Is Obama AWOL on mortgage relief? Schneiderman replies

Is Obama serious about re-election? If so, why doesn't he show us?
by Ronald Bleier

  Daily News headline

Obama’s mortgage unit is AWOL

New York Daily News,  April 18, 2012,

MIKE GECAN AND ARNIE GRAF

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-18/news/31357043_1_schneiderman-mortgage-fraud-mortgage-unit/2

The title of the New York Daily News op-ed tells much of the depressing story. Almost three months after President Obama’s announced his latest plan to relieve struggling homeowners, two activists sought out New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who was appointed by President Obama to co-chair a new mortgage relief task force.

Mindful of Schneiderman’s reputation for standing up to pressure from the Obama administration, the authors of the op-ed, Mike Gecan and Arnie Graf, were among many who hoped that at long last, the president was indeed serious about “speeding assistance to homeowners.”  The authors remind us that there are reportedly 12 million homeowners who are a collective $700 billion underwater. We also learn that this latest task force, called the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities Working Group, is the sixth such mortgage task force created since Obama took office in 2009.

Their sad, but unsurprising, finding is that Obama’s use of the word “speed” is belied by contrary information. Interviewing Schneiderman in early March and then again in early April, the authors learned that the attorney general had traveled especially to Washington twice to oversee his task force responsibilities. Both times he found that there was “no office, no phones, no staff and no executive director for his task force.” The authors report that the total staff hired in all five previous groups was ONE.

As we stand in awe at the administration’s brazen chutzpah, it would seem difficult to exaggerate the implications of Obama’s inaction on an issue so fraught for the economy and for his re-election--but I’ll try. Obama’s handling of the mortgage issue is part of a larger pattern of willful neglect and is consistent with policies that suggest little or no White House interest in spurring the larger economy.

Chief among those polices has been President Obama’s continuation of the ruinous tax cuts of the previous administration.  Writing for Z Magazine, (April 2012) Jack Rasmus points out that Obama cut $300+ billion in taxes in 2009 and another $802 billion in 2010 (who knew?). At the same time, before the advent of the Occupy movement, he used his bully pulpit to echo Republican calls for austerity and deep budget cuts. (Among all the damaging reductions to non-military spending overseen by the president, is it too frivolous to point to current plans  to strip PBS of significant funding for some of its most popular cultural and political programming?)

A depressed economy predictably means trouble for the incumbent and his party. Thus the Obama administration’s pursuit in early 2009 of a relatively small stimulus designed to largely peter out by the end of 2010 and riven with tax cuts suggests that the large losses of Democratic Congressional seats in the fall 2010 elections may very well have been a case of failure by design.

Could it be that Obama is only pretending to be a Democrat? Is it possible, as Oliver Stone charged in January 2012 (in connection with Obama’s wars and his attacks on Constitutionally protected freedoms), that the president is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing?

If Obama is not really the sincere and focused Democrat that we supported, that could explain why we’re so disappointed and dispirited and why current polls suggest that his lead over Mitt Romney, the presumptive  Republican nominee, is minimal at best?

Schneiderman responds. 

Daily News headline

Attacking the foreclosure crisis

New York's attorney general pushes back on recent reports

 By Eric Schneiderman 

 New York Daily News April 26, 2012,

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/attacking-foreclosure-crisis-article-1.1067516

A week after the publication of the Gecan and Graff op-ed, Attorney General Schneiderman replied in the same forum with his own op-ed in the New York Daily News entitled, “Attacking the foreclosure crisis.”  Schneiderman’s rebuttal might have reminded readers that in their article, Gecan and Graf called on the attorney general, who they emphasized  “has acted boldly and honorably,” to resign from Obama’s “cynical arrangement.” They appealed to him to “go back to working effectively with fellow attorneys general in Delaware, Massachusetts and Nevada.”

Without specifying the authors by name, or mentioning their op-ed, Schneiderman explained that he was writing to correct recent “mischaracterizations” of the mortgage backed working group. Schneiderman reminded readers that  $7 trillion was lost in household wealth when the housing bubble burst.

As evidence of the president’s purposeful action, Schneiderman pointed to the administration’s request for an additional $55 million “to ensure that we have the resources to do a thorough job.” But this assertion, if anything, seemed to weaken his case. First of all, the appropriation must get through the House of Representatives, and if past is prologue, a wink and a nod from the White House will be more than sufficient, if necessary, to ensure that the Republican led House won’t pass such a measure even if they trouble to take it up. Moreover, if Obama was serious about adding such funds, why weren't these funds mentioned in January?

More directly rebutting Gecan and Graff's information, Schneiderman claimed  “more than 50 attorneys, investigators and analysts have already been deployed to support our investigations, with many more on the way.” Yet, once again, Schneiderman’s assertion raises more questions than it might seem to answer.

Skeptical readers might wonder if these new personnel actually exist, and if they do, have they been specifically attached to Schneiderman’s task force?  If so, were they deployed only in the last week, or have they been working on the issue for weeks if not months? In the latter case, why then did Schneiderman tell Gecan and Graf a different story in March and April?

In his op-ed, Schneiderman references an additional $15 million in funds from the “settlement” that his office succeeded in obtaining “to expand legal services and housing counseling” that were otherwise set to expire on April 1. Now, he writes, these services will be available for three more years.

Readers could be forgiven for wondering if the $15 million in presumably new money was sufficient to get Schneiderman on board to front for a president who once more has shown little action. Obama’s eloquence seems intended to mask his bewildering indifference to the trillions in homeowner losses and the consequent effects on the larger economy.

