Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

The dogs of war are off the leash.

In meeting rooms in London, Tel Aviv and Washington the dice have been thrown: snake eyes.

Flashback, 1963: When John F. Kennedy decided not to escalate the soon-to-be disastrous Vietnam war and issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263), he signed his death warrant.

Scarcely six weeks after vowing to pull all American forces out of South Vietnam by 1965, Kennedy was dead, the target of an “executive action” orchestrated by the CIA, a coup d’état on behalf of America’s corporatist masters–the military-industrial cabal of hardline cold warriors who stood to lose billions if Kennedy lived.

That sweet little deal to “win” the war in Southeast Asia cost some two million Vietnamese lives, 58,000 dead Americans and precipitated an economic crisis which dealt a death blow to post-World War II prosperity and launched the United States on its inexorable glide path towards becoming a failed state.

Flash forward to 2012: We have Barack Obama in the White House; a fraudster who promised “hope and change” and instead led his wilfully blind constituents into embracing the third term of a George W. Bush administration.

Comparing Obama with Kennedy one can only conclude: They don’t make bourgeois politicians like they use to!

Following on from a decades-long drive to transform the Gulf into an “American lake” (under provisions of the so-called “Carter Doctrine,” another “peace loving” Democrat), the coming war with Iran is a transparent scheme to ensure U.S. hegemony over the vast petroleum resources of Central Asia and the Middle East–to the detriment of their geopolitical rivals.

U.S. and NATO naval forces on high alert threaten the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf, the life’s blood of the global capitalist economy.

A war will lead to an oil price spike as Iranian, but perhaps also Saudi and GCC oil is removed in one fell swoop from the market, thereby setting-off a chain reaction that will exacerbate the West’s economic decline–to the benefit of financial jackals waiting in the wings who will gobble up what remains of America and Europe’s publicly-owned assets at fire sale prices in a desperate move to stave off the crisis.

Currently, Iran is ringed with military bases. American, British and Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles keep silent watch. Aircraft carrier battle groups carry out provocative maneuvers. U.S. and Israeli drones routinely overfly Iranian territory. Scientists are murdered in orchestrated terror attacks. Defense installations are bombed.

Economic sanctions, universally recognized as a prelude to war, strangle the Iranian people and their economy, all in the quixotic hope of inducing (coercing) “regime change” in Tehran.

The U.S. media, reprising their role during the run-up to 2003′s invasion and occupation of Iraq, are chock-a-block with scare stories that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are preparing to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

Indeed, the Shiite regime “may have” given “new freedoms” to Sunni Salafist extremists, including members of the “management council” of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets also known as “Al Qaeda” detained in Iran and “may have provided some material aid to the terrorist group,” if an account published last week by The Wall Street Journal can be believed, which of course it can’t.

Meanwhile, the CIA and Mossad recruit, train and then unleash Salafist terrorists such as Jundallah or Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen, the cultic Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) for terror ops, just as they did in Libya when former Al Qaeda “emir,” the MI6 asset Abdelhakim Belhaj was appointed chief of Tripoli’s Revolutionary Military Council.

And what “evidence” did U.S. officials offer for these dastardly Iranian plots to murder us all in our beds? Why the now-discredited FBI fable which had a failed Texas used-car dealer, Manssor Arbabsiar, and a still-unnamed DEA snitch posing as, or actually a member of, the notorious Zetas narcotrafficking cartel, plotting to murder the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a tony Georgetown restaurant, that’s what!

Former CIA chief Leon Panetta, who replaced Robert Gates, also a former CIA chief, now helms the Defense Department.

Corporate media in Europe and America report that Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, have tried to “cool” the Israeli’s ardor for a preemptive strike and deny that the U.S. is preparing for war.

This too, is a carefully contrived disinformation campaign.

In a syndicated column for The Washington Post, war hawk David Ignatius wrote Thursday that “Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June–before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb.”

According to Ignatius, “the administration appears to favor staying out of the conflict unless Iran hits U.S. assets, which would trigger a strong U.S. response,” and that Washington’s alleged disapproval of an Israeli first strike “might open a breach like the one in 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower condemned an Israeli-European attack on the Suez Canal.”

Ignatius’ unnamed “senior administration official,” since identified as Panetta, “caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: The United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israel’s population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.”

In other words, should America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” launch a sneak-attack on Iran, hitting their civilian nuclear and defense installations, thereby inflicting “collateral damage,” i.e., the wanton slaughter of innocent Iranian citizens, if Tehran has the temerity to defend itself and strike back, the full military might of the imperialist godfather will be brought to bear.

Inter Press Service reported Wednesday that JCS Chairman Dempsey, “told Israeli leaders January 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.”

According to journalist Gareth Porter, “Dempsey’s warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.”

Claiming that “Obama still appears reluctant to break publicly and explicitly with Israel over its threat of military aggression against Iran, even in the absence of evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon,” Porter alleges that “the message carried by Dempsey was the first explicit statement to the Netanyahu government that the United States would not defend Israel if it attacked Iran unilaterally.”

Holding on to the thinnest of reeds, Porter writes that Panetta “had given a clear hint” of the U.S. position “in an interview on ‘Face the Nation’ Jan. 8 that the Obama administration would not help defend Israel in a war against Iran that Israel had initiated.”

When asked by CBS host Bob Schieffer, who pressed the issue of a unilateral Israeli attack, Panetta said, “If the Israelis made that decision, we would have to be prepared to protect our forces in that situation. And that’s what we’d be concerned about.”

What are we to make of these claims?

If their purpose was to force Israel to rethink their attack plans, it clearly isn’t working. If however, Panetta’s remarks were meant to disarm domestic opponents of U.S. war plans, then mission accomplished!

“Speaking at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center’s annual conference,” The Christian Science Monitor reported that “Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak compared the current standoff with Iran to the ‘fateful’ period before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt.”

“The temperature is rising in Israel,” Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar told the Monitor. “He says that if the defense minister sees the current period as similar to the run-up to the [1967] Six-Day War, ‘that gives credibility to those who think Israel is going to launch an attack’.”

In a follow-up piece published Saturday by IPS, Porter now suggests that Panetta’s leak to Ignatius “had a different objective,” namely that the “White House was taking advantage of the current crisis atmosphere over that Israeli threat and even seeking to make it more urgent in order to put pressure on Iran to make diplomatic concessions to the United States and its allies on its nuclear programme in the coming months.”

Indeed, the “Panetta leak makes it less likely that either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Iranian strategists will take seriously Obama’s effort to keep the United States out of a war initiated by an Israeli attack.”

Moreover, Panetta’s leak to The Washington Post “seriously undercut the message carried to the Israelis by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month that the United States would not come to Israel’s defence if it launched a unilateral attack on Iran.”

Although there is trepidation amongst military planners in Tel Aviv and Washington should Israeli officials opt for a preemptive attack on Iran–and a retaliatory counterstrike by the Islamic Republic would have devastating effects on both Israel’s civilian population and U.S./NATO military forces in the Persian Gulf and beyond–should such disastrous orders be given, it is a certainty that Washington would follow suit.

This, in fact, is what the Israeli leadership is banking on and, contrary to sanctioned leaks to media conduits like Ignatius, is fully in keeping with Washington’s strategy of employing Israel as a cats’ paw to “drag” the United States into a war with Iran.

As the World Socialist Web Site points out, “any differences between the US and Israel are purely tactical.”

“Washington could, of course, use its considerable influence to veto an attack by Israel, which is heavily dependent on the US, diplomatically, economically and militarily,” leftist critic Peter Symonds writes.

Ignatius’ column however, “makes no mention of this possibility. In effect, the Obama administration appears to be giving Israel a tacit green light for an illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran, and threatening its own military action if Iran retaliates.”

Indeed, the right-wing Israeli publication Debkafile reported Saturday that while Panetta “has been outspoken about a possible Israeli offensive against Iran taking place as of April … no US source is leveling on the far more extensive American, Saudi, British, French and Gulf states’ preparations going forward for an offensive against the Islamic Republic.”

Accordingly, Debkafile’s “military sources” (read high-placed intelligence and military officials favoring an attack) “report a steady flow of many thousands of US troops for some weeks to two strategic islands within reach of Iran, Oman’s Masirah just south of the Strait of Hormuz and Socotra, between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.”

Debkafile also noted that “the Saudis this week wound up their own intensive preparations for war. Large forces are now deployed around Saudi oil fields, pipelines and export facilities in the eastern provinces opposite the Persian Gulf, backed by anti-missile Patriot PAC-3 batteries. American, British and French fighter-bombers have been landing at Saudi air bases to safeguard the capital, Riyadh.”

And with the Pentagon speeding-up arms sales to repressive Gulf monarchies and Saudi royals (with tens of billions in profits flowing into the coffers of American and European death merchants), the stage is now set for a bloody military confrontation.

On the so-called diplomatic front, as “useful idiots” and “accessories before the fact” in the drive towards war, the shameful part played by the International Atomic Energy Agency must be underscored.

Despite, or more likely because Iran’s top leadership have expressed their willingness to reopen stalled talks over their civilian nuclear program and have taken steps to do so, the United States and NATO are stepping-up their propaganda offensive, with the IAEA playing a leading role.

Indeed, The New York Times reported Sunday that “American and European officials said Friday that a mission by international nuclear inspectors to Tehran this week had failed to address their key concerns, indicating that Iran’s leaders believe they can resist pressure to open up the nation’s nuclear program.”

Times’ stenographers Robert F. Worth and David E. Sanger averred that an unnamed “senior American official described the session between the agency and Iranian nuclear officials as ‘foot-dragging at best and a disaster at worst’.”

Why is the onus solely placed on Iranian negotiators?

Because “members of the I.A.E.A. delegation were told that they could not have access to Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an academic who is widely believed to be in charge of important elements of the suspected weaponization program, and that they could not visit a military site where the agency’s report suggested key experiments on weapons technology might have been carried out.”

What Worth and Sanger fail to mention in their report is that Iranian officials asserted that before Roshan’s murder he “had talked to IAEA inspectors, a fact which ‘indicates that these UN agencies may have played a role in leaking information on Iran’s nuclear facilities and scientists’,” Russia Today reported at the time.

Protesting the killing before the UN Security Council last month, Iranian deputy UN ambassador Eshagh Al Habib said there was “‘high suspicion’ that, in order to prepare the murder, terrorist circles used intelligence obtained from UN bodies.”

According to the deputy ambassador’s charge, “this included interviews with Iranian nuclear scientists carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the sanction list of the Security Council,” RT disclosed.

Sound far-fetched, the product of Iranian “conspiracy theories”? Better think again!

As former UNSCOM Iraq weapons’ inspector Scott Ritter revealed in his 2005 book, Iraq Confidential:

The issue of uncovering incriminating documentation suddenly took on a higher priority, and the CIA, supported by activist elements within the Department of State, pushed for more direct involvement in the operations of UNSCOM and the IAEA. For the first time, the darkest warriors in the CIA’s covert army, the Operations Planning Cell (OPC), were getting actively involved in preparing intelligence for UNSCOM’s use.

According to Ritter:

The secret warriors of the CIA were accustomed to plying their trade in the shadows, far away from prying eyes. UNSCOM inspections, however, were carried out in full view of the Iraqi government, representing the antithesis of covert action. The existence of the OPC, as with any CIA affiliation with UNSCOM, was a carefully guarded secret. Officially, therefore, all OPC personnel were presented to UNSCOM as State Department ‘experts’.

In light of past practices by the CIA, or for that matter the IAEA itself, Iranian fears that their scientists are being set-up for liquidation are fully justified.

Indeed, the “cautious” U.S. Secretary of Defense, former CIA chief Leon Panetta, speaking at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday, echoed Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s claim that Israel would need to “consider taking action” should nuclear inspections and sanctions fail.

“My view is that right now the most important thing is to keep the international community unified in keeping that pressure on, to try to convince Iran that they shouldn’t develop a nuclear weapon, that they should join the international family of nations and that they should operate by the rules that we all operate by,” Panetta asserted. “But I have to tell you, if they don’t, we have all options on the table, and we’ll be prepared to respond if we have to.”

One of those “options,” passed by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Friday were demands made to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT.

“The new Senate package,” Reuters reported, “seeks to target foreign banks that handle transactions for Iran’s national oil and tanker companies, and for the first time, extends the reach of Iran-related sanctions to foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies.”

The new legislation would target SWIFT with wide-ranging penalties if they failed to exclude sanctioned Iranian banks from the international system.

The bill now goes to the full Senate “where the likelihood of passage is considered strong,” The New York Times reported.

With the Orwellian title, the “Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act” Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-SD) said that “Iran can end its suppression of its own people, come clean on its nuclear program, suspend enrichment and stop supporting terrorist activities around the globe. Or it can continue to face sustained, intensifying multilateral economic and diplomatic pressure deepening its international isolation.”

Now if only Senator Johnson offered similar demands on America’s Israeli allies who possess upwards of 200 nuclear weapons, refuse to join the international nonproliferation regime and carry out worldwide terrorist attacks with impunity, perhaps then diplomacy would operate on a level playing field!

SWIFT officials were quick to cave to U.S. pressure. “SWIFT fully understands and appreciates the gravity of the situation,” Reuters disclosed.

In its statement, “SWIFT said it is working with officials and central banks to find ‘the right multilateral legal framework’ to ‘expedite’ a response to the issues.”

“This is a complex situation, and SWIFT needs to ensure that it takes into consideration the implications to the functioning of the broader global financial payments system, as well as the continued flow of humanitarian payments to the Iranian people,” the organization said.

Needless to say, a boycott of Iranian financial institutions by SWIFT would be catastrophic to Iran’s economy, a provocation fully intended as a step towards war.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted, “if Israel does attack Iran, it will not simply be ‘a surgical strike’ that destroys Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Any Iranian retaliation will be used by the US as a pretext for a massive air war aimed at destroying the country’s military and infrastructure. As a result, any conflict carries a real danger of becoming a regional war that could embroil the major powers.”

Despite the evident madness of countenancing an Iran attack, political calculations by capitalist elites during a critical election year in the United States, with “conservative” and “liberal” factions angling for advantage by currying favor with the powerful Zionist and U.S. defense lobbies, Israel’s unambiguous message to the White House is: “We’ll give you the war, you give us the cannon fodder.”

Corporations are people, my friend.

— Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations. This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work. People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm. The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread. The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions. Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread. For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world. Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to?

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people. Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that were designed to cover only people. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and people of color, had full rights. There was no mention of protecting corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood. At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial segregation. Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.

Corporations now claim: 1st amendment free speech rights to advertise and influence elections: 4th amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5th amendment rights to due process; 14th amendment rights to due process where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the constitution.

The most recent corporate judicial takeover of constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission. The court ruled that corporations are protected by the First Amendment so they can use their money to influence elections.

