The Rich Getting Richer
The Class War at Home
By BILL QUIGLEY
October 25, 2010
The rich and their paid false prophets are doing a bang up job deceiving the poor and middle class. They have convinced many that an evil socialism is alive in the land and it is taking their fair share. But the deception cannot last – facts say otherwise.
Yes, there is a class war – the war of the rich on the poor and the middle class – and the rich are winning. That war has been going on for years. Look at the facts – facts the rich and their false paid prophets do not want people to know.
Let Glen Beck go on about socialists descending on Washington. Allow Rush Limbaugh to rail about “class warfare for a leftist agenda that will destroy our society.” They are well compensated false prophets for the rich.
The truth is that for the several decades the rich in the US have been getting richer and the poor and middle class have been getting poorer. Look at the facts then make up your own mind.
The official US poverty numbers show we now have the highest number of poor people in 51 years. The official US poverty rate is 14.3 percent or 43.6 million people in poverty. One in five children in the US is poor; one in ten senior citizens is poor. Source: US Census Bureau.
One of every six workers, 26.8 million people, is unemployed or underemployed. This “real” unemployment rate is over 17 per cent. There are 14.8 million people designated as “officially” unemployed by the government, a rate of 9.6 per cent. Unemployment is worse for African American workers of whom 16.1 per cent are unemployed. Another 9.5 million people who are working only part-time while they are seeking full-time work but have had their hours cut back or are so far only able to find work part-time are not counted in the official unemployment numbers. Also, an additional 2.5 million are reported unemployed but not counted because they are classified as discouraged workers in part because they have been out of work for more than 12 months. Source: US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics October 2010 report.
The median household income for whites in the US is $51,861; for Asians it is $65,469; for African Americans it is $32,584; for Latinos it is $38,039. Source: US Census Bureau.
Fifty million people in the US lack health insurance. Source: US Census Bureau.
Women in the US have a greater lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy-related conditions than women in 40 other countries. African American US women are nearly 4 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. Source: Amnesty International Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA.
About 3.5 million people, about one-third of which are children, are homeless at some point in the year in the US. Source: National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.
Outside Atlanta, 33,000 people showed up to seek applications for low cost subsidized housing in August 2010. When Detroit offered emergency utility and housing assistance to help people facing evictions, more than 50,000 people showed up for the 3,000 vouchers. Source: News reports.
There are 49 million people in the US who live in households which eat only because they receive food stamps, visit food pantries or soup kitchens for help. Sixteen million are so poor they have skipped meals or foregone food at some point in the last year. This is the highest level since statistics have been kept. Source: US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
Middle Class Going Backward: Facts
One or two generations ago it was possible for a middle class family to live on one income. Now it takes two incomes to try to enjoy the same quality of life. Wages have not kept up with inflation; adjusted for inflation they have lost ground over the past ten years. The cost of housing, education and health care have all increased at a much higher rate than wages and salaries. In 1967, the middle 60 percent of households received over 52 per cent of all income. In 1998, it was down to 47 per cent. The share going to the poor has also fallen, with the top 20 per cent seeing their share rise.
A record 2.8 million homes received a foreclosure notice in 2009, higher than both 2008 and 2007. In 2010, the rate is expected to be rise to 3 million homes. Sources: Reuters and RealtyTrac.
Eleven million homeowners (about one in four homeowners) in the US are “under water” or owe more on their mortgages than their house is worth. Source: “Home truths,” The Economist, October 23, 2010.
For the first time since the 1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of the business cycle of the 2000s than they were at the beginning. Despite the fact that the American workforce is working harder and smarter than ever, they are sharing less and less in the benefits they are creating. This is true for white families but even truer for African American families whose gains in the 1990s have mostly been eliminated since then. Source: Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, State of Working America.
Rich Getting Richer: Facts
The wealth of the richest 400 people in the US grew by 8 per cent in the last year to $1.37 trillion. Source: Forbes 400: The super-rich get richer, September 22, 2010, Money.com
The top Hedge Fund Manager of 2009, David Tepper, “earned” $4 billion last year. The rest of the top ten earned: $3.3 billion, $2.5 billion, $2.3 billion, $1.4 billion, $1.3 billion (tie for 6th and 7th place), $900 million (tie for 8th and 9th place), and in last place out of the top ten, $825 million. Source: Business Insider. “Meet the top 10 earning hedge fund managers of 2009.”
Income disparity in the US is now as bad as it was right before the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s. From 1979 to 2006, the richest 1 per cent more than doubled their share of the total US income, from 10 per cent to 23 per cent. The richest 1 per cent have an average annual income of more than $1.3 million. For the last 25 years, over 90 per cent of the total growth in income in the US went to the top 10 per cent earners – leaving 9 per cent of all income to be shared by the bottom 90 per cent. Source: Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, State of Working America.
In 1973, the average US CEO was paid $27 for every dollar paid to a typical worker; by 2007 that ratio had grown to $275 to $1. Source: Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, State of Working America.
Since 1992, the average tax rate on the richest 400 taxpayers in the US dropped from 26.8 per cent to 16.62 per cent. Source: US Internal Revenue Service.
The US has the greatest inequality between rich and poor among all Western industrialized nations and it has been getting worse for 40 years. The World Factbook, published by the CIA, includes an international ranking of the inequality among families inside of each country, called the Gini Index. The US ranking of 45 in 2007 is the same as Argentina, Cameroon, and Cote d’Ivorie. The highest inequality can be found in countries like Namibia, South Africa, Haiti and Guatemala. The US ranking of 45 compares poorly to Japan (38), India (36), New Zealand, UK (34), Greece (33), Spain (32), Canada (32), France (32), South Korea (31), Netherlands (30), Ireland (30), Australia (30), Germany (27), Norway (25), and Sweden (23). Source: CIA The World Factbook:
Rich people live an average of about five years longer than poor people in the US. Naturally, gross inequality has consequences in terms of health, exposure to unhealthy working conditions, nutrition and lifestyle. In 1980, the most well off in the US had a life expectancy of 2.8 years over the least well-off. As the inequality gap widens, so does the life expectancy gap. In 1990, the gap was a little less than 4 years. In 2000, the least well-off could expect to live to age of 74.7 while the most well off had a life expectancy of 79.2 years. Source: Elise Gould, “Growing disparities in life expectancy,” Economic Policy Institute.
Conclusion
These are extremely troubling facts for anyone concerned about economic fairness, equality of opportunity, and justice.
Thomas Jefferson once observed that the systematic restructuring of society to benefit the rich over the poor and middle class is a natural appetite of the rich. “Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to…the general prey of the rich on the poor.” But Jefferson also knew that justice can only be delayed so long when he said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
The rich talk about the rise of socialism to divert attention from the fact that they are devouring the basics of the poor and everyone else. Many of those crying socialism the loudest are doing it to enrich or empower themselves. They are right about one thing – there is a class war going on in the US. The rich are winning their class war, and it is time for everyone else to fight back for economic justice.
Bill Quigley is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans.
http://counterpunch.org/quigley10252010.html
Saturday 30 October 2010
Friday 22 October 2010
VIVE LA RESISTANCE!
VIVE LA RESISTANCE!
Thank God for France
By MIKE WHITNEY
Weekend Edition
October 22 - 24, 2010
Thank God for France. While American liberals tremble at the idea of sending an angry e mail to congress for fear that their name will appear on the State Department's list of terrorists, French workers are on the front lines choking on tear gas and fending off billyclubs in hand-to-hand combat with Sarkozy's Gendarmerie. That's because the French haven't forgotten their class roots. When the government gets too big for its britches, people pour out onto to the streets and Paris becomes a warzone replete with overturned Mercedes Benzs, smashed storefront windows, and stacks of smoldering tires issuing pillars of black smoke. This is what democracy looks like when it hasn't been emasculated by decades of propaganda and consumerism. Here's a blurp from the trenches:
Headline:
"French Energy Sector Crippled by Nationwide Strike... French energy facilities are close to total disruption in the wake of nationwide strike against the raise of the retirement age.....France has been hit by numerous protests across the country against a controversial pension reform that would rise the retirement age to 62 from 60....On October 22 morning 80 protesters blockaded Grandpuits oil refinery outside Paris, key supplier for Charles de Gaulle and Orly international airport." (The Financial)
Shut 'em down.
Take note, Tea Party crybabies who moan about restoring "our freedoms" while stuffing the backyard bunker with seed corn and ammo. Glenn Beck won't save you from the "mean old" gov'mint. Liberty isn't free anymore. If you want it, get out of the barko-lounger and organize. The amount of freedom that any nation enjoys is directly proportionate to the amount of blood its people spilled fighting the state. No more, no less. The man who is willing to accept the blunt force of a cop's truncheon on his back is infinitely more praiseworthy than the leftist/rightist scribe crooning from the bleachers. The state isn't moved by lyrical editorials or prosaic manifestos. It responds to force alone, which is why it takes people who are willing to "throw themselves on the gears" of the apparatus and stop it from moving forward. Unfortunately, most of those people appear to live in France.
The resistance is steadily building in France. The budding rebellion is cropping up everywhere---"secondary schools, train stations, refineries and highways have been blockaded, there have been occupations of public buildings, workplaces, commercial centers, directed cuts of electricity, and ransacking of electoral institutions and town halls..." And the big unions are calling for more strikes, more agitation, more ferment.
For more than a week, transportation has been blocked across the France due to the protests by students and workers. Sarkozy's popularity has plummeted. 65% of people surveyed don't like the way the French president is handling the strikes. 79% of the people would like to see Sarkozy negotiate with the Union on terms and conditions, but he won't budge. Thus, the cauldron continues to boil while the prospect of violence rises.
"STRIKE, BLOCKADE, SABOTAGE"
This is from an anonymous striker:
"In each city, these actions are intensifying the power struggle and demonstrate that many are no longer satisfied with the order imposed by the union leadership. In the Paris region, amongst the blockades of train stations and secondary schools, the strikes in the primary schools, the workers pickets in front of the factories, people create inter-professional meetings and collectives of struggle are founded to destroy categorical isolation and separation. Their starting point: self-organization to meet the need to take ownership over our struggles without the mediation of those who claim to speak for workers.
We decided Saturday to occupy the Opera Bastille. This was to disturb a presentation that was live on radio, to play the trouble makers in a place where the cultural merchandise circulates and to organize an assembly there. So we met with more than a thousand people at the “place de la nation”, with banners stating “the bosses understand only one language: Strike, blockade, sabotage." (end of communique)
The action was met with predictable police violence and mass arrests.
The pension turmoil is not limited to France either. US pension funds are underfunded by nearly $3 trillion. Will US workers be as willing as their French counterparts to face the beatings (to defend "what's theirs") or will they throw up their hands and appeal to Obama for help?
There's no question that Washington elites have joined with Wall Street to offload the massive debts from the financial meltdown onto workers and retirees. Nor is their any doubt that they will invoke (what Slavoj Zizek calls) a "permanent state of economic emergency" to justify their actions. That will allow them to move ahead with so-called "austerity measures" that are designed to impoverish workers and strip popular government programs of their funding. The trend towards "belt-tightening" merely masks the ongoing class war which is aimed at restoring a feudal system of royalty and serfs.
This is from an article by economist Mark Weisbrot:
"If the French want to keep the retirement age as is, there are plenty of ways to finance future pension costs without necessarily raising the retirement age. One of them, which has support among the French left – and which Sarkozy claims to support at the international level -- would be a tax on financial transactions. Such a “speculation tax” could raise billions of dollars of revenue – as it currently does in the U.K. – while simultaneously discouraging speculative trading in financial assets and derivatives. The French unions and protesters are demanding that the government consider some of these more progressive alternatives."
But the retirement age is not really the issue at all. This is about union busting and "putting people in their place." It's about "who will call-the-shots" and in whose interests will society be run.
The French are fighting back against this "oligarchy of racketeers" and the ripoff system they represent, while, namby-pamby Americans are neutralized by signing their umpteenth petition or venting their spleen at a Palin rally.
VIVE LA FRANCE. VIVE LA RESISTANCE.
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney10222010.html
Thank God for France
By MIKE WHITNEY
Weekend Edition
October 22 - 24, 2010
Thank God for France. While American liberals tremble at the idea of sending an angry e mail to congress for fear that their name will appear on the State Department's list of terrorists, French workers are on the front lines choking on tear gas and fending off billyclubs in hand-to-hand combat with Sarkozy's Gendarmerie. That's because the French haven't forgotten their class roots. When the government gets too big for its britches, people pour out onto to the streets and Paris becomes a warzone replete with overturned Mercedes Benzs, smashed storefront windows, and stacks of smoldering tires issuing pillars of black smoke. This is what democracy looks like when it hasn't been emasculated by decades of propaganda and consumerism. Here's a blurp from the trenches:
Headline:
"French Energy Sector Crippled by Nationwide Strike... French energy facilities are close to total disruption in the wake of nationwide strike against the raise of the retirement age.....France has been hit by numerous protests across the country against a controversial pension reform that would rise the retirement age to 62 from 60....On October 22 morning 80 protesters blockaded Grandpuits oil refinery outside Paris, key supplier for Charles de Gaulle and Orly international airport." (The Financial)
Shut 'em down.
Take note, Tea Party crybabies who moan about restoring "our freedoms" while stuffing the backyard bunker with seed corn and ammo. Glenn Beck won't save you from the "mean old" gov'mint. Liberty isn't free anymore. If you want it, get out of the barko-lounger and organize. The amount of freedom that any nation enjoys is directly proportionate to the amount of blood its people spilled fighting the state. No more, no less. The man who is willing to accept the blunt force of a cop's truncheon on his back is infinitely more praiseworthy than the leftist/rightist scribe crooning from the bleachers. The state isn't moved by lyrical editorials or prosaic manifestos. It responds to force alone, which is why it takes people who are willing to "throw themselves on the gears" of the apparatus and stop it from moving forward. Unfortunately, most of those people appear to live in France.
The resistance is steadily building in France. The budding rebellion is cropping up everywhere---"secondary schools, train stations, refineries and highways have been blockaded, there have been occupations of public buildings, workplaces, commercial centers, directed cuts of electricity, and ransacking of electoral institutions and town halls..." And the big unions are calling for more strikes, more agitation, more ferment.
For more than a week, transportation has been blocked across the France due to the protests by students and workers. Sarkozy's popularity has plummeted. 65% of people surveyed don't like the way the French president is handling the strikes. 79% of the people would like to see Sarkozy negotiate with the Union on terms and conditions, but he won't budge. Thus, the cauldron continues to boil while the prospect of violence rises.
"STRIKE, BLOCKADE, SABOTAGE"
This is from an anonymous striker:
"In each city, these actions are intensifying the power struggle and demonstrate that many are no longer satisfied with the order imposed by the union leadership. In the Paris region, amongst the blockades of train stations and secondary schools, the strikes in the primary schools, the workers pickets in front of the factories, people create inter-professional meetings and collectives of struggle are founded to destroy categorical isolation and separation. Their starting point: self-organization to meet the need to take ownership over our struggles without the mediation of those who claim to speak for workers.
We decided Saturday to occupy the Opera Bastille. This was to disturb a presentation that was live on radio, to play the trouble makers in a place where the cultural merchandise circulates and to organize an assembly there. So we met with more than a thousand people at the “place de la nation”, with banners stating “the bosses understand only one language: Strike, blockade, sabotage." (end of communique)
The action was met with predictable police violence and mass arrests.
The pension turmoil is not limited to France either. US pension funds are underfunded by nearly $3 trillion. Will US workers be as willing as their French counterparts to face the beatings (to defend "what's theirs") or will they throw up their hands and appeal to Obama for help?
There's no question that Washington elites have joined with Wall Street to offload the massive debts from the financial meltdown onto workers and retirees. Nor is their any doubt that they will invoke (what Slavoj Zizek calls) a "permanent state of economic emergency" to justify their actions. That will allow them to move ahead with so-called "austerity measures" that are designed to impoverish workers and strip popular government programs of their funding. The trend towards "belt-tightening" merely masks the ongoing class war which is aimed at restoring a feudal system of royalty and serfs.
This is from an article by economist Mark Weisbrot:
"If the French want to keep the retirement age as is, there are plenty of ways to finance future pension costs without necessarily raising the retirement age. One of them, which has support among the French left – and which Sarkozy claims to support at the international level -- would be a tax on financial transactions. Such a “speculation tax” could raise billions of dollars of revenue – as it currently does in the U.K. – while simultaneously discouraging speculative trading in financial assets and derivatives. The French unions and protesters are demanding that the government consider some of these more progressive alternatives."
But the retirement age is not really the issue at all. This is about union busting and "putting people in their place." It's about "who will call-the-shots" and in whose interests will society be run.
The French are fighting back against this "oligarchy of racketeers" and the ripoff system they represent, while, namby-pamby Americans are neutralized by signing their umpteenth petition or venting their spleen at a Palin rally.
VIVE LA FRANCE. VIVE LA RESISTANCE.
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney10222010.html
THREE CHEERS FOR THE FRENCH STRIKERS!
THREE CHEERS FOR THE FRENCH STRIKERS!
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Weekend Edition
October 22 - 24, 2010
The strikes and demonstrations that have brought France to a near-halt are provoking the usual patronizing commentaries in the United States and United Kingdom. Those pampered French workers, not to mention school kids, are at it again, raising hell just because sensible President Sarkozy points out that the French pension system is simply not affordable and the retirement age must be raised from 60 to 62. It’s time for a reality check, of the sort just being imposed by U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, proposing to carve $128 billion, out of the budget – more than 4 per cent of GDP.
Across Europe the slash-and-burn crowd are in full cry, calling for tighter belts – though not to any stringent degree for those ample ones circling the portly tummies of the richer classes. Cheering them on are the neoliberals here in the U.S.A., urging similar retrenchment, starting with Social Security “reform” – a higher retirement age and reduced pensions. The mainstream press here, starting with the New York Times has been florid with homages to Osborne’s estimable zeal to pare back the welfare state “excesses” of 60 years.
Such portrayals of the French pension system are grotesquely misleading. Diana Johnstone, an American journalist who has lived in Paris for over three decades, has been unique in laying out clearly on our website on October 21 what is actually at stake in Sarkozy’s proposals:
“The retirement issue is far more complex than ‘the age of retirement.’ The legal age of retirement means the age at which one may retire. But the pension depends on the number of years worked, or, to be more precise, on the number of cotisations (payments) into the joint pension scheme. On the grounds of ‘saving the system from bankruptcy,’ the government is gradually raising the number of years of cotisations from 40 to 43 years, with indications that this will be stretched out further in the future.