The episode is a reminder that an inspiring element of the Kennedy administration was the sense that it intended to unleash the talents and energy of the most dedicated Americans in many fields, not least in politics.  Today, as we head deeper into election season, we watch while President Obama seems to block the efforts of a spirited public servant and turn him into a party apparatchik.

Unfortunately it will take more than ringing pronouncements to convince us that the president and attorney general Schneiderman will make much progress as they attack the foreclosure crisis.

***

NB: For a distinctly less flattering analysis of Schneiderman’s  independence on the mortgage crisis issue, see nakedcapitalism. com, April 23, 2012..

"The Ministry of Truth Speaks: American Prospect Tries to Pass Off Mortgage Turncoat Schneiderman as Hero"

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/the-ministry-of-truth-speaks-american-prospect-tries-to-pass-off-mortgage-turncoat-schneiderman-as-hero.html

***

Obama, Zionism and Arbitrary detention (the NDAA)

Early in 2011 a colleague in a political chat group wrote that President Obama was a more virulent form of Bush. After some reflection, I concluded that my colleague wasn’t exaggerating; he was right in thinking that Obama was more dangerous than Bush because he was institutionalizing some of the worst policies of the previous administration. A striking example of President Obama’s ability to enact dangerous legislation is his quiet signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2011.

Obama’s last minute maneuver successfully minimized press coverage, as was its evident intention. Apparently the administration did not wish to highlight a contentious provision of the law which authorized the military to arrest anyone, including U.S. citizens and legal residents, and detain them, possibly for life if they were suspected of “substantially supporting” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.”[i] The effect of the new legislation was to override the jurisdiction of the FBI, apparently in order to skirt the due process that would normally be accorded a detainee if the local police or the Justice Department were involved.[ii]

It’s worth emphasizing that granting the President the power of arbitrary arrest means an end to habeas corpus, the legal right of a defendant to demand that government present evidence justifying the arrest, an indispensable barrier to the tyranny of a police state. In addition, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out (“The Man Who Shot Habeas Corpus,” The Nation, January 23, 2012), President Obama’s New Year’s Eve signature has also rendered a dead letter the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 intended to exclude the military from domestic law enforcement.

In the weeks before a bi-partisan Congress passed the NDAA into law by a Senate vote of 93-7 and by 283-186 in the House, President Obama threatened to veto the bill. Many were at first misled by this veto threat, thinking that Obama intended to defend the due process rights of U.S. citizens and others.  However, as it turned out, there was no such intention, and the President signed the bill with only minor changes, leaving its draconian and alarming provisions in full force.[iii]

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones of Infowars.com noted that the drive to remove longstanding protections came from the White House, not Congress. They point to a floor speech by Democrat co-sponsor Senator Carl Levin who said that it was the Obama administration “that demanded the removal of language that would have precluded Americans from being subject to indefinite detention.”

“The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved…and the administration asked us to remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section,” said Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee.[iv]

President Obama’s sweeping activism on this and other issues would seem to put into question conventional media characterization of him as a weak, compromising, reflective, sober, cautious, moderate executive. On the contrary, on this and many other national security and domestic priorities, he seems focused, manipulative, ruthless, even driven. In any event it may be useful to highlight the means by which the President has succeeded in implementing and “legalizing” such a radical policy as arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.

As the leader of the Democratic Party President Obama can push through extremist legislation that a Republican president might find difficult or impossible to enact if only because of partisan politics. Obama’s chief enabler on the Senate side seems to be his reliable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who, at least in front of the TV cameras, never seems embarrassed by whatever may be demanded by the White House.

Less obvious but arguably just as important in enabling the relatively smooth passage of “anti-terrorist” legislation is the Israel Lobby—aka the Zionist Lobby or the Jewish Lobby. It was this same pro-Israel, anti-Muslim force that infuses the mainstream media as well as making up many of the top levels of the last three administrations that assisted in producing the unpopular and disastrous Iraq war. Since the Bush’s administration’s objective was regime change in the most powerful Arab  counterweight to Israeli area hegemony, they could count on the votes of even such liberal Senators as Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, John Kerry and others for the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution.

Similarly, since the targets of the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA policy are understood to be Muslim “terrorists,” policy makers in the Obama administration presumably considered that no perceptible hue and cry would materialize despite the apparent unconstitutionality of the law and its manifest danger to basic freedoms.

Powerful grassroots loyalty to Israel was anecdotally brought home to me not long ago in discussion with a Zionist friend when I argued that President Obama’s decision to employ drone attacks to assassinate an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki and his 21 year old son in October 2011 in Yemen, were criminal acts and a disastrous precedent. My friend responded: “Well, you know, Ron, you and I have different views on these drone attacks.”

I gathered that in my friend’s view such people as had been targeted by the Obama administration —American citizens or not—were to be regarded as “terrorists,” since by definition they were engaged in a war against Israeli as well as U.S. interests. Thus in such cases, the President should be applauded for overriding Constitutional norms.

Author and activist Naomi Wolf expressed a good deal of the anger and frustration of many who felt betrayed by this extraordinary power grab. In a blog post she argued that history showed that there would be payback to those legislators who supported such autocratic legislation, since it was likely that they would be among the first to suffer its consequences.[v]

It might be comforting to find moral shelter in the prospect of such just retribution, but I suspect that an equally persuasive case could be made that as often as not the perpetrators and handmaidens of such villainy go unpunished and live out their lives in with dignity. If, however, in this particular case, Ms Wolf should prove correct, such a turnabout would require a very messy revolution, the likes of which could be expected to shatter many innocent lives along the way.