Because of the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a constitutional amendment by the people to change the laws back. An amendment requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to agree, then three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify. This will take real work. But despite the growing size and unrestricted power of corporations, people are fighting back.

Dozens of groups are working to reverse Citizens United and restore limits on corporate election advocacy. In January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by over 750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the Constitution and reverse the decision. More than 350 local events were held in late January 2012 to challenge the Citizens United decision.

Groups challenging this injustice include Code Pink, Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Moveon.org, Move to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media and Democracy, and Women’s League for Peace and Freedom.

Many groups are asking for a broad constitutional amendment that makes it clear that corporations are not people and should not be given any constitutional rights. Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have sponsored bills in Congress to start the process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people, are not entitled to the rights of people, and cannot contribute to political campaigns.

There are also many energetic actions at the state level. People for the American Way list organizational efforts in nearly all 50 states to end corporate influence in elections or amend the constitution.

Massive corporations now rule the earth. But they are recent arrivals which can, and should, be dispatched. It is time for people to again take control. The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional rights taken by corporations must cease. Join the efforts to cut them down to size and restore the right of the people to govern.

A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of “robo-signing” and the attorneys general of the 50 states is pending for Monday, February 6th, but it is still not clear if all the AGs will sign.  California was to get over half of the $25 billion in settlement money, and California AG Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle.

That is good.  She and the other AGs should not sign until a thorough investigation has been conducted.  The evidence to date suggests that “robo-signing” was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008.  It is not just distressed homeowners but the entire economy that has paid the price, resulting in massive unemployment and a shrunken tax base, throwing state and local governments into insolvency and forcing austerity measures and cutbacks in government services across the nation.

The details of the robo-signing scam were spelled out in my last article, here.  The robo-signing fraud and its implications are expanded on below.

Why All the Robo-signing?

Over half the homes in the country are now held in the name of an electronic database called MERS—Mortgage Electronic Registration Services.  MERS is a smokescreen behind which mortgages were sold to trusts that sold them to investors.  The mortgages were chopped into pieces and sold as “mortgage-backed securities” (MBS), which traded in a supposedly liquid market.  That meant the investors could sell them in the money market at any time on a day’s notice.  Yale economist Gary Gorton gives this example:

Suppose the institutional investor is Fidelity, and Fidelity has $500 million in cash that will be used to buy securities, but not right now. Right now Fidelity wants a safe place to earn interest, but such that the money is available in case the opportunity for buying securities arises. Fidelity goes to Bear Stearns and “deposits” the $500 million overnight for interest. What makes this deposit safe? The safety comes from the collateral that Bear Stearns provides. Bear Stearns holds some asset‐backed securities [with] a market value of $500 millions. These bonds are provided to Fidelity as collateral. Fidelity takes physical possession of these bonds. Since the transaction is overnight, Fidelity can get its money back the next morning, or it can agree to “roll” the trade. Fidelity earns, say, 3 percent.

That is where the robo-signing came in.  Foreclosure defense attorneys armed with the tools of discovery have discovered that robo-signing — involving falsified signatures assigning mortgages back to the trusts allegedly owning them — occurred not just occasionally or randomly but in virtually every case.  Why?  Because the mortgages had to be left free to be bought and sold on a daily basis in the money market by investors.  The investors are not interested in making 30 year loans.  They want something short-term with immediate rights of withdrawal like a deposit account.

The Hazards of Borrowing Short to Lend Long

The problem is that when panicked investors all exercise that right at once, there is no cheap funding available to back the 30 year mortgage loans, rendering the banks insolvent.  And that is what happened on September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers, a major investment bank like Bear Stearns, went bankrupt.

According to Representative Paul Kanjorski, speaking on C-SPAN in January 2009, the collapse of Lehman Brothers precipitated a $550 billion run on the money market funds.  A report by the Joint Economic Committee pointed to the fact that the $62 billion Reserve Primary Fund had “broken the buck” (fallen below a stable $1 per share) due to its Lehman investments.  The massive bank run that followed was the dire news that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presented to Congress behind closed doors, prompting Congressional approval of Paulson’s $700 billion bank bailout despite deep misgivings.

The sleight of hand that brought the banking system down was that the mortgages backing the money market were supposedly held by trusts that had lent money to homeowners for 15 years or 30 years.  It was the classic “borrowing short to lend long,” a shell game in which banks have engaged for hundreds of years, routinely precipitating bank panics and bank runs when the depositors or the investors all pull their short-term money out at the same time.

The Shadow Banking System Is Still Unregulated

Periodic bank panics were averted in the conventional banking system only when the government agreed to insure the deposits of individual depositors in 1933.  But FDIC insurance covered only $100,000 (now $250,000), and large institutional investors had far more than that to invest.  The shadow banking system, in which deposits were “insured” with mortgage-backed securities, developed in response.  But the shadow banking system is unregulated and is just as prone to another collapse today as it was in 2008.  The Dodd-Frank banking “reforms” barely touched it.  As noted in an article titled “Risky Debt Use on Repo Market Hits 2008 Levels” in today’s Financial Times:

In the repo market, banks pledge their securities as collateral for short-term loans from money managers and other investors.  The market played a key role in the build-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Banks used toxic assets, such as repackaged subprime loans, to secure trillions of dollars worth of cheap funding.

When the US housing bubble burst, the banks’ trading partners refused to accept such securities as collateral and the repo market rapidly contracted.

However, a study by Fitch Ratings says the proportion of bundled debt being used as security in repo transactions has returned to pre-crisis levels.

Using the repackaged loans can increase risk in the repo market, the rating agency says. This is because the securities may be prone to sudden pullbacks such as the one experienced in 2008.

We could be looking at another banking collapse at any time; and to fix the problem, we first need to know what is going on.  The AGs should not agree to drop the curtain on the robo-signing scandal until all the evidence is on the table.  It is not just a matter of punishing the guilty; it is a matter of a banking scheme based on fraud, one that ultimately does not work and has jeopardized the homes, savings and investments of the public not just recently but for hundreds of years.

The Way Out

There is another way to design a banking system.  The deposits of large institutional investors do not need to be backed by sliced and diced pieces of our homes to be “safe” (something that has proven not to be safe at all).  The large institutional investors seeking safety are largely “us” – the pension funds and mutual funds in which we have stored our savings and on which we rely for support when we can no longer work.  Hundreds of years of history have demonstrated that the only reliable guarantor is the government itself.

Our pension funds and mutual funds need a government guarantee just as much as our individual deposits do.  But we don’t want to be guaranteeing the gambling and derivatives schemes of too-big-to-fail, for-profit Wall Street banks playing fast and loose with our money.  Banking and credit need to be public utilities, operated for the benefit of the public in plain sight of the public.

Though seemingly countless utterances have been made by the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, the Pulitzer-winning website Politifact pauses to research the veracity of a statement when its validity is put into question.  However, though the website makes designations as to the credibility of various remarks, it does not provide percentages of accuracy by the candidates, thus leaving open the question:  Who’s the most factual candidate?

Notes:

The variance in reported numbers (verified declarations) is due to some candidates making more questionable statements than others but, to be fair, some have had the opportunity to present a larger number of claims as a result of having remained in the primary longer and/or have had a greater number of questions put to them at the debates due to possessing higher poll figures, i.e. Romney and Perry’s triple digits.  (Of the latter, candidates with high poll numbers are granted more questions during the debates.)  Any statement made by a candidate that has not been given a designation by Politifact can either be considered to be factual and/or of little overall consequence or, in Politifact’s terms.

In deciding which statements to check, we ask ourselves these questions:

• Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable? We don’t check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole.
• Is the statement leaving a particular impression that may be misleading?
• Is the statement significant? We avoid minor “gotchas”’ on claims that obviously represent a slip of the tongue.
• Is the statement likely to be passed on and repeated by others?
• Would a typical person hear or read the statement and wonder: Is that true?1

How accuracy was calculated

The accuracy rate was calculated by adding the number of “True,” “Mostly True” and “Half True” (thus issuing benefit of the doubt since it is not listed as “Half False”) statements in contrast to the sum of those deemed to be “Mostly False,” “False,” and “Pants on Fire.”  The two grosses were then separately divided by the total number of statements, thereby deriving  the representative percentage of true and false claims.  I did not round up; i.e., the reason why some percentages total 99%.

Of the major candidates; i.e., ones who remained in the primary race for more than three debates (Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Huntsman, Paul, Perry, Romney, and Santorum), Bachmann has the lowest degree of accuracy (who also has the largest percentage of blatantly false statements) while Romney and Paul have the highest (Huntsman having made the lowest percentage of blatantly false statements).*

• “Blatantly false” equating to Politifact’s “Pants on Fire” designation or, in website’s terms, “[A] statement [which] is not accurate and [my emphasis] makes a ridiculous claim.”  More on how Politifact gauges veracity can be found here.

An explanation (and supporting research) by Politifact as to the motive/decision for every rating (or “ruling”) can be found via a hyperlink under each “Truth-o-Meter” gauge.  For example:

The Findings

Bachmann’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Bachmann’s statements for that ruling.

• True 5
• Mostly True 4
• Half True 6
• Mostly False 7
• False 19
• Pants on Fire 12

15:38 = 53 total

Accurate 28% of the time; inaccurate 71%

22% were blatantly false Cain’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Cain’s statements for that ruling.

• True 0
• Mostly True 3
• Half True 4
• Mostly False 3
• False 10
• Pants on Fire 3

7:16 = 23 total

Accurate 30% of the time; inaccurate 69%

13% were blatantly false Gingrich’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Gingrich’s statements for that ruling.

• True 5
• Mostly True 5
• Half True 11
• Mostly False 12
• False 10
• Pants on Fire 9

21:31 = 52 total

Accurate 40% of the time; inaccurate 59%

17% were blatantly false Huntsman’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Huntsman’s statements for that ruling.

• True 2
• Mostly True 4
• Half True 5
• Mostly False 5
• False 1
• Pants on Fire 1

11:7 = 18 total

Accurate 61% of the time; inaccurate 38%

.05% were blatantly false Johnson’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Johnson’s statements for that ruling.

• True 0
• Mostly True 1
• Half True 3
• Mostly False 0
• False 1
• Pants on Fire 0

4:1 = 5 total

Accurate 80% of the time; inaccurate 20%

0% were blatantly false Paul’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Paul’s statements for that ruling.

• True 7
• Mostly True 7
• Half True 6
• Mostly False 4
• False 6
• Pants on Fire 2

20:12 = 32 total

Accurate 62% of the time; inaccurate 37%

.06% were blatantly false Pawlenty’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Pawlenty’s statements for that ruling.

• True 2
• Mostly True 6
• Half True 3
• Mostly False 2
• False 3
• Pants on Fire 1

11:6 = 17 total

Accurate 64% of the time; inaccurate 35%

.05% were blatantly false Perry’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Perry’s statements for that ruling.

• True 15
• Mostly True 12
• Half True 31
• Mostly False 22
• False 23
• Pants on Fire 12

58:57 = 115 total

Accurate 50% of the time; inaccurate 49%

10% were blatantly false Romney’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Romney’s statements for that ruling.

• True 21
• Mostly True 18
• Half True 30
• Mostly False 14
• False 17
• Pants on Fire 10

69:41 = 110 total

Accurate 62% of the time; inaccurate 37%

.09% were blatantly false Santorum’s statements by rulingClick on the ruling to see all of Santorum’s statements for that ruling.

• True 3
• Mostly True 1
• Half True 8
• Mostly False 6
• False 4
• Pants on Fire 2

12:12 = 24 total

Accurate 50% of the time; inaccurate 50%

.08% were blatantly fals

 

1. Bill Adair, “Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter”, Tampa Bay Times, February 21, 2011

IPS – When Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius this week that he believes Israel was likely to attack Iran between April and June, it was ostensibly yet another expression of alarm at the Israeli government’s threats of military action.

But even though the administration is undoubtedly concerned about that Israeli threat, the Panetta leak had a different objective. The White House was taking advantage of the current crisis atmosphere over that Israeli threat and even seeking to make it more urgent in order to put pressure on Iran to make diplomatic concessions to the United States and its allies on its nuclear programme in the coming months.

The real aim of the leak brings into sharper focus a contradiction in the Barack Obama administration’s Iran policy between its effort to reduce the likelihood of being drawn into a war with Iran and its desire to exploit the Israeli threat of war to gain diplomatic leverage on Iran.

The Panetta leak makes it less likely that either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Iranian strategists will take seriously Obama’s effort to keep the United States out of a war initiated by an Israeli attack. It seriously undercut the message carried to the Israelis by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month that the United States would not come to Israel’s defence if it launched a unilateral attack on Iran, as IPS reported February 1.

A tell-tale indication of Panetta’s real intention was his very specific mention of the period from April through June as the likely time frame for an Israeli attack. Panetta suggested that the reason was that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak had identified this as the crucial period in which Iran would have entered a so-called “zone of immunity” the successful movement of some unknown proportion of Iran’s uranium enrichment assets to the highly protected Fordow enrichment plant.

But Barak had actually said in an interview last November that he “couldn’t predict” whether that point would be reached in “two quarters or three quarters or a year”.

Why, then, would Panetta deliberately specify the second quarter as the time frame for an Israeli attack? The one explicit connection between the April-June period and the dynamics of the U.S.-Israel- Iran triangle is the expiration of the six-month period delay in the application of the European Union’s apparently harsh sanctions against the Iranian oil sector.

That six-month delay in the termination of all existing EU oil contracts with Iran was announced by the EU January 23, but it was reported as early as January 14 that the six-month delay had already been adopted informally as a compromise between the three-month delay favoured by Britain, France and Germany and the one-year delay being demanded by other member countries.

The Obama administration had also delayed its own sanctions on Iranian oil for six months, after having been forced to accept such sanctions by the U.S. Congress, at the urging of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The administration recognised that six-month period before U.S. and EU sanctions take effect as a window for negotiations with Iran aimed at defusing the crisis over its nuclear programme. So it was determined to use that same time frame to put pressure on Iran to accommodate U.S. and European demands.

By the time the news of the postponement of the U.S.-Israeli military exercise broke on January 15, Panetta was already prepared to take advantage of that development to gain diplomatic leverage on Iran.

Laura Rozen of Yahoo News reported that U.S. Defence Department officials and former officials, speaking anonymously, said Barak had requested the postponement and that they were “privately concerned” the request “could be one potential warning signal Israel is trying to leave its options open for conducting a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the spring.”

The Israelis were not on board with that Obama administration tactic. In fact, Netanyahu seemed more interested in portraying the Obama administration as favouring a soft approach on Iran in an election year.

