Tony Karon: Jewish Opposition to the Lobby?

Tony Karon perceives growing dissent among American Jews, a source of potential power that might serve as a counterforce to the Israel Lobby. Karon makes for interesting reading and he provides important documentation of current events, but I think he's way too optimistic. The power of the Lobby is today greater than ever -- to the point that it's currently on steroids despite the heroic work of President Carter and Walt/Mearshimer and others.

Here are a few sentences about Hillary's position on Israel from the JTA (9.12.07) which effectively sum up the depth of the obeisance to the Lobby of the Democrat front runners -- and virtually everyone else running for president.

In her new position paper on Israel, Hillary Rodham Clinton comes not only to praise the Jewish state but to bury doubts that she would be any less vigilant in its protection than the Bush administration...
Perhaps, but Clinton faces challenges for Jewish support from two flanks: Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is a Republican front-runner, has moved even further to the right of Bush, saying that now is not the time to consider Palestinian statehood. And Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, has made considerable inroads among liberal Jewish donors.Despite the stepped-up challenges from Obama and Giuliani, a recent poll of 200 rabbis from all of the major denominations named her as the presidential candidate most supportive of Israel and Jewish causes.

One might think that it is evident that the power of the Lobby has been lifted to it's current hyper intensity in large part due to the terror events of 9/11 and the false attribution of Muslim fanatics as the cause or even as unwilling patsies on the scene. It's worth emphasizing that the terror of 9/11 is the springboard and the repeated justification for the phony but powerful and disastrous "War on Terror." That's bad enough. Equally dispiriting is that even opponents of Bush's purposeful and endless war against civilization have difficulty looking at the stark evidence of controlled demolition which ought to demonstrate that Osama couldn't have done it.

(For a handy primer on some of the evidence demonstrating that it must have been an inside job see: Summary of David Ray Griffin's 10 major points in support of controlled demolition [ http://www.truthmove.org/content/demolition-wtc-7/ ]This particular link provides, among much else, a handy video of the rather obvious free fall controlled demolition of WTC Building 7.

It's also probably clear to many that the reason that so many on the left choose to believe Bush on this matter and no other is because they are comfortable with the notion of fanatical Muslim terrorists -- which is precisely the core of the strength of the Lobby.

Ronald
***

Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-09-13
Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews
I often think of the letters that come into the Tomdispatch email box as the university of my later life -- messages from around the world, offering commentary, criticism, encouragement, but mainly teaching me about lives (and versions of life) I would otherwise know little or nothing about. Then again, the Internet has a way of releasing inhibitions and, from time to time, the Tomdispatch email box is also a sobering reminder of the mindless hate in our world -- of every sort, but sometimes of a strikingly anti-Semitic sort, letters that are wildly angry and eager, above all, to shut down or shut up commentary or debate of any sort.

It's ironic, then, that the threat of sparking such "anti-Semitism," as well as charges of being functionally anti-Semitic, have been used for a long time in this country as a kind of club to enforce, within the Jewish community, an exceedingly narrow range of correct opinion on Israel and its behavior in the world. In recent months, such attacks from within the Jewish establishment seem to have escalated whenever any professor or critic steps even slightly out of line, and the recent controversial book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt has caused a little storm of consternation. Tony Karon, who runs the always provocative Rootless Cosmopolitan website, suggests that these attacks may not be what they seem, that the need to turn back every deviation from Jewish orthodoxy may actually reflect a loosening of control within the political world of American Jews, and a new opening, a Jewish glasnost. Tom

Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=13777

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]

Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel
By Tony Karon

First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as "self-haters"is not unfamiliar to me.

In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.

Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.

What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."

A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent
The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.

So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent."

Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism." Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."

I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?

Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds -- have chosen not to live.

Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a Jew."

Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to "defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was the angry renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.
And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Haaretz online English edition in which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.

Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like "Birthright Unplugged," which aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program," funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)

Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others -- to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded. It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was originally a Jewish movement -- the majority of European Jews before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).

Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.
But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.

The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice
Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency -- apparently oblivious to irony of its own actions -- has complained to Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior. If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of "anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.

That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion,

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts are good for Israel.

But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an emerging Jewish glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein -- the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" -- could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.
So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming Zionism pulled by his American publisher, the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge.

Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a process, once started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.

Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."

"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."

In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to "delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.

Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the British Zionist Federation – and then, at the last minute, his speech was canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities." (While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to accept the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni, for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, "an apartheid situation.")

Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you're going to get.

Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.

In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:

"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."

Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition. Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.

Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has hurt.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan, where he comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to Jewish identity issues. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" was Stalin's euphemistic pejorative for "Jew" during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but Karon, who grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term as a badge of honor. Karon was a teenage activist in the left-Zionist Habonim movement before finding his way into the big tent of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle, an experience that prompted him to re-imagine what it meant to be a Jew in the world.
Copyright 2007 Tony Karon



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Carl Lesnor: Greenspan and Lenin on "War for Oil"

by Carl Lesnor
September 2007

Even Alan Greenspan admits it, so it must be true! This is the definitive
proof that the Iraq war was really "about " oil. What about oil? Well, according
to Greenspan, Saddam H was thinking of blockading the Straits of Hormuz, so we
had to take him out. The Straits in question just happen to be at the other
end of the Persian Gulf and Iraq didn't have much of a navy and if it did, the
Persians wouldn't have been too happy about it, and besides, the US navy and
air force wouldn't have appreciated the idea very much either, and it's not
clear just what Saddam H was trying to accomplish, but never mind, Alan knew he
was thinking dangerous thoughts and therefore had to be eliminated.

Although this explanation make absolutely no sense, it has been seized upon
like manna from heaven by all the Leninists who have always known that the war
was 'about' oil. Don't think that Leninists are restricted to the fringes of
political discourse, they are all over the mainstream as well as the
opposition. Environmentalists tell us to give up our SUVs, even our cars, so we won't be
forced to fight these unpleasant wars abroad. The Left keeps denouncing the
government for maintaining its domination of mid-east oil supplies -- in other
words for exactly what the government claims to be doing: protecting America's
"vital interests" or "vital national security interests". (The meaningless of
these phrases is a great advantage to those who enjoy throwing them around.)

It's not enough to appeal to the American people's desire to make
sacrifices in order to bring democracy and freedom to unfortunate foreigners who
haven't enjoyed them. They must be told that there's something in it for them.
That we're going to make a lot of money out of this. That the money will insure
our prosperity, and that if we don't take decisive action, we would have to
give up all those creature comforts that make the American Way of Life so
attractive. The warmongers aren't in the least embarrassed by the revelation of the
selfishness lurking beneath their fine words; they are Leninists too. It's
practically unanimous, Vladimir Illyich's statues might have been pulled down,
but his doctrine has conquered the world.

A good example of his enduring influence is to be found on today's WSWS, a
Marxist-Leninist website that is often well informed, well written, and where
their sermon is usually limited to the final paragraph.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/unsw-s21.shtml (They have an
excellent article on the firing of Dan Rather, which I would highly recommend. (
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/rath-s21.shtml ) It's because of
their site's general seriousness and high quality that it's worth analyzing what
they say about Greenspan.

At an educational meeting in Australia, Nick Breams, one of the Socialist leaders, discussing the 'underlying war-aims of the United States' referred to Greenspan's book in which the former Fed chief wrote: '“I’m saddened that it is politically
inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Expanding on this 'admission', Nick Beams,went on to say:

'The tensions and conflicts between the capitalist great powers were
developing along the lines of those that produced two world wars in the first half of
the twentieth century. Imagine for a moment a meeting such as this one, 100
years ago, in 1907. Political discussion would centre on the Moroccan
question, the Balkans question, the Bosnian question, the Eastern question... These
were various parts of the world, some of them somewhat remote, in which the
interests of the great powers and empires clashed—the interests of the British,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, Russia, France, and the rising power
Germany.

“The colliding interests of the capitalist Great Powers led eventually to the eruption of world war in 1914. We have now entered into a new pre-war period. That is the meaning of the Iraq war and the threats against Iran.”