“As education is prolonged, and employment begins later, to get a full pension most people will have to work until 65 or 67. A ‘full pension’ comes to about 40 per cent of wages at the time of retirement. But even so, that may not be possible. Full-time jobs are harder and harder to get, and employers do not necessarily want to retain older employees. Or, the enterprise goes out of business and the 58-year-old employee finds himself permanently out of work. It is becoming harder and harder to work full time in a salaried job for over 40 years, however much one may want to. Thus, in practice, the Sarkozy-Woerth reform simply means reducing pensions.” (Eric Woerth is the French Labor minister.)
Johnstone points out that the school kids on the streets are not there for the thrill of trashing a car or throwing a rock at the cops. They are well aware of the increasing difficulty of building a career. The trend is for qualified personnel to enter the work force later and later, having spent years getting an education. With the difficulty of finding a stable, full-time job, many depend on their parents until age 30. It is simple arithmetic to see that, in this case, there will be no full retirement until after age 70.
Those supposedly pampered French workers actually achieve productivity levels that are among the highest in the world – higher than the Germans’, for example. France also has a high birthrate, unlike the dismal levels in France in the 1930s, when austerity programs of the sort proposed by Sarkozy produced a population dwindling at disastrous speed. So, the wealth produced by high productivity should be adequate to maintain pension levels.
“Should be” are the operative words here. As in the U.S., the French workers don’t enjoy the rewards of their high productivity in the form of higher wages. Their pay packets stagnate, while the profits from increased productivity are siphoned off into the financial sector. Meanwhile, in order to maintain the high profits drained by the financial sector, and avoid paying higher wages, the jobs vanish overseas, and the likelihood of getting anything close to a full pension dwindles.
The bankers’ agenda both sides of the Atlantic is the same: cut the living standards of ordinary working people; roll back the clock to the 1920s, a decade which culminated in disaster, as the bankers insisted that the only way out of the Depression was fiercer austerity – the Osborne/Sarkozy strategy. It took mass unemployment and the ideas of Maynard Keynes to recover from that madness. Now, the Keynesian recipe is being shredded.
As Michael Hudson wrote here on our site at the start of October, “at issue are proposals to drastically change the laws and structure of how European society will function for the next generation. It is a purely vicious attempt to reverse Europe’s Progressive Era social democratic reforms achieved over the past century. Europe is to be turned into a banana republic by taxing labor – not finance, insurance, or real estate. Governments are to impose heavier employment and sales taxes while cutting back pensions and other public spending.”
In general, it seems the Euro zone has decided the underclass and retirees specifically are like a third world debtor who is required by the World Bank to tighten up. As Joe Paff emailed me from Paris this morning, whither he flew with his wife Karen from SFO Wednesday, without a hitch:
“the ruling class has decided to allow the underclass to hate Muslims as long as they retire a few years later.
“Merkel is the crucial player. She said multiculturalism has run aground and has foundered on the rock of True Religion--- that Germany is fundamentally a Christian country and that the Mussulmen have to join up and shape up or get out. This requires forgiving Sarkozy for rounding up a village of gypsies and shipping them ‘home’ to Rumania. The European Union had dropped its case against Sarkozy in appreciation for his raising the retirement age.”
Contrast the popular eruptions across France against Sarkozy with the sedate atmosphere in the U.K. after Osborne outlined a brutal agenda (presaged by New Labour, to be sure), which will lead to 500,000 public sector job losses, pensions kicking in only at a higher retirement age of 66, plus higher pension contributions, and pain which will strike most fiercely at the poor. Contrary to widespread belief here, levels of unionization in France are not high. But the French have a radical tradition stretching back across more than two centuries to their great revolution. Working people everywhere should raise three lusty cheers for the French strikers and their allies.
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Weekend Edition
October 22 - 24, 2010
The strikes and demonstrations that have brought France to a near-halt are provoking the usual patronizing commentaries in the United States and United Kingdom. Those pampered French workers, not to mention school kids, are at it again, raising hell just because sensible President Sarkozy points out that the French pension system is simply not affordable and the retirement age must be raised from 60 to 62. It’s time for a reality check, of the sort just being imposed by U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, proposing to carve $128 billion, out of the budget – more than 4 per cent of GDP.
Across Europe the slash-and-burn crowd are in full cry, calling for tighter belts – though not to any stringent degree for those ample ones circling the portly tummies of the richer classes. Cheering them on are the neoliberals here in the U.S.A., urging similar retrenchment, starting with Social Security “reform” – a higher retirement age and reduced pensions. The mainstream press here, starting with the New York Times has been florid with homages to Osborne’s estimable zeal to pare back the welfare state “excesses” of 60 years.
Such portrayals of the French pension system are grotesquely misleading. Diana Johnstone, an American journalist who has lived in Paris for over three decades, has been unique in laying out clearly on our website on October 21 what is actually at stake in Sarkozy’s proposals:
“The retirement issue is far more complex than ‘the age of retirement.’ The legal age of retirement means the age at which one may retire. But the pension depends on the number of years worked, or, to be more precise, on the number of cotisations (payments) into the joint pension scheme. On the grounds of ‘saving the system from bankruptcy,’ the government is gradually raising the number of years of cotisations from 40 to 43 years, with indications that this will be stretched out further in the future.
“As education is prolonged, and employment begins later, to get a full pension most people will have to work until 65 or 67. A ‘full pension’ comes to about 40 per cent of wages at the time of retirement. But even so, that may not be possible. Full-time jobs are harder and harder to get, and employers do not necessarily want to retain older employees. Or, the enterprise goes out of business and the 58-year-old employee finds himself permanently out of work. It is becoming harder and harder to work full time in a salaried job for over 40 years, however much one may want to. Thus, in practice, the Sarkozy-Woerth reform simply means reducing pensions.” (Eric Woerth is the French Labor minister.)
Johnstone points out that the school kids on the streets are not there for the thrill of trashing a car or throwing a rock at the cops. They are well aware of the increasing difficulty of building a career. The trend is for qualified personnel to enter the work force later and later, having spent years getting an education. With the difficulty of finding a stable, full-time job, many depend on their parents until age 30. It is simple arithmetic to see that, in this case, there will be no full retirement until after age 70.
Those supposedly pampered French workers actually achieve productivity levels that are among the highest in the world – higher than the Germans’, for example. France also has a high birthrate, unlike the dismal levels in France in the 1930s, when austerity programs of the sort proposed by Sarkozy produced a population dwindling at disastrous speed. So, the wealth produced by high productivity should be adequate to maintain pension levels.
“Should be” are the operative words here. As in the U.S., the French workers don’t enjoy the rewards of their high productivity in the form of higher wages. Their pay packets stagnate, while the profits from increased productivity are siphoned off into the financial sector. Meanwhile, in order to maintain the high profits drained by the financial sector, and avoid paying higher wages, the jobs vanish overseas, and the likelihood of getting anything close to a full pension dwindles.
The bankers’ agenda both sides of the Atlantic is the same: cut the living standards of ordinary working people; roll back the clock to the 1920s, a decade which culminated in disaster, as the bankers insisted that the only way out of the Depression was fiercer austerity – the Osborne/Sarkozy strategy. It took mass unemployment and the ideas of Maynard Keynes to recover from that madness. Now, the Keynesian recipe is being shredded.
As Michael Hudson wrote here on our site at the start of October, “at issue are proposals to drastically change the laws and structure of how European society will function for the next generation. It is a purely vicious attempt to reverse Europe’s Progressive Era social democratic reforms achieved over the past century. Europe is to be turned into a banana republic by taxing labor – not finance, insurance, or real estate. Governments are to impose heavier employment and sales taxes while cutting back pensions and other public spending.”
In general, it seems the Euro zone has decided the underclass and retirees specifically are like a third world debtor who is required by the World Bank to tighten up. As Joe Paff emailed me from Paris this morning, whither he flew with his wife Karen from SFO Wednesday, without a hitch:
“the ruling class has decided to allow the underclass to hate Muslims as long as they retire a few years later.
“Merkel is the crucial player. She said multiculturalism has run aground and has foundered on the rock of True Religion--- that Germany is fundamentally a Christian country and that the Mussulmen have to join up and shape up or get out. This requires forgiving Sarkozy for rounding up a village of gypsies and shipping them ‘home’ to Rumania. The European Union had dropped its case against Sarkozy in appreciation for his raising the retirement age.”
Contrast the popular eruptions across France against Sarkozy with the sedate atmosphere in the U.K. after Osborne outlined a brutal agenda (presaged by New Labour, to be sure), which will lead to 500,000 public sector job losses, pensions kicking in only at a higher retirement age of 66, plus higher pension contributions, and pain which will strike most fiercely at the poor. Contrary to widespread belief here, levels of unionization in France are not high. But the French have a radical tradition stretching back across more than two centuries to their great revolution. Working people everywhere should raise three lusty cheers for the French strikers and their allies.
Thursday 21 October 2010
When Banks Are the Robbers
When Banks Are the Robbers
Posted on Oct 19, 2010
By Amy Goodman
The big banks that caused the collapse of the global finance market, and received tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts, have likely been engaging in wholesale fraud against homeowners and the courts. But in a promising development this week, attorneys general from all 50 states announced a bipartisan joint investigation into foreclosure fraud.
Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, GMAC and other big mortgage lenders recently suspended most foreclosure proceedings, following revelations that thousands of their foreclosures were being conducted like “foreclosure mills,” with tens of thousands of legal documents signed by low-level staffers with little or no knowledge of what they were signing.
Then the Obama administration signaled that it was not supporting a foreclosure moratorium. Not long after, Bank of America announced it was restarting its foreclosure operations. GMAC followed suit, and others will likely join in. So much for the voluntary moratorium.
GMAC Mortgage engaged in mass document processing, dubbed “robo-signing.” In several cases, GMAC Mortgage filed documents with courts that were signed by Jeffrey Stephan. Stephan presided over a staff of 12 in suburban Philadelphia. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray filed a lawsuit against GMAC Mortgage, Stephan and the bank that owns GMAC, Ally Financial (itself a subsidiary of General Motors).
According to one report, Stephan received 10,000 mortgage foreclosure documents to process in one month. Based on an eight-hour workday, he would have had to read, verify and sign, in the presence of a notary, about one document per minute. He admitted to signing documents without reading them or checking the facts about homeowners said to be in default. And Stephan was just one of many “robo-signers.”
Recall that GM received $51 billion in taxpayer bailouts; its subsidiary, GMAC, received $16.3 billion; and Ally Financial subsidiary GMAC Mortgage received $1.5 billion as an “incentive payment for home loan modification.”
So you as a taxpayer may have bailed out a bank that is fraudulently foreclosing on you. What recourse do you have?
Back in February 2009, Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur advised homeowners to force lenders to “produce the note.” People facing foreclosure were being taken to court while the bank alleging default couldn’t even prove it owned the mortgage. The mortgage document often had been lost in the tangled web of financial wheeling and dealing. Kaptur told me: “Millions and millions of families are getting foreclosure notices. They don’t have proper legal representation ... possession is nine-tenths of the law; therefore, stay in your property.”
If you stay in your home, your mortgage lender may break in. Nancy Jacobini of Orange County, Fla., was inside her home when she heard an intruder. Thinking she was being burglarized, she called 911. Police determined the intruder was actually someone sent by JPMorgan Chase to change the locks. And Jacobini wasn’t even in foreclosure!
Most banks that suspended foreclosure efforts only did so in 23 states—because it is only in those 23 states that courts actually adjudicate over foreclosure proceedings. One judge who oversees foreclosures is New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Schack. He has made national headlines for rejecting dozens of foreclosure filings. He told “Democracy Now!” news hour, “My job is to do justice ... we run into numerous problems with assignments of mortgages, questionable affidavits of merit and just sloppy paperwork in general.”
Bruce Marks runs NACA, a national nonprofit that helps people avoid foreclosure. He told me: “When President Obama was running for president, he said one of the first things he’ll do is put a moratorium on foreclosures. He never did. He never backed bankruptcy reform so people could have the right to go in front of a bankruptcy judge.”
He went on: “And where is President Obama? When he says, ‘Well, you know, we don’t want to upset the market,’ what is good about a market when someone is foreclosed on and ... you’ve got a vacant building? We have to have a national moratorium to give ourselves a window of opportunity to restructure mortgages ... to look at homeowners as people, not as a commodity to make money.”
According to RealtyTrac, banks repossessed 102,134 properties in September, a home roughly every 30 seconds. Every 30 seconds, banks—many that received funds from the Bush administration’s TARP, and that may be using fraudulent practices—foreclose on an American family’s dream of home ownership. Meanwhile, GMAC Mortgage has reported increased profits for the first half of 2010.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/when_banks_are_the_robbers_20101019/?ln
Posted on Oct 19, 2010
By Amy Goodman
The big banks that caused the collapse of the global finance market, and received tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts, have likely been engaging in wholesale fraud against homeowners and the courts. But in a promising development this week, attorneys general from all 50 states announced a bipartisan joint investigation into foreclosure fraud.
Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, GMAC and other big mortgage lenders recently suspended most foreclosure proceedings, following revelations that thousands of their foreclosures were being conducted like “foreclosure mills,” with tens of thousands of legal documents signed by low-level staffers with little or no knowledge of what they were signing.
Then the Obama administration signaled that it was not supporting a foreclosure moratorium. Not long after, Bank of America announced it was restarting its foreclosure operations. GMAC followed suit, and others will likely join in. So much for the voluntary moratorium.
GMAC Mortgage engaged in mass document processing, dubbed “robo-signing.” In several cases, GMAC Mortgage filed documents with courts that were signed by Jeffrey Stephan. Stephan presided over a staff of 12 in suburban Philadelphia. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray filed a lawsuit against GMAC Mortgage, Stephan and the bank that owns GMAC, Ally Financial (itself a subsidiary of General Motors).
According to one report, Stephan received 10,000 mortgage foreclosure documents to process in one month. Based on an eight-hour workday, he would have had to read, verify and sign, in the presence of a notary, about one document per minute. He admitted to signing documents without reading them or checking the facts about homeowners said to be in default. And Stephan was just one of many “robo-signers.”
Recall that GM received $51 billion in taxpayer bailouts; its subsidiary, GMAC, received $16.3 billion; and Ally Financial subsidiary GMAC Mortgage received $1.5 billion as an “incentive payment for home loan modification.”
So you as a taxpayer may have bailed out a bank that is fraudulently foreclosing on you. What recourse do you have?
Back in February 2009, Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur advised homeowners to force lenders to “produce the note.” People facing foreclosure were being taken to court while the bank alleging default couldn’t even prove it owned the mortgage. The mortgage document often had been lost in the tangled web of financial wheeling and dealing. Kaptur told me: “Millions and millions of families are getting foreclosure notices. They don’t have proper legal representation ... possession is nine-tenths of the law; therefore, stay in your property.”
If you stay in your home, your mortgage lender may break in. Nancy Jacobini of Orange County, Fla., was inside her home when she heard an intruder. Thinking she was being burglarized, she called 911. Police determined the intruder was actually someone sent by JPMorgan Chase to change the locks. And Jacobini wasn’t even in foreclosure!
Most banks that suspended foreclosure efforts only did so in 23 states—because it is only in those 23 states that courts actually adjudicate over foreclosure proceedings. One judge who oversees foreclosures is New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Schack. He has made national headlines for rejecting dozens of foreclosure filings. He told “Democracy Now!” news hour, “My job is to do justice ... we run into numerous problems with assignments of mortgages, questionable affidavits of merit and just sloppy paperwork in general.”
Bruce Marks runs NACA, a national nonprofit that helps people avoid foreclosure. He told me: “When President Obama was running for president, he said one of the first things he’ll do is put a moratorium on foreclosures. He never did. He never backed bankruptcy reform so people could have the right to go in front of a bankruptcy judge.”
He went on: “And where is President Obama? When he says, ‘Well, you know, we don’t want to upset the market,’ what is good about a market when someone is foreclosed on and ... you’ve got a vacant building? We have to have a national moratorium to give ourselves a window of opportunity to restructure mortgages ... to look at homeowners as people, not as a commodity to make money.”
According to RealtyTrac, banks repossessed 102,134 properties in September, a home roughly every 30 seconds. Every 30 seconds, banks—many that received funds from the Bush administration’s TARP, and that may be using fraudulent practices—foreclose on an American family’s dream of home ownership. Meanwhile, GMAC Mortgage has reported increased profits for the first half of 2010.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/when_banks_are_the_robbers_20101019/?ln
French Demonstrations Mark the End of an Era
French Demonstrations Mark the End of an Era
Posted on Oct 20, 2010
By William Pfaff
PARIS—The plethora of unwanted strikes and student and youth unrest in Western Europe is a morbid condition.
Speaking medically, plethora is an overabundance of blood in the body, connected with the choleric temperament that medieval physiology described. The word “colere” means anger, fury, in French. The rest of the Western world has other words to match.
It is not pension claims that are driving the current political uproar. It is popular fury at the people who created the present economic crisis and have been rewarded, with everyone else left to face the consequences.
The demonstrations are obvious nonsense in terms of what they are supposed to be about—early pensions, secure working lives, abundance for all. “The French are bored,” Pierre Viansson-Ponte wrote shortly before all hell indeed broke loose in Paris in the spring of 1968. France soon was no longer bored. To the present day, France’s students and unionized workers have longed to stage something as memorable as May 1968. This is part of the explanation why, today, lycee students (15-18 years old), and even younger pupils from the middle school French “colleges,” have joined their university elders and teachers in these manifestations of outrage.
They have shown that they are contagious and even dangerous (the police dread dealing with juvenile rioters, who can be totally uncontrollable). Launched by minority unions in France, futile gestures of defiance against the Sarkozy government and mainly motivated by internal union politics, these protests have escaped union control, spreading from France to neighboring states, engaging port, refinery and railroad workers, printers, truckers, factory employees, and practically everyone else.
These events of autumn 2010, like those of 1968, mark the end of an era. Those who claim to be the new era’s reformers, or try to perform as reformers, are incapable of escaping the old system’s claims and its moral structure. Money has taken control.
The symbol of this to Americans was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in January (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that delivered the American government over to business corporations, all of whose corporate money, including unreported and secret special interest campaign money, is now declared democracy’s free speech, dominating other forms of speech. A quarter of a billion dollars of undeclared money will be spent on the November midterm elections, thanks to the Supreme Court.
Elsewhere in the Western world, the economic role of speculative money is widely recognized, as are the crimes committed in its service, the fortunes of defaulting moneymen that are rescued by taxpayers, and the corporations with foreign, tax-haven headquarters. This is today’s world.
Americans have demonstrated their anger over the result of all of this. But the American way is unique. It is to attack bitterly the liberals and progressive Democrats who have criticized the system all along and want to change it. It is to rally to vote increased power to those who created the crisis, together with the Republican senators and congressmen who voted for it all, and perpetuate the system.