Instead of reinforcing the effort by Panetta to use the six-month window to bring diplomatic pressure, Defence Minister Barak, speaking on Army Radio January 18, said the government had “no date for making decisions” on a possible attack on Iran and, adding “The whole thing is very far off …”

Another indication that the Ignatius column was not intended to increase pressure on Israel but to impress Iran is that it did not reinforce the message taken by Gen. Dempsey to Israel last month that the United States would not join any war with Iran that Israel had initiated on its own without consulting with Washington.

Ignatius wrote that the administration “appears to favor staying out of the conflict unless Iran hits U.S. assets which would trigger a strong U.S. response.” But then he added what was clearly the main point: “Administration officials caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: the United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israeli population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.”

Ignatius, who is known for reflecting only the views of the top U.S. defence and intelligence officials, was clearly reporting what he had been told by Panetta in Brussels.

Further underlining the real intention behind the Panetta leak, Ignatius went out of his way to present Netanyahu’s assumptions about a war as credible, if not perfectly reasonable, hinting that this was the view he was getting from Panetta.

The Israelis, he wrote “are said to believe that a military strike could be limited and constrained”. Emphasising the Israeli doubt that Iran would dare to retaliate heavily against Israeli population centres, Ignatius cited “(o)ne Israeli estimate” that a war against Iran would only entail “about 500 civilian casualties”.

Ignatius chose not to point out that the estimate of less than 500 deaths had been given by Barak last November in response to a statement by former Mossad director Meir Dagan that an attack on Iran would precipitate a “regional war that would endanger the (Israeli) state’s existence”

After that Barak claim, Dagan said in an interview with Haaretz newspaper that he assumes that “the level of destruction and paralysis of everyday life, and Israeli death toll would be high.”

But Ignatius ignored the assessment of the former Mossad director.

The Panetta leak appears to confirm the fears of analysts following the administration’s Iran strategy closely that its effort to distance the United States from an Israeli attack would be ineffective because of competing interests.

Reza Marashi, research director at the National Iranian-American Council, who worked in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs from 2006 to 2010, doubts the administration can avoid being drawn into an Israeli war with Iran without a very public and unequivocal statement that it will not tolerate a unilateral and unprovoked Israeli attack.

“Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And sometimes the only way to ensure that a friend doesn’t endanger you or themselves is to take the away the car keys,” Marashi said.

As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being “the only nuclear power in the Middle East” is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But — in the real, non-propaganda world — is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you’ve forgotten …

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.”1

2009: “A senior Israeli official in Washington” asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.”2

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, “believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.”

Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.”3

A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that “three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.”

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. … There are “certain things [the Iranians] have not done” that would be necessary to build a warhead.4

Admissions like the above — and there are others — are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted — On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: “But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.” Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No …”5

One of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:

Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?

Van Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I’ve researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn’t deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they’re the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. … We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons … thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany.

And throughout these years, regularly, Israeli and American officials have been assuring us that Iran is World Nuclear Threat Number One, that we can’t relax our guard against them, that there should be no limit to the ultra-tough sanctions we impose upon the Iranian people and their government. Repeated murder and attempted murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotage of Iranian nuclear equipment with computer viruses, the sale of faulty parts and raw materials, unexplained plane crashes, explosions at Iranian facilities … Who can be behind this but USrael? How do we know? It’s called “plain common sense”. Or do you think it was Costa Rica? Or perhaps South Africa? Or maybe Thailand?

Defense Secretary Panetta recently commented on one of the assassinations of an Iranian scientist. He put it succinctly: “That’s not what the United States does.”6

Does anyone know Leon Panetta’s e-mail address? I’d like to send him my list of United States assassination plots. More than 50 foreign leaders were targeted over the years, many successfully.7

Not long ago, Iraq and Iran were regarded by USrael as the most significant threats to Israeli Middle-East hegemony. Thus was born the myth of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the United States proceeded to turn Iraq into a basket case. That left Iran, and thus was born the myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat. As it began to sink in that Iran was not really that much of a nuclear threat, or that this “threat” was becoming too difficult to sell to the rest of the world, USrael decided that, at a minimum, it wanted regime change. The next step may be to block Iran’s lifeline — oil sales using the Strait of Hormuz. Ergo, the recent US and EU naval buildup near the Persian Gulf, an act of war trying to goad Iran into firing the first shot. If Iran tries to counter this blockade, it could be the signal for another US Basket Case, the fourth in a decade, with the devastated people of Libya and Afghanistan, along with Iraq, currently enjoying America’s unique gift of freedom and democracy.

On January 11, the Washington Post reported: “In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, [a US intelligence official] says another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”

How utterly charming, these tactics and goals for the 21st century by the leader of “The Free World”. (Is that expression still used?)

The neo-conservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America’s most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately. … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.8

What are we to make of that and all the other quotations above? I think it gets back to my opening statement: Being “the only nuclear power in the Middle East” is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. Is USrael willing to go to war to hold on to that card?

Please tell me again … What is the war in Afghanistan about?

With the US war in Iraq supposedly having reached a good conclusion (or halfway decent … or better than nothing … or let’s get the hell out of here while some of us are still in one piece and there are some Iraqis we haven’t yet killed), the best and the brightest in our government and media turn their thoughts to what to do about Afghanistan. It appears that no one seems to remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009:

But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.9

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the “plotting to attack America” in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn’t the United States bombed those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

The only “necessity” that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia — which reportedly contains the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world — and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of south Asia, pipelines that can bypass those not-yet Washington clients, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here’s Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.”10

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions.11 Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region’s total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels … From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks stalled in July, 2001 the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. The talks finally broke down for good the following month, a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can’t be “won” short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare “victory”. Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words “freedom” and “democracy”, but certainly not “pipeline”.

Love me, love me, love me, I’m a Liberal (Thank you, Phil Ochs. We miss you.)

Angela Davis, star of the 1960s, like most members of the Communist Party, was/is no more radical than the average American liberal. Here she is recently addressing Occupy Wall Street:

When I said that we need a third party, a radical party, I was projecting toward the future. We cannot allow a Republican to take office. … Don’t we remember what it was like when Bush was president?12

Yes, Angela, we remember that time well. How can we forget it since Bush, by all important standards, is still in the White House? Waging perpetual war, relentless surveillance of the citizenry, kissing the corporate ass, police brutality? … What’s changed? Except for the worse. Where’s our single-payer national health insurance? Nothing even close. Where’s our affordable university education? Still the most backward in the “developed” world. Where’s our legalized marijuana — I mean really legalized? If you think that’s changed, you must be stoned. Where’s our abortion on demand? What does your guy Barack think about that? Are the indispensable labor unions being rescued from oblivion? Ha! The ultra-important minimum wage? Inflation adjusted, equal to the mid-1950s.

Has the American threat to the environment and the world environmental movement ceased? Tell that to a dedicated activist-internationalist. Has the 50-year-old embargo against Cuba finally ended? It has not, and I can still not go there legally. The police-state War on Terror at home? Scarcely a month goes by without the FBI entrapping some young “terrorists”. Are more Banksters and Wall Street Society-Screwers (except for the harmless insider-traders) being imprisoned? Name one. The really tough regulations of the financial area so badly needed? Keep waiting. How about executives of the BP Oil Spill Company being arrested? Or war criminals, mass murderers, and torturers with names like … Oh, I don’t know, let’s see … maybe like Cheney or Bush or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or someone with a crazy name like Condoleezza? All walking completely free, all celebrated.

A major decline of progressive America occurred during the Clinton years as many liberals and their organizations accepted the presence of a Democratic president as an adequate substitute for the things liberals once believed in. Liberalism and a social democratic spirit painfully grown over the previous 60 years withered during the Clinton administration.

— Sam Smith13

A change of Presidents is like a change of advertising campaigns for a soft drink; the product itself still tastes the same, but it now has a new ‘image’.

— Richard K. Moore

1. Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26
2. Washington Post, March 5, 2009
3. “Face the Nation“, January 8, 2012
4. The Guardian (London), January 31, 2012
5. “PBS’s Dishonest Iran Edit”, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), January 10, 2012
6. Reuters, January 12, 2012
7. U.S. Government Assassination Plots
8. Video of Pletka making these remarks
9. Talk given by the president at Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009
10. Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007
11. See, for example, the December 17, 1997 article in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas“. For further discussion of the TAPI pipeline and related issues, see this article by international petroleum engineer John Foster
12. Washington Post, January 15, 2012
13. Sam Smith was a longtime publisher and journalist in Washington, DC, now living in Maine. Subscribe to his marvelous newsletter, the Progressive Review

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, Thursday.

That means there will be an additional six weeks of winter.

Or it means there will be an early Spring.

It doesn’t make much difference. Phil has an accuracy rate of about 39 percent, according to the StormFax Weather Almanac. That’s probably about the same as TV weather forecasters.

StormFax has tracked Phil’s predictions since 1897, the year he (with the help of the Punxsatawney Spirit) made his first trip to Gobbler’s Knob, about two miles from the town in the northwest part of Pennsylvania.

The name, Punxsutawney, is probably derived from an Algonquin or Delaware Indian name which loosely translates as “village of sand fleas.” The name, Phil, is a tribute to Philip Freas, a staff writer for the Spirit, who wrote dozens of stories about what would become one of the most enduring tourism attractions in the country.

The festival is based upon a German superstition and a Celtic celebration. The superstition relates to hibernating animals; when they leave their den, if they see their shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter; if they don’t, it’s an early spring. The Celtic festival (known as Imbolc) was midway between the winter solstice (usually about Dec. 21–22), and the Spring Equinox (usually March 20). The date set for Phil’s annual prediction is always February 2, midway between the beginning of Winter and the beginning of Spring. This, of course, means that among the millions who now watch the ceremony in person, by webcam, or on the TV news, none are groundhogs. Except for Phil, they hibernate in well-constructed underground burrows from October to early Spring.

The name, woodchuck, an alternate for groundhog, is probably from “wojak,” a Native American word.

The second most famous ground hog is Gus. Unlike the furry Phil, who lives with his wife, Phyllis, in a library for most of the year, Gus is a cute little animatronic animal whose primary mission is to lure Pennsylvanians to spend money on the state lottery. Television commercials have assured Gus of his own celebrity. However, unlike Phil, he doesn’t make personal appearances.

Groundhogs in captivity have life spans that average 10–14 years. However, faced by several predators—including wolves, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, eagles and man—groundhogs usually live only two or three years in the wild.

Phil and Gus are just about the only two groundhogs that people feel any warmth for. The Pennsylvania Game Commission treats groundhogs as nuisance animals. Every day but Sunday is open season on the animals that weigh only about five to nine pounds. Even a cursory look at Google shows that several hundred thousand posts about groundhogs focus upon ways to kill them, with thousands of people bragging about how many they killed, and with what kind of trap, gas, or gun. There is no fur or meat value to humans.

Hunters and trappers kill groundhogs near roads and fields, and go from farm to farm. However, hunters and trappers often believe that in their own enjoyment of killing a gentle species that poses no threat to humans they may be doing some kind of a service to mankind. Many believe that killing groundhogs will keep them from overpopulating the environment. However, such is not the case. “Studies show that even when all the woodchucks are trapped out of an area, others from surrounding areas quickly move into the vacated niche,” says Laura J. Simon, field director for the Urban Wildlife Program of the Humane Society of the United States. But there is also another problem. In Spring and Summer, baby groundhogs live in the underground tunnels. Killing their mother will lead them to starve to death.

Natural predators keep the balance of nature to reduce overpopulation. Like most animals, groundhogs have a sense that allows them to breed to keep the species alive in areas of extreme danger; as the danger is removed, instead of breeding, groundhogs will actually stabilize population growth.  Hunters and farmers claim groundhogs leave holes that can damage tractors or cause injuries to horses and livestock. However, the perceived reality of that happening may be far greater than the actual risk, according to Simon.

The second major reason people kill groundhogs is because of fear. “At least half the calls we get,” says Simon, “is because people are afraid that groundhogs will attack them.” But, groundhogs, says Simon, “are benign shy animals that will retreat to their burrows when they see humans, even small children, coming close.”

The third major reason people want to kill groundhogs is because the animals, in search for food, will destroy gardens. Ironically, the deforestation of America has allowed groundhogs to flourish. They prefer to build their complex multi-level burrows on open ground at the edge of forests. This open view gives them protection from predators, while providing sources for their appetite for grub, grasshoppers, earthworms, berries, and various fruits and some vegetables; for water, they eat grasses and leaves. But as agricultural land is also destroyed to allow the construction of everything from parking lots to condos to supermarkets, groundhogs, like most species, are shoved from their own homes. That’s when homeowners see the holes in their lawns and some garden crops chewed up. Animal-friendly gardeners will plant extra so animals and humans can share the food.

Some of the methods to get rid of groundhogs cause more injuries to humans than to groundhogs. People have also used broken glass or poured concrete into the entrance and exit holes of the burrows. But, these methods, says Simon, don’t work.

There are several non-lethal humane ways to effectively discourage the animals. One of the best is to enclose the garden in a three foot high mesh fence, “with the top part left wobbly to discourage the animals from climbing,” says Simon. To discourage groundhogs from burrowing under the garden and then coming up to munch, the Humane Society advises homeowners to purchase a four-foot tall roll of green garden fencing. The lower 12 inches of mesh should be bent at a 90 degree angle and run parallel to the ground, away from the garden, to create a “false bottom,” and secured to the ground by landscaping staples. Homeowners can also discourage groundhogs by placing objects that reflect sunlight and continually move in the breeze, such as tethered Mylar party balloons. Simon says ones with big eyes “seem to work best because they create a predator image.”

Groundhogs and people can co-exist, with neither harming the other. Killing groundhogs just because we can is never a good reason.

•  Rosemary Brasch assisted with this article.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected round the world.

— President Barack Obama, State of the Union address, 24th January 2012

On January 24th, the day President Obama delivered his last State of the Union speech to Congress before the election, citing the “selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces, (their) focus on the mission at hand”, the “selfless” Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, leader of the massacre at Haditha, in Iraq, became the seventh soldier to walk free from the mass murder of twenty four unarmed men, women and children in three homes and a taxi.

It was another chilling, ruthless, cold blooded, up to five hour rampage, revenge for the death a colleague in a roadside bomb which had nothing to do with the rural families that paid the price.

The youngest to die was one year, the oldest was a 76 year old wheelchair-bound amputee, Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. He died with nine rounds in the chest and abdomen.

Other children who died were aged 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 14.

On May 9th, 2007, Sergeant Sanick De la Cruz received immunity from prosecution in return for testimony in which he said that he had watched Wuterich shoot five Iraqis attempting to surrender. He further stated that he and Wuterich had further fired into the dead bodies – and that he had urinated on one of the dead Iraqis.

“Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed (US troops) example”, pondered the President in his speech – in a week which worldwide revulsion was expressed at a video of Marines, allegedly with the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan.