                  

Similarly, it would seem fruitless to remonstrate with Zionists—those who believe that a Jewish state should supplant the former Palestine—and argue that support for Israel is a pernicious influence on the politics, and on the democratic freedoms enjoyed for two centuries under the U.S. Constitution.  Such arguments might fall on deaf ears because it would be understood that measures like the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA are directed at those perceived to be Israel’s enemies. These enemies could include many who now are free to protest what they perceive as Israeli oppression. If legalization of indefinite detention in the U.S. helps to moderate or suppress such protests, it is, from their perspective, all to the good. Supporters of Israel are not the targets of the NDAA; they will not be the victims.

***

Postscript

As I was preparing the reflections above for distribution, I came across Glenn Greenwald’s blog that happened to be on a not dissimilar topic: the victims of the U.S.’s civil liberties assaults.[vi] Greenwald has no hesitation in identifying the victims: they are, he writes,  “racial, ethnic and religious minorities: specifically, Muslims (both American Muslims and foreign nationals).” Interestingly he also points as I do to those who believe that they benefit from these assaults, although he is careful not to name them. Choosing his words carefully, he refers to  “those who dominate American political debates” and he explains that they “perceive, more or less accurately, that they are not directly endangered (at least for now) by this assault on core freedoms and Endless War.”

I thought it was remarkable that one of the most outspoken and widely read Left-wing bloggers seems to feel that it is the better part of valor not to specify Zionists, the Jewish Lobby, the Israel Lobby, the Zionist Lobby.   Perhaps he feels that he would not come out the winner from the backlash that such naming of names could produce.  In that case, his perception could be another indication of Zionist power. In any event, I respect his understanding of his self-interest.

Such reflections lead to consideration of such high profile figures on the Left as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis and others who, as far as I can tell, to this day seem to deny the power of the Israel Lobby to influence and direct U.S. Middle East policy.[vii] I gather that the reason for their position is that they view the U.S. as the mighty imperialist bully, the great font of evil. Thus, by definition a tiny client state like Israel cannot dominate the greater power in any meaningful regard.

And what are we to make of those pundits on the Left who smell the whiff of anti-Semitism in those who point to—or even mention—the existence of Jewish power (the title of a book it so happens by journalist and author, J.J. Goldberg)? Such Leftists seem to be acting as assistant enforcers, attempting to ensure that such notions are not permitted within the borders of serious policy debate.

In a recent article on “The Mess in the Middle East,” (Middle East Policy, Winter 2011) (former) Ambassador (to Saudi Arabia) Chas W. Freeman Jr. cited the 20 standing ovations, which a special session of Congress in May 2011 presented to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In his speech, Netanyahu had openly rebuked President Obama for his “1967 Border Plan” which had outlined a proposal to resolve key differences between Israel and the Palestinians. Freeman was outraged at the “spectacle of members of Congress bouncing up and down like so many obsequious yo-yos” which he saw as “irrefutable proof of Israel’s hammerlock on U.S. policy.” 

           

A measure of the depths to which U.S. political culture has fallen is that those who dominate American political debates were heartened, not dismayed, by the Congressional display.        

---

[i] See Alexander Cockburn “The Man Who Shot Habeas Corpus,” The Nation January 23, 2012, who points out that “associated forces” “can mean anything, as can the phrase, “directly supported,” referencing those alleged in support of terror groups. The substance of “directly supported,” writes Cockburn, “will adjust itself to the whim of any ingenious prosecutor.”

[ii] See Chris Hedges on Democracy Now (January 17, 2012) for press reports that the arbitrary detention provisions were opposed by elements of the security establishment “the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence.” “Journalist Chris Hedges Sues Obama Admin over Indefinite Detention of U.S. Citizens Approved in NDAA,”

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/17/journalist_chris_hedges_sues_obama_admin

Similarly, according to a New York Times editorial (“Politics Over Principal,” December 15, 2011) “Nearly every top American official with knowledge and experience spoke out against the provisions, including the attorney general, the defense secretary, the chief of the F.B.I., the secretary of state, and the leaders of intelligence agencies.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/politics-over-principle.html?_r=4

[iii] Drilling down into the comments section of Naomi Wolf’s article—see Note 5 below—Roger Mattingly on January 1, 2012 illuminated the weasel wording of the arbitrary detention provisions of the NDAA. He explains that while the bill seemingly inoculates U.S. citizens since it does not REQUIRE detention in those cases, yet it is PERMITTED.

[iv] “Obama’s NDAA Signing Statement Is Meaningless,” http://www.infowars.com/obamas-ndaa-signing-statement-is-meaningless/

[v]Naomi Wolf,  “How Congress is Signing its Own Arrest Warrants in the NDAA Citizen Arrest Bill,” December 12, 2011.  http://naomiwolf.org/2011/12/how-congress-is-signing-its-own-arrest-warrants-in-the-ndaa-citizen-arrest-bill/

[vi] Glenn Greenwald, “”Who Are the Victims of Civil Liberties Assaults and Endless War?” January 16, 2012.  http://www.salon.com/2012/01/16/who_are_the_victims_of_civil_liberties_assaults_and_endless_war/singleton/

[vii]  An informed observer pointed out nuance among the three. He writes that while Chomsky dismisses the notion of a powerful Israel Lobby, “Bennis and Finkelstein  minimize its influence although Bennis had acknowledged that an attack on Iran would be a war for Israel and Finkelstein has admitted that the Lobby does shape US policy regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict but, ahistorically, believes it has ‘little influence on overall US policy in the Middle East.'”

Saving Iraq:? Allawi, Hitchens, Davies, etc

Saving Iraq?