Such is the wonder of American politics, in which only native Americans can recognize the national ideology that says, “Hurrah for the rich who’ve already made it; I’ll make mine tomorrow! Cut taxes for the rich! I’ll be rich one day! Reward the rip-off bankers and brokers of Wall Street—cleverer than the rest of the world—with tripled bonuses! Champion the corporations that not only ship their manufacturing overseas, but send their accounting headquarters there too, so as to be spared the burden of American taxes!” They’re the wise guys!
This is the crisis of the American and British version of capitalism, ruler of the world since Mikhail Gorbachev caused the collapse of communism by trying to reform it. Gorbachev’s party rivals, fearing the consequences, ousted him and brought down his system, with the result that brigands and looters took over.
Americans rejoiced, and decided that it was American capitalism that had “won” the Cold War. And if regulated and rational capitalism could do that, unregulated and irrational capitalism could do even better in looting Western as well as Eastern society, with the consequences being what we have experienced since the new century began. The unregulated Western economic system has demonstrated a moral abandonment and adhesion to greed that shows no sign of ending, whatever the timorous promises made by Barack Obama and David Cameron—leaders of the nations from which this disaster has sprung.
Visit William Pfaff’s website for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/french_demonstrations_mark_the_end_of_an_era_20101020/
Posted on Oct 20, 2010
By William Pfaff
PARIS—The plethora of unwanted strikes and student and youth unrest in Western Europe is a morbid condition.
Speaking medically, plethora is an overabundance of blood in the body, connected with the choleric temperament that medieval physiology described. The word “colere” means anger, fury, in French. The rest of the Western world has other words to match.
It is not pension claims that are driving the current political uproar. It is popular fury at the people who created the present economic crisis and have been rewarded, with everyone else left to face the consequences.
The demonstrations are obvious nonsense in terms of what they are supposed to be about—early pensions, secure working lives, abundance for all. “The French are bored,” Pierre Viansson-Ponte wrote shortly before all hell indeed broke loose in Paris in the spring of 1968. France soon was no longer bored. To the present day, France’s students and unionized workers have longed to stage something as memorable as May 1968. This is part of the explanation why, today, lycee students (15-18 years old), and even younger pupils from the middle school French “colleges,” have joined their university elders and teachers in these manifestations of outrage.
They have shown that they are contagious and even dangerous (the police dread dealing with juvenile rioters, who can be totally uncontrollable). Launched by minority unions in France, futile gestures of defiance against the Sarkozy government and mainly motivated by internal union politics, these protests have escaped union control, spreading from France to neighboring states, engaging port, refinery and railroad workers, printers, truckers, factory employees, and practically everyone else.
These events of autumn 2010, like those of 1968, mark the end of an era. Those who claim to be the new era’s reformers, or try to perform as reformers, are incapable of escaping the old system’s claims and its moral structure. Money has taken control.
The symbol of this to Americans was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in January (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that delivered the American government over to business corporations, all of whose corporate money, including unreported and secret special interest campaign money, is now declared democracy’s free speech, dominating other forms of speech. A quarter of a billion dollars of undeclared money will be spent on the November midterm elections, thanks to the Supreme Court.
Elsewhere in the Western world, the economic role of speculative money is widely recognized, as are the crimes committed in its service, the fortunes of defaulting moneymen that are rescued by taxpayers, and the corporations with foreign, tax-haven headquarters. This is today’s world.
Americans have demonstrated their anger over the result of all of this. But the American way is unique. It is to attack bitterly the liberals and progressive Democrats who have criticized the system all along and want to change it. It is to rally to vote increased power to those who created the crisis, together with the Republican senators and congressmen who voted for it all, and perpetuate the system.
Such is the wonder of American politics, in which only native Americans can recognize the national ideology that says, “Hurrah for the rich who’ve already made it; I’ll make mine tomorrow! Cut taxes for the rich! I’ll be rich one day! Reward the rip-off bankers and brokers of Wall Street—cleverer than the rest of the world—with tripled bonuses! Champion the corporations that not only ship their manufacturing overseas, but send their accounting headquarters there too, so as to be spared the burden of American taxes!” They’re the wise guys!
This is the crisis of the American and British version of capitalism, ruler of the world since Mikhail Gorbachev caused the collapse of communism by trying to reform it. Gorbachev’s party rivals, fearing the consequences, ousted him and brought down his system, with the result that brigands and looters took over.
Americans rejoiced, and decided that it was American capitalism that had “won” the Cold War. And if regulated and rational capitalism could do that, unregulated and irrational capitalism could do even better in looting Western as well as Eastern society, with the consequences being what we have experienced since the new century began. The unregulated Western economic system has demonstrated a moral abandonment and adhesion to greed that shows no sign of ending, whatever the timorous promises made by Barack Obama and David Cameron—leaders of the nations from which this disaster has sprung.
Visit William Pfaff’s website for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/french_demonstrations_mark_the_end_of_an_era_20101020/
Wednesday 20 October 2010
France Erupts Sarkozy Under Siege
France Erupts
Sarkozy Under Siege
By PHILIPPE MARLIÈRE
October 20, 2010
When he entered the Elysée palace in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy dreamed of a glorious destiny. Enthusiastic commentators predicted that his casual populism would revamp the Bonapartist right, and that his Gallic brand of neoliberal policies would sell the “American dream” to a mistrustful population. Things have not gone according to plan. Sarkozy wanted to be the French JFK; today he looks more like Louis XVI awaiting trial in 1793. He may escape the guillotine, but his presidency is now under siege.
The French are deeply unhappy with the way they have been governed, but their main grievance is about pension reform, which is seen as a cynical ploy to make ordinary people work more for inferior entitlements, while bailed-out bankers and the rich get tax rebates and continue to enjoy the high life. Over the past month, six national demonstrations have gathered together an estimated average of 3.5 million per action day. The latest, on Tuesday, was again a big success.
The movement is popular: 69% of the nation back the strikes and demonstrations; 73% want the government to withdraw the reform. And high school pupils have now joined the fray. Over 1,000 high schools are on strike as the youngsters take to the streets to protest against mass unemployment and the raising of the retirement age. The government has patronisingly labelled them as “manipulated kids”, but these comments have backfired and served only to galvanise the young, who have hardened their resistance and taken further interest in the reform. When interviewed by the media, pupils come across as articulate and knowledgable. Parents worry about their children's future, so they will not stop them from striking.
In France, strikes and demonstrations are seen as a civilised and effective way to enact one's citizenship. Students are expected to join marches from an early age, receiving by the same token a “political education”. France's youth have always scared governments because of their radical potential. Student demonstrations of late have been invariably popular because people know that the young have been badly hit by unemployment over the past 30 years.
University students are preparing to strike as well. Sarkozy, like Louis XVI in 1789, does not seem to have grasped how volatile the situation has become. He should know better. Since May 1968, all governments have been forced on the ropes every time youngsters have entered a social movement. This time it could prove crucial in helping to reach a tipping point; a stage in the conflict where the balance of power switches from the government toward those opposing the pension reform.
Last week, Sarkozy had to send in riot police to reopen fuel depots blocked by strikes in several places. Yet several hundred filling stations had to shut because they had run out of supplies. Lorry and train drivers are also starting strike actions.
How can the current situation be interpreted? Undoubtedly, the rebellion seems durable and runs deeper than the question of pensions. The reform has triggered a web of collective actions that are now spreading fast. Discontent is fuelled by low incomes and unemployment, but also by the impact of the crisis on people's daily life, the arrogance of the Sarkozy presidency, corruption cases and police brutality.
There is a sense of moral outrage at the imposition of a neoliberal medicine to cure an illness caused by the same neoliberal policies. The French are not hostile to reforms: they just demand those that redistribute wealth and allocate resources to those who need it the most. Any comparison with May '68, however, may be hasty. Then, France was experiencing a period of economic prosperity. Today, events occur in the context of a deep economic depression. This is why the political situation is potentially explosive. Radicalised workers and youngsters are forcing the unions to up their game. The normally toothless Socialist party has pledged to return the retirement age to 60, should it come back to power in 2012.
One can envisage two possible scenarios. Opposition to the reform hardens, in which case Sarkozy may have to water it down or even withdraw it. This would mark the first major popular victory in Europe against the post-2008 neoliberal order. Alternatively, Sarkozy stays put and imposes a deeply unpopular reform, in which case the political price to pay for the incumbent president would be very high, should he decide to run again in 2012.
Philippe Marlière is professor of French and European politics at University College, London (UK).
Sarkozy Under Siege
By PHILIPPE MARLIÈRE
October 20, 2010
When he entered the Elysée palace in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy dreamed of a glorious destiny. Enthusiastic commentators predicted that his casual populism would revamp the Bonapartist right, and that his Gallic brand of neoliberal policies would sell the “American dream” to a mistrustful population. Things have not gone according to plan. Sarkozy wanted to be the French JFK; today he looks more like Louis XVI awaiting trial in 1793. He may escape the guillotine, but his presidency is now under siege.
The French are deeply unhappy with the way they have been governed, but their main grievance is about pension reform, which is seen as a cynical ploy to make ordinary people work more for inferior entitlements, while bailed-out bankers and the rich get tax rebates and continue to enjoy the high life. Over the past month, six national demonstrations have gathered together an estimated average of 3.5 million per action day. The latest, on Tuesday, was again a big success.
The movement is popular: 69% of the nation back the strikes and demonstrations; 73% want the government to withdraw the reform. And high school pupils have now joined the fray. Over 1,000 high schools are on strike as the youngsters take to the streets to protest against mass unemployment and the raising of the retirement age. The government has patronisingly labelled them as “manipulated kids”, but these comments have backfired and served only to galvanise the young, who have hardened their resistance and taken further interest in the reform. When interviewed by the media, pupils come across as articulate and knowledgable. Parents worry about their children's future, so they will not stop them from striking.
In France, strikes and demonstrations are seen as a civilised and effective way to enact one's citizenship. Students are expected to join marches from an early age, receiving by the same token a “political education”. France's youth have always scared governments because of their radical potential. Student demonstrations of late have been invariably popular because people know that the young have been badly hit by unemployment over the past 30 years.
University students are preparing to strike as well. Sarkozy, like Louis XVI in 1789, does not seem to have grasped how volatile the situation has become. He should know better. Since May 1968, all governments have been forced on the ropes every time youngsters have entered a social movement. This time it could prove crucial in helping to reach a tipping point; a stage in the conflict where the balance of power switches from the government toward those opposing the pension reform.
Last week, Sarkozy had to send in riot police to reopen fuel depots blocked by strikes in several places. Yet several hundred filling stations had to shut because they had run out of supplies. Lorry and train drivers are also starting strike actions.
How can the current situation be interpreted? Undoubtedly, the rebellion seems durable and runs deeper than the question of pensions. The reform has triggered a web of collective actions that are now spreading fast. Discontent is fuelled by low incomes and unemployment, but also by the impact of the crisis on people's daily life, the arrogance of the Sarkozy presidency, corruption cases and police brutality.
There is a sense of moral outrage at the imposition of a neoliberal medicine to cure an illness caused by the same neoliberal policies. The French are not hostile to reforms: they just demand those that redistribute wealth and allocate resources to those who need it the most. Any comparison with May '68, however, may be hasty. Then, France was experiencing a period of economic prosperity. Today, events occur in the context of a deep economic depression. This is why the political situation is potentially explosive. Radicalised workers and youngsters are forcing the unions to up their game. The normally toothless Socialist party has pledged to return the retirement age to 60, should it come back to power in 2012.
One can envisage two possible scenarios. Opposition to the reform hardens, in which case Sarkozy may have to water it down or even withdraw it. This would mark the first major popular victory in Europe against the post-2008 neoliberal order. Alternatively, Sarkozy stays put and imposes a deeply unpopular reform, in which case the political price to pay for the incumbent president would be very high, should he decide to run again in 2012.
Philippe Marlière is professor of French and European politics at University College, London (UK).
A Tale of Two Nations Red Hot France; Tepid Britain
A Tale of Two Nations
Red Hot France; Tepid Britain
By TARIQ ALI
October 20, 2010
France is grinding to a standstill as millions of workers and students erupt in the streets at the government’s prposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Across the Channel, the new Tory Chancellor has announced savage cuts in public expenditures that will slice away more than a million jobs, drive workers out of south east England and doom the country to years of austerity (unequally imposed, bien sur.) Yet the response has been muted.
A few years ago, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy told an interviewer that he knew the French better than most. Today, he confided, they were admiring the good looks of his wife; tomorrow they would cut his throat. It hasn't quite come to that just yet, but the French – students and workers, men and women, citizens all – are out on the streets again. A rise in the pension age? Impossible. The barricades are up, oil supplies running out, trains and planes on a skeleton schedule and the protests are still escalating. More than three million people a week ago. Hundreds of thousands out this week, a million yesterday, and more expected this weekend. And what a joyous sight: school students marching in defense of old people's rights. Were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with three stars, with Greece a close second with two stars.
What a contrast with the miserable, measly actions being planned by the lily-livered English trade unions. There is growing anger and bitterness here too, but it is being recuperated by a petrified bureaucracy. A ritual protest has been planned, largely to demonstrate that they are doing something. But is this something better than nothing?
Perhaps. I'm not totally sure. But even these mild attempts to rally support against the austerity measures are too much for dear leader Ed Miliband. He won't be seen at them. He has renegued on a promise – made when he was seeking union support for his leadership bid) to show up at a union rally. The rot of Blairism goes deep in the Labour party. A crushing defeat last year might have produced something a bit better than the shower that constitutes the front bench. Ed Balls, the bulldog, might have gone for the jugular but he has been neutered. Instead, the new front bench is desperate to prove that it could easily be part of the coalition and not just on Afghanistan.
There is growing bitterness and growing anger in England, too, but not much else so far. It could change. The French epidemic could spread, but nothing will happen from above. Young and old fought against Thatcher and lost. Her New Labor successors made sure that the defeats she inflicted were institutionalized.
This is a country without an official opposition. An extra-parliamentary upheaval is not simply necessary to combat the cuts, but also to enhance democracy that at the moment is designed to further corporate interests and little more. Bailouts for bankers and the rich, an obscene level of defense expenditure to fight Washington's wars, and cuts for the less well off and the poor. A topsy-turvy world produces its own priorities. They need to be contested. These islands have a radical past, after all, that is not being taught in the history modules on offer. Given the inability of the official parliament to meet real needs why not the convocation of regional and national assemblies with a social charter that can be fought for and defended just as Shelley advised just under two centuries ago, shortly after the massacre of workers at Peterloo.
Ye who suffer woes untold
Or to feel or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold.
[. . .]
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many, they are few.
Tariq Ali’s latest book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad’ is published by Verso this month.
http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq10202010.html
Red Hot France; Tepid Britain
By TARIQ ALI
October 20, 2010
France is grinding to a standstill as millions of workers and students erupt in the streets at the government’s prposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Across the Channel, the new Tory Chancellor has announced savage cuts in public expenditures that will slice away more than a million jobs, drive workers out of south east England and doom the country to years of austerity (unequally imposed, bien sur.) Yet the response has been muted.
A few years ago, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy told an interviewer that he knew the French better than most. Today, he confided, they were admiring the good looks of his wife; tomorrow they would cut his throat. It hasn't quite come to that just yet, but the French – students and workers, men and women, citizens all – are out on the streets again. A rise in the pension age? Impossible. The barricades are up, oil supplies running out, trains and planes on a skeleton schedule and the protests are still escalating. More than three million people a week ago. Hundreds of thousands out this week, a million yesterday, and more expected this weekend. And what a joyous sight: school students marching in defense of old people's rights. Were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with three stars, with Greece a close second with two stars.
What a contrast with the miserable, measly actions being planned by the lily-livered English trade unions. There is growing anger and bitterness here too, but it is being recuperated by a petrified bureaucracy. A ritual protest has been planned, largely to demonstrate that they are doing something. But is this something better than nothing?
Perhaps. I'm not totally sure. But even these mild attempts to rally support against the austerity measures are too much for dear leader Ed Miliband. He won't be seen at them. He has renegued on a promise – made when he was seeking union support for his leadership bid) to show up at a union rally. The rot of Blairism goes deep in the Labour party. A crushing defeat last year might have produced something a bit better than the shower that constitutes the front bench. Ed Balls, the bulldog, might have gone for the jugular but he has been neutered. Instead, the new front bench is desperate to prove that it could easily be part of the coalition and not just on Afghanistan.
There is growing bitterness and growing anger in England, too, but not much else so far. It could change. The French epidemic could spread, but nothing will happen from above. Young and old fought against Thatcher and lost. Her New Labor successors made sure that the defeats she inflicted were institutionalized.
This is a country without an official opposition. An extra-parliamentary upheaval is not simply necessary to combat the cuts, but also to enhance democracy that at the moment is designed to further corporate interests and little more. Bailouts for bankers and the rich, an obscene level of defense expenditure to fight Washington's wars, and cuts for the less well off and the poor. A topsy-turvy world produces its own priorities. They need to be contested. These islands have a radical past, after all, that is not being taught in the history modules on offer. Given the inability of the official parliament to meet real needs why not the convocation of regional and national assemblies with a social charter that can be fought for and defended just as Shelley advised just under two centuries ago, shortly after the massacre of workers at Peterloo.
Ye who suffer woes untold
Or to feel or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold.
[. . .]
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many, they are few.
Tariq Ali’s latest book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad’ is published by Verso this month.
http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq10202010.html
Friday 15 October 2010
The War on Terror
What's It All About?
The War on Terror
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Weekend Edition
October 15 - 17, 2010
Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?
Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?
Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.
Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?
Are Americans aware that the same neoconservarives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?
The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?
The bottom line answer is that the “war on terror” is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides “security from terrorists,” but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties.
The US government creates terrorists by invading Muslim countries, wrecking infrastructure and killing vast numbers of civilians. The US also creates terrorists by installing puppet governments to rule over Muslims and by using the puppet governments to murder and persecute citizens as is occurring on a vast scale in Pakistan today.
Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.
Most Americans cannot see what is happening because of their conditioning. Most Americans believe that their government is the best on earth, that it is morally motivated to help others and to do good, that it rushes aid to countries where there is famine and natural catastrophes. Most believe that their presidents tell the truth, except about their sexual affairs.
The persistence of these delusions is extraordinary in the face of daily headlines that report US government bullying of, and interference with, virtually every country on earth. The US policy is to buy off, overthrow, or make war on leaders of other countries who represent their peoples’ interests instead of American interests. A recent victim was the president of Honduras who had the wild idea that the Honduran government should serve the Honduran people.
The American government was able to have the Honduran president discarded, because the Honduran military is trained and supplied by the US military. It is the same case in Pakistan, where the US government has the Pakistani government making war on its own people by invading tribal areas that the Americans consider to be friendly to the Taliban, al Qaeda, “militants” and “terrorists.”
