Ed Pearl

Noam Chomsky: Remembering Howard Zinn

2012-01-31T07:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/304-justice/9651-focus-remembering-howard-zinn

Noam Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. (photo: Ben Rusk/flickr)

Remembering Howard Zinn

By Noam Chomsky, Al Jazeera

27 January 12

Editor's note: Today, January 27, is the second anniversary of the death of Howard Zinn. An active participant in the Civil Rights movement, he was dismissed in 1963 from his position as a tenured professor at Spelman College in Atlanta after siding with black women students in the struggle against segregation. In 1967, he wrote one of the first, and most influential, books calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. A veteran of the US Army Air Force, he edited The Pentagon Papers, leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and was later designated a "high security risk" by the FBI.

His best-selling A People's History of the United States spawned a new field of historical study: People's Histories. This approach countered the traditional triumphalist examination of "history as written by the victors", instead concentrating on the poor and seemingly powerless; those who resisted imperial, cultural and corporate hegemony. Zinn was an award-winning social activist, writer and historian - and so who better to share his memory than his close friend and fellow intellectual giant, Noam Chomsky?

t is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn, the great American activist and historian. He was a very close friend for 45 years. The families were very close too. His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a marvellous person and close friend. Also sombre is the realisation that a whole generation seems to be disappearing, including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars, but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call when needed - which was constant. A combination that is essential if there is to be hope of decent survival.

Howard's remarkable life and work are summarised best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was "the countless small actions of unknown people" that lie at the roots of "those great moments" that enter the historical record - a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is torn from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma. His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews. It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments. That was true when he was an industrial worker and labour activist, and from the days, 50 years ago, when he was teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, a black college that was open mostly to the small black elite.

While teaching at Spelman, Howard supported the students who were at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement in its early and most dangerous days, many of whom became quite well-known in later years - Alice Walker, Julian Bond and others - and who loved and revered him, as did everyone who knew him well. And as always, he did not just support them, which was rare enough, but also participated directly with them in their most hazardous efforts - no easy undertaking at that time, before there was any organised popular movement and in the face of government hostility that lasted for some years. Finally, popular support was ignited, in large part by the courageous actions of the young people who were sitting in at lunch counters, riding freedom buses, organising demonstrations, facing bitter racism and brutality, sometimes death.

By the early 1960s, a mass popular movement was taking shape, by then with Martin Luther King in a leadership role - and the government had to respond. As a reward for his courage and honesty, Howard was soon expelled from the college where he taught. A few years later, he wrote the standard work on SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), the major organisation of those "unknown people" whose "countless small actions" played such an important part in creating the groundswell that enabled King to gain significant influence - as I am sure he would have been the first to say - and to bring the country to honour the constitutional amendments of a century earlier that had theoretically granted elementary civil rights to former slaves - at least to do so partially; no need to stress that there remains a long way to go.

A Civilising Influence

On a personal note, I came to know Howard well when we went together to a civil rights demonstration in Jackson Mississippi in (I think) 1964, even at that late date, a scene of violent public antagonism, police brutality and indifference - or even co-operation - with state security forces on the part of federal authorities, sometimes in ways that were quite shocking.

After being expelled from the Atlanta college where he taught, Howard came to Boston, and spent the rest of his academic career at Boston University, where he was, I am sure, the most admired and loved faculty member on campus, and the target of bitter antagonism and petty cruelty on the part of the administration. In later years, however, after his retirement, he gained the public honour and respect that was always overwhelming among students, staff, much of the faculty, and the general community. While there, Howard wrote the books that brought him well-deserved fame. His book Logic of Withdrawal, in 1967, was the first to express clearly and powerfully what many were then beginning barely to contemplate: that the US had no right even to call for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, leaving Washington with power and substantial control in the country it had invaded and by then already largely destroyed.

Rather, the US should do what any aggressor should: withdraw, allow the population to somehow reconstruct as they could from the wreckage, and if minimal honesty could be attained, pay massive reparations for the crimes that the invading armies had committed, vast crimes in this case. The book had wide influence among the public, although to this day, its message can barely even be comprehended in elite educated circles, an indication of how much necessary work lies ahead.

Significantly, among the general public by the war's end, 70 per cent regarded the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral", not "a mistake," a remarkable figure, considering the fact that scarcely a hint of such a thought was expressible in mainstream opinion. Howard's writings - and, as always, his prominent presence in protest and direct resistance - were a major factor in civilising much of the country.