And what were the interests of the Great Powers that led to the eruption of
1914? The Eastern Question? The one that Bismarck had said wasn't worth the
bones of a Pomeranian grenadier? (He was referring to Bosnia-Herzegovina) The
Moroccan question, whose trivial economic importance paled in comparison to
questions of national prestige?

Rather than analyzing how these fights about political power and prestige
could be traced back to their origins in the problems of the expanded
reproduction of capital, Beams proudly asserts that the socialist movement 'stands on
the shoulders of giants.'

The giant he has in mind is Trotsky, who, he says, 'explained that the war
arose out of a contradictory process at the very heart of the capitalist
economy. On the one hand the vast developments of technology meant that the
productive forces had now expanded on a global scale. The world, he wrote, had become
one economic workshop, the different parts of which are inseparably connected
with each other. At the same time, however, the world was divided by the
capitalist great powers each of which sought to establish its predominance over the
others, leading to a collision.'

Now Trotsky was indeed a very intelligent man, but this is simply a re-hash
of Marxism 101. It doesn't explain anything about the origin of World War I.
Neither the assassination of Francis Ferdinand by a Serb terrorist who had the
support of the Russian secret services, nor Austria's desire to put an end to
what it saw as a threat to the integrity of its multi-national empire, nor
Russia's desire to escape its domestic political crises by assuming the role of
leader of the Slavs, had anything to do with any vast development of technology.
(The only thing the vast development of technology contributed was
industrialized slaughter, thanks to artillery, machine guns, and poison gas.)
The other giant Beam quotes is the great man himself, Lenin, who 'explained
that with the eruption of war, capitalism had entered a new historical era of
imperialist wars from which there was no way out, other than the overthrow of
the profit system itself.' This dogmatic assertion naturally appeals to those
who have other reasons for wanting to overthrow the profit system -- the
desire for greater equality or the claimed advantages of rational planning, for
example -- and uncritically welcome any argument they can use against the hated
system.

Alas, this so-called scientific analysis is also a counsel of despair. Those
standing on the shoulders of giants might have illustrious forebears, but seem
bereft of followers and few prospects of attracting many. They are no doubt
sustained by a faith that the masses will one day come to see the truth of
their analysis. The problem isn't their faith in human reason; that seems
admirable; it is their allegiance to a doctrine that makes war -- and indeed all
politics -- the automatic consequence of contradictions in the mode of production.
Theirs is a politics in which politics doesn't matter. Is it any wonder that
Marxists -- even genuine ones -- have become an endangered species?

The End

Paul Craig Roberts: Why did Kerry stand idly by while questioner was tasered?

One theory advanced by Democracy Now (in 2005?) regarded Kerry's lightening concession of an election he had just won so that the destruction of Falluja could go forward. According to the testimony, the green light to attack Falluja was given after Kerry conceded. The extent of Kerry's treachery was astonishing. It would seem that Kerry ran for president knowing he didn't want to be president -- and his campaign reflected that.
Ronald
***


www.counterpunch.org

September 19, 2007

No Wonder He Didn't Condemn Torture During His 2004 Campaign
Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Naïve Americans who think they live in a free society should watch the video filmed by students at a John Kerry speech September 17, Constitution Day, at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

At the conclusion of Kerry's speech, Andrew Meyer, a 21-year old journalism student was selected by Senator Kerry to ask a question. Meyer held up a copy of BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast's book, Armed Madhouse, and asked if Kerry was aware that Palast's investigations determined that Kerry had actually won the election. Why, Meyer asked, had Kerry conceded the election so quickly when there were so many obvious examples of vote fraud? Why, Meyer, went on to ask, was Kerry refusing to consider Bush's impeachment when Bush was about to initiate another act of military aggression, this time against Iran?

At this point the public's protectors-the police-decided that Meyer had said too much. They grabbed Meyer and began dragging him off. Meyer said repeatedly, "I have done nothing wrong," which under our laws he had not. He threatened no one and assaulted no one.

But the police decided that Meyer, an American citizen, had no right to free speech and no constitutional protection. They threw him to the floor and tasered him right in front of Senator Kerry and the large student audience, who captured on video the unquestionable act of police brutality. Meyer was carted off and jailed on a phony charge of "disrupting a public event."

The question we should all ask is why did a United States Senator just stand there while Gestapo goons violated the constitutional rights of a student participating in a public event, brutalized him in full view of everyone, and then took him off to jail on phony charges?

Kerry's meekness not only in the face of electoral fraud, not only in the face of Bush's wars that are crimes under the Nuremberg standard, but also in the face of police goons trampling the constitutional rights of American citizens makes it completely clear that he was not fit to be president, and he is not fit to be a US senator.

Usually when police violate constitutional rights and commit acts of police brutality they do it when they believe no one is watching, not in front of a large audience. Clearly, the police have become more audacious in their abuse of rights and citizens. What explains the new fearlessness of police to violate rights and brutalize citizens without cause?

The answer is that police, most of whom have authoritarian personalities, have seen that constitutional rights are no longer protected. President Bush does not protect our constitutional rights. Neither does Vice President Cheney, nor the Attorney General, nor the US Congress. Just as Kerry allowed Meyer's rights to be tasered out of him, Congress has enabled Bush to strip people, including American citizens, of constitutional protection and incarcerate them without presenting evidence.

How long before Kerry himself or some other senator will be dragged from his podium and tasered?

The Bush Republicans with complicit Democrats have essentially brought government accountability to an end in the US. The US government has 80,000 people, including ordinary American citizens, on its "no-fly list." No one knows why they are on the list, and no one on the list can find out how to get off it. An unaccountable act by the Bush administration put them there.

Airport Security harasses and abuses people who do not fit any known definition of terrorist. Nalini Ghuman, a British-born citizen and music professor at Mills College in California was met on her return from a trip to England by armed guards at the airplane door and escorted away. A Gestapo goon squad tore up her US visa, defaced her British passport, body searched her, and told her she could leave immediately for England or be sent to a detention center.

Professor Ghuman, an Oxford University graduate with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, says she feels like the character in Kafka's book, The Trial. "I don't know why it's happened, what I'm accused of. There's no opportunity to defend myself. One is just completely powerless." Over one year later there is still no answer.

The Bush Republicans and their Democratic toadies have, in the name of "security," made all of us powerless. While Senator John Kerry and his Democratic colleagues stand silently, the Bush administration has stolen our country from us and turned us into subjects.

*The video of Andrew's Mayer's arrest may be found at http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?filmID=601

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

IPA: Hillary Clinton's Health Plan

It's not surprising that that Clinton is planning once again to stand in the way of reforming our broken health care system. She did so deliberately when she was in power and is doing the same again today and if she's elected. It's no secret that she supported Nixon and Goldwater. From Michael Moore's SICKO we learned how casually and clearly Nixon stood against health care for the middle and poorer classes. It's not surprising that Hillary is following her mentor and true ideological guiding star. The surprising thing is that she hasn't been exposed for who she is and what she stands for. Perhaps the electorate senses that like her husband (and unlike the others?), she's determined to win.
--Ronald
***

Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
___________________________________________________

September 18, 2007

Clinton Health Plan

DAVID HIMMELSTEIN, M.D., david_himmelstein@hms.harvard.edu, http://www.pnhp.org
Himmelstein is associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He said today: "Hillary Clinton is
combining two failed Massachusetts plans: the [former Gov. Michael] Dukakis plan, which fell apart 20 years ago,
and the [Gov. Mitt] Romney plan, which is in the process of falling apart.
"Clinton is advocating the Marie Antoinette approach to health care: 'Let them buy their own coverage.' She is
attempting to force middle class families to buy coverage without making it affordable. Clinton wants to keep the
private insurance industry in the middle of the system." Himmelstein is co-founder of Physicians for a National
Health Program.

QUENTIN YOUNG, M.D., info@pnhp.org, http://www.pnhp.org
Young is national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program. He said: "It's always ironic to
hear Clinton talk about standing up to the insurance companies. She'd tried to work them into her plan [in the
mid-'90s], which is a large part of why it failed. The biggest insurance companies actually backed her plan for a
time while the smaller ones opposed it."

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167.