Earlier this year a deputy US Treasury secretary ordered Pakistan to raise taxes so that the Pakistani government could more effectively make war on its own citizens for the Americans. On October 14 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Pakistan to again raise taxes or the US would withhold flood aid. Clinton pressured America’s European puppet states to do the same, expressing in the same breath that the US government was worried by British cuts in the military budget. God forbid that the hard-pressed British, still reeling from American financial fraud, don’t allocate enough money to fight America’s wars.
On Washington’s orders, the Pakistani government launched a military offensive against Pakistani citizens in the Swat Valley that killed large numbers of Pakistanis and drove millions of civilians from their homes. Last July the US instructed Pakistan to send its troops against the Pakistani residents of North Waziristan. On July 6 Jason Ditz reported on antiwar.com that “at America’s behest, Pakistan has launched offensives against [the Pakistani provinces of] Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Orakzai,and Khyber.”
A week later Israel’s US Senator Carl Levin (D,MI) called for escalating the Obama Administration’s policies of US airstrikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas. On September 30, the Pakistani newspaper, The Frontier Post, wrote that the American air strikes “are, plain and simple, a naked aggression against Pakistan.”
The US claims that its forces in Afghanistan have the right to cross into Pakistan in pursuit of “militants.” Recently US helicopter gunships killed three Pakistani soldiers who they mistook for Taliban. Pakistan closed the main US supply route to Afghanistan until the Americans apologized.
Pakistan warned Washington against future attacks. However, US military officials, under pressure from Obama to show progress in the endless Afghan war, responded to Pakistan’s warning by calling for expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan. On October 5 the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis wrote that “the US edges closer to invading Pakistan.”
In his book, Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward reports that America’s puppet president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
To keep Pakistan in line, the US government changed its position that the “Times Square Bombing” was the work of a “lone wolf.” Attorney General Eric Holder switched the blame to the “Pakistani Taliban,” and Secretary of State Clinton threatened Pakistan with “very serious consequences” for the unsuccessful Times Square bombing, which likely was a false flag operation aimed at Pakistan.
To further heighten tensions, on September 1 the eight members of a high-ranking Pakistani military delegation in route to a meeting in Tampa, Florida, with US Central Command, were rudely treated and detained as terrorist suspects at Washington DC’s Dulles Airport.
For decades the US government has enabled repeated Israeli military aggression against Lebanon and now appears to be getting into gear for another Israeli assault on the former American protectorate of Lebanon. On October 14 the US government expressed its “outrage” that the Lebanese government had permitted a visit by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is the focus of Washington’s intense demonization efforts. Israel’s representatives in the US Congress threatened to stop US military aid to Lebanon, forgetting that US Rep. Howard Berman (D,CA) has had aid to Lebanon blocked since last August to punish Lebanon for a border clash with Israel.
Perhaps the most telling headline of all is the October 14 report, “Somalia’s New American Primer Minister.” An American has been installed as the Prime Minister of Somalia, an American puppet government in Mogadishu backed up by thousands of Ugandan troops paid by Washington.
This barely scratches the surface of Washington’s benevolence toward other countries and respect for their rights, borders, and lives of their citizens.
Meanwhile, to silence Wikileaks and to prevent any more revelations of American war crimes, the “freedom and democracy” government in DC has closed down Wikileaks’ donations by placing the organization on its “watch list” and by having the Australian puppet government blacklist Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is now akin to a terrorist organization. The American government’s practice of silencing critics will spread across the Internet.
Remember, they hate us because we have freedom and democracy, First Amendment rights, habeas corpus, respect for human rights, and show justice and mercy to all.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10152010.html
The War on Terror
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Weekend Edition
October 15 - 17, 2010
Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?
Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?
Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.
Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?
Are Americans aware that the same neoconservarives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?
The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?
The bottom line answer is that the “war on terror” is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides “security from terrorists,” but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties.
The US government creates terrorists by invading Muslim countries, wrecking infrastructure and killing vast numbers of civilians. The US also creates terrorists by installing puppet governments to rule over Muslims and by using the puppet governments to murder and persecute citizens as is occurring on a vast scale in Pakistan today.
Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.
Most Americans cannot see what is happening because of their conditioning. Most Americans believe that their government is the best on earth, that it is morally motivated to help others and to do good, that it rushes aid to countries where there is famine and natural catastrophes. Most believe that their presidents tell the truth, except about their sexual affairs.
The persistence of these delusions is extraordinary in the face of daily headlines that report US government bullying of, and interference with, virtually every country on earth. The US policy is to buy off, overthrow, or make war on leaders of other countries who represent their peoples’ interests instead of American interests. A recent victim was the president of Honduras who had the wild idea that the Honduran government should serve the Honduran people.
The American government was able to have the Honduran president discarded, because the Honduran military is trained and supplied by the US military. It is the same case in Pakistan, where the US government has the Pakistani government making war on its own people by invading tribal areas that the Americans consider to be friendly to the Taliban, al Qaeda, “militants” and “terrorists.”
Earlier this year a deputy US Treasury secretary ordered Pakistan to raise taxes so that the Pakistani government could more effectively make war on its own citizens for the Americans. On October 14 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Pakistan to again raise taxes or the US would withhold flood aid. Clinton pressured America’s European puppet states to do the same, expressing in the same breath that the US government was worried by British cuts in the military budget. God forbid that the hard-pressed British, still reeling from American financial fraud, don’t allocate enough money to fight America’s wars.
On Washington’s orders, the Pakistani government launched a military offensive against Pakistani citizens in the Swat Valley that killed large numbers of Pakistanis and drove millions of civilians from their homes. Last July the US instructed Pakistan to send its troops against the Pakistani residents of North Waziristan. On July 6 Jason Ditz reported on antiwar.com that “at America’s behest, Pakistan has launched offensives against [the Pakistani provinces of] Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Orakzai,and Khyber.”
A week later Israel’s US Senator Carl Levin (D,MI) called for escalating the Obama Administration’s policies of US airstrikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas. On September 30, the Pakistani newspaper, The Frontier Post, wrote that the American air strikes “are, plain and simple, a naked aggression against Pakistan.”
The US claims that its forces in Afghanistan have the right to cross into Pakistan in pursuit of “militants.” Recently US helicopter gunships killed three Pakistani soldiers who they mistook for Taliban. Pakistan closed the main US supply route to Afghanistan until the Americans apologized.
Pakistan warned Washington against future attacks. However, US military officials, under pressure from Obama to show progress in the endless Afghan war, responded to Pakistan’s warning by calling for expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan. On October 5 the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis wrote that “the US edges closer to invading Pakistan.”
In his book, Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward reports that America’s puppet president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
To keep Pakistan in line, the US government changed its position that the “Times Square Bombing” was the work of a “lone wolf.” Attorney General Eric Holder switched the blame to the “Pakistani Taliban,” and Secretary of State Clinton threatened Pakistan with “very serious consequences” for the unsuccessful Times Square bombing, which likely was a false flag operation aimed at Pakistan.
To further heighten tensions, on September 1 the eight members of a high-ranking Pakistani military delegation in route to a meeting in Tampa, Florida, with US Central Command, were rudely treated and detained as terrorist suspects at Washington DC’s Dulles Airport.
For decades the US government has enabled repeated Israeli military aggression against Lebanon and now appears to be getting into gear for another Israeli assault on the former American protectorate of Lebanon. On October 14 the US government expressed its “outrage” that the Lebanese government had permitted a visit by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is the focus of Washington’s intense demonization efforts. Israel’s representatives in the US Congress threatened to stop US military aid to Lebanon, forgetting that US Rep. Howard Berman (D,CA) has had aid to Lebanon blocked since last August to punish Lebanon for a border clash with Israel.
Perhaps the most telling headline of all is the October 14 report, “Somalia’s New American Primer Minister.” An American has been installed as the Prime Minister of Somalia, an American puppet government in Mogadishu backed up by thousands of Ugandan troops paid by Washington.
This barely scratches the surface of Washington’s benevolence toward other countries and respect for their rights, borders, and lives of their citizens.
Meanwhile, to silence Wikileaks and to prevent any more revelations of American war crimes, the “freedom and democracy” government in DC has closed down Wikileaks’ donations by placing the organization on its “watch list” and by having the Australian puppet government blacklist Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is now akin to a terrorist organization. The American government’s practice of silencing critics will spread across the Internet.
Remember, they hate us because we have freedom and democracy, First Amendment rights, habeas corpus, respect for human rights, and show justice and mercy to all.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10152010.html
On the Road with Ahmadinejad in Lebanon
"Isn't This One Fine View?"
On the Road with Ahmadinejad in Lebanon
By FRANKLIN LAMB
Weekend Edition
October 15 - 17, 2010
Qana.
He came, he saw, he conquered.
As he watched the Iranian President blow kisses to cleaning workers at Beirut’s airport during his departure for Iran early this morning, a Lebanese Christian historian commented “This Persian’s glory at the moment is arguably greater than Caesar’s following Rome’s second conquest of Britain”.
And the Iranian president did indeed throw much more than a stone at US-Israel projects for Lebanon, perhaps energized by the adoring public he encountered.
A grateful nation extended to Makmoud Ahmadinejad what one Bishop claimed was the greatest outpouring of popular support on the streets, all along this country’s sectarian divide, that the Republic of Lebanon has ever witnessed including the May 10, 1997 visit of Pope John Paul II.
An important reason for the outpouring of popular support was the quarter century of Iranian assistance to Lebanon for social projects, and for rebuilding much of Lebanon following the 1993, 1996 and 2006 Israeli aggressions. Massive aid that was detailed by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General in a recent speech and the cost of which is estimated to be in excess of one billion dollars.
Iran’s President is widely believed in the diplomatic community here to have promoted sectarian unity in Lebanon, calmed the current political atmosphere, and delivered on offers of more desperately needed economic projects via 17 bilateral agreements. A particularly appreciated offer throughout Lebanon is Iran’s major pledge of an electrical complex that will deliver 7 times Lebanon’s current power supply, which in 2010 still sees power cuts throughout Lebanon. The current deficiencies range from three hours to 12 hours daily power cuts everywhere in Lebanon plus total blackouts for days at a time in some areas. Iran’s President is widely believed to have achieved a major advancement for Lebanese stability, sovereignty, and independence.
The throngs were cheering, waving, and shouting their admiration. Local media used descriptive words like “rock star, rapturous, massive affection,” to describe his reception.
Wretched Palestinian refugees, tightly shoe horned into Lebanon’s squalid UN camps, denied even the most elementary civil rights by an apathetic international community and some of the local sects, could be seen along the route. Many with eyes moistened, perhaps by Nakba memories and tears of hope for the early liberation of their sacred Palestine and the full exercise of their internationally mandated and inalienable Right of Return to their homes.
Refugees, plenty of them illegal, Iraqis, Afghans, Kurds and others, urging the expulsion of occupation forces from their countries and the restoration of their former lives waved and blew kisses. Lebanese domestic ‘guest/slave workers’ from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Sudan, Philippines, Bangladesh, and other countries could be seen in the crowds along with Syrian construction workers. Also a sprinkling of Stendhal “Le Rouge et le Noir” characters who, seeking secure advancement in life, have fixed themselves to one or the other, both requiring that they be seen publicly at such an important event.
Close to 750,000 people, or approximately one quarter of the total population of Lebanon,) of all ages and stations in life, appeared at the main road from Beirut’s airport and at other events during an intense two day frenetic series of appearances. Red, green and yellow rose petals, the colors of Iran’s flag, greeted Lebanon’s guest. Due to time constraints, some events for which much preparation had been made were “postponed”, including an “American Town Hall Meeting with President Ahmadinejad. ” It was to include 15 Americans currently in Lebanon as academics, business people, students, housewives, and NGO’s, in a much anticipated US political campaign type format with Iran’s President joining an informal dialogue with his interlocutors.
At Al Raya Athletic field in South Beirut, often used for popular Hezbollah events, an estimated 150, 000 people crowded onto just the main field boundaries, , one Hezbollah source reporting that it was the largest gathering inside the field ever seen. Thousands of other attendees spilled onto the side streets where huge TV screens has been set up and vendors hocked roasted ears of corn, boiled balila beans, kaak asrounye (baked bread with filling) ) various treats, including chips, cotton candy and soft drinks. Driving around the area on the mercifully cool autumn evening by motorbike, one could see thousands more gathered at several dozen Dahiyeh outdoor cafes and store front shops where families and friends gathered to watch on the proprietors’ outdoor TV screens. Some of the adults smoked arguila water pipes and little kids played, happy to be allowed to stay up late while teenagers appeared contented to get a day off from school and an evening without homework.
Lebanese and Iranian flags were fluttering everywhere without huge numbers of Hezbollah flags displayed in keeping with the message that this was an official state visit. President Ahmadinejad of Iran was invited by President Michel Suleiman of Lebanon on behalf of every Lebanese, including the majority of Lebanese who live in the Diaspora. Deployments of Suleiman’s Presidential guards were the ones seen to be providing security for Iran’s president with Hezbollah security largely out of site, except for occasional fleeting glimpse of Hezbollah sharpshooters in windows throughout the assembly area. They also surfaced quickly if a dispute or argument flared up in the packed crowds. In these few cases a representative of Hezbollah would apologize for the crowded conditions and ask for patience and understanding during the event.
At one stop near the blue line in South Lebanon he smiled broadly, winked to the media contingent and adoring villagers surrounding him and, gazing deep into occupied Palestine, as if posing for a Marlboro Country billboard advertisement, Iran’s charismatic President made many a heart flutter when he spoke softly, almost whispering to some villages, and with a twinkle in his eye, as if someone were eavesdropping: “Now isn’t this one fine view?”, as he discretely pointed. “I like it over there, don’t you?”
Almost everyone laughed at his joke.
A young lady wearing a full length black Chador (a women wearing one is called a ‘Chadori’ in Persian and Lebanese resistance culture) , with some of her school mates in tow who were volunteering as hostesses and Farsi, Arabic, and English interpreters, offered arriving American guests enthusiastic greetings: “Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s new border with Palestine!”
Almost everyone laughed at her joke.
Then, exuding an easy self confidence and speaking American accented English while obviously having a good time, the student noticed one seemingly horror struck humorless lady wearing a light brown business suit and heels who a security guy later confided was suspected of being a US Embassy plant. “Just teasing”, she assured the woman, as she offered her hand in friendship to the flinching guest who glared uneasily at the hostesses’ hand as if it held a dead rat or might bite hers. “Why are you Americans so serious”? the loquacious hostess smiled. “Do you agree Iran and America are destined to be good friends after our countries are finished with this problem?”, and she gestured with her head south toward Tel Aviv.
“Please tell me what do Americans think? I read a few days ago in preparation for my work today-I should not say work, it’s really fun- a report that ninety percent of Americans in a recent poll said they did not favor attacking Iran unless Iran attacks Israel first. This is very good news because I am sure Iran, unlike Israel’s record, will never be the first to start a war. Iran will retaliate naturally and that could mean World War III, but there will be no war involving Iran unless Iran, Syria, or Lebanon is attacked. We in the Resistance Alliance are ‘one for all and all for one’ but we really want to be friends with the American people.” And she offered the woman a small ribbon-tied, party wrapped, cellophane pouch with Iranian pistachios and candy attached to a small Iranian flag. “No thanks”, the American answered as she walked away.
The American Embassy warned Americans to avoid Ahmadinejad’s “provocative and potentially dangerous visit because the Lebanese government cannot protect US Citizens.” Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs, complained to the pan-Arab Al-Hayat on 10/13/10: “Why is the Iranian president organizing activities that might spark tension? We are taking steps to lower tension while Ahmadinejad is doing the opposite.”
Nevertheless, there were plenty of Yanks in attendance at all of Ahmadinejad’s appearances.
During his Qana visit, the Hezbollah Parliamentary delegation, friends with many Americans here, must have tipped off the Iranian President that Americans were sitting near them. The reason for this hunch is that he could not have been more gracious, making frequently eye contact and touching his forehead as a greeting and salute and thanking them for coming. He assured the American guests that eventually Iran and America will be good friends and perhaps allies.
Shortly before the Iranian President’s 35 car convoy carrying his delegation and various Lebanese officials arrived at Qana, his fourth largest gathering, an Israeli Air Force MRPV circled lazily yet provocatively above the site of the 1996 Qana massacre. Some in the more than 15,000 person crowd pointed skyward, some kids squealing “Israel!”. From their experience, “Qanains” as Ali, who grew up in this village explained some locals call themselves, were able to give foreigners fairly precise details of the MRPV’s specs and capabilities. This Israeli provocation ended, according to a Hezbollah security source, when the MRPV’s controllers realized that a Resistance laser guided missile had locked on to the uninvited intruder. The same source divulged that Hezbollah did not intend to shoot it down and would only monitor the threat. This was because the Resistance did not want mar the Iranian Presidents tour. In addition, he explained, explained that Lebanon’s resistance wanted to maintain “tactical and strategic ambiguity” concerning its array of anti-aircraft weapons until the moment war comes.
Lebanon’s people, army and resistance ignored provocations from this country’s southern enemy, including assassination threats like the one made by the Nakba-denying Knesset member Aryeh Eldad , more blustering from Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and PM Netanyahu, the beefing up of Israeli forces along the blue line, efforts to crack Hezbollah communications and send SMS threats via hacked mobile phones, conducting a chorus of US officials in childish criticisms of the visit, and Israeli spokesmen like Mark Regev and political extremists in Congress issuing threats.
Israeli warplanes on Friday carried out intensive, mock air raids over south Lebanon as if to send the message, “He is gone but we are still here!” The state-run National News Agency said Israeli jets staged mock air raids at medium attitude over Nabatiyeh, Iqlim al-Tuffah, Marjayoun, Khiam and Arqoub.
Another signature Israeli taunt during Iran’s Presidents visit was the launching of hundreds of blue and white balloons to catch the air current north to Bint Jbeil when Ahmadinejad was appearing. Some with insults written on them by children with magic markers and others allegedly smeared with human feces, the spreading of the latter being an IDF insult employed over the past 45 years of incursions into Lebanon and Palestine when during occupations of Lebanese and Palestinian homes some Israeli soldiers create what they call “poop art” on walls, mattresses and other surfaces.
Analysts will write about Iran’s Makmoud Ahmadinejad’s historic visit for months to come and what the visit means for the two countries, for the question of Palestine, strategic alignments in the region, and consequences for China, Russia and the wider international community.
A perhaps too early, road-weary, sleep-deprived photo snap of his visit’s effects would warrant the following brief and tentative evacuation, as Lebanon’s guest has just departed Beirut airport to return to his country. His midnight departure followed a visit at the Iranian Embassy with Hassan Nassrallah during which the Hezbollah Secretary-General gave the Iranian President an Israeli rifle taken from an Israeli soldier during the July 2006 war.