The title of the December 28, 2011 New York Times op-ed by three Iraqi politicians: “How to Save Iraq From Civil War” (see below) and the editor’s pull quote: “Unless America pushes for a unity government, violence will destroy us,” ably summarizes the gist. It would seem that in order to get their op-ed printed, the authors had to pretend that that they believe that the U.S. actively wants Iraq to succeed. But as they well know that is not correct on at least three counts, the third being recent history.

First: Would a successful and independent Iraq be good for Israel?

Second: Would an independent Iraq cohere with the permanent war agenda of Bush-Cheney-Obama?

The relevant history

The history of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 has been one of great accomplishment from the occupiers’ point of view: the sectarian division of the country in order to insure civil war and the ongoing destruction of the country. Why else was Paul Bremer sent to head the occupation forces  in 2003 other than to oversee the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the de-Bathification Program, ensuring that  there would be no competent people to promote  the civil life of the country?  He was also  well-placed to oversee the dirty tricks and special forces operations which were responsible for the instability and sectarian warfare—which continues to this day.

Just this  week (12.22.11)  a series of coordinated terror attacks killed more than  60 people. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16297707)

Coordination in these cases is often the signature of the kind of competence and resource rich assets associated with professional operatives of  agencies like the CIA, known to the corporate (and almost all of the alternative) media as Al-Qaeda (al-CIA duh). Link TV, a cable TV news program in Arabic with English translation, interviewed a man in the Baghdad  street who asked in connection with this latest attack:  “Who wants to kill the Iraqi people? We need to know.”  

Questions to the late lamented Christopher Hitchens regarding the destruction of the Iraqi Museum of Antiquities in the early days of the U.S. invasion evidently hit a nerve because he answered uncharacteristically defensively (or maybe not so uncharacteristically when it came to Iraq) in his otherwise  brilliant memoir Htich-22 with a reply approximating Donald Rumsfeld’s response to similar questions: “Stuff happens.”

As good a writer and controversialist as Hitchens was, I couldn’t help noticing that he avoided evidence that  U.S. forces had the wherewithal to prevent looting had this been their mission; that they  were warned at very high levels months before the invasion to secure the Museum and other treasures; that military commanders on the ground made a point of allowing if not encouraging  mobs to trash the Museum and many other critical sites such as the University, government buildings, key infrastructure installations, etc.

One might have hoped that Hitchens’s enthusiasm for removing Saddam would have been tempered by clear evidence that regime change was only part of the larger purpose of destroying, for a very long time, the possibility of civil life for the Iraqi people. This was achieved largely by promoting civil war in Iraq, and torpedoing reconstruction, and ditto reconciliation. Similarly Hitchens gracelessly acknowledged and ineptly defended the charge that the Iraq invasion was a giant step towards permanent war.

Nicholas J.S. Davies, author of Blood on our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq in a timely nine-page summary of his book for Z Magazine  (January 2012) explains that it wasn’t the U.S. “Surge” that reduced the violence in Iraq. He writes: “In fact, U.S. occupation forces and their allies were the perpetrators of most of the violence in Iraq throughout the war, and their invasion and occupation of Iraq was the cause of all of it. It was therefore entirely possible at any point for the occupation forces to achieve a reduction in violence by scaling back their own operations, as they finally did after the ’Surge’ in 2008.”

Davies’s testimony helps us understand how to read the very last sentence of the NYT op-ed:

“Unless America acts rapidly to help create a successful unity government, Iraq is doomed.”

***

“ How to Save Iraq From Civil War,”New York Times, 12.28,11

By AYAD ALLAWI, OSAMA AL-NUJAIFI and RAFE AL-ESSAWI

Ayad Allawi, leader of the Iraqiya coalition, was Iraq’s prime minister from 2004-5. Osama al-Nujaifi is the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament. Rafe al-Essawi is Iraq’s finance minister.

Ronald Bleier: Malthus and 7 Billion: Three Letters to the Media

 In October 2011 I posted a letter to the New York Review of Books regarding media references to Thomas Malthus in connection with world population reaching the 7 billion mark. In the end, I wrote three such letters to the NY media. Afterwards I decided to post all three letters within a little essay (about 3,500 words), which touched on population related issues. I also included reference to Malthus’s theory that the principle of population was the fundamental driving force that underlay the persistence of war in human civilization.

The article: "Malthus and 7 Billon: Three Letters to the Media" is available on the International Society of Malthus website:

http://desip.igc.org/malthus/Malthus7billion3Letters.html

***

 In the following segment from my article I reflect on the broad, wall-to-wall, political spectrum arrayed against Malthus’s teachings.

Excerpt from “Malthus and 7 Billon: Three Letters to the Media”

Malthus Excoriated

 

Among the more powerful institutions arrayed against Malthusian views would seem to be the pro-natalist Catholic Church. To this day the Church opposes most forms of birth control and advocates unrestricted births and tacitly promotes the repression of women. One can surmise that their authoritarian and patriarchal policies derive from the perception that maintaining the immiseration and illiteracy of so many helps to promote the continuance of their wealth, power and influence.

Ironically or otherwise, the Catholic Church is joined in its refusal to address the consequences of nature’s limits by many on the left including socialists, Marxists and many anarchists who believe that considerations of ever clearer signs of nature’s backlash is not the proper way to look at the problem. Rather they are disposed to believe in “systemic” approaches, with each sectarian element favoring one “system” or another. They tend to start from the fundamental notion that by some means or another—nature, God, etc.—there will always be sufficient supply of food and the means of subsistence. The answer they believe is the implementation of fair and just systems of distribution.