In those same years, Howard also became one of the most prominent supporters of the resistance movement that was then developing. He was one of the early signers of the Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority and was so close to the activities of Resist that he was practically one of the organisers. He also took part at once in the sanctuary actions that had a remarkable impact in galvanising anti-war protest. Whatever was needed - talks, participation in civil disobedience, support for resisters, testimony at trials - Howard was always there.

'History From Below'

Even more influential in the long run than Howard's anti-war writings and actions was his enduring masterpiece, A People's History of the United States, a book that literally changed the consciousness of a generation. Here he developed with care, lucidity and comprehensive sweep his fundamental message about the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice, and about the victims of the systems of power that create their own versions of history and seek to impose it. Later, his "Voices" from the People's History, now an acclaimed theatrical and television production, has brought to many the actual words of those forgotten or ignored people who have played such a valuable role in creating a better world.

Howard's unique success in drawing the actions and voices of unknown people from the depths to which they had largely been consigned has spawned extensive historical research following a similar path, focusing on critical periods of US history, and turning to the record in other countries as well, a very welcome development. It is not entirely novel - there had been scholarly inquiries of particular topics before - but nothing to compare with Howard's broad and incisive evocation of "history from below", compensating for critical omissions in how US history had been interpreted and conveyed.

Howard's dedicated activism continued, literally without a break, until the very end, even in his last years, when he was suffering from severe infirmity and personal loss - though one would hardly know it when meeting him or watching him speaking tirelessly to captivated audiences all over the country. Whenever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was there, on the front lines, unflagging in his enthusiasm, and inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and insight; a light touch of humour in the face of adversity, and dedication to non-violence and sheer decency. It is hard even to imagine how many young people's lives were touched, and how deeply, by his achievements, both in his work and his life.

There are places where Howard's life and work should have particular resonance. One, which should be much better known, is Turkey. I know of no other country where leading writers, artists, journalists, academics and other intellectuals have compiled such an impressive record of bravery and integrity in condemning crimes of the state, and going beyond to engage in civil disobedience to try to bring oppression and violence to an end, facing and sometimes enduring severe repression, and then returning to the task.

It is an honourable record, unique to my knowledge, a record of which the country should be proud. And one that should be a model for others, just as Howard Zinn's life and work are an unforgettable model, sure to leave a permanent stamp on how history is understood and how a decent and honourable life should be lived.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (Seven Stories Press), an updated version of his classic account, just being published this week with a major new essay - from which this post was adapted - considering the ten years since the 9/11 attacks.

Hurrah for Egypt! by Uri Avneri

2012-01-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

From: Sid Shniad: [mailto:sid-l@googlegroups.com]
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 12:34 PM

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1327671448/

28/01/12

Hurrah for Egypt!

by Uri Avneri*

THE IMPOSSIBLE has happened. The Egyptian parliament, democratically elected
by a free people, has convened for its first session.

For me this is a wonderful, a joyful occasion.

For many Israelis, this is a worrisome, a threatening sight.

I CANNOT but rejoice when a downtrodden people arises and wins its freedom
and human dignity. And not by the intervention of outside forces, but by its
own steadfastness and courage. And not by shooting and bloodshed, but by the
sheer power of nonviolence.

Whenever and wherever it happens, it must gladden the heart of any decent
person around the globe.

Compared to most other revolutions, this Egyptian uprising was bloodless.
The number of victims ran in the dozens, not thousands. The current struggle
in Syria claims that number of victims every day or two, and so did the
successful uprising in neighboring Libya, which was greatly assisted by
foreign military intervention.

A revolution reflects the character of its people. I always had a special
liking for the Egyptian people, because they are - by and large - devoid of
aggressiveness and violence. They are a singularly patient and humorous lot.
You can see this in thousands of years of recorded history and you can see
it in daily life in the street.

That is why this revolution was so surprising. Of all the peoples on this
planet, the Egyptians are among the most unlikely to revolt. Yet revolt they
did.

THE PARLIAMENT convened after 60 years of military rule, which also started
with a bloodless revolution. Even the despised king, Farouk, who was
overthrown on that day in July 1952, was not harmed. He was bundled into his
luxurious yacht and sent off to Monte Carlo, there to spend the rest of his
life gambling.

The real leader of the revolution was Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. I had met him
several times during the 1948 war - though we were never properly
introduced. These were all night battles, and only after the war could I
reconstruct the events. He was wounded in a battle for which my company was
awarded the honorary name "Samson's Foxes", while I was wounded five months
later by soldiers under his command.