Ahmadinejad’s visit achieved more than a symbolic consecration of a new local and regional reality that encompasses a third way, separate from the US-Israel-Saudi or Syrian path. Some here think we are witnessing a new era of growing and uncompromising Resistance to Israel’s brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine as well as America’s occupation and exploitation of Arab natural resources. Some analysts are speaking about a six member Axis of Resistance led by Iran and Turkey and including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon that is the rising regional power.
What seems quite evident is that Iran’s President and the large delegation of business people comprising his entourage have opened a new era of bilateral relations between the two countries. His positive personal and political connections with virtually all Lebanon’s leaders, including compliments from rightist Christian politicians including Samir Geagea, will likely lead to big joint economic projects, the Iranian arming of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and strategic political cooperation, starting now.
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/lamb10152010.html
On the Road with Ahmadinejad in Lebanon
By FRANKLIN LAMB
Weekend Edition
October 15 - 17, 2010
Qana.
He came, he saw, he conquered.
As he watched the Iranian President blow kisses to cleaning workers at Beirut’s airport during his departure for Iran early this morning, a Lebanese Christian historian commented “This Persian’s glory at the moment is arguably greater than Caesar’s following Rome’s second conquest of Britain”.
And the Iranian president did indeed throw much more than a stone at US-Israel projects for Lebanon, perhaps energized by the adoring public he encountered.
A grateful nation extended to Makmoud Ahmadinejad what one Bishop claimed was the greatest outpouring of popular support on the streets, all along this country’s sectarian divide, that the Republic of Lebanon has ever witnessed including the May 10, 1997 visit of Pope John Paul II.
An important reason for the outpouring of popular support was the quarter century of Iranian assistance to Lebanon for social projects, and for rebuilding much of Lebanon following the 1993, 1996 and 2006 Israeli aggressions. Massive aid that was detailed by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General in a recent speech and the cost of which is estimated to be in excess of one billion dollars.
Iran’s President is widely believed in the diplomatic community here to have promoted sectarian unity in Lebanon, calmed the current political atmosphere, and delivered on offers of more desperately needed economic projects via 17 bilateral agreements. A particularly appreciated offer throughout Lebanon is Iran’s major pledge of an electrical complex that will deliver 7 times Lebanon’s current power supply, which in 2010 still sees power cuts throughout Lebanon. The current deficiencies range from three hours to 12 hours daily power cuts everywhere in Lebanon plus total blackouts for days at a time in some areas. Iran’s President is widely believed to have achieved a major advancement for Lebanese stability, sovereignty, and independence.
The throngs were cheering, waving, and shouting their admiration. Local media used descriptive words like “rock star, rapturous, massive affection,” to describe his reception.
Wretched Palestinian refugees, tightly shoe horned into Lebanon’s squalid UN camps, denied even the most elementary civil rights by an apathetic international community and some of the local sects, could be seen along the route. Many with eyes moistened, perhaps by Nakba memories and tears of hope for the early liberation of their sacred Palestine and the full exercise of their internationally mandated and inalienable Right of Return to their homes.
Refugees, plenty of them illegal, Iraqis, Afghans, Kurds and others, urging the expulsion of occupation forces from their countries and the restoration of their former lives waved and blew kisses. Lebanese domestic ‘guest/slave workers’ from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Sudan, Philippines, Bangladesh, and other countries could be seen in the crowds along with Syrian construction workers. Also a sprinkling of Stendhal “Le Rouge et le Noir” characters who, seeking secure advancement in life, have fixed themselves to one or the other, both requiring that they be seen publicly at such an important event.
Close to 750,000 people, or approximately one quarter of the total population of Lebanon,) of all ages and stations in life, appeared at the main road from Beirut’s airport and at other events during an intense two day frenetic series of appearances. Red, green and yellow rose petals, the colors of Iran’s flag, greeted Lebanon’s guest. Due to time constraints, some events for which much preparation had been made were “postponed”, including an “American Town Hall Meeting with President Ahmadinejad. ” It was to include 15 Americans currently in Lebanon as academics, business people, students, housewives, and NGO’s, in a much anticipated US political campaign type format with Iran’s President joining an informal dialogue with his interlocutors.
At Al Raya Athletic field in South Beirut, often used for popular Hezbollah events, an estimated 150, 000 people crowded onto just the main field boundaries, , one Hezbollah source reporting that it was the largest gathering inside the field ever seen. Thousands of other attendees spilled onto the side streets where huge TV screens has been set up and vendors hocked roasted ears of corn, boiled balila beans, kaak asrounye (baked bread with filling) ) various treats, including chips, cotton candy and soft drinks. Driving around the area on the mercifully cool autumn evening by motorbike, one could see thousands more gathered at several dozen Dahiyeh outdoor cafes and store front shops where families and friends gathered to watch on the proprietors’ outdoor TV screens. Some of the adults smoked arguila water pipes and little kids played, happy to be allowed to stay up late while teenagers appeared contented to get a day off from school and an evening without homework.
Lebanese and Iranian flags were fluttering everywhere without huge numbers of Hezbollah flags displayed in keeping with the message that this was an official state visit. President Ahmadinejad of Iran was invited by President Michel Suleiman of Lebanon on behalf of every Lebanese, including the majority of Lebanese who live in the Diaspora. Deployments of Suleiman’s Presidential guards were the ones seen to be providing security for Iran’s president with Hezbollah security largely out of site, except for occasional fleeting glimpse of Hezbollah sharpshooters in windows throughout the assembly area. They also surfaced quickly if a dispute or argument flared up in the packed crowds. In these few cases a representative of Hezbollah would apologize for the crowded conditions and ask for patience and understanding during the event.
At one stop near the blue line in South Lebanon he smiled broadly, winked to the media contingent and adoring villagers surrounding him and, gazing deep into occupied Palestine, as if posing for a Marlboro Country billboard advertisement, Iran’s charismatic President made many a heart flutter when he spoke softly, almost whispering to some villages, and with a twinkle in his eye, as if someone were eavesdropping: “Now isn’t this one fine view?”, as he discretely pointed. “I like it over there, don’t you?”
Almost everyone laughed at his joke.
A young lady wearing a full length black Chador (a women wearing one is called a ‘Chadori’ in Persian and Lebanese resistance culture) , with some of her school mates in tow who were volunteering as hostesses and Farsi, Arabic, and English interpreters, offered arriving American guests enthusiastic greetings: “Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s new border with Palestine!”
Almost everyone laughed at her joke.
Then, exuding an easy self confidence and speaking American accented English while obviously having a good time, the student noticed one seemingly horror struck humorless lady wearing a light brown business suit and heels who a security guy later confided was suspected of being a US Embassy plant. “Just teasing”, she assured the woman, as she offered her hand in friendship to the flinching guest who glared uneasily at the hostesses’ hand as if it held a dead rat or might bite hers. “Why are you Americans so serious”? the loquacious hostess smiled. “Do you agree Iran and America are destined to be good friends after our countries are finished with this problem?”, and she gestured with her head south toward Tel Aviv.
“Please tell me what do Americans think? I read a few days ago in preparation for my work today-I should not say work, it’s really fun- a report that ninety percent of Americans in a recent poll said they did not favor attacking Iran unless Iran attacks Israel first. This is very good news because I am sure Iran, unlike Israel’s record, will never be the first to start a war. Iran will retaliate naturally and that could mean World War III, but there will be no war involving Iran unless Iran, Syria, or Lebanon is attacked. We in the Resistance Alliance are ‘one for all and all for one’ but we really want to be friends with the American people.” And she offered the woman a small ribbon-tied, party wrapped, cellophane pouch with Iranian pistachios and candy attached to a small Iranian flag. “No thanks”, the American answered as she walked away.
The American Embassy warned Americans to avoid Ahmadinejad’s “provocative and potentially dangerous visit because the Lebanese government cannot protect US Citizens.” Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs, complained to the pan-Arab Al-Hayat on 10/13/10: “Why is the Iranian president organizing activities that might spark tension? We are taking steps to lower tension while Ahmadinejad is doing the opposite.”
Nevertheless, there were plenty of Yanks in attendance at all of Ahmadinejad’s appearances.
During his Qana visit, the Hezbollah Parliamentary delegation, friends with many Americans here, must have tipped off the Iranian President that Americans were sitting near them. The reason for this hunch is that he could not have been more gracious, making frequently eye contact and touching his forehead as a greeting and salute and thanking them for coming. He assured the American guests that eventually Iran and America will be good friends and perhaps allies.
Shortly before the Iranian President’s 35 car convoy carrying his delegation and various Lebanese officials arrived at Qana, his fourth largest gathering, an Israeli Air Force MRPV circled lazily yet provocatively above the site of the 1996 Qana massacre. Some in the more than 15,000 person crowd pointed skyward, some kids squealing “Israel!”. From their experience, “Qanains” as Ali, who grew up in this village explained some locals call themselves, were able to give foreigners fairly precise details of the MRPV’s specs and capabilities. This Israeli provocation ended, according to a Hezbollah security source, when the MRPV’s controllers realized that a Resistance laser guided missile had locked on to the uninvited intruder. The same source divulged that Hezbollah did not intend to shoot it down and would only monitor the threat. This was because the Resistance did not want mar the Iranian Presidents tour. In addition, he explained, explained that Lebanon’s resistance wanted to maintain “tactical and strategic ambiguity” concerning its array of anti-aircraft weapons until the moment war comes.
Lebanon’s people, army and resistance ignored provocations from this country’s southern enemy, including assassination threats like the one made by the Nakba-denying Knesset member Aryeh Eldad , more blustering from Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and PM Netanyahu, the beefing up of Israeli forces along the blue line, efforts to crack Hezbollah communications and send SMS threats via hacked mobile phones, conducting a chorus of US officials in childish criticisms of the visit, and Israeli spokesmen like Mark Regev and political extremists in Congress issuing threats.
Israeli warplanes on Friday carried out intensive, mock air raids over south Lebanon as if to send the message, “He is gone but we are still here!” The state-run National News Agency said Israeli jets staged mock air raids at medium attitude over Nabatiyeh, Iqlim al-Tuffah, Marjayoun, Khiam and Arqoub.
Another signature Israeli taunt during Iran’s Presidents visit was the launching of hundreds of blue and white balloons to catch the air current north to Bint Jbeil when Ahmadinejad was appearing. Some with insults written on them by children with magic markers and others allegedly smeared with human feces, the spreading of the latter being an IDF insult employed over the past 45 years of incursions into Lebanon and Palestine when during occupations of Lebanese and Palestinian homes some Israeli soldiers create what they call “poop art” on walls, mattresses and other surfaces.
Analysts will write about Iran’s Makmoud Ahmadinejad’s historic visit for months to come and what the visit means for the two countries, for the question of Palestine, strategic alignments in the region, and consequences for China, Russia and the wider international community.
A perhaps too early, road-weary, sleep-deprived photo snap of his visit’s effects would warrant the following brief and tentative evacuation, as Lebanon’s guest has just departed Beirut airport to return to his country. His midnight departure followed a visit at the Iranian Embassy with Hassan Nassrallah during which the Hezbollah Secretary-General gave the Iranian President an Israeli rifle taken from an Israeli soldier during the July 2006 war.
Ahmadinejad’s visit achieved more than a symbolic consecration of a new local and regional reality that encompasses a third way, separate from the US-Israel-Saudi or Syrian path. Some here think we are witnessing a new era of growing and uncompromising Resistance to Israel’s brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine as well as America’s occupation and exploitation of Arab natural resources. Some analysts are speaking about a six member Axis of Resistance led by Iran and Turkey and including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon that is the rising regional power.
What seems quite evident is that Iran’s President and the large delegation of business people comprising his entourage have opened a new era of bilateral relations between the two countries. His positive personal and political connections with virtually all Lebanon’s leaders, including compliments from rightist Christian politicians including Samir Geagea, will likely lead to big joint economic projects, the Iranian arming of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and strategic political cooperation, starting now.
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/lamb10152010.html
Wednesday 13 October 2010
YOU CANNOT CRITICIZE ISRAEL IN THIS COUNTRY AND SURVIVE
YOU CANNOT CRITICIZE ISRAEL IN THIS COUNTRY AND SURVIVE
Helen Thomas Cries, Denies Anti-Semitism, Calls President Obama 'Reprehensible'
Text by Associated Press
MARION, Ohio — In a radio interview, former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were "exactly what I thought," even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.
"I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive," Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas' Washington, D.C., condominium.
Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get "out of Palestine." She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
She has kept a low profile since then.
In the below clip (via Mediaite), Thomas can be heard crying after learning that President Obama condemned her remarks about Israel on the "Today" show, calling them "offensive and out of line."
"I think he was very unfair, and I return the compliment on his remarks," Thomas said. "Reprehensible."
"(It was) very hard for the first two weeks. After that, I came out of my coma," Thomas said.
Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the website rabbilive.com, said he approached Thomas after he'd been at the White House for Jewish Heritage Day on May 27. He asked whether she had any comments on Israel.
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she replied.
"Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland," she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, "They should go home."
"Where's home?" Nesenoff asked.
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," Thomas replied.
"I told him exactly what I thought," she told Spears.
Spears said during the interview that some accounts left off her reference to America and gave the wrong impression that Thomas was referring to World War II.
"I was not talking about Auschwitz or anything else," she said.
"They distorted my remarks, which they obviously have to do for their own propaganda purposes, otherwise people might wonder why they continue to take Palestinian land," said Thomas, a daughter of Lebanese immigrants who over the years did little to hide her pro-Arab views. There was no explanation of whom "they" referred to.
When she soon began getting calls about her remark, "I said this is the end of my job."
She issued an apology, she told the radio interviewer, because people were upset and she thought she had hurt people. "At the same time, I had the same feelings about Israel's aggression and brutality," Thomas said.
Asked whether she's anti-Semitic, she responded "Baloney!" She said she wants to be remembered for "integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism" and would like to work again.
Spears said Thomas granted him the interview because the two had developed a friendship during previous interviews she had done with the station in Marion, 42 miles north of Columbus in central Ohio.
Their discussion also touched on current politics, particularly on women.
Thomas described Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as "a hawk." "I thought women in politics would have more compassion, be more liberal," Thomas said.
As for Sarah Palin, Thomas said she believed the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate was ambitious enough to run for president.
"That would be a tragedy, a national tragedy," she said, describing Palin as "very conservative, reactionary, unbelievable."
Asked about tea party-backed Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, Thomas responded with one word: "Frightening."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/13/helen-thomas-im-not-antis_n_760789.html
Helen Thomas Cries, Denies Anti-Semitism, Calls President Obama 'Reprehensible'
Text by Associated Press
MARION, Ohio — In a radio interview, former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were "exactly what I thought," even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.
"I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive," Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas' Washington, D.C., condominium.
Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get "out of Palestine." She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
She has kept a low profile since then.
In the below clip (via Mediaite), Thomas can be heard crying after learning that President Obama condemned her remarks about Israel on the "Today" show, calling them "offensive and out of line."
"I think he was very unfair, and I return the compliment on his remarks," Thomas said. "Reprehensible."
"(It was) very hard for the first two weeks. After that, I came out of my coma," Thomas said.
Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the website rabbilive.com, said he approached Thomas after he'd been at the White House for Jewish Heritage Day on May 27. He asked whether she had any comments on Israel.
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she replied.
"Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland," she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, "They should go home."
"Where's home?" Nesenoff asked.
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," Thomas replied.
"I told him exactly what I thought," she told Spears.
Spears said during the interview that some accounts left off her reference to America and gave the wrong impression that Thomas was referring to World War II.
"I was not talking about Auschwitz or anything else," she said.
"They distorted my remarks, which they obviously have to do for their own propaganda purposes, otherwise people might wonder why they continue to take Palestinian land," said Thomas, a daughter of Lebanese immigrants who over the years did little to hide her pro-Arab views. There was no explanation of whom "they" referred to.
When she soon began getting calls about her remark, "I said this is the end of my job."
She issued an apology, she told the radio interviewer, because people were upset and she thought she had hurt people. "At the same time, I had the same feelings about Israel's aggression and brutality," Thomas said.
Asked whether she's anti-Semitic, she responded "Baloney!" She said she wants to be remembered for "integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism" and would like to work again.
Spears said Thomas granted him the interview because the two had developed a friendship during previous interviews she had done with the station in Marion, 42 miles north of Columbus in central Ohio.
Their discussion also touched on current politics, particularly on women.
Thomas described Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as "a hawk." "I thought women in politics would have more compassion, be more liberal," Thomas said.
As for Sarah Palin, Thomas said she believed the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate was ambitious enough to run for president.
"That would be a tragedy, a national tragedy," she said, describing Palin as "very conservative, reactionary, unbelievable."
Asked about tea party-backed Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, Thomas responded with one word: "Frightening."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/13/helen-thomas-im-not-antis_n_760789.html
From Apartheid South Africa to Palestine "To Exist is to Resist"
From Apartheid South Africa to Palestine
"To Exist is to Resist"
By PATRICK BOND
October 13, 2010
On a full-day drive through the Jordan Valley late last month, we skirted the earth’s oldest city and the lowest inhabited point, 400 meters below sea level. For 10,000 years, people have lived along the river separating the present-day West Bank and Jordan.
Since 1967 the river has been augmented by Palestinian blood, sweat and tears, ending in the Dead Sea, from which no water flows out, it only evaporates. Conditions degenerated during Israel’s land-grab, when from a peak of more than 300,000 people living on the west side of the river, displacements shoved Palestinian refugees across to Jordan and other parts of the West Bank. The valley has fewer than 60,000 Palestinians today.
But they’re hanging in. “To exist is to resist,” insisted Fathi Ikdeirat, the Save the Jordan Valley network’s most visible advocate (and compiler of an exquisite new book of the same name, free for internet download: www.maan-ctr.org/pdfs/exit.pdf. At top speed on the bumpy dirt roads, Ikdeirat maneuvered between Israeli checkpoints, through Bedouin outposts in the dusty semi-desert, where oppressed communities eke out a living from the dry soils.
Just a few hundred meters away from such villages, like plush white South African suburbs drawing on cheap black township labour, stand some of the 120 Israeli settlements that since the early 1970s have pocked the West Bank. The most debilitating theft is of Palestinian water, for where once peasants gathered enough from local springs and a mountain aquifer to supply ponds that fed their modest crops, today pipe diversions by the Israelis’ agro-export plantations leave the indigenous people’s land scorched.
From the invaders’ fine houses amidst groves of trees with green lawns, untreated sewage is flushed into the Palestinian areas. The most aggressive Israeli settlers launch unpunished physical attacks on the Palestinians, destroying their homes and farm buildings – and last week even a mosque at Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem.