NYT (1993): The FBI Allowed (or arranged) the WTC '93 Bombing: What Was Clinton's Role?

Ralph Schoenman was recently in NYC (May 2006) for some lectures, parts of which were broadcast on local, soon to be gone, community access cable. In connection with false flag operations, Schoenman mentioned the 1993 WTC bombing and gave the documentation regarding the Times account which blew the whistle on the FBI operation.

So the truth comes out in plain sight, but it doesn't matter, since it's never repeated and certainly not part of the official story, the only story that is allowed.

In his lecture Schoenman laid out his theory that the Blind Sheik was brought in to this country against Egypt's protests to serve as a patsy in these false flag operations and was aided by the CIA while in Egypt as part of a larger operation to destabilize secular Arab governments.

This reminder from 1993 brings up again the question of Clinton's involvement in these shadow operations. This false flag operation was intended to jump start the war against the Muslim community in the CIA/FBI creation of an Islamic villain and permanent war that is their mission.

Did Clinton know in advance? After the incident, what effort if any did he make to get to the bottom of it? In all likelihood, the best that can be said is that he kept a hands off approach.
--Ronald


The FBI allowed the 1993
WTC bombing to happen

THE NEW YORK TIMES * * * * * Thursday October 28, 1993 Page A1
"Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast" By Ralph Blumenthal

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building
a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center,
and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting
harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after
the blast. The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb
and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by
an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer,
Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said. The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as
being in a far better position than previously known to foil
the February 26th bombing of New York City's tallest towers.

The explosion left six people dead, more than a thousand people
injured, and damages in excess of half-a-billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manhattan Federal Court [on charges of involvement] in that attack. Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian Army officer, was used by the Government [of the United States] to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists who are now charged in two bombing cases:

the World Trade Center attack, and a foiled plot to destroy
the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels, and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the World Trade Center blast,
he was feuding with the F.B.I. Supervisor `Messed It Up' After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period,Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent
about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up."

"He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor. "He requested to make me to testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was
involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that." The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. Headquarters in Washington about the
Bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.

Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him, "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to
Washington, D.C." Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute
Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the `New York people': "Well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."

Nicholas Lysson: Holocaust and Holodomor

HOLOCAUST AND HOLODOMOR

By Nicholas Lysson

April 2007

(Complete text: http://desip.igc.org/holo_lysson.html )

One might think the worst holocaust deniers—at least the only ones who command serious attention—are those who insist the Nazi holocaust, as it involved the Jews only, was without parallel.

Guenter Lewy argues for example in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford University Press, 2000) that while the Gypsies were gassed, shot and otherwise exter-minated in great numbers, right alongside the Jews, they were not true victims of “the” Holocaust (capital “H”) but only of something collateral. Lewy even suggests the Gypsies invited their own destruction with certain cultural traits—in particular, sharply divergent moral standards for dealing among their own and with outsiders.

But pre- or anti-Enlightenment Judaism is hardly a less ethnocentric or hostile moral system. As Edward Gibbon correctly notes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 15 (1776), “the wise, the humane Maimonides openly teaches [in The Book of Torts, 5:11] that, if an idolator fall into the water, a Jew ought not to save him from instant death.” See also Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s remarkable second-century exercise in ejusdem generis: “The best of the heathen merits death; the best of serpents should have its head crushed; and the most pious of women is prone to sorcery” (Yer. Kid. iv. 66c; Massek. Soferim xv. 10; comp. Mek., Beshallah, Wayehi, 1, and Tan., Wayera, 20, all as cited by JewishEncyclopedia. com). For “heathen” some translators simply write “goyim”; for “prone to sorcery” they write “a witch.” Rabbi Simeon is mentioned more than 700 times in the Talmud.

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2d ed. 2004), say (p. 1) “that in the usual English translations of talmudic literature some of the most sensitive passages are usually toned down or falsified,” and indeed (pp. 150-51) that “the great majority of books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter,” in part by omitting or obscuring such teachings. For a fuller discussion of the point, see Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, esp. ch. 2 (1994), available online. As to Jews, Gypsies or anyone else, of course, ethnocentrism or even outright cultural hostility as a rationale for genocide is obscene.

A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1987). Norman Davies gives the following description in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed phrase is his own:

“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants,” “like one vast Belsen.” “The rest, in various stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or neighbours.” “[As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”



. . . All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the “class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has seen many terrible famines. . . . But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.

See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986); Nicolas Werth, “The Great Famine,” in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism, pp. 159-68 (Harvard University Press, 1999); Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 257-59 (1996); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (1985); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 84-85 (2003); and the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Report to Congress (1988). That report, at pp. 6-7, cites estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the Ukraine and 9 million overall.

Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, pp. 248-49 (2000) gives this description, drawn from still further sources, all cited in his notes:

A population of “walking corpses” . . . even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. . . . Cannibalism became so common-place that. . . local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.”. . .

They staggered into towns and collapsed in the squares. . . . Haunting the railway stations these “swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice,” followed passengers with mute appeals. . . . [They] “dragged themselves along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy. Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead.” Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by wolves.


Read more: http://desip.igc.org/holo_lysson.html

Raw Story: US Demands Purge of Voter Roles

RawStory.com


Purge of voter rolls could swing 2008 election
http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=7499
09/12/2007 Filed by Jason Rhyne


Using statistics and methodology that some voting experts are calling "flawed," the Justice Department's Voting Section is telling 10 US states to purge voter rolls which allegedly show more registered voters than are eligible--a house-cleaning effort AlterNet's Steven Rosenfeld says could swing the 2008 election.

"Voting Section Chief John Tanner called for the purges in letters sent this spring under an arcane provision in the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the Motor Voter law, " says Rosenfeld, adding that the letters "notify states that 10 percent or more of their election jurisdictions have problematic voter rolls. It tells states to report 'the subsequent removal from rolls of persons no longer eligible to vote."

According to experts interviewed by Rosenfeld, however, the Justice Department is misrepresenting the information they are using to make their recommendations.

"That data does not say what they purport it says," David Becker, senior voting rights counsel for People for the American Way, said. "They are saying the data shows the 10 worst voter rolls. They have a lot of explaining to do." Rosenfeld also quotes U.S. Election Assistance Commission consultant Kim Brace, who said "You are basically seeing them grasping at whatever straws are possible to make their point."

Obtaining the same data used by the Voting Section, AlterNet's analysis found that "some states facing Justice Department pressure to purge voters have long been targeted by GOP 'vote fraud' activists, especially where concentrations of minority voters have historically elected Democrats -- such as St. Louis, Philadelphia and South Dakota's Indian reservations."

"Voter roll purges, if incorrectly done, can be a factor in determining election outcomes -- particularly in tight races," Rosenfeld writes. "Looking toward the 2008 election, it appears the purges could be a new and legal way to accomplish a controversial longstanding Republican Party electoral tactic -- thinning the ranks of likely Democratic voters in states where there may be close races."

"The GOP agenda is to make it harder to vote," Joe Rich, former Voting Section Chief told AlterNet. "You purge voters. You don't register voters. This is ripe for partisan decision making. You pick the states where you go after Democrats."

Earlier this year, ePlubirus Media examined what they called a "breathtaking politicization" of the Voting Section after Rich was replaced as chief in 2005 by John Tanner.

"Tanner has waged an aggressive effort to remake the section in his own image -- not an image that most people who promote the core mission of the Voting Rights Act, which the Section is primarily responsible for enforcing, would support," ePlubirus reported.

The 10 states that received Voting Section letters, according to AlterNet, are Iowa, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Vermont.

Edgar Steelle's Latest Rant:: Military Exercises: Be Very Afraid : Oh yeah, dollar plunging

Here is Edgar Steele's latest rant. Every so often I open one of his emails. The thing that usually impresses me is his tracking of the fall of the dollar which he says is currently below 80 on an index of currencies and falling rapidly -- even more rapidly than he predicted a week ago.(I have to take his word for it as I don't even have the expertise to check up on his figures.) I'm distributing this selection mostly because of the first three items on his ominous portents list. Air Force stand downs, civil defense drills, emergency alert in Illinois?? Where does he get this information? Does he make it all up? However, he does well to remind us of the recent nuclear missiles mysteriously traveling cross country and Cheney's ominous warning that the next 9/11 will be a nuclear attack. (Of course he's right about the phony Bin Laden tape and that Bin Laden died in 2001.) But my guess is that they never planned on more than one 9/11. I imagine that they figured that the attack on Iran will serve very well as 9/11 #2.