It was, of course, “behaviour … not in keeping with the values of the US Armed Forces … not consistent with out core values (or) indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps”, said a Defence Department spokeswoman.

Ross Caputi, a former Marine who took part in another massacre, Falluja, exactly a year before Haditha, was sickened at what he saw and experienced.  He now campaigns tirelessly for Iraq and for reparation for Falluja, and he disputes the Defence Department’s sunny view of “core values”.

”These attitudes are common in the Marine Corps. The guys who peed on the poor dead Afghans were not ‘bad apples’, they were average Marines”, Caputi told this publication. For his outspokenness, Caputi has received such volume of chilling and obscene threats from former colleagues and US Service personnel (seen by the writer) that they stand testimony to his words.

As Afghanistan, the litany of Iraq’s blood-lettings are silent witness to “core values” of an altogether different kind. In an expression disturbingly mirroring “cleansed”, homes are “cleared.” Grenades are thrown in and then troops storm in, automatic rifles (and more grenades) blazing.

A description of  the assault on one Haditha home from a Lt. William T. Kallop records:

The Marines cleared it the way they had been trained to clear it, which is frags (grenades)first … It was clear just by the looks of the room that frags went in and then the house was prepped and sprayed like, with a machine gun, and then they went in. And by the looks of it, they just … they went in, cleared to room, everybody was down.

In her meticulous, eye-watering article, “The Haditha Massacre:  No Justice for Iraqis“, Marjorie Cohn writes:

Citing doctors at Haditha’s hospital, The Washington Post reported: ‘Most of the shots … were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor’.

She goes on to add that days after the mass murders at Haditha became public, “US forces killed eleven  civilians, after rounding them up in a room in a house in Ishaqi”, in Salahuddin Province.  All were handcuffed (presumably not the six month old) and executed.

The murdered civilians of Ishaqi are:

Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months

“A report by the US military found no wrongdoing by the US soldiers”, writes Professor Cohen.

There are Falluja’s football fields of mass graves, Najav’s hotel and hospital parks turned graveyards, the pathetic uncounted ones in gardens, in yards, the lost buried in the family home across Iraq by families who would be also shot if they ventured with their beloved to the cemetery.

In Falluja, reminiscent of other historic “cleansings”, categorized war crimes, men between fifteen and fifty five were forbidden to leave or enter their city.

Iraqi families shot in their cars by US service personnel are beyond counting – and indeed have not been. “It is not productive to count Iraqi deaths”, as the inimitable General Kimmit reminded the world.

Deaths included the family of Ali Abbas by rogue US missiles in the residential Zafaraniya suburb of Baghdad, with its evocative Convent and ancient Catholic church. Ali lost his pregnant mother, father, brother and thirteen other family members. He also lost his arms. He was twelve years old.

Allegations of summary executions have emerged from Tel Afar, whose blood drenched toddler, her parents shot by troops in their car, remains a never to be erased image; Samarra, Quaim, Taal al Jal, Mukaradeeb, Hamdaniya, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul – and throughout the country.

In Mahmudiya, in 2008, fourteen year old Abeer Quasim Hamza was gang raped then killed by five US servicemen — after they had murdered her mother, Fakriyah (34) father Qasim (45) and six year old sister. All were burned in an attempt to cover the crime. There were two convictions.

And never forget Abu Ghraib.

Long forgotten are the wedding and funeral massacres, a particular target for the US military, a litany. One, early in the invasion, was just a month after the first Falluja onslaught.

On May 19th, 2004 46 people celebrating a wedding in Mugrideeb village were mown down by assault helicopters, other attack planes and Marines.

USMC Major General James Mattis at the time simply commented: “How many people go to the middle of the desert to celebrate a wedding …?” He later said that it had taken him thirty seconds to decide to attack.

Eman Khammas of Iraq Occupation Watch braved the dangerous road out to the village as soon as she heard. She found carnage – and remains of the musicians’ instruments, decorations, pots, sacks of rice, improvised bread ovens, sacks filled with leftovers for the animals, all who had been shot – and surviving eyewitnesses.

There were blood stained toys, clothes, childrens’ hair slides, camera batteries. The family were sheep traders. Khammas recalled:

The ground was full of bullets holes of different sizes, spots of blood every where, some a meter wide. In some of them the remains of human flesh were drying in the sun. . . . In one of these remains there was a long black lock still attached to the flesh. I could not see any more. I ran away back to the demolished house.

Those mown down of the Rakaad Naif family as they celebrated were:

1. Mohammad Rekaad, 28
2. Ahmed Rekaad, 26
3. Talib Rekaad, 27
4. Mizhir Rekaad, 20
5. Daham Rekaad, 17
6. Saad Mohammad Rekaad
7. Marifa Obeid, Rekaad’s wife
8. Fatima Madhi, Rekaad’s daughter in law
9. Raad Ahmed, grandson, 3
10. Ra’id Ahmed, grandson, 2
11. Wa’ad Ahmed, grandson, 1 month
12. Inad Mohammad, grandson, 6
13. Anood Mohammad, granddaughter, 5
14. Amal Rekaad, daughter, 30
15. Anood Talib, granddaughter, 2
16. Kholood Talib, granddaughter, 6 months
17. Hamid Monif, son in law, 22
18. Somayia Nawaf, wife, 50
19. Siham Rekaad, daughter, 18
20. Hamda Suleiman, wife, 45
21. Rabha Rekaad daughter, 16
22. Zahra Rekaad daughter,15
23. Fatima Rekaad daughter, 4
24. Ali Rekaad son, 12
25. Hamza Rekaad, 6

Five from a family called Garaghool also died, thirteen of the band and three photographic crew. Forty six mown down for celebrating a wedding..

Kholood, 8 months, Sabha, 22, Iqbal 14, Mouza, 12, Feisal and Adil (children, ages unknown) were hospitalized.

There were no prosecutions.

General Mark Kimmit, questioned on the liquidation of the party goers – the  dead women’s gold also torn from their necks by the troops, according to consistent survivors accounts – simply replied: “Bad people have parties too.” Asked about the near countless other acts of carnage, he responded: “Change the channel.”

As the cost in Iraqi lives at the hands of US troops briefly hits the headlines again, some of the names that are known, in the perhaps 1.7 million lost, should be remembered. They are not “collateral damage” or “regrettable incidents”.  Each one is a unique human being, often a small, fledgling one.

In Haditha the victims were:

House One:

Abdul Hameed Hassin Ali, 76.
Khamisa Tuma Ali, 66, wife of Abdul.
Rashid Abdul Hamid, 30.
Walid Abdul Hamid Hassan, 35.
Jahid Abdul Hamid Hassan, middle aged.
Asma Salman Rasif, 32.
Abdullah Walid, 4.
Injured: Iman, 8 and Abdul Rahman, 5.
Escaped: Daughter-in-law, Hiba, with 2 month old Asia.

House Two:

Younis Salim Khalfif, 43.
Aida Yasin Ahmed, wife of Younis Salim, died shielding her youngest daughter, Aisha.
Muhammad Younis Salim, 10, son.
Noor Younis Salim, 14, daughter.
Sabaa Younis Salim, 10, daughter.
Zainabl Younis Salim, 5, daughter.
Aisha Younis Salim, 3, daughter.
One year old girl staying with the family.
Survived: Safa Younis Salim, 13, who pretended to be dead.

House Three:

Ajamal Ahmed, 41.
Marwan Ahmed, 28.
Qahtan Ahmed, 24.
Chasib Ahmed, 27. Brothers.

Taxi: Passengers were students at the Technical Institute in Saqlawiyah:

20 Ahmed Khadir, taxi driver.
21.Ahram Hamid Flayeh.
22.Khalid Ayada al-Zawi
23.Wajdi Ayada al-Zawri
24.Mohammad Battal Mahmoud.

Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones, who, seemingly, was not involved, was ordered to photograph the bodies. He picked up a little girl, shot in the head. The contents of her small skull spilled out on to his trousers. “I need immediate help”, he said.

What of help for then thirteen year old Safa, pretending to be dead amongst her family’s bodies? Of Hiba, lone survivor of her home and her now six year old daughter?

What of  the heroic Taher Thabet al-Hadithi, young journalist and human rights activist, who filmed every minute, bloody detail the following day, and amassed the truth of what had really happened as the Defence Department were busy trying to cover their tracks? He fled to Syria in fear of his own life expectancy should the US military learn of his evidence.

It was his witness materials that made its way into Time magazine, engendering an “inquiry.” Evidence that was indisputable..

The reaction of Major General Steve Johnson, Commander of US Forces in the Province was salutary: “It happened all the time … it was just the cost of doing business …”

Routine massacres.

“The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe”, said President Obama, concluding his address, citing, “… the enduring power of our moral example … tyranny is no match for liberty.”

On the wall of the deserted house of one of the Haditha families, silent witness to this “moral example”, is written:

Democracy assassinated the family that was here.

The Sonoma County daily’s Press Democrat February 1 editorial “Occupy Movement in Ashes” is wishful thinking. Our phoenix will rise during this month. You wait. You watch. You see.

Occupy is still an infant, having been born in New York September 17 with Occupy Wall Street. It is not even five months old and already the local daily tries to editorialize it into ashes. Rumors of our death are premature. We have made mistakes, including in Oakland. We’re learning and experiencing what one activist calls “growing pains.”

Provoked by police violence in Oakland, a few cornered occupiers among the 2000 present reacted. That has not happened here. The Sonoma County Occupy Town Hall Affinity Group,of which I am a member, opposes violence, as do the overwhelming majority of Occupy groups and individuals.

I do, however, respect the right of self-defense by those cornered by the police. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ”Violence is the voice of the unheard.”  And as President John F. Kennedy said at a 1962 speech at the White House, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

What would you do when surrounded by a large group of armed, masked, threatening, charging, and rioting armored men? I praise the brave souls willing to face such police violence. As one occupier wondered, “What’s next? Live ammunition?”

Punishing people in a democracy should be the job of the courts, not the police, which Oakland police are notorious for doing. They fan the flames.

Court-appointed monitors, according to The Bay Citizen recently wrote in their quarterly report that the police response to Occupy Oakland protests this fall raised ‘serious concerns’ about the department’s ability to ‘hold true to the best practices in American policing,’ and promised a thorough investigation of the matter. Last week, a judge moved the police department closer to a federal takeover, writing that he was in ‘disbelief’ that the department had yet to finish a series of court-ordered reforms.

Why did the Press Democrat not report these relevant facts? The PD carefully selects what to report and what to exclude. A daily newspaper should represent various voices of its community, rather than just the status quo.

Occupy has “officially overstepped its welcome,” the PD alleges. Since when has the PD ever welcomed Occupy or officiated over such matters? The argument that what a few people did in one city reduces the national Occupy movement to ashes is without merit.

The PD asks occupiers to condemn the violence in Oakland. I condemn the police brutality and criticize the much less violent behavior of a few activists. I have done so within our movement and publicly, as have other Occupy co-leaders.

Now, will the Press Democrat denounce the violence of the Oakland police, who exercise unlawful authority? Or is there a double standard here?

Burning the American flag is an inflammatory and futile act of frustration that dilutes the main messages of the majority of occupiers and our many supporters, which is to bring about fundamental changes in our economic and political systems. When I was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, I swore an oath to defend my country against external and internal threats. I have kept that vow, which is a big reason that I am part of the Occupy movement, as are many veterans.

Violence by occupiers is a tactical mistake. The guns, other weapons, and media are in the hands of the protectors of the wealthy 1%. Violence is also a strategic and moral error.

The real violence that we should oppose includes the following: banks that gambled and foreclosed on the homes of millions; corporations that buy politicians with their big bucks; and stripping workers’ pensions and health care benefits.

Occupy does need to mature. Young people, especially, are desperate today. Their college debts are astronomical and their job options are minimal. Desperation can lead to violence. Long-term organizing is more likely to be successful.

“Ashes,” you fantasize. Yet on February 9 the Sonoma County Town Hall will host its third of ongoing monthly gatherings in a downtown Sebastopol church; 130 to 140 people attended the previous two. On February 17 the new Occupied Press, North Bay, will show the film “Battle in Seattle,” about the l999 shut-down of the World Trade Organization. On February 25 Occupy Santa Rosa will support teachers unions in a day of action in support of public education.

These are samples of the dozens of activities lead by Sonoma County Occupy groups as we prepare to move from a reflective winter into an action-oriented spring. Do these indicate “ashes?” You wait. You watch. You see.

Perhaps your editorial represents what we can expect from the new conservative Florida owners of the Press Democrat. Perhaps we need a new newspaper here that reflects the 99%.

Violence, abuse, non-accountability, hate — such is communal living today within the occupied West Bank, where some 518,974 colonisers sit within “200” illegal settlements. According to Noam Chomsky:

The settlements cover over 42% of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), not counting the Jordon valley, which they are taking over

Estimates of colonisation vary from the 42% reported by Chomsky and BT Salem to that of Human Rights Watch who, at 60%, set the figure even higher.

Around half a million ‘settlers’, more accurately, colonisers, now squat upon Palestinian soil, huddled within walled encampments upon stolen land, branded blue and white. Noisily perching upon hilltops, rooms with a view, or flourishing in verdant valleys, these settlements creep shamefully throughout the West Bank and the sacred city Jerusalem, East, West North South; The City of Peace.

Former President Jimmy Carter stated:

The occupation & confiscation of Palestinian land that doesn’t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonisation of that land, and the connecting up of those isolated but multiple settlements, (there are some 200), with each other by high-ways on which Palestinians can’t travel and where quite often cannot even cross. The persecution of the Palestinians under the occupation [by the Israelis] is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation

Inside the West Bank, Outside the Law

The building of one single settlement is illegal. This is a fact, a fact well known, a fact Israel signs up to and a fact in International Law.

Article 49 of The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 to which Israel is a signatory (1949) and has ratified (1951) and Mother-ship USA is a High Contracting Party, which “aims at protecting the civilian persons in enemy hands, notably those residing in occupied territories” and “explicitly prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory” [Emphasis mine].

The Geneva conventions agreed and adopted after the Second World War are “one of the major sources of international humanitarian law and are binding [emphasis mine] upon [the] 189 signatory states”, meaning you can’t simply ignore them. As a party to the Geneva Conventions, the United States is obligated “to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.” [Emphasis mine] Israel and the USA, two of those bound – some feel gagged and bound would serve well — by the conventions, failed to attend a conference in December 2001 in Geneva, concerning the application of international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territories; a scandalous absence by the two key ‘players’ or ‘builders’ – not of peace, but builders of conflict, separation walls and Israeli housing condos.