The Gaza Strip has suffered far worse. Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ bombing and invasion in early 2009, the 1400 mainly civilian deaths, the use of white phosphorous, political assassinations and the relentless siege are responsible for untold misery. International solidarity activists – including a Jewish delegation last month – are lethally attacked (nine Turks were killed in May) or arrested while trying to sail ships to Gaza with emergency relief supplies.
As Ikdeirat pointed out, the Jordan Valley’s oppression appears as durable, for Netanyahu vowed in February this year ‘never’ to cede this space to the land’s rightful owners. On our way back up to Ramallah for an academic conference, Ikdeirat looked down on his homeland from the western mountains, and outlined the larger struggle against geopolitical manipulation, land grabbing, minority rule, Palestinian child labour on Israeli farms and other profound historical injustices.
Given the debilitating weaknesses within Palestine’s competing political blocs - Hamas in besieged Gaza and Fatah in the Occupied West Bank, as well as the US-Israeli-Fatah-backed unelected government in Ramallah led by the neoliberal prime minister (and former World Bank/IMF official) Salam Fayyad - this is a struggle that only progressive civil society appears equipped to fight properly.
To illustrate the potential, 170 Palestinian organizations initiated the ‘Boycott, Divest, Sanction’ (BDS) campaign five years ago, insisting on the retraction of illegal Israeli settlements (a demand won in the Gaza Strip in 2005), the end of the West Bank Occupation and Gaza siege, cessation of racially-discriminatory policies towards the million and a half Palestinians living within Israel, and a recognition of Palestinians’ right to return to residences dating to the 1948 ethnic cleansing when the Israeli state was established.
The BDS movement draws inspiration from the way we toppled apartheid: an internal intifadah from townships and trade unions, combined with financial sanctions that in mid-1985 peaked because of an incident at the Durban City Hall. On August 15 that year, apartheid boss PW Botha addressed the Natal National Party and an internationally televised audience of 200 million, with his belligerent ‘Rubicon Speech’ featuring the famous finger-wagging command, “Don’t push us too far.”
It was the brightest red flag to our anti-apartheid bull. Immediately as protests resumed, Pretoria’s frightened international creditors – subject to intense activist pressure during prior months - began calling in loans early. Facing a run on the SA Reserve Bank’s hard currency, Botha defaulted on $13 billion of debt payments coming due, shut the stock market and imposed exchange controls in early September.
Within days, leading English-speaking businessmen Gavin Relly, Zac de Beer and Tony Bloom began dismantling their decades-old practical alliance with the Pretoria racists, met African National Congress leaders in Lusaka, and initiated a transition that would free South Africa of racial (albeit not class) apartheid less than nine years later.
Recall that over the prior eight years, futile efforts to seduce change were made by Rev Leon Sullivan, the Philadelphia preacher and General Motors board member whose ‘Sullivan Principles’ aimed to allow multinationals in apartheid SA to remain so long as they were non-racist in employment practices.
But the firms paid taxes to apartheid and supplied crucial logistical support and trade relationships. Hence Sullivan’s effort merely amounted, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, to polishing apartheid’s chains. Across the world, taking a cue from the internal United Democratic Front, activists wisely ignored attempts by Sullivan as well as by ANC foreign relations bureaucrat (later president) Thabo Mbeki to shut down the sanctions movement way too early.
Civil society ratcheted up anti-apartheid BDS even when FW DeKlerk offered reforms, such as freeing Nelson Mandela and unbanning political parties in February 1990. New bank loans to Pretoria for ostensibly ‘developmental’ purposes were rejected by activists, and threats were made: a future ANC government would default.
It was only by fusing bottom-up pressure with top-down international delegitimization of white rule that the final barriers were cleared for the first free vote, on April 27 1994.
Something similar has begun in the Middle East, as long-overdue international solidarity with Palestinians gathers momentum, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s bad-faith peace talks with collaborationist Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas go nowhere. Yet if another sell-out soon looms, tracking the 1993 Oslo deal, we can anticipate an upsurge in BDS activity, drawing more attention to the three core liberatory demands: firstly, respecting, protecting and promoting the right of return of all Palestinian refugees; secondly, ending the occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands; and thirdly, recognizing full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Abbas and Fayyad are sure to fold on all of these principles, so civil society is already picking up the slack. Boycotting Israeli institutions is the primary non-violent resistance strategy.
BDS, says Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (http://www.pacbi.org), “remains the most morally sound, non-violent form of struggle that can rid the oppressor of his oppression, thereby allowing true coexistence, equality, justice and sustainable peace to prevail. South Africa attests to the potency and potential of this type of civil resistance.”
For more than 250 South African academics (plus Tutu) who signed a BDS petition last month, the immediate target was Ben Gurion University (BGU). During apartheid, the University of Johannesburg (UJ, then called Rand Afrikaans University) established a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for scientific exchanges with BGU, which came up for renewal at the UJ Senate on September 29 (details are at http://www.ujpetition.com/).
Perhaps influenced by Mandela’s ill-advised acceptance of an honorary doctorate from BGU, the UJ Senate statement was not entirely pro-Palestinian, for it promoted a fantasy: reform of Israeli-Palestinian relations could be induced by ‘engagement’. Shades of Sullivan empowering himself, to try negotiating between the forces of apartheid and democracy.
On the one hand, the UJ Senate acknowledged that BGU “supports the military and armed forces of Israel, in particular in its occupation of Gaza” – by offering money to students who went into the military reserve so as to support Operation Cast Lead, for example. To its credit, the UJ Senate recognized that “we should take leadership on this matter from peer institutions among the Palestinian population.”
On the other hand, in an arrogant display of constructive-engagement mentality, the UJ Senate academics – many of whom are holdovers from the apartheid era - resolved to “amend the MOU to include one or more Palestinian universities chosen on the basis of agreement between BGU and UJ.”
Fat chance. The UJ statement forgets that Palestinian universities are today promoters of BDS. Even Al Quds University, which historically had the closest ties (and which until Operation Cast Lead actually encouraged Palestine-Israel collaboration), broke the chains in early 2009, because, “Ending academic cooperation is aimed at, first of all, pressuring Israel to abide by a solution that ends the occupation, a solution that has been needed for far too long and that the international community has stopped demanding.”
The man tasked with reconciling UJ’s Senate resolution with Middle East realpolitik is UJ Deputy Vice Chancellor Adam Habib. In 2001 he founded our University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and led substantial research projects nurturing progressive social change. Habib was banned from entering the United States from 2006-10, for his crimes of being Muslim and speaking at a 2003 anti-war protest, and he is probably the most eloquent and highest-profile political analyst in South Africa today.
However, Habib made a serious mistake, when recently remarking: “We believe in reconciliation... We’d like to bring BGU and Palestinian universities together to produce a collective engagement that benefits everyone.”
Even Habib’s enormous persuasive capacity will fail, if he expects liberal Zionists to recognize the right of Palestinians to self-determination and Israel’s obligation to comply with international law. Writing in the newspaper Haaretz in early October, BGU official David Newman celebrated Habib’s remark and simultaneously argued, point-blank (with no acknowledgement of the South Africa case), “Boycotts do nothing to promote the interests of peace, human rights or – in the case of Israel – the end of occupation.”
(Yet even Israel’s reactionary Reut Institute recognizes BDS power, arguing in February 2010 that a “Delegitimization Network aims to supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle by turning Israel into a pariah state” and that “the Goldstone report that investigated Operation Cast Lead” caused “a crisis in Israel's national security doctrine… Israel lacks an effective response.”)
Habib deserves far better than a role as a latter-day Leon Sullivan uniting with the likes of Newman, and I hope he changes his mind about ‘engagement’ with Zionism.
After all, last year I witnessed an attempt to do something similar, also involving Habib and BGU. At the time of Operation Cast Lead and the imposition of the siege, Habib, Dennis Brutus, Walden Bello, Alan Fowler and I (unsuccessfully) tried persuading two academic colleagues - Jan Aart Scholte of Warwick University and Jackie Smith of Notre Dame - to respect BDS and decline keynote speaking invitations to an Israeli ‘third sector’ conference.
BGU refused to add Palestinian perspectives (a suggestion from Habib), and the lesson I quickly learned was not to attempt engagement, but instead promote a principled institutional boycott. Today as then, what Habib forgets is Barghouti’s clear assessment of power relations: “Any relationship between intellectuals across the oppression divide must be aimed, one way or another, at ending oppression, not ignoring it or escaping from it. Only then can true dialogue evolve, and thus the possibility for sincere collaboration through dialogue.”
The growing support for Palestinian liberation via BDS reminds of small but sure steps towards the full-fledged anti-apartheid sports, cultural, academic and economic boycotts catalyzed by Brutus against racist South African Olympics teams more than forty years ago. Today, these are just the first nails we’re hammering into the coffin of Zionist domination – in solidarity with a people who have every reason to fight back with tools that we in South Africa proudly sharpened: non-violently but with formidable force.
Patrick Bond, a Durban-based political economist and co-editor of the new book Zuma's Own Goal, was a recent visitor to Palestine at the invitation of Birzeit University in Ramallah.
http://www.counterpunch.org/bond10132010.html
"To Exist is to Resist"
By PATRICK BOND
October 13, 2010
On a full-day drive through the Jordan Valley late last month, we skirted the earth’s oldest city and the lowest inhabited point, 400 meters below sea level. For 10,000 years, people have lived along the river separating the present-day West Bank and Jordan.
Since 1967 the river has been augmented by Palestinian blood, sweat and tears, ending in the Dead Sea, from which no water flows out, it only evaporates. Conditions degenerated during Israel’s land-grab, when from a peak of more than 300,000 people living on the west side of the river, displacements shoved Palestinian refugees across to Jordan and other parts of the West Bank. The valley has fewer than 60,000 Palestinians today.
But they’re hanging in. “To exist is to resist,” insisted Fathi Ikdeirat, the Save the Jordan Valley network’s most visible advocate (and compiler of an exquisite new book of the same name, free for internet download: www.maan-ctr.org/pdfs/exit.pdf. At top speed on the bumpy dirt roads, Ikdeirat maneuvered between Israeli checkpoints, through Bedouin outposts in the dusty semi-desert, where oppressed communities eke out a living from the dry soils.
Just a few hundred meters away from such villages, like plush white South African suburbs drawing on cheap black township labour, stand some of the 120 Israeli settlements that since the early 1970s have pocked the West Bank. The most debilitating theft is of Palestinian water, for where once peasants gathered enough from local springs and a mountain aquifer to supply ponds that fed their modest crops, today pipe diversions by the Israelis’ agro-export plantations leave the indigenous people’s land scorched.
From the invaders’ fine houses amidst groves of trees with green lawns, untreated sewage is flushed into the Palestinian areas. The most aggressive Israeli settlers launch unpunished physical attacks on the Palestinians, destroying their homes and farm buildings – and last week even a mosque at Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem.
The Gaza Strip has suffered far worse. Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ bombing and invasion in early 2009, the 1400 mainly civilian deaths, the use of white phosphorous, political assassinations and the relentless siege are responsible for untold misery. International solidarity activists – including a Jewish delegation last month – are lethally attacked (nine Turks were killed in May) or arrested while trying to sail ships to Gaza with emergency relief supplies.
As Ikdeirat pointed out, the Jordan Valley’s oppression appears as durable, for Netanyahu vowed in February this year ‘never’ to cede this space to the land’s rightful owners. On our way back up to Ramallah for an academic conference, Ikdeirat looked down on his homeland from the western mountains, and outlined the larger struggle against geopolitical manipulation, land grabbing, minority rule, Palestinian child labour on Israeli farms and other profound historical injustices.
Given the debilitating weaknesses within Palestine’s competing political blocs - Hamas in besieged Gaza and Fatah in the Occupied West Bank, as well as the US-Israeli-Fatah-backed unelected government in Ramallah led by the neoliberal prime minister (and former World Bank/IMF official) Salam Fayyad - this is a struggle that only progressive civil society appears equipped to fight properly.
To illustrate the potential, 170 Palestinian organizations initiated the ‘Boycott, Divest, Sanction’ (BDS) campaign five years ago, insisting on the retraction of illegal Israeli settlements (a demand won in the Gaza Strip in 2005), the end of the West Bank Occupation and Gaza siege, cessation of racially-discriminatory policies towards the million and a half Palestinians living within Israel, and a recognition of Palestinians’ right to return to residences dating to the 1948 ethnic cleansing when the Israeli state was established.
The BDS movement draws inspiration from the way we toppled apartheid: an internal intifadah from townships and trade unions, combined with financial sanctions that in mid-1985 peaked because of an incident at the Durban City Hall. On August 15 that year, apartheid boss PW Botha addressed the Natal National Party and an internationally televised audience of 200 million, with his belligerent ‘Rubicon Speech’ featuring the famous finger-wagging command, “Don’t push us too far.”
It was the brightest red flag to our anti-apartheid bull. Immediately as protests resumed, Pretoria’s frightened international creditors – subject to intense activist pressure during prior months - began calling in loans early. Facing a run on the SA Reserve Bank’s hard currency, Botha defaulted on $13 billion of debt payments coming due, shut the stock market and imposed exchange controls in early September.
Within days, leading English-speaking businessmen Gavin Relly, Zac de Beer and Tony Bloom began dismantling their decades-old practical alliance with the Pretoria racists, met African National Congress leaders in Lusaka, and initiated a transition that would free South Africa of racial (albeit not class) apartheid less than nine years later.
Recall that over the prior eight years, futile efforts to seduce change were made by Rev Leon Sullivan, the Philadelphia preacher and General Motors board member whose ‘Sullivan Principles’ aimed to allow multinationals in apartheid SA to remain so long as they were non-racist in employment practices.
But the firms paid taxes to apartheid and supplied crucial logistical support and trade relationships. Hence Sullivan’s effort merely amounted, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, to polishing apartheid’s chains. Across the world, taking a cue from the internal United Democratic Front, activists wisely ignored attempts by Sullivan as well as by ANC foreign relations bureaucrat (later president) Thabo Mbeki to shut down the sanctions movement way too early.
Civil society ratcheted up anti-apartheid BDS even when FW DeKlerk offered reforms, such as freeing Nelson Mandela and unbanning political parties in February 1990. New bank loans to Pretoria for ostensibly ‘developmental’ purposes were rejected by activists, and threats were made: a future ANC government would default.
It was only by fusing bottom-up pressure with top-down international delegitimization of white rule that the final barriers were cleared for the first free vote, on April 27 1994.
Something similar has begun in the Middle East, as long-overdue international solidarity with Palestinians gathers momentum, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s bad-faith peace talks with collaborationist Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas go nowhere. Yet if another sell-out soon looms, tracking the 1993 Oslo deal, we can anticipate an upsurge in BDS activity, drawing more attention to the three core liberatory demands: firstly, respecting, protecting and promoting the right of return of all Palestinian refugees; secondly, ending the occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands; and thirdly, recognizing full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Abbas and Fayyad are sure to fold on all of these principles, so civil society is already picking up the slack. Boycotting Israeli institutions is the primary non-violent resistance strategy.
BDS, says Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (http://www.pacbi.org), “remains the most morally sound, non-violent form of struggle that can rid the oppressor of his oppression, thereby allowing true coexistence, equality, justice and sustainable peace to prevail. South Africa attests to the potency and potential of this type of civil resistance.”
For more than 250 South African academics (plus Tutu) who signed a BDS petition last month, the immediate target was Ben Gurion University (BGU). During apartheid, the University of Johannesburg (UJ, then called Rand Afrikaans University) established a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for scientific exchanges with BGU, which came up for renewal at the UJ Senate on September 29 (details are at http://www.ujpetition.com/).
Perhaps influenced by Mandela’s ill-advised acceptance of an honorary doctorate from BGU, the UJ Senate statement was not entirely pro-Palestinian, for it promoted a fantasy: reform of Israeli-Palestinian relations could be induced by ‘engagement’. Shades of Sullivan empowering himself, to try negotiating between the forces of apartheid and democracy.
On the one hand, the UJ Senate acknowledged that BGU “supports the military and armed forces of Israel, in particular in its occupation of Gaza” – by offering money to students who went into the military reserve so as to support Operation Cast Lead, for example. To its credit, the UJ Senate recognized that “we should take leadership on this matter from peer institutions among the Palestinian population.”
On the other hand, in an arrogant display of constructive-engagement mentality, the UJ Senate academics – many of whom are holdovers from the apartheid era - resolved to “amend the MOU to include one or more Palestinian universities chosen on the basis of agreement between BGU and UJ.”
Fat chance. The UJ statement forgets that Palestinian universities are today promoters of BDS. Even Al Quds University, which historically had the closest ties (and which until Operation Cast Lead actually encouraged Palestine-Israel collaboration), broke the chains in early 2009, because, “Ending academic cooperation is aimed at, first of all, pressuring Israel to abide by a solution that ends the occupation, a solution that has been needed for far too long and that the international community has stopped demanding.”
The man tasked with reconciling UJ’s Senate resolution with Middle East realpolitik is UJ Deputy Vice Chancellor Adam Habib. In 2001 he founded our University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and led substantial research projects nurturing progressive social change. Habib was banned from entering the United States from 2006-10, for his crimes of being Muslim and speaking at a 2003 anti-war protest, and he is probably the most eloquent and highest-profile political analyst in South Africa today.
However, Habib made a serious mistake, when recently remarking: “We believe in reconciliation... We’d like to bring BGU and Palestinian universities together to produce a collective engagement that benefits everyone.”
Even Habib’s enormous persuasive capacity will fail, if he expects liberal Zionists to recognize the right of Palestinians to self-determination and Israel’s obligation to comply with international law. Writing in the newspaper Haaretz in early October, BGU official David Newman celebrated Habib’s remark and simultaneously argued, point-blank (with no acknowledgement of the South Africa case), “Boycotts do nothing to promote the interests of peace, human rights or – in the case of Israel – the end of occupation.”
(Yet even Israel’s reactionary Reut Institute recognizes BDS power, arguing in February 2010 that a “Delegitimization Network aims to supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle by turning Israel into a pariah state” and that “the Goldstone report that investigated Operation Cast Lead” caused “a crisis in Israel's national security doctrine… Israel lacks an effective response.”)
Habib deserves far better than a role as a latter-day Leon Sullivan uniting with the likes of Newman, and I hope he changes his mind about ‘engagement’ with Zionism.
After all, last year I witnessed an attempt to do something similar, also involving Habib and BGU. At the time of Operation Cast Lead and the imposition of the siege, Habib, Dennis Brutus, Walden Bello, Alan Fowler and I (unsuccessfully) tried persuading two academic colleagues - Jan Aart Scholte of Warwick University and Jackie Smith of Notre Dame - to respect BDS and decline keynote speaking invitations to an Israeli ‘third sector’ conference.