As far as the collapse of the economy, he doesn't seem to realize that the fact that he's been predicting it for years takes AWAY from his credibility. On the other hand, it was clear from the first Bush-Cheney tax cut for the rich that they were making a full fledged assault on the economy, and like other items in their agenda of destruction, they have been very successful.

Ronald


The Dollar in the Punch Bowl

by Edgar J. Steele

September 12, 2007

Downloadable audio files of The Dollar in the Punch Bowl:
http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/rants/punch16-16.mp3
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My name is Edgar J. Steele. This is a Nickel Rant.

Some ask why I write financial articles, rather than continually pout over America's general political and social condition, seemingly my normal wont.

I have said, straight out, that my financial writings are designed to lure the unsuspecting back to my lair (www.ConspiracyPenPal.com) where I then can have my way with them.

But there is another reason to carry on about the financial end of things: Economics is just another way of looking at the same old gloom and doom I have been preaching for years.

What's more, national economics now is quickening and merging ever more closely with our political and social condition. After all, that is what war always is about, you know: economics. And ... has anybody proven better than have Bush and our current Congress that politics is about nothing but money?

The Dollar Does a Swan Dive...

Now the dollar has breached 80 (remember 85, then 84, then 82, all of which now seem so long ago?), measured as it is against that index of foreign currencies. The dollar is dropping faster this week than a cheap hooker's panties, despite obvious illegal and manipulative bailing taking place by the usual suspects, producing modest gold/silver declines this morning on the heels of several days' strong gains.

We may find out as early as today if the first part of my prediction of just last week - that "they" will weakly defend the dollar at 79, yet draw the battle line at 78 - comes true. Actually, I already know it will come true. After all, it has to.

However, even I am just a little surprised to see that it might happen so quickly. And so will the rest of my years'-old prediction come true, namely that the dollar eventually will sail on down to 65, enroute to oblivion.

...Right into the Punch Bowl

Picture the financial markets as a giant party, with everybody queuing up to drink the Kool-Aid. Suddenly, someone keels over, then another. Somebody cries out: "Ewwww...there's a giant t**d floating in the punch bowl."

WhirlyBen (Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, which is private, not federal, has no reserves and is no bank, yet controls the dollar absolutely) shouts, "Relax, it's just a fake, plastic gag prop. Here, let me shovel in a bunch more to prove it."

"Gag is right," shouts another, "God, the smell is awful!"

That's kind of like what is taking place right now with regard to the dollar, as people begin to realize what "backed by the full faith and credit of the United States" really means.

Something's Coming...

There are ominous portents all over the landscape just now, indicating that something big is in the offing:

1. The impending and unprecedented Air Force Stand-Down ordered for this Friday, together with numerous civil defense "drills" scheduled during the coming week throughout America, not to mention war drills scheduled throughout the world.
2. The cancelled El Al (Israeli) flight schedule for Friday through Sunday (yes, the front end of the Jewish high, holy days, but that is not the point or the cause, rest assured).
3. The mysteriously meandering nuclear missiles that illegally flew cross-country suspended under wing on a bomber, not just as freight, which our government now claims was the result of an error (yeah, right, an error involving 5 nuclear missiles ... or was that 6 and now one is missing, as some claim?).
4. The Fed meeting scheduled for next Tuesday where discount rate cuts almost inevitably will be announced (if not sooner because of the ever-expanding mushroom cloud rising up over the collapse of America's housing and mortgage industries).
5. That just-released, already-proven-phony Bin Laden videotape (yes, Virginia, he died several years ago, just as then was reported upon extensively in the Arabic-language press but suppressed in the West, as so much is suppressed here).
6. That "accidental" emergency alert triggered in Illinois this morning.
7. Bush straining with everything he's got to get the American public on board with his "kill Iranians for Israel" plans.
8. Israel claims, suddenly, to have discovered nuclear installations in Syria.
9. Oil is about to breach $80 per barrel.
10. Dick Cheney's "gut feeling" that America's next terrorist attack "will be nuclear."
11. Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling" that America "will soon be hit hard."

Use Our Dollar or Die

Remember that, for years, I have predicted that WWIII must start to mask implosion of the dollar. Hardly anybody seems to have noticed that the dollar, no longer backed by gold or, even, oil, now is backed by American military force alone (use our Dollar or die - just ask Iraq and, soon, Iran).

"They" clearly have made the stock market a priority. After all, crashing it (in absolute dollar terms) would lead to the current derivative hangover turning into a first-class nightmare faster than necessary. Discount and interbank interest rates - and general short-term interest rates, too - all have to ratchet down in order to continue the market's current death-defying act of levitation.

They Live!

Who are "They?" Please, there are children present. Go rent a copy of "They Live," then follow it up with a rewatch of "The Matrix" (ignore the sequels, which are trash) and you will understand. Then come back and ask me that question again.

The average American seems not to care that the measuring stick (the dollar) gets shorter every day, just so long as his stock portfolio or retirement account doesn't drop in value, as measured by the number of those sticks. He will, believe me. He will. I almost added "but then it will be too late," but it has been too late for years, already.

Meanwhile, you can have the punch if you like. I'll stick to things a bit more precious, things with a metallic aftertaste.

New America. An idea whose time has come.

My name is Edgar J. Steele. Thanks for listening. Please visit my web site, www.ConspiracyPenPal.com, for other messages just like this one.
-ed

Copyright ©2007, Edgar J. Steele

Forward as you wish. Permission is granted to circulate both the written and audio version of this Nickel Rant among private individuals and groups, post on all Internet sites and publish in full in all not-for-profit publications. The audio version of this Nickel Rant may also be freely used in its entirety by for-profit broadcasting entities, but is not to be included in any recorded format which then is sold to others. The audio version may be rebroadcast, either live or archived on the Internet, either copied or linked directly to my web site, profit and nonprofit alike, so long as it is used in its entirety. In fact, I encourage any and all radio hosts to use it freely. Contact author for all other rights, which are reserved.



On-Line link to this rant in HTML format: http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/rants/punch.htm

Carl Lesnor: Robert Fisk on 9/11 Truth: Good Beginning

Robert Fisk on 9/11 Truth: Good Beginning

By Carl Lesnor
September 2007

Robert Fisk has written an article in the Independent entitled Even I question the Truth About 9/11 that has attracted a great deal of attention and a certain amount of controversy. [i] (http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece )

Fisk begins by complaining about the "ravers" as he calls them, who come to his lectures about the Middle East and accuse him of covering up the truth about the events of September 11. He usually replies that he is a Middle East correspondent and has no special knowledge of what happened to the World Trade Center, that he has "quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc., to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan.”

Still, he has questions. More questions than answers, but raising questions about the government's account on the part of a famous and respected journalist is a notable event. He concludes his column by repeating that he is not a "conspiracy theorist" but that he'd like to know the full story, not least because it was the trigger for the disaster in Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the Middle East.

He has been taken to task, sometimes gently, sometimes harshly, by people in the "truth movement" for being too ambiguous, for engaging in "doublethink" and by repeating in the last paragraph that he is not a "conspiracy theorist" (though he concludes by saying that he'd like to know more.)

Much depends on the words "conspiracy theory" and how it used. Let's begin at the beginning. Some of us are old enough remember that this expression dates from the time of the JFK assassination when, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the bullets came from two directions, the Warren commission claimed that they were all fired from the rear by a lone assassin. Thus the notorious "magic bullet" theory. Rejecting this theory automatically led to an inescapable conclusion: that if there were two or more assassins there was a conspiracy. That's how the law defines it. (Unless, of course, two lone assassins, unknown to one another opened fire at the same time.) If the magic bullet theory is true, the assassination can be explained in terms of psychology, but if it's false, then it becomes a political issue.