Yet, from a Malthusian perspective, too often such “systems” seem to ignore the day-to-day costs of production and distribution and the requirement to somehow pay for those costs. Many seem to ignore the imperatives of scarcity that drive powerful individuals and institutions to secure the interest of elites at the expense of the rest.  In Malthusian theory, such traits evident in the rich and powerful as unrestrained selfishness, ruthlessness and unmotivated malignancy are symptoms rather than the fundamental causes of evil and misery.

Karl Marx saw Malthus’s teachings as a threat to his own desiderata of a more or less equal per capita division of resources and he favored a system outlawing private property in favor of communal ownership. In all his writings, Marx only devoted about a page of vituperation to Malthus, excoriating him as a plagiarist and as a stooge of the privileged, especially the landed gentry. Marx’s collaborator, Fredrich Engels, at least had the self-assurance to address the central issue Malthus raised of limits to growth. According to Engels, Malthus was proved wrong by the very existence of the lands west of the Mississippi River, which, he believed, demonstrated that humanity would never be bound by an insufficiency of resources.

***

Read More

http://desip.igc.org/malthus/Malthus7billion3Letters.html

Hisham Matar: Who said Gaddafi had to go?

Readers may be interested in the views of American born Libyan author Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men, Anatomy of a Disappearance) on whether or not Gaddafi had to go. Matar responded in the London Review of Books to Hugh Roberts's long (12,000+ words) article
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go
with the letter below in the 1 December 2011 edition.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n23/letters
I understood that Gaddafi was guilty of any number of crimes but I had little idea of the charges that Matar makes against him.
I gather the alleged crimes of Gaddafi are still a controversial issue on the left.
***

Who said Gaddafi had to go?
Letter by Hisham Matar

For 42 years Libyans endured the contempt and violence of Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. It subjugated the press, closed down unions and weakened the independence of the courts. It dismantled civic institutions and hanged students by the neck from the gates of the university. Executions of critics in public squares and sports stadiums were broadcast on national television. In a country with a population smaller than that of the City of London, tens of thousands disappeared or were imprisoned. Journalists who dared break the silence were found dead.

It is extraordinary how in his very long essay Hugh Roberts excludes any mention of this history (LRB, 17 November). It makes one wonder whether he knows the country at all. His objection to Nato’s support of the Libyan revolution causes him to lament the end of the dictatorship. With an air of ethnocentric contempt he disregards the will of the Libyan people. Indeed, he even disapproves of calling the deposed leader a dictator, and offers Gaddafi’s comical Green Book the respectability of a serious political theory that, according to Roberts, ‘drew many ordinary Libyans into a sort of participation in public affairs’. Really? What ‘sort of participation’ was possible when every independent agency and organisation was subdued? Although Roberts prefers to judge Gaddafi by his words and not by his actions, he mysteriously excludes any mention of the speeches Gaddafi delivered after 17 February promising to ‘exterminate’ the demonstrators. Just as baffling is the derogatory tone in which he refers to those ‘young men … careering up and down’. He means the men who led the battles that ousted the dictator. In more than 12,000 words Roberts succeeds in expressing no sympathy for, let alone solidarity with, a people’s legitimate aspiration for justice and freedom. Shame.

Hisham Matar
New York

Letter to NYRB re Malthus and nature's limits

The following is a letter I wrote responding to the last paragraph of an article by John Terborgh, “Can Our Species Escape Destruction” in the New York Review of Books (October 13, 2011).

The New York Review of Books
October 14, 2011

Dear NYRB:

Thanks for John Terborgh’s valuable review and not least for his welcome reference to Malthus in his last paragraph. I offer a quibble only because Terborgh suggests a popular misconception about Malthus’s views, a misreading that has worked to obscure the author’s important message regarding the restraints that nature imposes on life on earth.

[Here is Terborgh’s final paragraph.

Malthus foresaw more than two hundred years ago that exponential growth could not be sustained in a world of finite resources. Malthus’s thesis is not a conjecture: it is a truism. Dismissing Malthus has become a popular talking point because global society has not collapsed-yet-but must remember that Malthus put no time limit on his prediction.]

Malthus never predicted that population growth would one day lead to the collapse of civilization. Rather in An Essay on Population (1798), he did hazard a more fundamental and useful prediction. Writing to counter some of the optimism inspired by the French Revolution, Malthus postulated that humans would always be “condemned to “a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery” due to the “principle of population,” the tendency of population to increase faster than food supplies. Malthus emphasized that this oscillation was a “constantly operating process,” not an event that would take place at some distant point.

Arguably not a day has since passed that humans have not experienced a measure of the misery that Malthus predicted. Malthus believed that his major theoretical contribution was his discovery that misery was the mechanism by which population is kept level with resources.

Malthus ends his first chapter with an eloquent and pertinent description of nature’s “imperious” demand for limits. Incidentally, Darwin famously acknowledged that it was an adumbration of this insight that helped underpin his theory of evolution.

The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds, in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it.

Sincerely,
Ronald Bleier
The author is the editor of The International Society of Malthus, a website.
http://desip.igc.org/malthus/index.html
***

Taibbi closes in on Obama

In a recent blog, Rolling Stone contributing editor, Matt Taibbi, comes very close in his last paragraph to supporting the headline to his article: “Obama Doesn’t Want a Progressive Deficit Deal.” Taibbi calls out the Democrats for a “transparent lie” when they claim to support a progressive solution to the current economic situation.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-doesnt-want-a-progressive-deficit-deal-20110711


I agree: Obama has been maneuvering much more openly, quite blatantly in fact, since at least December 2010, driving not merely a rightwing agenda, but an extremist right wing agenda, a Tea Party agenda.