I never met him face to face, of course, but a good friend of mine did.
During the battle of the "Faluja pocket", a cease-fire was agreed in order
to bring out the dead and wounded lying between the lines. The Egyptians
sent Major Abd-al-Nasser, our side sent a Yemen-born officer whom we called
"Gingi" (Ginger), because he was almost totally black. The two enemy
officers liked each other very much, and when the Egyptian revolution broke
out, Gingi told me - long before anyone else - that Abd-al-Nasser was the
man to watch.

(I cannot restrain myself from voicing a pet peeve here. In Western films
and books, Arabs often bear the first name Abdul. Such a name just does not
exist. "Abdul" is really Abd-al-, which means "servant of"' and is
invariably followed by one of Allah's 99 attributes. Abd-al-Nasser, for
example, means "Servant of (Allah) the Victorious". So please!)

"Nasser", as most people called him for short, was not a born dictator. He
later recounted that after the victory of the revolution, he had no idea
what to do next. He started by appointing a civilian government, but was
appalled by the incompetence and corruption of the politicians. So the army
took things into its own hands, and soon enough it became a military
dictatorship, which lasted and steadily degenerated until last year.

One does not have to take Nasser's account literally, but the lesson is
clear: now as then, "temporary" military rule tends to turn into a lasting
dictatorship. Egyptians know this from bitter experience, and that's why
they are becoming very very impatient now.

I remember an arresting conversation between two leading Arab intellectuals
some 45 years ago. We were in a taxi in London, on our way to a conference.
One was the admirable Mohammed Sid Ahmad, an aristocratic Egyptian Marxist,
the other was Alawi, a courageous leftist Moroccan opposition leader. The
Egyptian said that in the contemporary Arab world, no national goal can be
achieved without a strong autocratic leadership. Alawi retorted that nothing
worthwhile can be achieved before internal democracy is established. I think
this case has now been settled.

AS WINSTON CHURCHILL famously said, "democracy is the worst form of
government except all those other forms that have been tried." The bad thing
about democracy is that free elections don't always turn out the way you
want them to.

The recent Egyptian election was won by "Islamists". The tumultuous first
session produced by this whiff of freedom was dominated by deputies with
religious beards. Elected members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the more
extreme Salafists (adherents of the Salafiyeh, a Sunni tendency which claims
to follow the teaching of the first three Muslim generations) form the
majority. The Israelis and the world's Islamophobes, for whom all Muslims
are the same, are aghast.

Frankly, I don't like religious parties of any stripe - Jewish, Muslim,
Christian or what have you. Full democracy demands full separation between
State and religion, in practice as well as in theory.

I would not vote for politicians who use religious fundamentalism as a
ladder for their careers - whether they are American presidential
candidates, Israeli settlers or Arab demagogues. Even If they were sincere,
I would still vote against them. But if such people are elected freely, I
accept them. I certainly would not let the success of the Islamists spoil my
joy at the historic victory of the Arab Spring.

The way it looks now, Islamists of various shades are going to be
influential in all the new parliaments that will be the products of Arab
democracy, from Morocco to Iraq, from Syria to Oman. Israel will not be a
"villa in the jungle", but a Jewish island in a Muslim sea.

Island and sea are not natural enemies. On the contrary, they complement
each other. The islanders catch fish in the sea, the island shelters the
young fish.

THERE IS no reason for Jews and Muslims not to live peacefully together and
cooperate. They have done so many times in history, and these were good
times for both.

In any religion, there are many contradictions. In the Hebrew Bible there
are the inspiring chapters of the prophets and the abominable calls for
genocide in the Book of Joshua, for example. In the New Testament, there are
the beautiful Sermon on the Mount and the disgusting (and obviously false
and later inserted) description of the Jews calling for the crucifixion of
Jesus, which has caused anti-Semitism and untold suffering.
In the Koran are several objectionable passages about the Jews, but they are
overshadowed by the admirable command to protect the "peoples of the book",
Jews and Christians.

It is up to the believers of any religion to pick from their holy texts the
passages they want to act upon. Once I saw a Nazi book composed entirely of
quotations from the Talmud - hundreds of them. I was certain that they were
all false and was shocked to the core when a friendly rabbi assured me that
they were all authentic, only taken out of context.

JEWS AND Muslims can and did live peacefully together, and so did Israelis
and Egyptians.