Naturally, the political implications of a conspiracy were enormous and inevitably led to speculation about the identities and motives of the conspirators. Much of the dispute was about these implications and people tended to take positions based on their political predispositions and to reason backwards. The trajectory of the bullets was determined not by ballistics, but by political beliefs and loyalties.

Those who trusted the government considered it disloyal to question its word.Those who considered Kennedy merely another servant of an omnipotent ruling class denied that its agents would have any interest in killing him. ([Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn maintain this position to this day.)*[ii]

Those who were relieved that the "Marxist" assassin was not being accused of acting on behalf of the Soviets or the Cubans, which they feared might lead to war, (like I.F. Stone) preferred to let sleeping dogs lie and not question the inconsistencies in the official story. Fortified by their devotion to this noble end, they had no compunction in attacking those who challenged the authorized version.

Those who were counting on the Kennedy family to challenge the Commission report took their failure to do as a reason to endorse it, though Robert Kennedy --as well as family friend, Arthur Schlesinger -- were careful to say that they "accepted" it, but hadn't actually read it. ([It has now been revealed that Robert Kennedy never believed it: see the review of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot,just published) at (http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2565)

All of these people used the term "conspiracy theory" to discredit those who questioned the official findings and had no trouble some finding far-fetched theories as proof that all skeptics were the victims of paranoid delusions --- yet it is obvious that conspiracies have always existed and that no political history that rejects them a priori is possible.

The events of September 11, 2001 present an entirely different question, for in this case the official version is itself a conspiracy theory, and on its face quite an implausible one. To begin with there are the obvious questions of how such a vast operation could have succeeded in overcoming US defenses. If the government was completely taken by surprise by this conspiracy in the morning, unable even to mount a defence of the Pentagon hours after the first alert was received, how could it have known just who was behind it in the afternoon? The nature of the evidence it presented -- the incriminating documents left in the rental car and in the suitcase that never made it aboard the plane, the passport that came floating down at the crash site -- was enough to arouse suspicions. The accumulation of conflicting stories and implausible events in the following days only strengthened them. (For a list of seventy --but by no means all -- of the reasons to doubt the official story see: 70 reasons to doubt the offiical 9/11 story)

But implausible doesn't necessarily mean impossible and suspicions aren't always justified; more complete information can dispel them. But in this instance, the behavior of the government in refusing to provide such evidence, stonewalling appeals for investigations, lying, and destroying evidence could only increase them. As in the Kennedy assassination, the cover-up itself can be seen as part of the conspiracy and cannot fail to fuel suspicions which give rise to conflicting theories, theories that not only conflict with the official story, but inevitably with one another. Some of them might seem fanciful; some indeed are, but this cannot simply be ascribed to the "paranoia" of those who put them forward and used as an argument for accepting the government story. The government’s failure to provide an open investigation of this disaster is the real scandal; one colluded in by the American political oligarchy and the media that serves it.

This doesn't mean that all who accepted, persuaded themselves to accept, or thought it prudent to accept the official story are equally culpable; many refused to listen to conflicting evidence for fear of its implications. Shortly after the attack on the twin towers I attended a talk given at Columbia University by a noted British radical, Tariq Ali, who spoke about its political implications. During the question period he was taken aback by the widespread disbelief in the official account on the part of his New York audience. When asked whether he actually believed it, he replied that he didn't want to think about it. In addition to this fear, which was shared by many, we might add the fear of ridicule, the fear of being discredited by being seen as embracing "irresponsible" speculation.

Refusal to open Pandora's box, disinclination to isolate oneself, to risk undermining one's political credibility for fear of being branded a "loony"--all this might not be admirable, but it is certainly understandable. Fisk's emerging doubts, however guarded and tentative, should be welcomed, for the question is not whether or not he is waffling, but finding out what happened. If we welcome his first step on the road to truth, we can ask him to be consistent and take the next step.[iii]

Fisk gives the impression of trying to allay his increasing doubts by pulling the well-worn but comforting blanket of "incompetence" over his head.[iv] This is the last refuge of the denier of conspiracies, for it is undeniably true that government officials -- as much as, or more than others -- often produce disasters through mere incompetence and "stupidity." But this argument only goes so far: taken to its logical extreme, it can be used to deny any and all purposeful action. That there are unintended consequences doesn't mean that there are no intended ones. This becomes painfully obvious when Fisk writes:

"My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11."

The obvious objection to his last sentence is that the U.S. claim is not an error, but a lie. Surely Fisk understands that there's a difference between what a military spokesman claims and what he actually believes. After spending a lifetime listening to them he cannot possibly believe them honest but dimwitted. Similarly, his assertion that the administration has screwed up everything it has tried to do in the Middle East rests on the assumption that the stated reasons for its intervention were the real reasons. (Or else that he has discerned what the 'real' reasons are, but that they, too, conflict with what Cheney-Bush have brought about.) The poor man is suffering; he would like to be able to get back to sleep, but the incompetence comforter isn't going to succeed in shutting out the light. He would like to believe it "a clincher," but he already knows that it isn't.

The End

-------

Notes

[i] Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11 (August 2007) Here’s the first paragraph of Fisk’s article:

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver."

For an open letter responding to Fisk’s article see H.Fenton: Open Letter to Robert Fisk re 911 Truth or Conspiracy, published on 911blogger.com.

[ii] Cockburn still believes in the Warren Commission and its 'magic bullet.' He makes his political motives quite clear: "These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx..." a fact he deplores. If they had they would have been able to resist the "diffuse, peripatic (sic) conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly "rogue" agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list."
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html

As he makes very clear, his refusal to examine the evidence is rooted in his a priori view that everything can and ought to be explained in terms of Marxist theories of vast anonymous forces such as capitalist accumulation and the falling rate of profit. Conspiracies, he thinks, are more to the taste of "the libertarian and populist right" which "mistrusts government to a far greater degree than the left..." Obviously, after mastering Volume Three of Capital, one has no need of empirical evidence, even if Marx never did get around to writing his book on the State. Cockburn -- as well as Chomsky -- know in advance that all US presidents are all equally servants of ruling class interests and that therefore it wouldn't make any political sense to assassinate them, ergo an assassination is merely a fait diversr [current event], devoid of political significance, ergo the bullets all came from the sixth floor of the Book Depository. Cockburn also asks: What do we make of Osama taking credit for the attacks? That he's still on the CIA payroll?" The fact is that Osama explicitly denied having anything to do with the attacks and indeed condemned them. http://www.robert-fisk.com/usama_interview_ummat.htm After denying and condemning it publicly, he then is supposed to have made a private video, claiming credit for what he publicly denied, and condemned, and somehow allowed it to fall into the hands of the Americans.

[iii] He might begin by going back to his interview with Bin Laden, where he encountered a man seemingly cut off from what was happening in the world (he devoured a two-week old newspaper that Fisk was carrying in his backpack). Is it possible to reconcile that with the idea that such a man could have been the "mastermind" of this complicated and ramified plot. (He might also care to reread the interview with Bin Laden referred to above.

[iv] Cockburn goes him one better: After flinging the word "idiocy" against David Ray Griffin's claim that..."In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them," Cockburn goes on to claim: "A central characteristic of the conspiracists is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency. Many of them start with the racist premise--frequently voiced in as many words in their writings -- that "Arabs in caves" weren't capable of the mission."

It is hard to recognize in such gratuitous accusations of "idiocy" and "racism" any sign of genuine conviction or dedication to finding the truth. Rather such name calling appears to be a desperate attempt to discredit the motives of those who differ.

Iraq Documentary: No End in Sight - Willful? Incompetence

Charles Ferguson's new documentary on the (mis)handling of the aftermath of the US invasion Iraq is all the more powerful because the filmmaker supported the war. We begin with a helpful review by the New Yorker, Then a review in the form of a letter to a friend by Carl; and finally a very good review by the World Socialist Website (WSWS). In his intro to the Trotkist WSWS review, Carl helpfully explains why their "War for Oil" theory doesn't make sense. If they wanted the oil (or control of the oil) they wouldn't have destroyed the country.
Ronald
http://desip.igc.org

***

David Denby:

The New Yorker

August 2007

Review of No End in Sight

There isn’t much that’s factually new in “No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson’s extraordinary documentary about the American occupation of Iraq—at least, not for people who have kept up with the best reporting on the war and have read such books as “Fiasco,” by Thomas E. Ricks, and “The Assassins’ Gate,” by the New Yorker writer George Packer, who appears in the film. Yet we need to hear the story again and again, for no amount of rage and disbelief can turn what the Bush Administration did into someone else’s problem. The occupation is our problem, a dead eagle hanging around our necks. Though the facts in “No End in Sight” are well known, the movie is still a classic.