Notwithstanding this ban, almost half-a-million Jewish Israelis with Israeli government support have moved into settlements it has constructed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and formally annexed occupied territory in East Jerusalem, a move not recognized by any other government in the world.1

The settlers are living illegally, often violently, supported by all manner of subsidies from the Knesset, “which entitles them to a number of benefits: in housing, by enabling settlers to purchase quality, inexpensive apartments, with an automatic grant of a subsidized mortgage; wide-ranging benefits in education, such as free education from age three, extended school days, free transportation to schools, and higher teachers’ salaries; for industry and agriculture, by grants and subsidies, and indemnification for the taxes imposed on their produce by the European Union; in taxation, by imposing taxes significantly lower than in communities inside the Green Line, and by providing larger balancing grants to the settlements, to aid in covering deficits.”

These subsidies are little more than bribes, all thanks to Mother Goose USA. Chomsky points out:

We’re [USA] paying for it [settlement building, subsidies, security], stop paying for it, stop supporting it, stop subsidising. Stop allowing the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to remain in the territories. The setters are subsidized to stay there [the OPT], if the subsidies are withdrawn, they [settlers] will have to face the fact that they are not the ‘Lords of the Land’ they will then go back to Israel.

Israel, however, disregards, with impunity, the many and various binding agreements, such is the arrogance of the aggressor. Tzipi Livni, when serving as Israel’s foreign minister, declared:  “I’m a lawyer and I’m against the law, international law in particular”. Norman Finlkestein commenting ”She had good reason for saying that because under international law Israel loses, on Jerusalem, on the West Bank and Gaza, on settlements and right of return for refugees”  There is a rising light of freedom and unity throughout the World, Miss Livni.  It glints from the cleansing sword of justice, law, International, National.

Israel is supported, sustained and supplied, in words, arms and deed by the US. During 2011, the U.S. provided Israel with at least $8.2 million per day in “military aid” alone. The One who rides shotgun above any treatise, convention and/or nation, Big American Brother, allows [Israel] to dissent, encourages violation of international law, and leads by example. One has only to recall the International Court of Justice judgment against the USA in 1984, when the ICJ found in favour of Nicaragua. As Noam Chomsky puts it:

America was condemned by the World Court for, what they called unlawful use of force for political ends, another word for International terrorism. Tens of thousands of people [were] killed [and] the country ruined perhaps beyond recovery. The ICJ ordered the US to terminate their crimes and pay substantial reparations.2

The US ignored the court and continued unabated, in fact, escalating the terror.  It seems international laws apply to some but not to others, ‘Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you’. Good idea unless it’s Israel or their Godfather in, and of, arms, America.

In February 2011 the USA vetoed a proposed United Nations Security Council Resolution calling upon Israel ‘to end illegal policies that promote settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem’ (HRW). In so doing they undermined international law and gave the green, or should we say the blue and white light, to their Middle East proxy, to continue committing criminal acts, by expanding the settlement building, the colonisation within, and of, the West Bank to include East Jerusalem.

In the UN report (UNSCIIPA), the concerns of the General Assembly are made plain.

Despite the repeated calls from the international community and the illegality of settlements, the State of Israel is continuing to expand settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in violation of its international legal obligations [emphasis mine].

The report continues:

Israel is in violation of international humanitarian law, relevant United Nations resolutions, agreements reached between the parties and obligations under the Quartet road map.

The Clash

Clashes between settlers living illegally upon the West Bank, a line drawn in the 1967 sand – walled and fenced – and Palestinians in their homes, upon their land, inside their schools and mosques, are growing, intensifying and escalating. The UN report makes clear how serious the problem is “Many of these incidents have been overtly violent acts targeting Palestinian individuals and communities with live ammunition, destruction and denial of access to property, physical assault and the throwing of stones. Some incidents have led to the killing and injury of Palestinians”.

According to Defence for Children International (DCI) ‘there has been a sharp increase in settler violence incidents against children. As of May 2011, DCI documented 19 cases of violence against children involving settlers, two of them fatal’.

Two cases of murder, murder of two innocent children at the hands of the colonisers.

We find in the UN report (UNSCIIPA) the following:

From September 2010 to May 2011, 5 deaths (including three children) and more than 270 cases of injury of Palestinians by Israeli settlers were recorded, lack of accountability for Israeli settlers persists. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) not only failed to protect Palestinians, there are documented instances of their direct involvement in violence perpetrated against Palestinians.

Noam Chomsky says:

“We [USA] now have in the OPT a neo-colonial army, the IDF, to control the population.”

The following shocking examples of settler violence as monitored by the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) are given in the UN report.  They are illustrative of the violence that Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israeli settlers, and are simply some of the loudest in a crowd of screaming atrocities committed by Israeli colonists against Palestinian men, women and children, their places of worship and of education. So here they are, to the shame of the “settlers”.

On 7 March 2011, a group of at least 12 settlers from the “outpost” of Esh Kodesh in the northern West Bank attacked Palestinians from the adjacent village of Qusra. Three of the settlers were armed with a handgun and two rifles while the rest were carrying baseball bats and metal bars. One of the settlers had a dog. The settlers hurled stones at the Palestinians and fired guns in the air, before physically assaulting the Palestinians. Israel Defence Forces soldiers reached the scene 30 to 45 minutes later, but the Israel Defence Forces personnel acted only in support of the settlers. One of the Palestinians was shot in his left wrist by a settler. An Israel Defence Forces soldier shot another victim in the leg from a distance of some 30 metres. Once on the ground the same Israel Defence Forces soldier shot him again from close range in the other leg. While trying to flee, the victim was hit in the leg and kicked in the face by a settler with a wooden stick, in the presence of the Israel Defence Forces soldier who had just shot him. An Israel Defence Forces soldier hit another Palestinian in the head with the butt of his rifle. Once the victim fell on the ground, a settler and the Israel Defence Forces soldier started kicking him.

On 27 January 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin. Footage of the killing captured by a security camera appeared in various media. On 15 February 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian from the village of Jalud south of Nablus, which is surrounded by six Israeli settlements and “outposts”, was shot in his stomach

Settler violence [According to the UN is not random criminal activity; in most cases, it is ideology-driven, organized violence, the goal of which is to assert settler dominance over an area.

The Israeli methodology of suppression, control and terror is organised and systematic ‘policies and practices’ as the UN calls them, the settlement building, land theft (UN diplomatically, calls it ‘confiscation’), ‘zoning’ – a term invoking images of social, ethnic and racial manipulation, or cleansing. Add to this Eviction from their own land and the barbaric practice of house or home demolitions and you have a witches brew of control, victimisation and criminality, which has cast a toxic cloak over the lives of Palestinians and a shadow over history.

In their Sites

Sites for settlements, like everything else the occupying Israeli force undertakes, are chosen with care, on hilltops overlooking valleys, Palestinians, and Bedouins. A demographic dot to dot, one colony merges with another, the dots connected, a line is formed. The line, a triangle; the triangle, a star; six armed and driven hard into the freshly watered Palestinian earth, to flutter in full intimidation, as the settlers sit high above the valley and the law, eagle-eyeing the Palestinians upon their homeland. And from that height settlers establishing new lows “dump raw sewage down the hillside, contaminating the well[s] and making it unusable for agriculture and drinking”.3

Duel Lives

Two parallel ways of life exist within the West Bank, a controlled, unjust, frightening existence for Palestinians living behind walls of servitude upon their homeland, and a comfortable, flourishing life within their tree lined encampments for the settlers. Palm trees and gardens bursting with colour create a theme park image of artificial beauty upon a battleground of injustice and hate.  Defence for Children International states:

Over 90% of settler violence incidents that are investigated by Israeli authorities are closed without any charges being filed. There is a dual system of law operating in the West Bank. The settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, with all the rights of a democratic state guaranteed to them. Palestinians, on the other hand are governed by a series of military orders within a military system, which deprives them of the rights guaranteed to their Israeli settler neighbours. This dual system of law discriminates against Palestinians.

A ‘dual system’ indeed.

Human Rights Watch recently documented Israel’s two-tier system for the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish populations in the 60% of the West Bank area that Israel controls, and in East Jerusalem. Israeli policies deliberately withhold basic services from Palestinians, causing tremendous hardships by preventing, and punishing the construction of homes and infrastructure for their communities, while providing generous financial benefits and infrastructure for Jewish settlements. Such differential treatment lacks any security rationale, but is meted out on the prohibited basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin

A two tier system of injustice, cruelty and control, If they could, they would bottle sunlight and ration its use. They have turned day to night, and in the darkness of division, violence and hate they march, out of step with the men and women of goodwill that would bring peace and harmony to the land, out of pace with the winds of change that are sweeping humanity towards peace and unity, out of sync with the destiny of the nations to live safely side by side as enshrined in International Law.

A ‘dual system’, where a settler shoots and kills with impunity, an innocent Palestinian, as in the case of the 18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin”; a system which allows a six year old child on his way to the neighbourhood shop for his grandfather to be ‘detained’ by the Israeli army, “they kept the child in detention for four hours at a nearby police station (to Al-Esawiyya town), and interrogated him in an attempt to intimidate him in to giving them names of youth who hurled stones at the soldiers”.  Said  Mohammad Ali Dirbas after the ‘kidnapping’: “The Police tried to terrify me, but they can’t scare me, they must leave our land.”

The UN concludes its comprehensive  report (UNSCIIPA) with six clearly articulated recommendations. All recommendations should be applied forthwith. The two most prescient measures are:

1. The Government of Israel should bring its policies and practices into compliance with its international legal obligations and its commitments in the Road Map, as well as the repeated calls of the international community to immediately cease the transfer of its civilian population into occupied territory and to completely freeze all settlement activities in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and to immediately dismantle all “outposts”.

2. The Government of Israel should take all necessary measures to prevent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Enough! Enough of the injustice, violence and fear.  Let International Law be done and let the Palestinian people live in peace in a country that is rightly their home.

1. Human Rights Watch (HRW) February 2011
2. Noam Chomsky. 9-11 Seven Stories. Seven Stories Press, New York, 2002
3. Doris Norrito, Rebuilding a Wall, Stone by Stone, IMEMC,  20 December 2011

The isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson once remarked, “The first casualty when war comes is the truth.”  And so, as the West’s “covert war” (or campaign of terror) against Iran continues, drawing military confrontation ever-closer in the process, we find the truth repeatedly sacrificed upon the alter of militarist propaganda.

In fact, indifferent to the substantial evidence to the contrary, the corporate media continues to insist that a fictitious Iranian nuclear weapons program is a fact firmly established by both Israel and the Untied States.

As the New York Times writes (1/26/12):

The uranium enrichment program in Iran has become the most urgent point of contention between Iran and the West, which has long suspected the Iranians are working to build a nuclear weapon despite their repeated denials.

CNN, meanwhile, reports (1/23/12):

Iran says its nuclear program is not military, but the United States and many of its allies suspect Iran intends to produce a bomb.

Likewise, the Associate Press writes (1/2/12):

Israel, like the West, believes Iran is developing nuclear weapons and says no option, including force, can be ruled out in stopping it.

And finally, NPR reports (1/31/12):

Israel believes that Iran is working to build a nuclear bomb, and dismisses Iran’s assertion that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes.

All such claims, however, run directly counter to the intelligence assessments of both countries.  The latest National Intelligence Estimate (the authoritative U.S. intelligence assessment derived from the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies), for example, found that Iran’s nuclear weapons program remains suspended—dormant since 2003.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, moreover, has now reiterated this much on two separate occasions: first in Congressional testimony this past spring, and second in testimony occurring just earlier this week.  As Clapper stated in his latest testimony: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Meanwhile, as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports (1/18/12):

“The Israel view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon—or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile.

Of course, such sentiments are by no means limited to the intelligence communities.  As Defense Chief Leon Panetta succinctly asked and answered on Face the Nation (1/8/12), “Are they [the Iranians] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.”

And when asked the same question late last month, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak responded, “To do that, Iran would have to announce it is leaving the [UN International Atomic Energy Agency] inspection regime and stop responding to IAEA’s criticism, etc.”  Iran has obviously not announced any withdrawal from the IAEA inspection regime, and high-ranking IAEA officials remain set on returning to Iran later this month after a series of “good” talks earlier this week.

But such truths are becoming increasingly irrelevant (and altogether inconvenient) with the specter of war looming along the horizon.  And as the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius reported on Thursday, “[Secretary of Defense] Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June.”

This comes in the wake of a piece appearing in New York Times Magazine (1/25) by Israeli analyst Ronen Bergman, in which he concludes Israel will indeed strike Iran at some point in the next year.

Needless to say, if such a strike were to occur, it would quickly ensnare the U.S. into what would quickly morph into a wider regional, if not global, conflict.  Accordingly, the U.S. has hastily begun a military build-up in the Persian Gulf in anticipation of an Israeli strike.

Of course, if Israeli fails to draw the U.S. into overt military confrontation against Iran, the American press just may.  Through its ubiquitous deceits and outright lies, all functioning to construct what is now commonly known as the “Iranian threat,” the American public has begun to come around to the notion of yet another Middle East war.  In fact, a staggering 50 percent of Americans could now support a strike against Iran.  Channeling their inner, and ever-present, William Randolph Hearst, the corporate press has indeed begun to furnish war.

Perhaps, then, it is already all too late.  Perhaps the U.S. shall finally come to exact its revenge for over thirty years of Iranian intransigence.

Yet, even as the drone of the war drums grows louder, a popular movement remains afoot to resist war against Iran.   Calling for “No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations against Iran,” protests actions are set to commence nationwide this weekend.  And if there is any hope for peace—and for that matter, truth—it ultimately lies in this.

Unless a miracle occurs, Indiana (with approximately 11-percent of its workforce unionized) is going to become the 23rd “right-to-work” state in the U.S. (and the first one to take that dreadful plunge since Oklahoma did it in 2001), making it illegal to require union membership as a condition of employment.

Since 1935, unions have been pretty much mainstream.  When a person hired into a “union shop,” he or she was required to join up, and begin paying regular monthly membership dues, and that’s how it worked.  Given that union jobs generally offered 15-20 percent better wages and benefits (not to mention safer and superior working conditions), and are highly coveted, that requirement was viewed not only as a fair trade-off, but as a privilege.

Then, despite a flourishing middle-class and an economy chugging along at a record pace—and national union membership rolls hovering at close to 35-percent—the anti-union forces (alas, both Republicans and Democrats) rose up, mobilized, and came up with the bumper-sticker concept of “right-to-work,” an arrangement that allows you to work in a union facility without having to join the union.  The states that embraced RTW were mainly in the Deep South and Southwest, which makes Indiana’s decision noteworthy.

But give these anti-union zealots some credit.  Their sappy, albeit close-to-meaningless phrase smacks of the same general good feeling conveyed by that “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” reference in the Declaration of Independence. Right to work.  Right to vote.  Right to choose.  Right to speak your mind.  It’s all good.  Hell, who’s going oppose something as basic the “right to work”?  After all, this is America, isn’t it?