Taibbi quotes from a recent Paul Krugman op-ed where Krugman couldn’t be clearer. It’s hard, Krugman begins, to trust Mr. Obama to uphold Democratic principles and a liberal, progressive view of the needs of the country. Krugman noticed that Obama’s economic rhetoric has parroted the know-nothings and the cynics.

It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.

One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.” --NYT, July 8, 2011, “What Obama Wants”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/opinion/08krugman.html?_r=2

The difficulty with Taibbi’s blog is that he muddles the issue by suggesting that Obama’s purpose is to gain political advantage ahead of the 2012 elections.
Taibbi writes:

But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt to voters in advance of the 2012 elections.

If Taibbi had stopped before his last phrase, he would have been spot on.

But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt…

In his last paragraph Taibbi comes so close to nailing it.

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie.

Yes, it’s a transparent lie to think that the Democrats and/or Obama believe that by endorsing GOP anti-government, anti-civil society policies, they are gaining popular support.

Matt Taibbi is one of our clearest and most focused writers and has made important contributions, especially by documenting and elucidating many of the shenanigans that led to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008. If this particular blog is somewhat muddled, we can wonder if it is so because he’s writing for a national publication and it may not be so easy for him as it might be for others to call out Obama for who he is.

How much more clear do we need the signs to be? Obama appears to be a traitor to his party. In the last few days Obama repeated: 'I'm prepared to take significant heat from my own party.' President Obama has turned out to be a traitor to the hopes of the millions of his supporters. Obama appears to be a fraud, an imposter, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, devouring what little remains of the New Deal. Obama seems intent on keeping us on the unsustainable road of the post 9/11 world of permanent war and totalitarian government.

It’s time to seek an answer to the question: Who is Obama? And while we do so, let’s recognize that the Republicans are right. We can’t afford another Obama term.

Ronald Bleier (via Xymphora): Who Killed the Fogels?--Jewish Settlers Stabbed to Death

My article, “Who Killed the Fogels?” is posted on the DESIP website at:
http://desip.igc.org/MiddleEast/WhoKilledtheFogels.html


The article presents evidence suggesting that Palestinians were not responsible for the brutal stabbing in March 2011 of five members of a Jewish settler family in their home at the Itamar, West Bank settlement.

The quote below is from a paragraph describing some of the security obstacles that Palestinians would have had to overcome in order to gain entry to the settlement.

A Palestinian blog, KABOBfest…explained that Itamar is a heavily fortified settlement, whose security included an electrified wire fence topped with two feet of razor wire, with sensors that could signal intrusion by means of cutting shears, and cameras that covered the entire perimeter. 24-hour security guards in addition to Israeli military forces also protected the settlement. Itamar…is surrounded by hundreds of meters of empty buffer land to isolate and identify intruders.

Stalemate in Libya: Obama, Ghaddafi and Israel

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How can we explain the current heartbreaking state of the U.S./NATO campaign against Libya, which seems mired in stalemate? The evidence seems to indicate that the stalemate is a result of a decision by the Obama administration not to topple Ghaddafi’s regime despite the negative effect the inconclusive war is having on Obama’s domestic poll numbers. An American stalemate strategy would explain why the U.S. immediately handed over direction of the war to NATO and ended its briefly effective air support.

Perhaps the White House has either not found a reliable ally among rebel leaders or is not really looking. It seems as if the U.S. is prepared to allow Ghaddafi to defeat the rebellion and/or to remain in power indefinitely.

If Obama, despite his rhetoric, prefers not to remove Ghaddafi, it’s not unlikely that it is because putative Libyan rebel leaders would reflect their country’s public opinion in support of Palestinian national and human rights, including an end to the occupation. Obama’s reluctance to remove Ghaddafi may be due to his disinclination to challenge Israeli interests. The New York Times front-page headline for April 29, 2011 highlighting Egyptian moves to normalize ties with the Iranians and Hamas is an example of the sort of thing the Israelis and undoubtedly the Obama administration do not want to see repeated in Libya.

The current turmoil in the Middle East sheds light on the Israeli boast that it is the only democracy in the Middle East as it reveals its wish to maintain that position. It’s also a reminder that Israeli pressure on the Arab world has helped to sustain dictatorships in many ways, not least by persuading millions of Arabs for decades that national unity trumped democratic rights in the face of the security threat from the lone democracy.

Obama and Ghaddafi

I couldn't help noticing on facebook and elsewhere that many if not all of my friends on the Left (including I just noticed, one of my heroes, Glenn Greenwald) are on the other side of the question of U.S. intervention against Ghaddafi.

Here we have a case where, largely because of the example of Tunisia and Egypt, etc., much of the Libyan population have understandably been emboldened to demonstrate and demand regime change. And I gather that to some extent, their boldness comes from the circumstance that Obama occupies the White House and not Bush-Cheney.

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Don’t get me wrong. I think Obama is as great a threat (or even greater) to democracy in the Middle East, in the U.S. and everywhere else as was Bush and Cheney. However, Ghaddafi's naked brutality and the ruthless extent of his brutal viciousness has placed Obama in a difficult position. On the one hand, I gather that he’d prefer to maintain support for Ghaddafi perhaps because the Libyan dictator represents stability and the status quo; and also because Israel would be more comfortable with Ghaddafi than they would be with a successor government which might better represent the Libyan public when it comes to Israeli repression of the Palestinians and the political and military carte blanche the Israelis enjoy in the area. Obama’s real sentiments in support of these dictators—and his fealty to Israeli desires could explain his wavering and indecision in all these cases.

