attempt to crush Hezbollah with its Lebanon invasion of 2006. Its latest provocation in Lebanon (see above) fell flat on its face. The effort to starve Gaza and to isolate Hamas (which holds power there) is in trouble, with more and more voices internationally (and within Israel itself) saying that sooner or later talking with Hamas will be necessary. Indirect negotiations mediated by Egypt are already happening.

Perhaps most dangerous for Tel Aviv was the climate surrounding what were supposed to be triumphal celebrations on the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding. In most of the world, this anniversary was marked by commemorations of the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 and harsh criticism of Israeli actions which drove tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. Even in the U.S. (where, outside of Israel itself, Zionism holds its firmest grip) there was a noticeable uptick in mainstream articles (as well as protests by Palestine solidarity activists) that raise issues that apologists for Israeli occupation do not like to see mentioned. (See for instance: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/05/05/080505crbo_books_remnick?currentPage=5

When the term "Nakba" appears in both the New Yorker and Time there is change in the air.

It remains a hard road. The antiwar movement has to walk on many paths at the same time. We have a contribution to make to insuring that fear-mongering, racism and "appeasement-baiting" prove costly to their advocates and not to their targets. We have a fight to wage against the whole "us-them/enemy" discourse that justifies war, torture and occupation. We have a demand of "bring them all home now" that has to be projected into the heart of the nationwide conversation over Iraq until it is won. - writes that he has "all along believed that Sistani would ultimately issue a fatwa saying that it was illegitimate for there to continue to be foreign troops on Iraqi soil." Sistani's relative quiet so far has been a key factor preventing things in Iraq from being even worse for the U.S. than they already are. If he continues in the direction these latest reports indicate, even George Bush may finally recognize that a U.S. "victory" is not in the cards.