Yet, if these RTW laws were actually examined, we might take a different view.  In fact, our first order of business might be to suggest they be called “right-to-become-hypocritical-unAmerican-blood-sucking-parasite” agreements.

While it’s true that workers who choose not to join the union can’t run for union office, or be appointed to committees, or vote in union elections, they’re still allowed to bury their greedy, non-dues-paying snouts in the union trough.  These “free-riders” not only receive full union wages and benefits, they have the right to file grievances when their contractual rights have been violated.  Not too shabby an arrangement.  Sort of like a draft-dodger being entitled to a Purple Heart.

Naturally, the business and political interests pushing these RTW initiatives make them sound as noble and quasi-altruistic as possible (remember “trickle-down economics”?), even though, in truth, they’re doing nothing more high-minded than trying to hang on to their money.  Apparently, the DNA that triggers a desire for lower taxes, greater profits, and Cayman Island bank accounts is intrinsic to human nature.  Anyone doubting the veracity of this simplistic proposition need only observe the response of Toddler A when Toddler B attempts to take away a valued toy.

And this acquisitive impulse has nothing to do with necessity.  Even with near-record unemployment, the Department of Commerce reported in November, 2010, that U.S. companies just had their best quarter….ever.  According to the DOC, businesses recorded profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, which is the highest rate (in non-inflation-adjusted figures) since the government began keeping records more than 60 years ago.  All this while the middle-class continues to be chipped away.

But as selfish as businesses are, and as devious and monomaniacal as the Republican Party is in dedicating itself to crippling organized labor’s political influence (labor was reported to have spent $400 million getting Obama elected in 2008), it’s the workers themselves who cause the most heartburn.

Non-union workers who earn union wages and benefits—but don’t know why—are not only ignorant, they’re dangerous.   The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.  Non-union forklift drivers who earn $40,000 a year in a union shop, but cling to the belief that they’re doing it “on their own,” are not only gaming the system, they’re missing the point.  They don’t realize that without worker collectives and worker solidarity, the whole shebang would quickly devolve into “every man for himself,” which is precisely what corporations dream about when they go to sleep at night.

Workers with limited skills and a h.s. education—and without a labor union to back them up—would find themselves in economic free-fall.  Without outside help, they’d gradually slide all the way down until they hit the federal or state minimum.  Not a pretty outcome.  On the other hand, they would, of course, retain their “right” to work.

On  March 24, Canada’s New Democratic Party will do more than elect a new leader; it will face a test of character.

As it stands, the NDP is the only major national party not led by an avowed zionist. Stephen Harper leads a cabal of governing “Likudniks,” who value subservience to Israel above all else, and the interim leader of the “Labour-Zionist” Liberals Bob Rae, is on the board of the Jewish National Fund, an organization so criminal that it has been condemned in Israel as racist.

The NDP, therefore, is the only apparently Canadian governing choice that voters have, but even this modest fig leaf will be blown away if the blatant Israel-firster Thomas Mulcair becomes party leader. On May 1, 2008, he told Canadian Jewish News:  “I am an ardent supporter of Israel in all situations and in all circumstances.” [my emphasis]

Does Mulcair mean to say that he “ardently supports” Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians, which includes torturing children, bulldozing homes, and keeping Palestinians near starvation levels as a matter of national policy? Do these constitute morally defensible “situations and circumstances?” Based on his abject endorsement of Israel, the answer is clearly, “yes.” The fact that all of the preceding are contrary to Canadian and international law, to say nothing of basic humanity, doesn’t faze Mulcair one bit. What a mensch!

How this walking advertisement for sedition found a home in a left-of-centre, social-democratic party is bizarre. The NDP, after all, still cleaves to the quaint notions that the federal government should defend the Constitution, uphold the rule of law, oppose military aggression, stand up for victims of human rights abuses, and generally serve the public good. Such high-minded ethical standards clearly distinguish it from both “Likud” and “Labour,” which are financially and politically indentured to the Israel Lobby.

So, why would the NDP even allow someone like Mulcair in the front door? This question takes on added significance when we recall that Mulcair had first considered joining Harper’s Likudniks, and was even said to have been tempted by a cabinet appointment. That would at least have made sense. When questioned last July about the earlier offer, though, the NDP’s newly minted interim leader Nycole Turmel seemed curiously unconcerned: “[Mulcair] was contacted by a number of people, a number of political parties and he chose to come work with us. He chose the NDP and I’m proud of that. He’s a great candidate.”

When looked at a bit more closely, however, Turmel’s praise for this crypto-Likudnik comes across more as a perfunctory platitude than a genuine endorsement; in this case the riding, not the MP, is the prize.

Mulcair represents Outremont, a small, wealthy riding on the Island of Montreal, which he won in a 2007 by-election, thus making him the NDP’s (ta-da!) first MP from Quebec. Outremont has a substantial Jewish population, more than 20%; in the larger Labour riding of Mount Royal just to the south, represented by Israel-firster extraordinaire Irwin Cotler, it is 36%. If the NDP expects to make inroads into Quebec it is logical for it to compete for the Jewish vote, but how far is the NDP prepared to go to mortgage its principles for electoral advantage?

As party leader, Mulcair would be expected to protect his caucus colleagues from harassment and abuse from other parties, but in 2010 he sided with Labour and Likud to call for the resignation of fellow MP Libby Davies as NDP House Leader. Davies’s “crime” was to state that Israel’s occupation of Palestine began in 1948, not 1967. Her statement is a fact supported by historical documents that include admissions from leading political and military Israelis like David Ben Gurion and Gen. Moshe Dayan.

Mulcair’s contemptible attack on Davies’s basic freedom of expression, to say nothing of historical honesty, showed Mulcair’s true allegiance, and the threat he poses to this country. It doesn’t matter if he believes the zionist bilge he spews or whether he’s merely pandering to the Jewish community. By rights, he should have been expelled from the party for his misconduct.

If you are reading this and are a member of the federal NDP who plans to cast a vote at the leadership convention, ask yourself these questions before you vote:

1) Can Mulcair be trusted to put loyalty to Canada and the NDP ahead of his loyalty to Israel?

2) Would Mulcair stifle his MPs’ freedom of expression in the name of being an “ardent supporter”of Israel?

3) Would Mulcair’s overt zionism irreparably debase the NDP’s reputation as a party of law and justice?

If you answered 1) no; 2) yes; and 3) yes, then you can proudly claim to be a member in good standing of a national, Canadian political party. You know what not to do on March 24. No matter how much you may like Mulcair’s position on the environment or any other issue, anyone who bullies his own people, betrays his party’s principles, and sells out his country is unfit to lead the NDP, much less sit in the House of Commons.

As I said earlier, the NDP appears to many voters to be the only viable Canadian governing option left in this country. Don’t force them into a no-win scenario among Likud, Labour and Meretz!

Capitalism will end when oil runs out, according to Fleeing Vesuvius, a collection of essays first published in Ireland in 2010. The US and New Zealand editions came out in mid-2011. The basic theme of Fleeing Vesuvius, which is aimed at the growing sustainability movement, is TEOTWAWI (The End of the World as We Know It). The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent. For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse. Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.

The authors contributing to Fleeing Vesuvius represent an impressive range of expertise. Six are economists, four environmental scientists, three specialists in green commerce and marketing, two architects, two community organizers, one an environmental engineer, one a psychotherapist and one a former corporate attorney. Others have backgrounds in appropriate technology, ethics and local government. All are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.

The first two sections of Fleeing Vesuvius define the problem by outlining the scientific, technological and economic parameters of fossil fuel depletion. The last five focus on solutions, with examples from Europe and North America of pioneering programs local groups and communities are undertaking to wean themselves off fossil fuels.

The Link Between Fossil Fuels, Industrialization and Capitalism

Fleeing Vesuvius deliberately emphasizes fossil fuel depletion more than climate change, owing to the major role it played (according to the authors) in the 2008 economic collapse. The first and most important section of the book, “Energy Availability” addresses the economics of fossil fuel depletion. It lays out hard truths about the link between cheap fossil fuels, industrialization, capitalism and money. We are always taught that the industrial revolution of the late 18th century was the result of British technological innovation, the view promoted by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Unfortunately Smith totally overlooks the importance of cheap fossil fuel energy, at first from coal and later from oil and natural gas, in running the giant machines that replaced human labor.

In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years. He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible – an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it. By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further. Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

The other side of this argument is that industrialization and capitalism will eventually cease when fossil fuel becomes too prohibitively expensive to support it. In fact,

Douthwaite argues that the skyrocketing cost of oil ($148 a barrel) and food – not speculation in subprime mortgage derivates – were the root cause of the 2008 economic crisis.

The End of Industrial Agriculture

Part I of Fleeing Vesuvius also looks at the link between cheap fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. In addition to the fossil fuel energy required for farm machinery, food processing and transportation to market, oil and natural gas are essential in the production of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that are an essential feature of industrial scale agriculture. Doing without them means returning to an era where people produced food and other basic needs with manure, human labor and draft animals. Prior to the industrial revolution, these primitive methods fed a global population of two billion. Many economists question whether it’s possible to provide for our current global population of seven billion without relying on fossil fuels.

Energy Return on Investment (EROI)

In the essay entitled “Future Energy Availability,” environmental physicist Chris Vernon explains the link between Peak Oil and Energy Return on Investment (EROI). EROI is defined as the amount of energy that must be expended to extract or produce surplus energy for business or household use. Although there’s still a lot of oil, gas and coal in the ground, we have reached the point where the reserves that are easy and cheap to extract have been used up. More importantly, owing to the enormous amount of energy required to produce some forms of renewal energy, renewable sources will never have the ability of fossil fuels to produce abundant cheap energy. Although wind, especially off-shore wind, and tidal energy have great promise, energy from these sources will remain quite costly for the foreseeable future. This leads Vernon to draw the conclusion that humankind will have no choice but to downsize their energy intensive lifestyles.

Money and Energy Scarcity

The main focus of the second section of Fleeing Vesuvius, “Innovation in business, money and finance,” is the link between energy availability and money. In it, Richard Douthwaite looks at our current debt based monetary system, which started at the beginning of the industrial revolution. He explains how banks create money out of thin air every time they approve a new loan and why continuous economic growth is necessary in order to pay off the debt created in this way. When economic growth stalls, as it did in 2008, the debt becomes unpayable.

With the end of cheap energy, according to Douthwaite, global leaders must accept that the era of continuous economic growth has also ended. This means our current debt-based system of money creation must also be scrapped. In addition to calling for government to remove control of money creation from private banks, Douthwaite also supports the creation of regional and local currencies. This preserves the ability of low income groups to trade products and services when the national currency is in short supply due to recession and deflation.

The Transition to a Fossil Energy-Free Society

The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle. There are two somewhat technical essays on using biochar as a carbon sink and the importance of soil mineral content in localized food production. Other essays look at national and international strategies for reducing carbon emissions, including the innovative “Cap and Share” approach put forward by Fiesta (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) in 2008. This would require primary fossil-fuel suppliers (e.g. oil companies) to buy permits to introduce fossil fuels into the economy. As fossil fuel suppliers pass these costs on to consumers, they, in turn, begin to seek out renewable energy alternatives. At the same time, revenue from the permits is used to help low income customers pay their energy bills.

Part 5 “Changing the way we live” includes an excellent essay by community organizer Davie Phillip describing some of the accomplishments of the worldwide Transition movement, started by Rob Hopkins (in Ireland and the UK) in 2002.

Part 6 “Changing the Way We Think” addresses the apathy and inertia that prevents most of the developing world from taking serious measures to address the catastrophic economic, ecological and resource crises we presently face. In “Cultivating hope and managing despair,” psychotherapist John Sharry compares this widespread apathy and inertia to Kubler Ross’s stages of grief in bereavement or impending loss (denial, anger, depression, acceptance). The impending collapse of our current way of life is the worst loss any of us can imagine. It should be no surprise that the initial response to such news is denial. Sharry suggests that Kubler Ross has left out an essential step between depression and acceptance – namely, the hopeful and constructive activity which is often necessary before full acceptance can occur.

Fleeing Vesuvius finishes with an Epilogue in which different authors give suggestions for specific steps people can take on an individual, community, national and international level in preparing for the eventual collapse of our present energy intensive economic system.

The North American edition of Fleeing Vesuvius has a preface by Richard Heinberg, author of the End of Growth and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.This edition also contains an appendix, “Should the US try to avoid a financial meltdown?”, a dialogue between two of the economists who contributed essays (Richard Douthwaite and Tom Konrad).

Our most recent media alert, Silence Of The Lambs, created a small ripple in the Guardian universe. We had asked why even the paper’s most radical journalists, Seumas Milne and George Monbiot, are silent on the propaganda role of the liberal media, particularly the Guardian, in propping up power. We noted that, in this regard, they are no different from other journalists. Of course, it is obvious why any corporate employee would be reluctant to criticise his or her employer in public; but our primary intention was to shine some light on an issue that is never discussed. After all, the Guardian sells itself as a vanguard of liberal journalism, holding power to account and hosting wide-ranging debate. The reality is different.

Former Guardian and Observer journalist, Jonathan Cook, shares our incredulity:

It really is astounding that we still need to talk about this as though it is controversial – though, of course, we do.

Everyone accepts that the mainstream media are businesses. As such they are out to maximise profits, increase their brand visibility and market share, and to develop the best possible public image they can (though this last aim usually takes a back seat to the other commercial imperatives if they conflict). This is true for all large businesses…

With that context, we can see that Seumas Milne – however nice, open-minded, progressive he is as an individual – cannot speak honestly about the media or his role in it. It’s rather like the scene in Ricky Gervais’ film The Invention of Lying when the Cola rep tastes his company’s drink in a TV promotional ad and admits (because he is incapable of lying), “Oh, that’s rather sweet”. it’s funny precisely because we know that’s exactly what no Coca Cola employee could ever dare do publicly. It would be career suicide. Milne and Monbiot’s situation is no different.  (Email to Media Lens, January 25, 2012)

Further support for our attempt to boost public discussion came from a rather surprising source: Michael White, the Guardian’s assistant editor. In a piece titled, “Media Lens shows it doesn’t get the whole picture”, White wrote that our latest alert “is largely devoted to badmouthing the Guardian.”