At the same time it should be clear that there’s no argument here that the U.S. is the great imperial monster, resorting to unprovoked aggression time and again—and virtually always against its own best interests--for more than a century, but especially since WWII. Nevertheless, as adults, we’re responsible for making case-by- case distinctions. Libya is a case where the U.S., with its military and political power, is in a position to do some good, as it could have done and should have done in Rwanda.

When you have a situation where Ghaddafi has already demonstrated that he’s prepared to wipe out thousands of people, perhaps many thousands of people—intellectuals, professionals, students, shopkeepers—all its perceived opponents--it behooves a great power to take action when it can do so with relative ease –even if we don’t have much of a clue about the nature of the government that might follow. We can just hope that it would not be as murderous nor as illegitimate as Ghaddafi's.

I took a similar position years ago with Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo only to find out later the extent to which it was the Clinton administration’s support of the most criminal Kosovar elements that incited the bloodshed. I don’t expect to find that Libya and Tunisia and Egypt are parallel cases.

My only problem with the U.S. intervention in Libya is that it took so long to get started nor is it clear to me that the U.S. anti-Ghaddafi effort, even now, is whole-hearted and sincerely aimed at stopping Ghaddafi’s criminal activity.

I wish it were.

***

Churchill's Chamberlain: The Unnecessary War

Some years ago I read a book called The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal ** (1993) by one Clement Leibovitz (1923-2009), a Canadian computer engineer, born in Egypt, with a PhD in physics from the Technion, in Israel.

Leibovitz’s extraordinary and remarkably readable book presents the hidden history of the origins of WWII by means of contextualizing and annotating document after document to make his point that Chamberlain was bent on reaching a “general settlement” with Hitler’s Germany, in effect, a deal. Leibovitz’s theory is that Chamberlain hoped that Hitler would repay the British offer of “a free hand in the East” with peace in the West.

Perhaps Leibovitz’s most important contribution is to overturn the notion of Chamberlain as a timid and weak-minded leader, slow to understand the threat from Hitler.

Chamberlain is revealed to have been as tough, savvy, ruthless and as forceful as any of his contemporaries, arguably the equal as far as achieving his agenda, as any of the century’s dictators. Leibovitz’s portrait is consistent with the findings of other historians who have portrayed Chamberlain as essentially autocratic in nature, arrogant, stubborn and increasingly intolerant of criticism.

In addition, as former British Labor Parliamentarian Tony Benn writes in his “Introduction,” Leibovitz’s book (which he calls “by far the best book yet published about the causes and origins of the second world war”) exposes the sympathy many in the British establishment shared for Hitler and Mussolini. As ill luck would have it, the most dedicated and ideologically determined member of that group, Neville Chamberlain, rose to the position of prime minister of Britain.

But if Chamberlain was as shrewd, clever and forceful as the evidence suggests, how could it be that he gave up so much to Hitler at Munich in September 1938, removing the last obstacle to Nazi aggression?

In due course, I found that Chamberlain’s offer to Hitler of a “free hand in the East” was only part of the story. By throwing Czechoslovakia and Poland (not to mention Austria) to the Nazi wolf, Chamberlain was also endangering the West. In the end, I concluded that Chamberlain intentionally, treacherously, labored to undermine the security and independence of the West as well as the East.

“Churchill’s Chamberlain: The Unnecessary War,” (6 pp., 2550 words) is projected as the first in a series attempting to shed light on the hidden history of the origins of WWII, as well as prompting a re-evaluation of conventional notions of Hitler and Chamberlain and other key players.

The first two paragraphs of “ Churchill’s Chamberlain” follows. The entire article is posted on the DESIP website:

http://desip.igc.org/Hitler-Chamberlain/Chamberlainswar.html

(Also try http://desip.igc.org)

**Clement Leibovitz’s The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal is now available as a free download from the Desip website:

http://desip.igc.org/bookdownloads/Leibovitz_Chamberlain_Hitler__complete.pdf

A later version of Leibovitz’s book, co-written with Alvin Finkel, entitled: In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (1997), is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

Personal Note: Since I have shifted many or most of my postings to Facebook, those interested are encouraged to view my profile there and/or friend me. --RB

***

Churchill’s Chamberlain: The Unnecessary War

By Ronald Bleier

In the “Preface” to The Gathering Storm, volume I of his World War II memoirs, Winston Churchill writes that when President Roosevelt asked for suggestions about what the war should be called, he replied that it should be called “the Unnecessary War. There never was a war more easy to stop.”

Churchill doesn’t explain in his brief “Preface” how war could have been prevented, but two thirds of his memoir is taken up with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s conduct in office in the crucial years 1937-1940. During that time Churchill was the most high profile critic of the prime minister’s appeasement policies, marked by Britain’s extraordinary and devastating security concessions to Hitler. Churchill was particularly outraged by what he saw as the prime minister’s purposeful obstruction of British rearmament in the face of the manifest threat from Germany. Churchill’s book may be read as a record of his frustration and its sum and substance amounts to an indictment of Chamberlain.

Read more: http://desip.igc.org/Hitler-Chamberlain/Chamberlainswar.html

Letter to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: No Planes on 911

Patty Goldstein’s letter regarding 911 Truth in the December 2010 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs caught my eye. She complained that in the previous issue in a feature presenting three views of Ground Zero Islamophobia, none of the authors questioned the official story of 9/11. Her letter in turn supported the majority view that four passenger planes were hijacked and crashed that day.