Modest and attentive and quietly outraged, this collection of interviews, news footage, and narrated history gathers weight and strength and delivers, in chronological order, an overwhelming pattern of folly: In the run-up to the invasion of March, 2003, and then in the early months of the occupation, all the people who actually knew anything about Iraq and the Middle East—anyone who had serious experience in military, intelligence, or reconstruction work—were either ignored or dismissed by the Department of Defense, with White House backing. They were then replaced by ignorant and inexperienced ideologues who refused to hear what the knowledgeable told them. Ferguson establishes the disastrous thinking around such turning points as the decision not to stop the looting that followed the invasion; the de-Baathification of the professional classes of Iraq; and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, which sent some half a million armed men into the streets. “No End in Sight” is an exposure of the psychopathology of power.

Ferguson earned a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T., but went into Web design, only to sell his company to Microsoft, in 1996. He is one of the new plutocrats (Andrew Jarecki, of “Capturing the Friedmans,” is another) who unaccountably refused to buy a vineyard in the Napa Valley and instead turned to filmmaking. He paid for the movie himself—it cost two million dollars—and hired some of the best talent he could find: the cinematographer Antonio Rossi, the composer Peter Nashel, and the documentary producer Alex Gibney, who advised him to hold down the rhetoric and build up the interview subjects so that they become real characters. No better counsel has ever been given to a first-time director and writer. Despite the often gruesome subject, this is an exceptionally elegant-looking film, and it provides what can only be called sensuous rewards. It’s necessary for us to see, and feel, how utterly torn up Baghdad and Falluja and other sites in Iraq are. And it’s moving to see the faces and hear the voices of the losers in the policy wars, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who makes it clear, in his terse and guarded way, that he and his boss, Colin Powell, got exactly nowhere whenever they offered sane advice; General Jay Garner, the first American proconsul in Iraq, who was replaced by the fatuous L. Paul Bremer, and wishes that he had been able to fight harder against Bremer’s decisions to disband the Iraqi military; and, most painfully, Colonel Paul Hughes, who was in touch with Iraqi officers commanding troops ready to maintain order in Baghdad, only to be shut down, from Washington, by Walter Slocombe, the senior adviser for national security and defense for the Coalition Provisional Authority. The madness continues: Slocombe, for example, still refuses, in an interview, to admit that the disbanding of the Army had anything to do with the insurgency. The bitterest revelation of “No End in Sight” is that the people who got it right are in agony, whereas the people who got it wrong are practically serene.
***


Letter from Carl:

Dear XXXXXX
I saw No end in sight yesterday. Yes, I knew that Ferguson was in favor of the war when it started, and still might have been in favor if it weren't for the systematic destruction of Iraq that followed US occupation. This is what he focusses on, rather single-mindedly, and the story is so astonishing that it presents a convincing case that the appalling destruction of the country is what was intended by Cheyney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz et al. I'm not sure he believes this, or would be willing to say it if he did. Yet the story he tells makes any other conclusion hard to believe. Over and over they were told (and the people who told them are interviewed) that dismantling the army, the police, the civili administration, would lead to a widespread insurgency, that making members of the Baath party unemployable would feed it, and leaving enormous ammunition dumps unguarded would help arm it (and those are just the highlights).
The inevitable question this film raises is that if you were intent on destroying Iraq could you have devised a better plan? The alternative view: "Stuff happens" is expressed by an insouciant Rumsfeld, denying, at a press conference, that there was anything to worry about.
Since I have long believed in the dictum; "Men intend the foreseeable consequences of their actions" most of this didn't come as a surprise to me, but the material about the CPA's allowing enormous weapons stores to fall into the hands of the "insurgents" was something I hadn't considered before, and lends a gruesomely hypocritical flavor to the slogan. "Support our troops."

I don't think this film will turn out to be a good investment. It must have cost rather a lot (including the expense of bodyguards in Iraq) and it doesn't try to appeal to the public in the way that Michael Moore apparently does. The audience at the Film Forum seemed to be intently watching, but with very little in the way of emotional reactions.

It is because he had hoped that the war would be a success, that his exposé of the step-by-step systematic destruction of the country we were supposed to be saving (or at least exploiting) is so powerful. The reviews are full of words like "astonishing," and "jaw-dropping." Here are a few excerpts:

staggering callousness and incompetence
calamitous errors

seemingly boundless behind-the-scenes ineptitude
a catalog of horrors so absurd and relentless it verges on farce, or Greek tragedy.

Time and again, Rumsfeld and company failed to consult and even actively ignored military strategists, postwar reconstruction experts and diplomats familiar with the region
the sheer scale and depth of this appalling failure la times

The knowledge and expertise of military, diplomatic and technical professionals was overridden by the ideological certainty of political loyalists. Republican Party operatives, including recent college graduates with little or no relevant experience, were put in charge of delicate and complicated administrative areas. Those who did not demonstrate lock-step fidelity to the White House line were ignored or pushed aside. nytimes

In general, ideology makes imbeciles of everyone caught in its grip. Time

No End in Sight," lays out the disastrous missteps of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The magnitude of the errors perpetrated by the Bush administration—ignorance, incompetence, arrogance, bad or nonexistent planning, cronyism and naiveté—can make you weep with anger. newsweek

presented in a concentrated dose, as this movie does, the raw facts are staggering. At some point, during a sequence about unguarded weapons depots that Iraqis raided, I wrote in my notepad, "This is unbelievable." Then there's the monetary waste, the low troop levels, the lack of suitable body armor for the troops, and Rumsfeld's haughty dismissal -- it's always Rumsfeld -- of why that armor's not there. It's as though the administration actively wanted this to go badly. boston globe

Carl

***

August 29, 2007

Carl introduces the WSWS review:

Although the reviewer naturally takes issue with Ferguson's politics (that we should learn from our mistakes when the time for the next war comes) as do I, she's very impressed by the film, as am I. Whether or not Ferguson wanted to raise the question of whether the chaos and destruction was intentional, his film does. The reviewer's phrase "willful incompetence" says it all. (By the way, this Trotskyist website is a believer in the 'war for oil' explanation, which is undermined by the way the occupation has played out. if they wanted to seize the oil resources, it made no sense to destroy the state apparatus, the army, and the police and leave munition dumps unguarded. They would want to get the place up and running so that they could exploit its wealth. This is what Wolfowitz & co. were talking about when they advertised that the whole thing could be financed by what we'd save by driving the cost of oil down. If they intended to exploit Iraq they wouldn't have destroyed it, but destroying it makes serves Israeli interests as well as those of the war party (creation of enemies.) --Carl

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org

WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews
No End In Sight: An establishment view of what went wrong
By Christie Schaefer
30 August 2007

Written and directed by Charles Ferguson
No End in Sight, the documentary by Charles Ferguson, opens and closes with a montage of images of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. From early, warm greetings of American troops by some Iraqis, through the consequent demolition of the country and many of its people, the descent into chaos is presented as a time-lapse sequence of mounting despair.
Ferguson, a former Brookings Institution fellow and co-founder of a software firm, is a liberal establishment figure who believes that the war in Iraq has gone horribly wrong. He makes clear in interviews that his purpose in making the film, which he financed himself, is to point out the mistakes made by the Bush administration, so that future administrations can carry out interventions more effectively.


Ferguson told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Unfortunately, it’s too late for Iraq. ... But this is not the last time America is going to go to war. This is not the last time where there will be a debate about what to do about a failed state or a dictator. I hope people come away with the understanding that war is sometimes necessary. And if you go to war, you’re going to have to do it very carefully and with humility.”