Just one chapter: in November, 1944, two members of the pre-state
underground Lehi organization (aka Stern Gang) assassinated Lord Moyne, the
British Minister of State for the Middle East, in Cairo. They were caught,
and their trial in an Egyptian court turned into an anti-British
demonstration. Young Egyptian patriots filled the chamber and made no effort
to hide their admiration for the accused. One of the two (with whom I was
acquainted) reciprocated with a rousing speech, in which he dismissed
Zionism and defined himself as a freedom fighter out to liberate the entire
region from British imperialism.

When Israel was founded soon after, some of us suggested that the new state
use this and other acts in order to present ourselves as the first Semitic
state that had liberated itself from foreign rule. In this spirit, we
publicly welcomed Abd-al-Nasser's 1952 revolution. But in 1956, Israel
attacked Egypt in collusion with France and Great Britain, and was branded
as an outpost of Western colonialism.

AFTER ANWAR SADAT'S historic visit to Jerusalem, I was one of the first four
Israelis to arrive in Cairo. For weeks we were the heroes of the city,
lionized by one and all. Enthusiasm for peace with Israel gave rise to a
carnival mood. Only later, when the Egyptians realized that Israel had no
intention whatsoever of allowing the Palestinians to achieve their freedom,
did this mood evaporate.

Now is the time to try to restore this mood. It can be done, if we
resolutely turn our face toward the Arab Spring and its winter offshoots.

That raises again one of the most basic questions for Israel: Do we want to
be a part of this region, or an outpost of the West? Are the Arabs our
natural allies or our natural enemies? Does the new Arab democracy arouse
our sympathy and admiration, or does it frighten us?

This leads to the most profound question of all: Is Israel just another
branch of world Jewry, or is it a new nation born in this region and
constituting an integral part of it?

For me, the answer is clear. And therefore I salute the Egyptian people and
their new parliament: Congratulations!
_______________________________________________
Rad-Green mailing list
Rad-Green@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green

-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.1901 / Virus Database: 2109/4770 - Release Date: 01/27/12

Krugman: Jobs, Jobs and Cars

2012-01-30T07:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/opinion/krugman-jobs-jobs-and-cars.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Jobs, Jobs and Cars

Paul Krugman

NY Times Op-Ed: January 27, 2012

Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s governor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring. But he did say something thought-provoking — and I mean that in the worst way.

For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great job creator — which is one thing that Jobs definitely wasn’t. And if we ask why Apple has created so few American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong with the ideology dominating much of our politics.

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn’t have much of a future in the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in China? As the article explained, it’s not just about low wages. China also derives big advantages from the fact that so much of the supply chain is already there. A former Apple executive explained: “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away.”

This is familiar territory to students of economic geography: the advantages of industrial clusters — in which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers huddle together to their mutual benefit — have been a running theme since the 19th century.

And Chinese manufacturing isn’t the only conspicuous example of these advantages in the modern world. Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so furiously opposed to the single most successful policy initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.

The case for this bailout — which Mr. Daniels has denounced as “crony capitalism” — rested crucially on the notion that the survival of any one firm in the industry depended on the survival of the broader industry “ecology” created by the cluster of producers and suppliers in America’s industrial heartland. If G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they would probably have taken much of the supply chain with them — and Ford would have gone the same way.

Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t let that happen, and the unemployment rate in Michigan, which hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect, is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3 percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to apply the lessons of that success more broadly.

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

Mikhail Gorbachev: Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?

2012-01-29T08:08:00.000-08:00

Hi. Here's a wonderful read for Sunday. I don't think I've ever read a speech by any political leader in any country with such understanding, compassion and lack of nationalism. If taken seriously, it will add imensely to your understanding of the past two decades, where we are today and what can and should be. As ot did mine.

http://www.thenation.com/article/165317/world-really-safer-without-soviet-union

Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?

Mikhail Gorbachev

This article appeared in the January 9-16, 2012 edition of The Nation.

Virtually all American commentary about the end of the Soviet Union extols what the West is believed to have gained from that historic event. On this twentieth anniversary of the breakup, The Nation presents three writers who focus instead on what may have been lost. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader and first constitutional president, argues that a chance for a more secure and just world order was missed. Stephen F. Cohen, a historian and longtime Nation contributor, reminds readers of the political, economic and social costs to Russians themselves. And Vadim Nikitin, a US-educated Russian journalist, presents a new interpretation of pro-Soviet nostalgia. —The Editors

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, Western commentators have often celebrated it as though what disappeared from the world arena in December 1991 was the old Soviet Union, the USSR of Stalin and Brezhnev, rather than the reforming Soviet Union of perestroika. Moreover, discussion of its consequences has focused mostly on developments inside Russia. Equally important, however, have been the consequences for international relations, in particular lost alternatives for a truly new world order opened up by the end of the cold war.