BGU refused to add Palestinian perspectives (a suggestion from Habib), and the lesson I quickly learned was not to attempt engagement, but instead promote a principled institutional boycott. Today as then, what Habib forgets is Barghouti’s clear assessment of power relations: “Any relationship between intellectuals across the oppression divide must be aimed, one way or another, at ending oppression, not ignoring it or escaping from it. Only then can true dialogue evolve, and thus the possibility for sincere collaboration through dialogue.”
The growing support for Palestinian liberation via BDS reminds of small but sure steps towards the full-fledged anti-apartheid sports, cultural, academic and economic boycotts catalyzed by Brutus against racist South African Olympics teams more than forty years ago. Today, these are just the first nails we’re hammering into the coffin of Zionist domination – in solidarity with a people who have every reason to fight back with tools that we in South Africa proudly sharpened: non-violently but with formidable force.
Patrick Bond, a Durban-based political economist and co-editor of the new book Zuma's Own Goal, was a recent visitor to Palestine at the invitation of Birzeit University in Ramallah.
http://www.counterpunch.org/bond10132010.html
The Real Bibi His Father's Boy
The Real Bibi
His Father's Boy
By URI AVNERY
October 13, 2010
Which is the real Netanyahu?
- Bibi the weakling, the invertebrate, who always gives in to pressure, who zigzags to the left and to the right, depending whether the pressure comes from the US or from his coalition partners?
- The tricky Likud chief, who is afraid that Avigdor Ivett Lieberman might succeed in pushing him towards the Center and displace him as the leader of the entire Right?
- Netanyahu, the man of principle, who is determined to prevent at any cost the setting up of the State of Palestine, and is therefore using every possible ruse to sabotage real negotiations?
The real Netanyahu – stand up!
Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here? Do I see all three of them rising?
THE FIRST Netanyahu is the one who meets the eye. A leaf in the wind. The con man without principles and with plenty of tricks, whose sole aim is to survive in power.
This Netanyahu practically invites pressure on himself.
Barack Obama pressured him, so he agreed to the settlement freeze – or the perceived settlement freeze. In order to avoid a crisis with the settlers, he promised them that after the agreed ten months, the construction boom would be resumed with full vigor.
The settlers pressured him, and he did indeed resume the building at the appointed time, in spite of the intense pressure from Obama, who pushed for an extension of the moratorium for another two months. Why two months? Because the congressional elections take place on November 2, and Obama desperately needs to avoid a crisis with the Jewish establishment before that. For this end, he is ready to sell Netanyahu the whole inventory – arms, money, political support, a set of guarantees about the outcome of the negotiations that have not yet even begun. Sixty days! sixty days! my kingdom for sixty days!
Netanyahu is now zigzagging between these pressures, trying to find out which is the stronger, which one to give in to, how much and when. In his dreams he probably feels like the Baron von Munchhausen, who found himself on a narrow path, with a lion behind him getting ready to spring and a crocodile in front of him opening its awesome jaws. (If I remember right, the baron ducked and the lion jumped straight into the jaws of the reptile.)
This is the great hope of Netanyahu. AIPAC will help to deliver Obama a crushing defeat in the elections, Obama will deliver a crushing blow to the settlers, and Baron von Netanyahu will rub his hands and survive to fight another day.
Is this the real Netanyahu? For sure.
BUT THE second Netanyahu is no less real. This is Tricky Bibi who is trying to out-fox Tricky Ivett.
Lieberman astounded the UN General Assembly, when, as the Foreign Minister of Israel, he addressed this august body from the rostrum.
Because our Foreign Minister did not rise to defend the policies of his country, as did his colorless colleagues. Quite the opposite: from the UN rostrum he vigorously attacked the policy of his own government, giving it short shrift.
The official policy of the Government of Israel is to conduct direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, in order to achieve a final peace treaty within one year.
Nonsense, said the Foreign Minister of that same government. Rubbish. There is no chance at all of a peace treaty, not within a year and not within a hundred years. What’s needed is a Long-Term-Interim-Agreement. In other words, the continuation of the occupation without time limits.
Why did Lieberman give this performance? He was not addressing the few delegates who had remained in the UN assembly hall, but the Israeli public. He challenged Netanyahu: either dismiss me or pretend that the spittle on your face is rain.
But Netanyahu did not dismiss and did not react, except for a weak statement that Lieberman was not expressing his views. And this why? Clearly, if Netanyahu were to kick Lieberman’s party out of the government and bring in Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party, Lieberman would do to Netanyahu what Netanyahu did to Yitzhak Rabin. He would declare him a traitor selling out the fatherland, an enemy of the settlements. His devotees would parade around with posters of Netanyahu in SS uniform or wearing a keffiyeh, while others performed arcane Kabbalah rituals to bring about his death.
Lieberman would raise the flag of the Right, split the Likud and take sole possession of the entire Israeli Right. He believes that this is the way to become Prime Minister.
Netanyahu understands this perfectly. That’s why he is restraining himself. As a man who grew up in the United States he probably remembers what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover: Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, then outside the tent pissing in.
AND PERHAPS this Netanyahu – the second one – does not really object to the plan outlined by Lieberman at the UN assembly.
The Foreign Minister was not content with rejecting peace and bringing up the idea of the Long-Term-Interim-Agreement. He described the solution he has in mind. Not surprisingly, it is the electoral platform of his party, Israel Beytenu (“Israel Our Home”). In essence: Israel, the “Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People”, will be free of Arabs, or, translated into German, Araberrein.
But Lieberman is a humane person, and does not advocate (at least in public) ethnic cleansing. He does not propose a third Naqbah (after the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe and the 1967 expulsion). No, his solution is far more creative: he will separate from Israel the Arab towns and villages along the Eastern border, the so-called “triangle”, from Umm al-Fahm in the North to Kufr Kassem in the South This area, together with its inhabitants and lands, would be joined to the territory of the Palestinian Authority, and in return Israel would annex the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
That raises, of course, several questions. First, what about the Arab concentrations in Galilee, which include dozens of villages, towns like Nazareth and Shefa Amr, and the Arab population in the mixed towns, Haifa and Acre? Lieberman does not propose to transfer them too. Neither does he propose to give up East Jerusalem, with its quarter of a million Arab residents. If that is the case, is he prepared to leave in the “Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People” more than three quarters of a million Arabs? Or does he dream at night, lying in his bed, of conducting ethnic cleansing after all?
A second question: to whom will he transfer the Arab towns and villages of the ‘triangle”? Without a peace treaty, there will be no Palestinian state. Instead, there will remain the Palestinian Authority, with its few small enclaves all subject to Israeli occupation. The Long-Term-Interim-Agreement would leave this situation, more or less, intact. Meaning that this area, now part of Israel, would become a territory under Israeli occupation. Its inhabitants would lose their status as Israeli citizens and become an occupied population, devoid of civil rights and human rights.
As far as is known, not a singe Arab leader in Israel agrees to that. Even in the past, when it seemed that Lieberman agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state and wanted to transfer to it the Arab areas of Israel, not a single Arab leader in Israel agreed. The Arab citizens of Israel, a population approaching a million and a half, are indeed a part of the Palestinian people, but they are also a part of the Israeli population.
Netanyahu is certainly afraid of Lieberman, but can it be that he did not condemn Lieberman’s UN speech because he secretly shares his views?
In any case, this week Netanyahu announced that he is adopting Lieberman’s baby, the demand that non-Jewish (meaning Arab) people who wish to obtain Israeli citizenship swear allegiance not just to the State of Israel and its laws, as is usual, but to “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”. This is a nonsensical and meaningless addition, solely devised to provoke the 20% of Israelis who are Arabs. One might as well demand candidates for US citizenship swear allegiance to the “United States as a White Anglo-Saxon Christian and democratic nation”.
BUT IT is quite possible that there is a third Netanyahu, who stands taller than the others.
This is the Netanyahu who always believed in a Greater Israel, and who has never given up the ideology which he suckled with his mother’s milk.
The veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Samet goes further: he believes that Binyamin Netanyahu’s main motivation is his total obedience to his old father.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu is now 100 years old, and in full possession of his mental faculties. He is a professor of history, born in Warsaw, who came to Palestine in 1920 and changed his name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu (“God has Given”). He has always been on the extreme right-wing fringe. Ben-Zion Netanyahu spent several periods of his life in the US, where his three sons grew up. When in 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted the plan to partition Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state, father Netanyahu signed a petition, published in the New York Times, condemning the resolution in the strongest terms. Returning to Israel, he was not accepted into the new Freedom Party (the forerunner of Likud), because his views were too extreme even for Menachem Begin’s tastes. He claims that he was barred from a professorship in the Hebrew University because of his opinions, and his bitterness about this poisoned the atmosphere at home.
The professor’s special field is Spanish Jewry, with the emphasis on the Spanish Inquisition. He condemns the Jews who were baptized (the Marranos) and says that the great majority of them were eager to be assimilated into Christian Spanish society, contrary to the official heroic myth, which says that they continued to practice the religion of their forefathers in secret.
When Netanyahu the son transferred a part of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority, his father rebuked him and stated publicly that he was unfit for the job of Prime Minister, fit at most to serve as Foreign Secretary. But the son made a huge effort to remain true to his father’s views, and that is the main motivation for his policy. According to Samet, he would not dare to face his father and tell him that he had given away parts of Eretz Israel.
I tend to accept this version. Netanyahu will never agree to be responsible for the establishment of the State of Palestine, will never conduct serious peace negotiations – unless under extreme duress. That is all there is to it, everything else is hollow talk.
If the real Netanyahu were called to stand up, all three, and perhaps a few more, would rise. But the third one is the most real.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery10132010.html
His Father's Boy
By URI AVNERY
October 13, 2010
Which is the real Netanyahu?
- Bibi the weakling, the invertebrate, who always gives in to pressure, who zigzags to the left and to the right, depending whether the pressure comes from the US or from his coalition partners?
- The tricky Likud chief, who is afraid that Avigdor Ivett Lieberman might succeed in pushing him towards the Center and displace him as the leader of the entire Right?
- Netanyahu, the man of principle, who is determined to prevent at any cost the setting up of the State of Palestine, and is therefore using every possible ruse to sabotage real negotiations?
The real Netanyahu – stand up!
Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here? Do I see all three of them rising?
THE FIRST Netanyahu is the one who meets the eye. A leaf in the wind. The con man without principles and with plenty of tricks, whose sole aim is to survive in power.
This Netanyahu practically invites pressure on himself.
Barack Obama pressured him, so he agreed to the settlement freeze – or the perceived settlement freeze. In order to avoid a crisis with the settlers, he promised them that after the agreed ten months, the construction boom would be resumed with full vigor.
The settlers pressured him, and he did indeed resume the building at the appointed time, in spite of the intense pressure from Obama, who pushed for an extension of the moratorium for another two months. Why two months? Because the congressional elections take place on November 2, and Obama desperately needs to avoid a crisis with the Jewish establishment before that. For this end, he is ready to sell Netanyahu the whole inventory – arms, money, political support, a set of guarantees about the outcome of the negotiations that have not yet even begun. Sixty days! sixty days! my kingdom for sixty days!
Netanyahu is now zigzagging between these pressures, trying to find out which is the stronger, which one to give in to, how much and when. In his dreams he probably feels like the Baron von Munchhausen, who found himself on a narrow path, with a lion behind him getting ready to spring and a crocodile in front of him opening its awesome jaws. (If I remember right, the baron ducked and the lion jumped straight into the jaws of the reptile.)
This is the great hope of Netanyahu. AIPAC will help to deliver Obama a crushing defeat in the elections, Obama will deliver a crushing blow to the settlers, and Baron von Netanyahu will rub his hands and survive to fight another day.
Is this the real Netanyahu? For sure.
BUT THE second Netanyahu is no less real. This is Tricky Bibi who is trying to out-fox Tricky Ivett.
Lieberman astounded the UN General Assembly, when, as the Foreign Minister of Israel, he addressed this august body from the rostrum.
Because our Foreign Minister did not rise to defend the policies of his country, as did his colorless colleagues. Quite the opposite: from the UN rostrum he vigorously attacked the policy of his own government, giving it short shrift.
The official policy of the Government of Israel is to conduct direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, in order to achieve a final peace treaty within one year.
Nonsense, said the Foreign Minister of that same government. Rubbish. There is no chance at all of a peace treaty, not within a year and not within a hundred years. What’s needed is a Long-Term-Interim-Agreement. In other words, the continuation of the occupation without time limits.
Why did Lieberman give this performance? He was not addressing the few delegates who had remained in the UN assembly hall, but the Israeli public. He challenged Netanyahu: either dismiss me or pretend that the spittle on your face is rain.
But Netanyahu did not dismiss and did not react, except for a weak statement that Lieberman was not expressing his views. And this why? Clearly, if Netanyahu were to kick Lieberman’s party out of the government and bring in Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party, Lieberman would do to Netanyahu what Netanyahu did to Yitzhak Rabin. He would declare him a traitor selling out the fatherland, an enemy of the settlements. His devotees would parade around with posters of Netanyahu in SS uniform or wearing a keffiyeh, while others performed arcane Kabbalah rituals to bring about his death.
Lieberman would raise the flag of the Right, split the Likud and take sole possession of the entire Israeli Right. He believes that this is the way to become Prime Minister.
Netanyahu understands this perfectly. That’s why he is restraining himself. As a man who grew up in the United States he probably remembers what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover: Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, then outside the tent pissing in.
AND PERHAPS this Netanyahu – the second one – does not really object to the plan outlined by Lieberman at the UN assembly.
The Foreign Minister was not content with rejecting peace and bringing up the idea of the Long-Term-Interim-Agreement. He described the solution he has in mind. Not surprisingly, it is the electoral platform of his party, Israel Beytenu (“Israel Our Home”). In essence: Israel, the “Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People”, will be free of Arabs, or, translated into German, Araberrein.
But Lieberman is a humane person, and does not advocate (at least in public) ethnic cleansing. He does not propose a third Naqbah (after the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe and the 1967 expulsion). No, his solution is far more creative: he will separate from Israel the Arab towns and villages along the Eastern border, the so-called “triangle”, from Umm al-Fahm in the North to Kufr Kassem in the South This area, together with its inhabitants and lands, would be joined to the territory of the Palestinian Authority, and in return Israel would annex the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
That raises, of course, several questions. First, what about the Arab concentrations in Galilee, which include dozens of villages, towns like Nazareth and Shefa Amr, and the Arab population in the mixed towns, Haifa and Acre? Lieberman does not propose to transfer them too. Neither does he propose to give up East Jerusalem, with its quarter of a million Arab residents. If that is the case, is he prepared to leave in the “Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People” more than three quarters of a million Arabs? Or does he dream at night, lying in his bed, of conducting ethnic cleansing after all?
A second question: to whom will he transfer the Arab towns and villages of the ‘triangle”? Without a peace treaty, there will be no Palestinian state. Instead, there will remain the Palestinian Authority, with its few small enclaves all subject to Israeli occupation. The Long-Term-Interim-Agreement would leave this situation, more or less, intact. Meaning that this area, now part of Israel, would become a territory under Israeli occupation. Its inhabitants would lose their status as Israeli citizens and become an occupied population, devoid of civil rights and human rights.
As far as is known, not a singe Arab leader in Israel agrees to that. Even in the past, when it seemed that Lieberman agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state and wanted to transfer to it the Arab areas of Israel, not a single Arab leader in Israel agreed. The Arab citizens of Israel, a population approaching a million and a half, are indeed a part of the Palestinian people, but they are also a part of the Israeli population.
Netanyahu is certainly afraid of Lieberman, but can it be that he did not condemn Lieberman’s UN speech because he secretly shares his views?
In any case, this week Netanyahu announced that he is adopting Lieberman’s baby, the demand that non-Jewish (meaning Arab) people who wish to obtain Israeli citizenship swear allegiance not just to the State of Israel and its laws, as is usual, but to “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”. This is a nonsensical and meaningless addition, solely devised to provoke the 20% of Israelis who are Arabs. One might as well demand candidates for US citizenship swear allegiance to the “United States as a White Anglo-Saxon Christian and democratic nation”.
BUT IT is quite possible that there is a third Netanyahu, who stands taller than the others.
This is the Netanyahu who always believed in a Greater Israel, and who has never given up the ideology which he suckled with his mother’s milk.
The veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Samet goes further: he believes that Binyamin Netanyahu’s main motivation is his total obedience to his old father.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu is now 100 years old, and in full possession of his mental faculties. He is a professor of history, born in Warsaw, who came to Palestine in 1920 and changed his name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu (“God has Given”). He has always been on the extreme right-wing fringe. Ben-Zion Netanyahu spent several periods of his life in the US, where his three sons grew up. When in 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted the plan to partition Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state, father Netanyahu signed a petition, published in the New York Times, condemning the resolution in the strongest terms. Returning to Israel, he was not accepted into the new Freedom Party (the forerunner of Likud), because his views were too extreme even for Menachem Begin’s tastes. He claims that he was barred from a professorship in the Hebrew University because of his opinions, and his bitterness about this poisoned the atmosphere at home.
The professor’s special field is Spanish Jewry, with the emphasis on the Spanish Inquisition. He condemns the Jews who were baptized (the Marranos) and says that the great majority of them were eager to be assimilated into Christian Spanish society, contrary to the official heroic myth, which says that they continued to practice the religion of their forefathers in secret.
When Netanyahu the son transferred a part of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority, his father rebuked him and stated publicly that he was unfit for the job of Prime Minister, fit at most to serve as Foreign Secretary. But the son made a huge effort to remain true to his father’s views, and that is the main motivation for his policy. According to Samet, he would not dare to face his father and tell him that he had given away parts of Eretz Israel.
I tend to accept this version. Netanyahu will never agree to be responsible for the establishment of the State of Palestine, will never conduct serious peace negotiations – unless under extreme duress. That is all there is to it, everything else is hollow talk.
If the real Netanyahu were called to stand up, all three, and perhaps a few more, would rise. But the third one is the most real.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery10132010.html
The Waning of Obama Fanon, D'Souza, Obama and the Echoes of Colonialism
The Waning of Obama
Fanon, D'Souza, Obama and the Echoes of Colonialism
By VIJAY PRASHAD
October 13, 2010
Barack Obama, Dinesh D’Souza and I went to college at almost the same time. Obama was at one end of Los Angeles (Occidental College), while I was at the other end (Pomona College). “We smoked cigarettes,” Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father, “and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.” My cigarettes didn’t have tobacco in them, and thanks to KSPC’s press pass I spent as much time outside the Roxy “discoursing” with such luminaries as Jello Biafra and Nina Hagen; I imagine if Obama had turned the corner, he might have joined us. We had Fanon and radical feminism in common. California über alles!