That being said, No End in Sight’s director goes about his work intelligently. He weaves news conferences and interviews with key players (those who were willing to talk with him) to reconstruct a time line of events in a comprehensible manner.
Ferguson presents a picture of almost breathtaking US shortsightedness. An even more catastrophic situation could only have been created, one gets the sense, if those involved had been actively working to bring about such a result. As it is, the willful incompetence and the disregarding of experts and eyewitnesses as to the conditions on the ground have helped create hellish conditions for an Iraqi population already rendered weak by over a decade of a lethal embargo and economic isolation.

Time and again, Ferguson notes, surprise decisions were made from Washington to be carried out by those in the field. Such decisions included the disbanding of the Iraqi army—whose former members were armed and knew where to procure further weapons (great caches of which were left unguarded). This took place in the midst of negotiations with the leaders of the army, which was beginning to prove its usefulness to the US in reining in some of the disorder. For the Americans, this decision proved especially damaging. This effectively deprived approximately 100,000 people of their livelihoods, starving their families and encouraging them to join the resistance.

Although this is not new territory, as much the same documentation can be found in Imperial Life in the Emerald City (Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Alfred Knopf, 2006) and other such books, Ferguson makes good use of his materials and successfully personalizes this war.

Most effective are the sections in which he directly questions the active players. The level of unpreparedness in the run-up to the war is astonishing. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, in charge of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, states that there was not so much as a telephone when she arrived in the Iraqi capital as head of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Her group spent the first weeks gathering such things as chairs for their office and trying to find the whereabouts of anyone who might have a clue as to the running of the place. Her situation was not atypical.

It is also revealed that at the time of George W. Bush’s “Bring it on” speech (July 2, 2003, almost four months after the invasion), only one in eight US Humvees were equipped with armor. Ferguson introduces us to a number of veterans of the war, disabled by being caught in their Humvees by IEDs. They share not only their own stories, but provide insight into what was occurring on the front lines.

The casual disregard of Bush and his administration (including Congress) for the people they were sending into combat is breathtaking. We are treated to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous answer to a soldier’s question as to why there was no armor and soldiers had to scrounge in landfills for extra metal to retrofit their Humvees, “You fight a war with the army you have.”

No End in Sight raises the issue of private contractors from two points of view. Again, indicating his own view of things, Ferguson first discusses the actual cost of the mercenaries as opposed to their efficiency; he also considers their overall behavior. Since the director’s concern is to indicate how such a war might be properly conducted, he shows us images of a fort built by local workers (being paid enough to support their families, and thereby given less reason to join the resistance) under the direction of US troops. Their fort cost approximately $200,000 and was completed in about six months. The film contrasts to this a fort being built by contractors, which cost ten times more and was uncompleted. In either case, it should be noted, the colonialist character of the occupation remains the same.


We also see more troubling images in a home movie made by a group of contractors in an armored vehicle. As they drive along a popular street, they level their guns and fire at anyone who follows them, amid whoops, racial slurs and loud country-and-western music. To them, it seems, this is nothing more than a playground. They are held neither to international nor military law, having been given a free pass to create mayhem.

Within definite limits, No End in Sight provides a starting point for understanding the disastrous character of Bush administration policy. Its simple layout and the almost hands-off interviewing style give a balanced picture of what has happened and why. Officials are condemned by the contradiction between their words and reality. Ferguson presents much valuable and harrowing material. His notion that such a neo-colonial adventure could be done ‘properly’ is what needs to be rejected.

Copyright 1998-2007
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

Jean Bricmont: Why Bush Will Get Away with Attacking Iran

Bricmont says Americans live in a totalitarian society -- from an Israeli perspective. What would we say from an American perspective?

As far as Israel is concerned, the United States is a de facto totalitarian society--no articulate opposition is acceptable. The U.S. Congress passes one pro-Israel or anti-Iran resolution after another with "Stalinist" majorities.

But the power of the Lobby is only one of his many points. His main point is that that normal political considerations do not apply to this administration. The fact that war against Iran is bad policy is not going to stop Bush. On the contrary, Bricmont leaves open the possibility of considering that the worse the results of such a war will be, the better that will satisfy Bush and Cheney. They are determined on a policy that will produce chaos, anarchy, destruction and suffering, there and here and everywhere.

In a preview of my comment below, I quibble with one of Bricmont's paragraphs where he attacks elements of the academic world.

[I don't blame the academic world or any other particular group for our current crisis. We're in a situation where the good guys, normal people wanting to live their lives in relative justice and peace are leaderless, and have been leaderless due to the success of the secret government's 60s assassinations of our natural leaders: JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm, and the resultant non appearance of those who would have normally followed. Into the vacuum moved Reagan, Bush Sr Bush Jr to the point where there is no difference between the secret and the public government. In a footnote, Clinton did as much as he could for the secret government from the Democratic side as in WTC 93 and Oklahoma City. --RB]

Ronald


http://desip.igc.org
***

September 4, 2007

www.counterpunch.org

When Wishful Thinking Replaces Resistance
Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran

By JEAN BRICMONT

Many people in the antiwar movement try to reassure themselves: Bush cannot possibly attack Iran. He does not have the means to do so, or, perhaps, even he is not foolish enough to engage in such an enterprise. Various particular reasons are put forward, such as: If he attacks, the Shiites in Iraq will cut the US supply lines. If he attacks, the Iranians will block the Straits of Ormuz or will unleash dormant terrorist networks worldwide. Russia won't allow such an attack. China won't allow it -- they will dump the dollar. The Arab world will explode.

All this is doubtful. The Shiites in Iraq are not simply obedient to Iran. If they don't rise against the United States when their own country is occupied (or if don't rise very systematically), they are not likely to rise against the US if a neighboring country is attacked. As for blocking the Straits or unleashing terrorism, this will just be another justification for more bombing of Iran. After all, a main casus belli against Iran is, incredibly, that it supposedly helps the resistance against U.S. troops in Iraq, as if those troops were at home there. If that can work as an argument for bombing Iran, then any counter-measure that Iran might take will simply "justify" more bombing, possibly nuclear. Iran is strong in the sense that it cannot be invaded, but there is little it can do against long range bombing, accompanied by nuclear threats.

Russia will escalate its military buildup (which now lags far behind the U.S. one), but it can't do anything else, and Washington will be only too glad to use the Russian reaction as an argument for boosting its own military forces. China is solely concerned with its own development and won't drop the dollar for non-economic reasons. Most Arab governments, if not their populations, will look favorably on seeing the Iranian shiite leadership humiliated. Those governments have sufficient police forces to control any popular opposition-- after all, that is what they managed to do after the attack on Iraq.

With the replacement of Chirac by Sarkozy, and the near-complete elimination of what was left of the Gaullists (basically through lawsuits on rather trivial matters), France has been changed from the most independent European country to the most poodlish (this was in fact the main issue in the recent presidential election, but it was never even mentioned during the campaign). In France, moreover, the secular "left" is, in the main, gung-ho against Iran for the usual reasons (women, religion). There will be no large-scale demonstrations in France either before or after the bombing. And, without French support, Germany--where the war is probably very unpopular -- can always be silenced with memories of the Holocaust, so that no significant opposition to the war will come from Europe (except possibly from its Muslim population, which will be one more argument to prove that they are "backward", "extremist", and enemies of our "democratic civilization").

All the ideological signposts for attacking Iran are in place. The country has been thoroughly demonized because it is not nice to women, to gays, or to Jews. That in itself is enough to neutralize a large part of the American "left". The issue of course is not whether Iran is nice or not ­according to our views -- but whether there is any legal reason to attack it, and there is none; but the dominant ideology of human rights has legitimized, specially in the left, the right of intervention on humanitarian grounds anywhere, at any time, and that ideology has succeeded in totally sidetracking the minor issue of international law.