My letter to the Washington Report follows. I suspect there’s a good chance they’ll print it in their next issue.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

The Washington Review of Middle East Affairs

To the editor:

Thanks for printing Patty Goldstein’s letter regarding “The Truth About 911,” and for your helpful response in the December 2010 issue. I agree with Ms Goldstein that the evidence is overwhelming that the official story cannot be true. Indeed I go further. There’s a subset of the 911 Truth movement who advocate the No Planes Theory (NPT), which holds that there were no plane crashes on 911, no hijackings and no hijackers. We believe this theory better reflects the (circumstantial) evidence; in particular that no independently verified plane wreckage and no bodies of plane victims have ever appeared or been produced. The relatively short article that persuaded me was (the late) Gerard Holmgren’s “Manufactured Terrorism,” and when Morgan Reynolds followed up with an article providing additional detail, I had sufficient information to summarize their work in my own article titled: “Holmgren and Reynolds on No Planes on 911”

Among other things Holmgren lays out the evidence that the “planes” were a product of computer generated imagery, and Reynolds goes into detail explaining the requirement for wreckage in any plane crash, similar to the physics involved when an insect strikes a windscreen. The NPT points even more strongly to the theory that the 911 terror attacks were completely homegrown, and thus there was no need for Israeli involvement in their planning and execution; although I gather there is evidence that the Israelis had foreknowledge. (Search for No Planes on 911; See also: “Top 10 reasons why no planes hit the WTC on 9/11/01”)

Patty Goldstein and I—and millions of others--also agree that there’s been no accountability for the 911 crimes or for the hyper-militarism, which was evidently its intended aftermath. Perhaps we split hairs over whether the goal of the perpetrators was a latter day anti-Muslim Crusade, or whether the current war on Moslem and Arab and Central Asian nations was simply a venue for their larger ambition of permanent war, with Moslems and Arabs and others merely their latest convenient victims.

Sincerely,

Ronald Bleier

HC's comments on George Antonius's The Arab Awakening

George Antonius was born in 1891, a Lebanese Christian, educated at Cambridge, and worked in the British Administration in Cairo during WW1, moved to Palestine only in 1921, but was wholly absorbed in the Arab cause, of which Palestine was the flashpoint. His book appeared in 1938 in Britain and 39 in the US. It is probably the first reliable account in English (or any European
language) of modern Arab nationalism, going back to the mid-19th c, and most of all, of the betrayal of the Arabs by the British in WW1.

The Arabs were very brave in their revolt against the Turks and their
military contribution was invaluable. The Turks repressed the
revolutionary plotters in Damascus and Beirut ruthlessly, rounding up
and torturing and hanging dozens of patriots. A Turkish-German force
sent to the Arabian peninsula forced the Sharif of Mecca's hand before
his preparations were complete, but he proceeded on his own
initiative, summoned British help and took the area of Mecca and Jidda
to start. This timely move kept enemy forces out of Arabia, relieving
a threat to the British base at Aden, and to British colonies in East
Africa, and bottled up a Turkish garrison of 14,000 in Medina almost
until the end of the war. In fact as the Arabs took Aqaba, threatened
Ma'an and harassed the Hejaz railway, they were engaging more Turks
than the British under Murray in Sinai and Palestine.

The British betrayal started during the war, with Sykes-Picot and then
the Balfour Decl. Interestingly, Antonious says that Sykes came to his
senses about the enormity of the betrayal of his secret diplomacy, and
died from the great influenza epidemic, in Paris, as he was
arguing with the British delegation to the Versailles conf. In late
1917 the Sharif and Arab notables in Cairo sought reassurance from the
Brits that their wartime promise of independence still held, as the
Bolsheviks had released the Sykes-Picot text, to which imperial Russia
was a party, which they found in the czarist archives, and Balfour was
of course publicized in Nov. They received such assurances
categorically; Allenby was just starting his Palestine campaign and
the Arabs were his right flank.

The betrayal culminated in the San Remo protocol of 1920, which
dismembered Syria and awarded the Mandates to Britain and France, and
also incorporated the Balfour Decl. Antonious writes very eloquently:

"The decisions taken at San Remo were made public on the 5th of May,
and their promulgation gave birth to a new sentiment in the Arab
world--contempt for the powers of the West. It was not only the
denial of the two cherished goals of independence and unity that
provoked the revulsion of feeling, but also, and more profoundly, the
breach of faith. The distinction is an important one: it foreshadows
the subsequent transition from disappointment to despair,.and in it
lies the key to the upheavals that followed. In the eyes of the Arabs,
the San Remo decisions were a betrayal, and the fact that they
violated a compact sealed in blood made the betrayal more hateful and
despicable."

The Sharif released the texts of his correspondence with McMahon,
British High Commissioner in Cairo, in Arabic, and Antonius studied
and collated them for his book. He argued convincingly that they did
not exclude Palestine from the area promised to Sharif Husain, which
had been debated in British politics since the early 1920s, and
Britain finally released the correspondence in 1939. Antonius
interviewed Sharif Husain before he died, and many important Arab
participants, incl Husains's sons. The last part of his last chapter
is about Palestine, written in 1938, and he clearly sees the danger to
the Arab position, writes most strongly about the Arab claim to the
country, and also grants the Jews rights on liberal democratic, but emphatically not national terms. The importance of Antonius and hiswork is attested by a 2001 biography by Susan Silsby Boyle, "The Betrayal of Palestine".

It gets better; there's an illuminating account of Lawrence. He did not invent the Aqaba campaign as claimed in his book (and featured in the movie). The idea arose from Auda of the Howeitat (the Anthony Quinn character in the film) and was approved by Faisal, before Lawrence was told. He went along, but not as leader or strategist or adviser, only as a British
observer. The Arabs needed no lessons in such warfare from Lawrence; crossing deserts to make daring raids was exactly their strength.