The pejorative use of ‘badmouthing’ signalled that however reasoned and well-referenced our criticism of the Guardian might be it was, as usual, to be dismissed as angry invective. The familiar litany of stock mainstream responses to our work was rolled out: We don’t “do subtle”. Rather, we exhibit ‘strident conceit’, “narcissism”, and “mean-spirited nit-picking”. We are also “naïve”’, guilty of  “artlessly framing” our own narrative “as truth”. Ours is a “childishly apocalyptic polemic”. We think we “know how the world works” but we “may grow out of that”. Affable, but, in fact, effortlessly patronising, White noted that Media Lens was set up in 2001 by “a couple of bright and determined young graduates”. Mature students, perhaps, given that we were both a year shy of 40 at the time. As with so much mainstream reaction over the years, White saw what he wanted to see – nothing really meriting serious attention. But as many readers observed, he was paying us attention at some length – something didn’t add up!

“This week’s attack,” White continued, “focuses on colleagues of mine, specifically George Monbiot and Seumas Milne, two of the Guardian’s more radical leftwing contributors. In effect, Media Lens is saying, they trim their sails and pull their punches to accommodate their paymasters, their presence in the paper’s Comment columns little more than a gesture to pluralism or dissent.”

He added:   “OK, if you say so. Most people have to trim their views at one time or another, though I have watched journalists smuggling dissenting opinions into even the Murdoch press with admiration for years.”

Yes, most people have to trim their views. But media omissions and bias go far beyond trimming, and far beyond the self-restraint required in everyday life. As we will see below, our point is that whole areas of thought and discussion are demonstrably off the agenda for corporate journalists with disastrous consequences for our species. If this is a grand claim, it is one that predicts that it will be perceived as grandiose by journalists and media consumers trained to view even the most pathological aspects of our society as ‘normal’.

It seems our “nit-picking” focus also ignores the blocks on reactionary views. Describing himself as “an elderly herbivore of moderate opinions”, White complained that it had been difficult to place a defence of Blair in the paper when the former prime minister first gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry:

There was a distinct lack of pluralism in the media that day, but I doubt if Media Lens spotted it.

This could be a sign of the Guardian’s intolerance. Or a sign that even it has abandoned its attempts to defend the indefensible (having urged citizens to vote for Blair, even after his worst crimes had been thoroughly exposed, in 2005).

This, White’s solitary red-herring, was supposed to undermine our detailed argument that the corporate nature of the mass media tends to produce performance that defends and furthers the goals of the corporate system. Apropos of nothing much, White completed his fairy tale account of mainstream radicalism with the estimation that Channel 4′s Jon Snow “does more good for progressive attitudes than half a dozen Pilgers”. Ironically, it was our own unpleasant confrontation with the reality of Snow’s self-professed ‘pinko-liberalism’ that helped motivate us to start Media Lens.

But White’s real ‘worry’ about Media Lens “which disinclines me to seek wisdom on its site very often is that it betrays the narcissism of small difference that is so destructive on the left.”

Again, despite serious evidence supplied over ten years, White dismisses our critique as trivial – the “narcissism of small difference,”

Jonathan Cook concluded his reaction to White’s article:

What to do when an “irritant” unsettles you? Unleash the ad hominems – lots of references to how “childish” you are – while trying to shore up his and the Guardian’s credentials as worldly and self-deprecating. It’s a master-class in how to belittle an argument and avoid dealing with it entirely.

As for the “they may grow out of it”, doesn’t that cut both ways? I was one of the lentil-eating Guardianistas in my early 20s and a devoted Michael White wannabee in my 30s, when I was working there. I’m now 46, seen a bit of the world, and sense I may be nearly all grown-up. And my verdict: they’re starting to run scared.

Keep up the good work.  (Email to Media Lens, January 27, 2012)

Readers Respond – And The Return Of Monty Python

Scores of readers responded in the Guardian Comments section below White’s online article. To his credit, White also joined in, describing the responses as ‘a decent spread.’  In truth, White received a pummelling – responses favoured our position by about 10 to 1.

While White’s five follow-up posts elicited a grand total of four ‘Recommend’ clicks from readers, by far the most popular comment, recommended by 82 readers, is this one:

If medialens are so “wrong” and naive and “don’t get it” then why the long article?

The reason is that they are right.

Assange smears, Iran nukes lies, Chavez smears, silence on the sky high obscene pay of the guardian executives and editor, the tax avoidance of the gmg [Guardian Media Group], all examples of Guardian hypocrisy.

The guardian gives the impression of being radical yet it is just a slightly less right wing media outlet publishing pro war establishment propaganda.

Why didn’t the guardian call the illegal Bombing of Libya, the terrorism we support and create in Syria, the war crimes in iraq, the war crimes of Israel, the war crimes in Afghanistan, the illegal murders and torture in Pakistan by the USA, all by the name they are. War crimes. And call for those that carried them out and those who printed propaganda about them, to be tried for crimes against humanity? Because it was and is complicit.

The guardian is yet another establishment outlet and medialens exposed you and you don’t like the truth. Hence the smear article here.

In one post, White responded to a reader who had challenged him to justify his use of “nit-picking” to describe Media Lens:

Nit-picking”? This started with my surprise that ML thinks it helpful to go after two Guardian colleagues whose views are more closely aligned with ML’s own that most of us are. I’m not the only person posting on this thread who has had this feeling.

That strikes me as both “naive” and lacking “the bigger picture” though it is common enough among small groups – left, right and centre – who feel they have a unique and righteous insight into virtue. It’s the Popular Front of Judea joke in the Monty Python sketch in Life of Brian.

The Monty Python sketch did provide an amusing satire on left infighting. But like the standard association of ‘Big Brother’-style thought control with totalitarian regimes, the idea that toxic infighting is the preserve of leftists – a sign of their naïve, unworldly idealism – is an ironic product of mainstream propaganda. Thought control is far more important in ostensibly free societies like our own, while totalitarian regimes rely far more on force. Similarly, mainstream intolerance is such that progressive, compassionate ideas and aims are efficiently shredded and thrown out. Thus, for all its disagreements, the left has made far more progress in developing enlightened, compassionate analyses than the mainstream.

Consider, for example, that the left does not simply seek and demand more for the poor as a response to the insatiable greed of elite bankers. Rather, it calls for a society based on respect and compassion for all, rooted in the enlightened position that the suffering of every individual is of exactly equal importance (some, rightly, extend this compassion to all sentient beings).

Note also that while petty infighting based on rivalry, clashing egos and the like, is, of course, needlessly destructive, some disagreements on key issues can be a vital part of a process of development and maturation.

Imagine if three characteristics follow from the fact that the mass media is corporate in nature; i.e., that it is profit-maximising, owned by parent corporations and/or wealthy individuals, heavily dependent on corporate advertising, on subsidised state and business news sources, and so on. Imagine if this means that:

1) The corporate media are deeply dependent on, and closely allied to, other corporations responsible for promoting environmental and human rights disasters, tyrannies, wars and other horrors around the world.

2) Profit-maximising within this fiercely competitive media system – requiring, as it does, that the business be sold hard to both readers and advertisers, and to corporate and state allies with the power to heavily punish and reward – makes any criticism from vulnerable, employed journalists extremely threatening, unpopular and unlikely.

3) As a result, even ‘liberal’ journalists avoid criticising the corporate product in any way in front of the all-important customers and advertisers. Moreover, they feel reluctant to criticise other ‘liberal’ media corporations (potential future employers). They also feel reluctant to criticise the corporate media system as a whole for fear of being tarred as a liability, ‘one of them’, by all potential employers.

Theory is one thing, but if we are to test the truth of these claims honestly, we simply have to do so in reference to the performance of the best journalists. In this case, to ask if even Milne, Fisk and Monbiot have seriously discussed whether a corporate media system is able to report honestly on the corporate system is not ‘nit-picking’ or ‘naïve’ infighting at all. It is an important attempt to show that discussion on key issues is currently shut down right across our culture.

In an age of impending climate disaster – when corporate media are doing such a good job of presenting the suicidal status quo as ‘normal’, and all but ignoring the astonishing and massive corporate efforts to prevent vital action on climate change – this discussion might actually be considered crucial to human survival.

If we are right, then Milne and Monbiot are making a terrible mistake in encouraging readers to perceive this pathological – even anti-life – media system as a source of hope. To lead hope down a blind corporate alley at this late stage may prove to be the final nail in the coffin.

Post Script

Seumas Milne has responded to an email from us asking whether Michael White speaks on his behalf. Milne told us: “of course he doesn’t”, adding that he didn’t know White would respond. He also told us, and a number of readers, that he is still some way off full fitness, that he still intends to answer our original points and he apologises for not having done so. We sent him our sincere best wishes for a full recovery. We note, however, that Milne’s failure to respond to our challenges pre-dates his recent health problems, stretching back to 2001.

George Monbiot has not responded to our alert.

Outrageously yet routinely, America is preparing for yet another war. Though warned by Iran not to bring an aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, the US now has an unprecedented three. (Gee, I wonder why they call it the Persian Gulf, but don’t be surprised if, say, 200% of our high school seniors don’t even realize that Persia is Iran.) Forget the nuclear weapon babble, America is harassing Iran because it ranks in the top five in both oil and natural gas preserves. Further, it has the chutzpah to wrest itself away from the dollar hegemony by selling oil to Russia and China for rubles and yuans. For five years, Iran also tried to operate an oil bourse where customers were asked to pay in currencies other than the greenback. This, America clearly saw as a grave threat and provocation, for if the petro dollar expires, this empire will sink with it. For showing similar insolence, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were barbarically and publically killed, with their final moments broadcast to the world as a warning. See, when there’s a body to be shown, America does not hesitate to display her trophy.

On land, America has surrounded Iran by having troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. At sea, she has dozens of ships, with a permanent naval base in Bahrain. Assassinations linked to Israel and America have happened inside Iran, and American drones have flown over the country, with one shot down. On the economic front, America is leading an oil sanction. So with all this intimidation and threat of violence, this is what our Peace Laureate President has to say, in his recent State of the Union, “We will stand against violence and intimidation.” Here, Obama was referring to Syria, who is yet another victim of our intimidation if not, soon enough, violence.

Without a doubt, America is the world leader in violence and intimidation, and the US, UK and Israel alliance is the true axis of evil, for these countries have been behind so much violence and turmoil for several decades now. They instigate, spearhead, package and sell violence as a normal, day to day business. First in war and looting, they are a much graver threat to world peace than Iran, Syria and North Korea ever were, or could be. Most lives worldwide are untouched and cannot be molested by what’s decided in Tehran, Damascus and Pyongyang, but a mere sneeze in DC, London or Tel Aviv can send scores to the emergency room.

When this empire is over, and it cannot end soon enough, I doubt that it will be remembered for its artistic achievements, for Americans themselves are completely indifferent to all of their artists. Even the highly educated among us would have a very hard time naming a single living American painter, sculptor, composer or poet. Practitioners of meditative forms, they cannot compete with the hyper kinetic seduction of pop music, pop dancing and sports. Americans cannot think about the arts because their minds are crammed with hundreds of athletes.

In his State of the Union, Obama started out by thanking the troops. He praised their teamwork and urged us all to emulate them. This teamwork ethos is inculcated most effectively in sports, for both participants and spectators, but also at the workplace. Now, unity and sacrifice are certainly laudable, but only when they serve honorable goals, which are clearly absent if you happen to be in the US military, occupying a Goldman Sachs cubicle or drawing a paycheck from the Carlyle Group, etc. Soldiers speak often of fighting primarily for each other, and this makes perfect sense once you’re already on the battlefield, but if they would only step back and reflect, a near impossibility in the herd culture of the military, where the highest virtue is abject obedience, they might discover that they are just dumb, stupid animals being used, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger. Hell, they might realize that they are even less than dumb, stupid animals, for an animal’s strongest instinct is safety. Beside a contemporary American GI, I can’t imagine any primate that would volunteer to be shot at just so another SUV could be sold, not even a mouse lemur with a brain weighting just two grams.

As America moves its war pieces into place, the folks back home can watch helmeted pseudo-warriors crash into each other with each play. In our culture, repeated collisions are a primary excitement. The players’ immediate aim is to gain yards, which are carefully tabulated, with the climax happening in an end zone, a goal which, unlike other sports, cannot be crossed by the ball alone, but must be accompanied by one’s own body. This hard fought, much resisted entry is called a touchdown, as if one has been airborne and homeless all this time. In the end time, the blessed among us will be allowed into that final, celestial end zone, where we can whoop it up with a real Touchdown Jesus, Vince Lombardi and Joe Pa. The Cowgirls will shake their pompoms and more, and Billy White Shoes Johnson will do his funky chicken dance.

Meanwhile, on this depleted uranium, corexit, cesium, agent orange and corn syrup mess of an earth, we can look forward to this game on Sunday, where military jets will roar overhead and there will be a huge flag the size of the field itself, with soldiers standing at attention. During the broadcast, troops stationed overseas will be shown so we can all thank them in our hearts for allowing us to watch these simulated wars at home, and when an actual war starts, we can watch that too. Between real and fake wars, car commercials. It’s so exciting, all these wars all the time.

Texas comedian Ron White is famous for a bit he does claiming you can’t fix stupid. He says there’s no class you can attend to alleviate it. He says there’s no pill you can take to cure it. “Stupid is forever,” he insists.

The bit gets lots of laughs, but here in White’s home state, it’s less and less funny—because we’ve been pretty stupid of late.

If that comes as news to you, let me bring you up to speed.

A little while back we re-elected a governor who refused to take part in a single debate. It was a preposterous antic that the majority of Texans stupidly overlooked. And stupid is the right word. Only a stupid electorate couldn’t have recognized the ploy for what it was: sheer shenanigans.

If you’re running for mayor of Lajitas and you’re a goat, you can get away with skipping campaign debates. But if you’re not a goat and you’re running for state governor, you can’t refuse to debate your opponents. It’s like calling yourself a cowboy but refusing to ride a horse.

At best, it was simply political calculation; at worst, it was cowardly chicanery. In either case, we were complicit.

We stupidly re-elected a stuffed haircut whose campaign highlight was gunning down an unarmed coyote. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his idiotic re-election success emboldened him to run for the highest office in the land.

Unfortunately for us and Governor Perry, you can’t win a presidential primary without participating in a debate. That dog may hunt in Texas, but it won’t hunt in other states where folks are a little brighter.

The 2012 Republican Primary was chockfull of ill-informed, asinine hopefuls, including Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain. But even in a field littered with that level of imbecilic company, our governor won the kewpie doll for top oaf.

It’s really no small accomplishment if you think about it.

Perry repeatedly distinguished himself as the candidate that was all hat, no cattle. He called Social Security a Ponzi Scheme.  He forgot one of the three federal agencies he claimed he’d cut if he was elected. He rambled incoherently about taxes and 16th century Founding Fathers and hugged a bottle of New Hampshire pancake syrup as if it was little Baby Jesus. He committed gaffe after gaffe and became the doltish darling of late night television comedy skits.

He made a fool of himself and us. But his muddled Republican Primary showing inescapably says more about us than him. We allowed him to serve a 4th term without subjecting him to a proper vetting process.