Israel and its fanatical American supporters want Iran attacked for its political crimes--supporting the rights of the Palestinians, or questioning the Holocaust. Both U.S. political parties are equally under the control of the Israel lobby, and so are the media. The antiwar movement is far too preoccupied with the security of Israel to seriously defend Iran and it won't attack the real architects of this coming war--the Zionists-- for fear of "provoking antisemitism". Blaming Big Oil for the Iraq war was quite debatable, but, in the case of Iran, since the country is about to be bombed but not invaded, there is no reason whatsoever to think that Big Oil wants the war, as opposed to the Zionists. In fact, Big Oil is probably very much opposed to the war, but it is as unable to stop it as the rest of us.

As far as Israel is concerned, the United States is a de facto totalitarian society--no articulate opposition is acceptable. The U.S. Congress passes one pro-Israel or anti-Iran resolution after another with "Stalinist" majorities. The population does not seem to care. But if they did, but what could they do? Vote? The electoral system is extremely biased against the emergence of a third party and the two big parties are equally under Zionist influence.

The only thing that might stop the war would be for Americans themselves to threaten their own government with massive civil disobedience. But that is not going to happen. A large part of the academic left long ago gave up informing the general public about the real world in order to debate whether Capital is a Signifier or a Signified, or worry about their Bodies and their Selves, while preachers tell their flocks to rejoice at each new sign that the end of the world is nigh. Children in Iran won't sleep at night, but the liberal American intelligentsia will lecture the ROW (rest of the world) about Human Rights. In fact, the prevalence of the "reassuring arguments" cited above proves that the antiwar movement is clinically dead. If it weren't, it would rely on its own forces to stop war, not speculate on how others might do the job.

[This is the one paragraph that I disagree with. I don't blame the academic world or any other particular group for our current crisis. We're in a situation where the good guys, normal people wanting to live their lives in relative justice and peace are leaderless, and have been leaderless due to the sucess of the secret government's 60s assassinations of our natural leaders: JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm, and the resultant non appearance of those who would have normally followed. Into the vaccuum moved Reagan, Bush Sr Bush Jr to the point where there is no differnce between the secret and the public government. In a footnote, Clinton did as much as he could for the secret governnent from the Democratic side as in WTC 93 and Oklahoma City. --RB]

Meanwhile, an enormous amount of hatred will have been spewed upon the world. But in the short term, it may look like a big Western "victory", just like the creation of Israel in 1948; just like the overthrow of Mossadegh by the CIA in 1953; just like the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine seemed to be a big German victory after the French defeat at Sedan in 1870. The Bush administration will long be gone when the disastrous consequences of that war will be felt.

PS: This text is not meant to be a prophecy, but a call to (urgent) action. I'll be more than happy if facts prove me wrong.

Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium and is a member of the Brussels Tribunal. His new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, is published by Monthly Review Press. He can be reached at bricmont@fyma.ucl.ac.be.

WSJ: Hold the line Bernanke

When was the last time you agreed with a WSJ editorial, of all things? But when they're right they're right.
Except of course for their last paragraph where they call for tax cuts, by which they mean forcing the middle and lower classes to pay an even greater proportion of the taxes that are collected. Of course tax cuts for the middle and lower classes should be enacted and the money raised from those with more than say, $5 million of net income. Would that be fair?
Check out the useful graphs (available on the Web) which I've seen on the net but not the NYTimes which only printed a confused and misleading version. One look at the graph of the price of houses should make clear how perversely asleep were the regulators. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to recognize that something should be done -- as in raising interest rates -- when housing prices go to say 10 times their historical averages.
Ronald

http://desip.igc.org


Wall Street Journal
August 31, 2007
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Song of Bernanke
August 31, 2007; Page A8

And so did a cry of lamentation arise from the multitudes unto Bernanke: Spare us, Oh Lord, from the wrath of subprime.

From the House of Countrywide wailing was heard, from the land of Dodd and Schumer there was gnashing of polls, and from the Kingdoms of Bear, Lehman and Cramer the rending of fine Italian garments: Set your righteous hand, glorious and merciful Fed, against our enemies among the rating agencies, the risk-averse and short-sellers. In your power and majesty, you need only say the word and interest rates shall fall, liquidity like manna shall descend from the skies, and easy credit shall flow once again across the parched and barren land.

Try as we might, we can't find this passage in the Old Testament. But you wouldn't know it from the increasingly desperate pleas for Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve to save the economy, if not all of mankind, from the August credit crunch. Judging from the media incantations, you'd think Chairman Bernanke could simply cut the fed funds rate and credit worries would crumble like Jericho.


We think, instead, that Mr. Bernanke has been doing well these last few weeks by resisting this belief in the Fed as Yahweh. The central bank has been doing good work in its role as a financial system plumber, plugging leaks as they spring up, and in reassuring banks that its liquidity window is open. Mr. Bernanke has done especially well to resist being bullied by Wall Street, the homebuilders, automakers and easy-money editorialists into opening the broader credit spigots. When he speaks at the Fed's annual Jackson Hole retreat today, Chairman Bernanke -- who favors transparency -- has a chance to explain how the central bank contributed to the current problems, and why it can't be anyone's savior.

Mr. Bernanke is in part a hostage to the legacy of the Alan Greenspan era, when the Fed seemed to ride to the rescue during every financial crisis. This is the famous "Greenspan put," which is as much legend as reality. The current market and media pleas to Mr. Bernanke are in part an attempt to get the new Fed chief to behave as if it is something of a guarantee. But the Fed doesn't have the same flexibility now, in part because its reckless policy in the early part of this decade helped produce the credit excesses we are now trying to work off.

As Dallas Fed Governor Richard Fisher has candidly acknowledged, the central bank kept interest rates too low for too long. For much if not all of 2003 through 2005, short-term interest rates were below the observed rate of inflation. This is a subsidy for debt creation. And debt certainly was created, flowing into the housing markets and causing a boom in prices out of all historic proportion. The first chart suggests the magnitude of the housing bubble relative to median family income.

The same incentive for debt fed the boom on Wall Street, where creative minds found all sorts of new ways to package and sell mortgage assets. There was nothing corrupt in most of this, and given the low cost of credit it made sense at the time. Everyone loved the boom while it lasted, except that home prices can't increase at 10% to 20% a year forever. The Fed was feeding inflationary expectations that hadn't been seen since the late 1970s. The price of gold is one rough proxy for those expectations, and the second chart suggests the magnitude of its mistake.


It hardly matters, as some claim in defense of the Fed, that officially measured inflation only rose to 3.4% from 1.9% from 2003-2005. What matters is the magnitude of the increase and altered expectations. The U.S. didn't arrive at 13% inflation in a single leap during the 1970s. It got there step by step, as the Fed was called upon again and again to save a sputtering economy with easy credit, and it eventually lost all credibility. That's one risk the Fed faces now as it confronts the lamentations of the bubble boys. A reckless reflation runs the risk of bigger problems down the road if it results in a global loss of confidence in Mr. Bernanke, or in the dollar as a store of value.

The Fed's first obligation isn't to reflate the bubble but is to protect the larger economy and especially price stability. One economic reality today is that the Fed's debt subsidy led to a misallocation of resources into real estate and certain debt instruments that is in the process of being worked off. The losses are real, and someone will have to pay them. Housing prices will fall in some markets for some time to come. There is no joy in saying so, but this is what happens when credit is no longer subsidized and markets change their risk assessments.

One question looking forward is how much the housing recession will affect consumer spending and thus the overall economy. The same commentators who said only two months ago that all was well now say that housing will tank everything if the Fed does nothing. Yet the economy entered this period on an upswing, as yesterday's upward revision of second quarter GDP to 4%, from the preliminary 3.4%, shows. Corporate profits rose smartly, and last week's industrial production numbers were good. Weekly jobless claims have been climbing, but the overall labor market has been healthy.

The Fed may well have to act if the economy does begin to stumble. But if that happens, the Fed isn't the only or even the best policy lever. Fiscal policy is also available, which means the Bush Administration and Congress should be considering another tax cut. A tax cut could revive incentives for risk-taking among those feeling burned by the housing fallout. The federal deficit is heading down to 1% of GDP, and nothing would be worse for tax receipts than a recession.

We realize tax cutting is taboo in today's Washington, but if the Presidential candidates aren't considering a tax cut proposal, they should be. The entreaties of Wall Street notwithstanding, the Federal Reserve is no miracle worker.

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