Following my election as general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, the Soviet leadership formulated a new foreign policy agenda. One of the key ideas of our reforms, or perestroika, was new political thinking, based on the recognition of the world's interconnectedness and interdependence. The top priority was to avert the threat of nuclear war. Our immediate international goals included ending the nuclear arms race, reducing conventional armed forces, settling numerous regional conflicts involving the Soviet Union and the United States, and replacing the division of the European continent into hostile camps with what I called a common European home.

We understood that this could be accomplished only by working with the United States. Our two nations together held 95 percent of the world's arsenals of nuclear weapons. It was therefore of enormous importance that at my first summit meeting with President Ronald Reagan, held in Geneva in November 1985, we stated that "nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." We also agreed that the USSR and the United States would not seek military superiority over each other. At our next summit, in Reykjavik in 1986, Reagan and I went on to discuss specific ways to achieve a world without nuclear weapons.

Concrete steps in that direction soon followed. In December 1987 President Reagan and I signed in Washington the INF Treaty—the first and still the only agreement eliminating two classes of weapons of mass destruction, intermediate- and short-range missiles. In 1991 President George H.W. Bush and I signed in Moscow the first START treaty, reducing strategic nuclear weapons by half, and then in the fall of the same year we agreed to eliminate most tactical nuclear weapons on both sides.

The road to these agreements was difficult, but the result was mutual trust, which enabled me and President Bush to state at the Malta summit in December 1989 that our two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies. It meant that the cold war was over. This opened the way to cooperation in ending regional conflicts that had raged for decades in various parts of the world and in pushing back Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait in 1990, and, most important, led to peaceful change in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–91, based on the free choice of its people. This process culminated in the unification of Germany. Conditions were now in place to revive the United Nations as the main tool for international conflict resolution and prevention.

What happened after the Soviet Union ended in 1991? Why were the opportunities to build what Pope John Paul II called a more stable, more just and more humane world order not realized? To answer this question we need to look back at the events associated with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the West's reaction to it.

The breakup of the Soviet Union interrupted perestroika—an attempt to effect an evolutionary transition from totalitarianism to democracy in a vast country from 1985 to 1991. The achievements of perestroika were real and many. It brought freedom, including freedom of speech, assembly, religion and movement, as well as political pluralism and free elections. We started a transition to market economics. But we acted too late to reform the Communist Party and to transform the Soviet Union into a new, decentralized union of sovereign republics.

Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, the Soviet Union was not destroyed by any foreign power but as a result of internal developments. First, in August 1991 the anti-perestroika conservative forces organized a coup against my leadership that failed but weakened my position. Then, on December 8, defying the will of the people, who had supported renewal of the union in a referendum in March 1991, the leaders of three Soviet republics—Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belorussia—meeting in secret, abolished the Union.

This event led to euphoria and a "winner's complex" among the American political elite. The United States could not resist the temptation to announce its "victory" in the cold war. The "sole remaining superpower" staked a claim to monopoly leadership in world affairs. That, and the equating of the breakup of the Soviet Union with the end of the cold war, which in reality had ended two years before, has had far-reaching consequences. Therein are the roots of many mistakes that have brought the world to its current troubled state.

I used to say to my negotiating partners, Reagan, Bush and other Western leaders, that all of us would need to change our thinking—not only the Soviet Union but the West as well—because the rapid changes under way in the world leave all of us with no other choice. But as long as the West insisted on its purported victory in the cold war, it meant that no change was needed in the old cold war thinking and that the old methods, such as using military force and political and economic pressure to impose one model on everyone, would still be used.

Within such a matrix, the United Nations and its Security Council become expendable or at best an impediment, while international law is viewed as a burdensome legacy of the past. That was the attitude taken by the United States and its supporters in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in Iraq in 2003. American pundits started talking about the United States as more than just a superpower, calling it a "hyperpower" capable of creating "a new kind of empire."

Thinking in such terms in our time is a delusion. No wonder that the imperial project failed and that it soon became clear that it was a mission impossible even for the United States. Military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the assumption that might is right, severely undermined the American economy, in addition to causing tens of thousands of deaths. Today many in the West admit that it was the wrong path to take, but the time that could have been used to build a truly new world order was lost.