Honestly speaking, the most pathetic part of Perry’s flameout on a national stage isn’t that he made Texas look bad. It’s that—truth be told—he was truly and genuinely representative of Texans in general.

There’s no use in trying to run from it. If thinking was our strong suit, we wouldn’t be letting the natural gas industry turn North Texas land into a hazardous industrial “fracking” experiment that threatens existing and future water supplies. And if debating was something that came natural to us, we wouldn’t have stood dimly by while the Texas State Board of Education watered down our textbooks to foster a narrow-minded, conservative version of history.

The bad news is, we’ve been out to lunch. The lights were on, but very few folks were home.

The good news is, with all due respect to Ron White, “stupid” doesn’t have to be forever.

As famous, onscreen simpleton Forrest Gump once put it, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

If we stop acting stupidly, voting stupidly and/or standing stupidly by while ulteriorly-motived shysters whisk ludicrous bills-of-goods past us, make political footballs out of our differences and pull the dead coyote wool over our eyes in terms of what it means to be a real Texan, then we can step off the geo-political short-bus and take our place among smart states with real vision. Of the future and for the future.

A recall of Texas’ dumbest son would probably be too much to ask. But we definitely need a change of intelligentsia in the next governor’s race.

In a recent article, columnist Yaniv Halili described British author Ben White as ‘anti-Semitic’. He also denounced Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi for writing a forward to White’s latest book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy.

Those of us who can see through such distorted thinking know that White is a principled writer who has never displayed a shred of racism in his work. Zoabi is very well-known civil rights leader with a long-standing reputation of courage and poise.

How could anti-racist endeavors themselves become the subject of accusation by Halili and others like him?

It goes without saying there should be no room for any racist discourse – Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or any other – in the Palestine solidarity movement, which aims at achieving long-denied justice and rights for the Palestinian people. A racist discourse is predicated on racial supremacy, which is exactly what Palestinians are resisting in Israel and the occupied territories.

But the “Jewish and democratic state” of Israel is riddled with so many contradictions, the kind that no straightforward narrative can possibly capture.

Many scholars and rights groups have discussed the way in which irreconcilable values defined the very character of Israel from the onset. According to Adalah (meaning “justice” in Arabic), the legal center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, “Israel’s Declaration of Independence (1948) states two principles important for understanding the legal status of Palestinian citizens of Israel. First, the Declaration refers specifically to Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ committed to the ‘ingathering of the exiles.’ (Second)…it contains only one reference to the maintenance of complete equality of political and social rights for all its citizens, irrespective of race, religion, or sex.”

Adalah further asserts that there is a ‘tension’ between the two principles. Perhaps this is the case, intellectually, but in practice the Israeli political establishment has resolved the seeming quandary whereby the Jewishness of the state prevails above every other humanitarian, democratic or legal consideration. Racially discriminating legislation is being churned out in the Israeli Knesset at an alarming speed, and new laws are constantly being proposed. These include “one that would end the status of Arabic as one of Israel’s official languages and another that would punish Israeli citizens, including Arab Israelis, for refusing to pledge their allegiance to ‘Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,’” according to columnist Linda Heard (Arab News, Jan 24).

As for Palestinians living in the occupied territories, their legally enshrined political inferiority has been felt in much harsher and often bloodier ways than their brethren living in Israel. For nearly four and a half decades, the Palestinians living in these territories have been losing their land, livelihood, freedom of movement and even their very lives in the name of the racial superiority of their occupiers. Jewish settlements are illegally constructed on Palestinian land to host Jewish settlers, who use Jewish-only roads to travel between their heavily fortified colonies and the “Jewish state”. While numerous intellectuals, activists and ordinary members of Jewish communities around the world have strongly protested Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, as well as Israel’s misuse of the Jewish religion to attain political goals, Israel relies greatly on the support of Jewish communities, organizations and individuals for vital funds, political support and lobbying.

While many Jews identify with Israel as a ‘Jewish state’, “younger American Jews are more likely than their parents to be acquainted with the Palestinians and their story,” reported TIME magazine on September 29.

The TIME story references one such youth, Benjamin Resnick, 27, who decries the fact that the Jewish state and American liberal democracy represent two views that are ‘irreconcilable’. On the other hand, he “continues to consider himself a Zionist,” who “quotes the Torah in support of his view that American Jews should press Israel to end settlement expansion and help facilitate a Palestinian state.” Even Resnick’s political dissent is riddled with inconsistencies, where national identity (as an American) clashes with ideology (Zionism) and religion (the Torah) is referenced as a means to resolve the discord.

The Torah is put to good use repeatedly among mainstream and ardent Israeli rabbis, whose edicts to kill Arabs are commonplace in Israeli media (although rarely discussed in US media). The so-called King’s Torah – which is endorsed by some prominent Israeli rabbis – has made it permissible to kill Palestinians of all ages, including those who don’t pose a threat. “You can kill those who are not supporting or encouraging murder in order to save the lives of Jews,” it states in the fifth chapter, entitled “Murder of non-Jews in a time of war.” The BBC elaborates: “At one point it suggests that babies can justifiably be killed if it is clear they will grow up to pose a threat” (July 19).

This becomes particularly problematic when the lines between politics, ideology and religion become so conveniently blurred. Israeli and Jewish leaders borrow from the corresponding text as they find suitable to achieve policies to further occupation, war and illegal settlement. Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, came to represent the latter model. His style lacks diplomacy and logic; however, it is effective in some circles because it centers around the idea of smearing anyone who dares to criticize Israel. The greater tragedy is that Dershowitz is provided with platforms in mainstream and right wing Israeli media, thus giving his smear campaign the means to turn any genuine discussion of Israel into a controversial hate speech.

While critical non-Jews are often smeared as ‘anti-Semites’, jurist Richard Goldstone, who lead the UN investigation into the Israeli war on Gaza., was not a mere anti-Semite for concluding that Israel and Hamas had both potentially committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Dershowitz told Israeli Army Radio that Goldstone is a ‘traitor to the Jewish people’. ‘The Goldstone report is a defamation written by an evil, evil man,’ Dershowitz said (Haaretz, October 31).

While the case for Palestinian rights and statehood can be clear-cut – not many true-to-self intellectuals could justify ethnic cleansing, defend Apartheid and rationalize murder – delving into the political identity of Israel and its ideological and religious supporters becomes immediately ‘controversial’. The controversy is embedded in the purposeful intellectual and political elasticity by which Israel defines, or refuses to define, itself. It claims to be Jewish as well as democratic. It claims to embody religious ideals but also to be secular. It claims to be liberal, while it is militarily oppressive. It claims to uphold ‘equality’ for all, while it is racially exclusive.

And if you dare to challenge these irreconcilable contradictions, you are termed an anti-Semite or a traitor – or both.

IPS — Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told Israeli leaders January 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.

Dempsey’s warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.

But the Israeli government remains defiant about maintaining its freedom of action to make war on Iran, and it is counting on the influence of right-wing extremist views in U.S. politics to bring pressure to bear on Obama to fall into line with a possible Israeli attack during the election campaign this fall.

Obama still appears reluctant to break publicly and explicitly with Israel over its threat of military aggression against Iran, even in the absence of evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Dempsey’s trip was highly unusual, in that there was neither a press conference by the chairman nor any public statement by either side about the substance of his meetings with Israeli leaders. Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either U.S. or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive.

The substance of Dempsey’s warning to the Israelis has become known, however, to active and retired senior flag officers with connections to the JCS, according to a military source who got it from those officers.

A spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Commander Patrick McNally, offered no comment Wednesday when IPS asked him about the above account of Dempsey’s warning to the Israelis.

The message carried by Dempsey was the first explicit statement to the Netanyahu government that the United States would not defend Israel if it attacked Iran unilaterally. But Defence Secretary Leon Panetta had given a clear hint in an interview on “Face the Nation” January 8 that the Obama administration would not help defend Israel in a war against Iran that Israel had initiated.

Asked how the United States would react if Israel were to launch a unilateral attack on Iran, Panetta first emphasised the need for a coordinated policy toward Iran with Israel. But when host Bob Schieffer repeated the question, Panetta said, “If the Israelis made that decision, we would have to be prepared to protect our forces in that situation. And that’s what we’d be concerned about.”

Defence Minister Barak had sought to dampen media speculation before Dempsey’s arrival that the chairman was coming to put pressure on Israel over its threat to attack Iran, but then proceeded to reiterate the Netanyahu-Barak position that they cannot give up their responsibility for the security of Israel “for anyone, including our American friends”.

There has been no evidence since the Dempsey visit of any change in the Netanyahu government’s insistence on maintaining its freedom of action to attack Iran.

Dempsey’s meetings with Netanyahu and Barak also failed to resolve the issue of the joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise geared to a missile attack, “Austere Challenge ’12″, which had been scheduled for April 2012 but had been postponed abruptly a few days before his arrival in Israel.

More than two weeks after Dempsey’s meeting with Barak, the spokesman for the Pentagon, John Kirby, told IPS, “All I can say is that the exercise will be held later this year.” That indicated that there has been no major change in the status of U.S.-Israeli discussions of the issue since the postponement of the exercise was leaked January 15.

The postponement has been the subject of conflicting and unconvincing explanations from the Israeli side, suggesting disarray in the Netanyahu government over how to handle the issue.

To add to the confusion, Israeli and U.S. statements left it unclear whether the decision had been unilateral or joint as well as the reasons for the decision.

Panetta asserted in a news conference January 18 that Barak himself had asked him to postpone the exercise.

It now clear that both sides had an interest in postponing the exercise and very possibly letting it expire by failing to reach a decision on it.

The Israelis appear to have two distinct reasons for putting the exercise off, which reflect differences between the interests of Netanyahu and his defence minister.
Netanyahu’s primary interest in relation to the exercise was evidently to give the Republican candidate ammunition to fire at Obama during the fall campaign by insinuating that the postponement was decided at the behest of Obama to reduce tensions with Iran.

Thus Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s spokesman, explained it as a “joint” decision with the United States, adding, “The thinking was it was not the right timing now to conduct such an exercise.”

Barak, however, had an entirely different concern, which was related to the Israeli Defence Forces’ readiness to carry out an operation that would involve both attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and minimising the Iranian retaliatory response.

A former U.S. intelligence analyst who followed the Israeli military closely told IPS he strongly suspects that the IDF has pressed Barak to insist that the Israeli force be at the peak of readiness if and when they are asked to attack Iran.

The analyst, who insisted on anonymity because of his continuing contacts with U.S. military and intelligence personnel, said the 2006 Lebanon War debacle continues to haunt the thinking of IDF leaders. In that war, it became clear that the IDF had not been ready to handle Hezbollah rocket attacks adequately, and the prestige of the Israeli military suffered a serious blow.

The insistence of IDF leaders that they never go to war before being fully prepared is a primary consideration for Barak, according to the analyst. “Austere Challenge ’12″ would inevitably involve a major consumption of military resources, he observes, which would reduce Israeli readiness for war in the short run.

The concern about a major military exercise actually reducing the IDF’s readiness for war against Iran would explain why senior Israeli military officials were reported to have suggested that the reasons for the postponement were mostly “technical and logistical”.

The Israeli military concern about expending scarce resources on the exercise would apply, of course, regardless of whether the exercise was planned for April or late 2012. That fact would help explain why the exercise has not been rescheduled, despite statements from the U.S. side that it will be.

The U.S. military, however, has its own reasons for being unenthusiastic about the exercise. IPS has learned from a knowledgeable source that, well before the Obama administration began distancing itself from Israel’s Iran policy, U.S. Central Command chief James N. Mattis had expressed concern about the implications of an exercise so obviously based on a scenario involving Iranian retaliation for an Israeli attack.

U.S. officials have been quoted as suspecting that the Israeli request for a postponement of the exercise indicated that Israel wanted to leave its options open for conducting a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the spring. But a postponement to the fall would not change that problem.

For that reason, the former U.S. intelligence analyst told IPS he doubts that “Austere Challenge ’12″ will ever be carried out.

But the White House has an obvious political interest in using the military exercise to demonstrate that the Obama administration has increased military cooperation with Israel to an unprecedented level.

The Defence Department wants the exercise to be held in October, according to the military source in touch with senior flag officers connected to the Joint Chiefs.

Thanks to the “help”  of the US and NATO, and their Islamist proxy butchers of Libya, the African Sahel is now potentially facing a “slide into hell”. Libya is, of course, facing its own disharmony, but its Sahelian neighbors are facing a host of problems too. Like Qaddafi was, many of the countries of the Sahel are fighting their own Al-Qaeda/Islamist elements as well. And many of the governments of this region have suggested that the Libyan disarray/chaos handed Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — a golden opportunity — to obtain looted arms, guns and a variety of other deadly munitions too.

Countries like Niger, Mali, and Mauritania, are struggling to deter an influx of fighters and jihadis, from the ostensibly declining — yet still bubbling over —  Libyan military theater. Though the Sahel is not exactly like Somalia, other security concerns there include terrorist attacks in Nigeria, which have ravaged many sections of that country. And additionally, the NATO/Western military intervention and concomitant destruction of Libya has extinguished a generous donor in the area, and a nation where thousands of Sahelian workers found gainful employment; and even sent remittances, as an economic lifeline, back home. All of this, within the backdrop of an area facing a drought, and in a vast, sprawling, arid region — with villages often in remote and inaccessible areas.

The wars in Libya and Ivory Coast, indeed, have forced about 200,000 migrants to return to the Sahel —instead of sending money home from their foreign employment. David Gressly, the regional director of Unicef in Western Africa, has said, “It’s a double blow to families because they’ve lost the remittances and they’ve got additional people in the family to take care of.”

A current food crisis is also looming on the horizon in the Sahelian region, and moreover around ten million people are affected — in Niger (6 million), Mali (2.9 million), Mauritania (around 500,000), and tens of thousands in other countries of the region too.

Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, argues that drought and famine are not extraordinary events, but predictable consequences of a global food system “built on inequality, imbalances and – ultimately – fragility.” The food system is broken — according to De Schutter — and this can often mean waiting for people to starve before actually doing something. The readiness for persistent famine is not currently built-in or existent within the system, and the current crisis in the African Sahel is an illustrative example of this. It represents a crack in the global food system because famine in the region should be considered as normal — and not an unusual, unique, extreme, unpredictable, or out of the ordinary circumstance or event.

The Libyan misadventure’s contribution to the Sahelian discontent/immiseration, I do not think, however, should be discounted. The oil on the brain of Western hegemonic powers seized their opportunity to take out a man, who, far too little would play ball/go along with them. And neighboring nations and impoverished areas are reaping the “benefits” of such myopic opportunism of the — blinded by greed, hubris, and petroleum — Western avaricious, ravenous and, indeed, ideologically moribund imperialist states!