Dinesh was on the other coast, at Dartmouth, where I imagine him in an Oxford shirt and tie, smiling in his quiet way on the deck of some plutocrat’s house where his Dartmouth Review colleagues repaired for the weekend. When I first read his Illiberal Education (1991), I longed to reach out and hand him a joint. My best classes in college had us read the books that Dinesh excoriated: Fanon, for instance. It tells you something about how poorly Dinesh reads when you get to his section on Fanon's Wretched of the Earth (pp. 78-79). “Much of his book is a crude rationalization of violence,” writes our Dartmouth graduate. Anyone who has actually read the book knows that “Concerning Violence” is only one chapter in a very complex book about the legacy of colonialism and the post-colonial present (another chapter, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” is a fierce indictment of the post-colonial regimes, and it does not “cater to a guilty Western audience”).
In his What’s So Great About America (2002), Dinesh has a chapter called “Two Cheers for Colonialism,” a little play on E. M. Forester’s 1951 Two Cheers for Democracy. It is perhaps useful to mention that Dinesh D’Souza was born in Goa in 1961, the year that the Indian republic invaded the Portuguese colony, annexed it to India, and undermined the Bamon (Roman Catholic Brahmin) community to which D’Souza’s family belongs. Dinesh’s allergy to anti-colonialism cannot be reduced to India’s invasion of his family’s domestic bliss (for that would be as reductive as what he does to Obama in his new book), but it is certainly useful context. In What’s So Great, Dinesh quotes a line from Fanon, which he repeats in his new book: “The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races” (p. 76 of Wretched).
Historians are now quite in agreement that the emergence of capitalism in the Atlantic world benefitted greatly, if not was produced by, the values appropriated from the slave trade and colonial plantation labor. Fanon’s dictum is humdrum. Not so for Dinesh, and the Right, who would much rather take Max Weber’s view, that capitalism emerges because of the Protestant instinct towards thrift. If you take Weber’s position, then resentment for colonial wrongs and poverty due to the political economy of colonialism are off the table. The answer to the whinging from the South: get on with it. Without a consideration of the history of colonialism, and of the unequal political-economic arrangements of our current world, people in the United States don’t have enough tools to properly grasp the contemporary international dynamics. If it is ignorance you want, or simply arrogance, Dinesh is good stuff.
Dinesh’s handle on Fanon and neo-colonialism was weak then, and incoherent now. In his new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Dinesh reaches into the deep well of conspiracy and paranoia to make Obama the Manchurian President. Obama, for Dinesh, is neither a liberal, nor a socialist in the European sense. Worse than that, Obama is literally a child of his father (whose dreams he continues to dream). Barack Obama, Sr. (1936-1982) came to Hawaii as a student, married Ann Dunham, and they gave birth to their only child, Barack “Barry” Obama. Obama, jr. was born in 1961, and saw his father until early 1964 (when his parents divorced) and then again briefly in 1971. Their contact was limited, and Senior’s influence was mute.
What the Father was, the Son becomes: that is Dinesh’s method. In July 1965, in the heyday of the Third World Project, Obama, Sr., published an essay in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” It is standard fare for a government economist of his caliber, particularly in his avowal of self-reliant growth for his country (Kenya) and anxiety over too close association with either the Atlantic bloc (laissez faire, in his terms) or the Warsaw Pact (“Marxian socialism”). Every country wants to be independent, he argues, so non-alignment with the superpowers is the natural bent of most new nation-states. The problem is how to break out of dependence. But there are limits “because of our lack of basic resources and skilled manpower, yet one can choose to develop by the bootstraps rather than become a pawn of some foreign power such as Sékou Touré did” (the reference is to Ahmed Sékou Touré’s policy of linking Guinea’s development to the USSR; to be fair, Touré tried to make good with JFK, but lost the momentum when he blamed the CIA for the arrest of a Guinean delegation in post-coup Ghana in 1965). Obama, Sr., wants not association with Moscow, nor with Washington or London. He wants Kenya to rule itself (or at least be ruled by the post-colonial elite who took over western Nairobi for its ecumene).
Dinesh misses the plot of the essay. He paints Obama, Sr., as a radical Third World nationalist in the mold of Modibo Keïta and Kwame Nkrumah. This is superficial. Obama, Sr., was certainly a Kenyan nationalist, one who was eager for a fair bargain for the Kenyan people, but he was not Africa’s Castro. He was more like Rómulo Betancourt, the bourgeois leader of Venezuela whose nationalism was only as fierce as his attachment to the survival of his country. Or else, his essay reads very much like Alexander Hamilton’s remarkable, and little read, 1791 “Report on Manufacturers.” Can’t get much more patriotic than that. Nevertheless, both Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck jumped up and down in glee in agreement with Dinesh. This is the kind of blather that passes for analysis on the Right. There is no need for the fantasy critique of Dinesh D’Souza, or the mad hatter slogans of the Tea Party. To them, the slogan of Talleyrand, “All that is exaggerated is insignificant.”
Those who read Fanon seriously are not blind advocates of Obama’s innings in the White House. Indeed, the Left has been far more sincerely critical of the genuine problems in Washington than the Right, which is keen on wedge issues, on lies and on diversions. I wanted Obama to win the 2008 election for one simple reason: it was a stubby brown finger in the eye of white supremacy. I had few expectations for his presidency. In early 2009 I began to write a play set in the White House Master Bedroom, with Barack and Michelle Obama in bed, reading Fanon and Toni Cade Bambara, wondering what they were doing in this mess. Sandwiched by Wall Street and the Pentagon, by the far Right Republicans and the near Right Democrats, there was so little room to maneuver. The electoral calendar (elections every two years) precludes any long-range reform, and the corporate money (Citizens United) makes it hard to sell any long-term policy in a media-saturated political climate. The context leaves them in a miserable state.
Obama, the person, is not relevant to me. Even the most radical person in the White House would not be able to move an agenda without some fundamental reform of the political system, or an active people’s movement ready to beat back the Right and the plutocrats, as well as to hold its leader accountable. Nothing like that now, or in the near future. In December 1971, Newsweek put our predicament well, “The relationship between money and politics is so organic that seeking reform is tantamount to asking a doctor to perform open-heart surgery on himself.” It is not just money, as I’ve pointed out, but the electoral calendar, and indeed the archaic system of the Electoral College, of the demographic inequality in the Senate, and of fear among the population to break from the comforts of the two-party system. In 2008, Robert Kuttner (founder of The American Prospect) wanted Obama to “restore taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans, reduce spending on foreign wars, incur temporary larger deficits, and use the proceeds for very substantial social investments” (Obama’s Challenge). Such idealism always results in acute disappointment.
The dark night of the Bush years, and the immense frustration with the result of his 2004 re-election, provided the electricity for the 2008 election campaign. Obama appeared not so much for his own views, or lack thereof, but as one of Hegel’s Heroes, those who derive “their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount, from the inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface.” The standard bearer had to be Myth, and so he won with a margin of seven million votes. It had to be so. Unlike Hegel’s Hero, however, Obama could not move the inner kernel to burst its shell into pieces. He was paralyzed by it.
Circumstances might have forced him to inhabit the progressive ideal, but Fanon’s “granite block,” the vast pressure of Wealth and Power, took its revenge on History. It is this that holds the attention of Tariq Ali, whose The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad (Verso, 2010) documents the collapse of the Myth into a thousand pieces (David Remnick’s The Bridge, Knopf, 2010 admits to much of the same defenestration of a New Deal charter into the Potomac, where it floated past the Pentagon to hearty cheers). Tariq indicts Obama for hypocrisy and a failure of nerve, whether in dealing with the banking crisis or the escalation in Afghanistan. The charge sheet is comprehensive, but of course not exhaustive (it is a 100 page book).
It is even stronger in Cathy Cohen’s powerful Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford, 2010), which shows how black youth remain in structural desolation, with few good jobs, high rates of incarceration and no trust in the institutions that seem to encage them. Politicians like to reduce the structural problems to personal failures, to blame the victim in some ways, because it is much easier and cheaper to do so (eat better, don’t drink soda, they tell the poor; far more difficult to force the food industry to stop using high fructose corn syrup, fat and salt to addict us). Cathy will have none of it. She is fierce in her recovery of the structural dynamic, and in insisting that the malaise in public policy be removed in favor of a forthright acknowledgement of the barriers put before the disposable classes in the country.
The insistence on the structural returns us to colonialism and to Fanon. American power falters in the thickets of its wars. If one knows nothing of one’s enemy, then one must only strive for its obliteration. There is something genocidal about the refusal to understand (this is an ethic shared by Islamic fundamentalism and Washington globalization). The charge of naïveté is thrown at those who counsel dialogue, but the same indictment applies to those whose foreign policy starts and ends with the B2 stealth bomber. It is of course naïve to expect the leadership of al-Qaeda and the Obama administration to conduct a conclave. It is, however, reasonable to demand that the inequities of colonial rule and the unequal architecture of the post-colonial world order be redressed to create the conditions in the future for human relations to be possible. Such was the demand of the Third World Project, of which Fanon was such an important intellectual figure. We can get out of the severe conflicts of our time only if we restore meaning to the great ideas of the Project.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
October 13, 2010
Fanon, D'Souza, Obama and the Echoes of Colonialism
By VIJAY PRASHAD
October 13, 2010
Barack Obama, Dinesh D’Souza and I went to college at almost the same time. Obama was at one end of Los Angeles (Occidental College), while I was at the other end (Pomona College). “We smoked cigarettes,” Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father, “and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.” My cigarettes didn’t have tobacco in them, and thanks to KSPC’s press pass I spent as much time outside the Roxy “discoursing” with such luminaries as Jello Biafra and Nina Hagen; I imagine if Obama had turned the corner, he might have joined us. We had Fanon and radical feminism in common. California über alles!
Dinesh was on the other coast, at Dartmouth, where I imagine him in an Oxford shirt and tie, smiling in his quiet way on the deck of some plutocrat’s house where his Dartmouth Review colleagues repaired for the weekend. When I first read his Illiberal Education (1991), I longed to reach out and hand him a joint. My best classes in college had us read the books that Dinesh excoriated: Fanon, for instance. It tells you something about how poorly Dinesh reads when you get to his section on Fanon's Wretched of the Earth (pp. 78-79). “Much of his book is a crude rationalization of violence,” writes our Dartmouth graduate. Anyone who has actually read the book knows that “Concerning Violence” is only one chapter in a very complex book about the legacy of colonialism and the post-colonial present (another chapter, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” is a fierce indictment of the post-colonial regimes, and it does not “cater to a guilty Western audience”).
In his What’s So Great About America (2002), Dinesh has a chapter called “Two Cheers for Colonialism,” a little play on E. M. Forester’s 1951 Two Cheers for Democracy. It is perhaps useful to mention that Dinesh D’Souza was born in Goa in 1961, the year that the Indian republic invaded the Portuguese colony, annexed it to India, and undermined the Bamon (Roman Catholic Brahmin) community to which D’Souza’s family belongs. Dinesh’s allergy to anti-colonialism cannot be reduced to India’s invasion of his family’s domestic bliss (for that would be as reductive as what he does to Obama in his new book), but it is certainly useful context. In What’s So Great, Dinesh quotes a line from Fanon, which he repeats in his new book: “The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races” (p. 76 of Wretched).
Historians are now quite in agreement that the emergence of capitalism in the Atlantic world benefitted greatly, if not was produced by, the values appropriated from the slave trade and colonial plantation labor. Fanon’s dictum is humdrum. Not so for Dinesh, and the Right, who would much rather take Max Weber’s view, that capitalism emerges because of the Protestant instinct towards thrift. If you take Weber’s position, then resentment for colonial wrongs and poverty due to the political economy of colonialism are off the table. The answer to the whinging from the South: get on with it. Without a consideration of the history of colonialism, and of the unequal political-economic arrangements of our current world, people in the United States don’t have enough tools to properly grasp the contemporary international dynamics. If it is ignorance you want, or simply arrogance, Dinesh is good stuff.
Dinesh’s handle on Fanon and neo-colonialism was weak then, and incoherent now. In his new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Dinesh reaches into the deep well of conspiracy and paranoia to make Obama the Manchurian President. Obama, for Dinesh, is neither a liberal, nor a socialist in the European sense. Worse than that, Obama is literally a child of his father (whose dreams he continues to dream). Barack Obama, Sr. (1936-1982) came to Hawaii as a student, married Ann Dunham, and they gave birth to their only child, Barack “Barry” Obama. Obama, jr. was born in 1961, and saw his father until early 1964 (when his parents divorced) and then again briefly in 1971. Their contact was limited, and Senior’s influence was mute.
What the Father was, the Son becomes: that is Dinesh’s method. In July 1965, in the heyday of the Third World Project, Obama, Sr., published an essay in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” It is standard fare for a government economist of his caliber, particularly in his avowal of self-reliant growth for his country (Kenya) and anxiety over too close association with either the Atlantic bloc (laissez faire, in his terms) or the Warsaw Pact (“Marxian socialism”). Every country wants to be independent, he argues, so non-alignment with the superpowers is the natural bent of most new nation-states. The problem is how to break out of dependence. But there are limits “because of our lack of basic resources and skilled manpower, yet one can choose to develop by the bootstraps rather than become a pawn of some foreign power such as Sékou Touré did” (the reference is to Ahmed Sékou Touré’s policy of linking Guinea’s development to the USSR; to be fair, Touré tried to make good with JFK, but lost the momentum when he blamed the CIA for the arrest of a Guinean delegation in post-coup Ghana in 1965). Obama, Sr., wants not association with Moscow, nor with Washington or London. He wants Kenya to rule itself (or at least be ruled by the post-colonial elite who took over western Nairobi for its ecumene).
Dinesh misses the plot of the essay. He paints Obama, Sr., as a radical Third World nationalist in the mold of Modibo Keïta and Kwame Nkrumah. This is superficial. Obama, Sr., was certainly a Kenyan nationalist, one who was eager for a fair bargain for the Kenyan people, but he was not Africa’s Castro. He was more like Rómulo Betancourt, the bourgeois leader of Venezuela whose nationalism was only as fierce as his attachment to the survival of his country. Or else, his essay reads very much like Alexander Hamilton’s remarkable, and little read, 1791 “Report on Manufacturers.” Can’t get much more patriotic than that. Nevertheless, both Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck jumped up and down in glee in agreement with Dinesh. This is the kind of blather that passes for analysis on the Right. There is no need for the fantasy critique of Dinesh D’Souza, or the mad hatter slogans of the Tea Party. To them, the slogan of Talleyrand, “All that is exaggerated is insignificant.”
Those who read Fanon seriously are not blind advocates of Obama’s innings in the White House. Indeed, the Left has been far more sincerely critical of the genuine problems in Washington than the Right, which is keen on wedge issues, on lies and on diversions. I wanted Obama to win the 2008 election for one simple reason: it was a stubby brown finger in the eye of white supremacy. I had few expectations for his presidency. In early 2009 I began to write a play set in the White House Master Bedroom, with Barack and Michelle Obama in bed, reading Fanon and Toni Cade Bambara, wondering what they were doing in this mess. Sandwiched by Wall Street and the Pentagon, by the far Right Republicans and the near Right Democrats, there was so little room to maneuver. The electoral calendar (elections every two years) precludes any long-range reform, and the corporate money (Citizens United) makes it hard to sell any long-term policy in a media-saturated political climate. The context leaves them in a miserable state.
Obama, the person, is not relevant to me. Even the most radical person in the White House would not be able to move an agenda without some fundamental reform of the political system, or an active people’s movement ready to beat back the Right and the plutocrats, as well as to hold its leader accountable. Nothing like that now, or in the near future. In December 1971, Newsweek put our predicament well, “The relationship between money and politics is so organic that seeking reform is tantamount to asking a doctor to perform open-heart surgery on himself.” It is not just money, as I’ve pointed out, but the electoral calendar, and indeed the archaic system of the Electoral College, of the demographic inequality in the Senate, and of fear among the population to break from the comforts of the two-party system. In 2008, Robert Kuttner (founder of The American Prospect) wanted Obama to “restore taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans, reduce spending on foreign wars, incur temporary larger deficits, and use the proceeds for very substantial social investments” (Obama’s Challenge). Such idealism always results in acute disappointment.
The dark night of the Bush years, and the immense frustration with the result of his 2004 re-election, provided the electricity for the 2008 election campaign. Obama appeared not so much for his own views, or lack thereof, but as one of Hegel’s Heroes, those who derive “their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount, from the inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface.” The standard bearer had to be Myth, and so he won with a margin of seven million votes. It had to be so. Unlike Hegel’s Hero, however, Obama could not move the inner kernel to burst its shell into pieces. He was paralyzed by it.
Circumstances might have forced him to inhabit the progressive ideal, but Fanon’s “granite block,” the vast pressure of Wealth and Power, took its revenge on History. It is this that holds the attention of Tariq Ali, whose The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad (Verso, 2010) documents the collapse of the Myth into a thousand pieces (David Remnick’s The Bridge, Knopf, 2010 admits to much of the same defenestration of a New Deal charter into the Potomac, where it floated past the Pentagon to hearty cheers). Tariq indicts Obama for hypocrisy and a failure of nerve, whether in dealing with the banking crisis or the escalation in Afghanistan. The charge sheet is comprehensive, but of course not exhaustive (it is a 100 page book).
It is even stronger in Cathy Cohen’s powerful Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford, 2010), which shows how black youth remain in structural desolation, with few good jobs, high rates of incarceration and no trust in the institutions that seem to encage them. Politicians like to reduce the structural problems to personal failures, to blame the victim in some ways, because it is much easier and cheaper to do so (eat better, don’t drink soda, they tell the poor; far more difficult to force the food industry to stop using high fructose corn syrup, fat and salt to addict us). Cathy will have none of it. She is fierce in her recovery of the structural dynamic, and in insisting that the malaise in public policy be removed in favor of a forthright acknowledgement of the barriers put before the disposable classes in the country.
The insistence on the structural returns us to colonialism and to Fanon. American power falters in the thickets of its wars. If one knows nothing of one’s enemy, then one must only strive for its obliteration. There is something genocidal about the refusal to understand (this is an ethic shared by Islamic fundamentalism and Washington globalization). The charge of naïveté is thrown at those who counsel dialogue, but the same indictment applies to those whose foreign policy starts and ends with the B2 stealth bomber. It is of course naïve to expect the leadership of al-Qaeda and the Obama administration to conduct a conclave. It is, however, reasonable to demand that the inequities of colonial rule and the unequal architecture of the post-colonial world order be redressed to create the conditions in the future for human relations to be possible. Such was the demand of the Third World Project, of which Fanon was such an important intellectual figure. We can get out of the severe conflicts of our time only if we restore meaning to the great ideas of the Project.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
October 13, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)