The erroneous interpretation of the end of the cold war, the disappearance from the world arena of a strong partner with its own views—the reforming Soviet Union—and the weakening of Russia also had a negative impact on European developments. The Charter of Paris for a New Europe, which was signed in 1990 by European nations, the United States and Canada—a blueprint for new security architecture of the common European home—was relegated to oblivion. The United States and its allies instead decided to expand NATO eastward, bringing that military alliance closer to Russia's borders while claiming for it the role of a pan-European or even a global policeman. This usurped the functions of the United Nations and thus weakened it.

In the early 1990s it was also decided to accelerate the enlargement of the European Union, also eastward. Despite the EU's real achievements, the results of its expansion have been ambiguous, as has become particularly clear in recent months with Europe's unprecedented financial and economic crisis.

The expectations that all of our continent's problems would be solved by building Europe from the West eastward have not been fulfilled, and in fact they were bound to fail. A truly whole and democratic Europe must be built not only from the West but also from the East, including Russia. I often recall my conversation in the fall of 1989 with Pope John Paul II. A man with a profound and comprehensive view of the world and not given to triumphalist euphoria, he regarded perestroika as a vitally important step in the advance of freedom and democracy as well as an opportunity to build a truly united Europe. Speaking of the East and West, he said that "Europe should breathe with two lungs." But after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, Western leaders chose a different path.

As a result, Europe's role and weight in world affairs have been far less than their potential. New dividing lines have appeared in our continent, now much closer to Russia's borders, and twice—in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008—conflicts led to bloodshed.

n short, the world without the Soviet Union has not become safer, more just or more stable. Instead of a new world order—that is, enough global governance to prevent international affairs from becoming dangerously unpredictable—we have had global turmoil, a world drifting in uncharted waters. The global economic crisis that broke out in 2008 made that abundantly clear.

The West must undertake a critical reassessment of all that preceded this painful crisis. It is more than just a crisis of global finance or even a crisis of an economic model based on a race for hyperprofits and excessive consumption that grinds down the earth's resources and ruins nature. The crisis grew out of the arrogant conviction of "the collective West" that it had the recipes to solve all problems and that there was no alternative to the "Washington Consensus," which claimed to work equally well for all countries.

The crisis, the end of which is not in sight, seems to have sobered up some world leaders and prompted a search for collective solutions to global challenges. But the results so far have been slight. International organizations, particularly the United Nations, crippled by the unilateralism of the United States and NATO, are still faltering, unable to fulfill their task of conflict settlement. The G-8 is not sufficiently representative of the global community, and the G-20 has not become an effective mechanism.

Policy-making and political thinking are still militarized. This is particularly true in the United States, which has not renounced the methods of pressure and intimidation. Every time it uses armed force against non–nuclear weapon states, countries such as Iran become more determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century US military budgets accounted for nearly half the world's spending on armed forces. Such overwhelming military superiority of one country will make the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons impossible to achieve. Judging by the weapons programs of the United States and a number of other countries, they are setting their sights on a new arms race.

It makes me wonder whether every time there is a crisis or conflict, leaders will try to resolve them by resorting to military force. The only way to break this vicious circle is to reassert the principles of mutual security, which formed the core of our new political thinking more than twenty years ago.

* * *

Finally, there is post-Soviet Russia and its role in the world. During the period following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Union kept relations with Russia in a state of uncertainty. On the one hand, there were numerous declarations of cooperation and even strategic partnership. On the other hand, post-Soviet Russia was not given a voice in resolving key problems, and obstacles were put in the way of its integration into the European and global economy. It seems that while being given occasional pats on the back, Russia is still being treated as an outsider, not as a serious and constructive force in world affairs.

At the same time, the Russian people remember how during the 1990s the West strongly recommended and applauded "shock therapy"—the radical reforms that resulted in the collapse of the Russian economy and plunged tens of millions of its citizens into poverty. In the eyes of many Russians, it meant that the West did not want a revival of Russia—that it wanted Russia only as a supplier of resources that "knows its place."

Periods of Russia's weakness had occurred before, and they always proved temporary. Recently, US and EU policies toward Russia have begun to reflect an understanding of that fact. Despite difficulties, the policy of resetting relations with Russia initiated by President Barack Obama produced clear results, such as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, signed in 2010. Though the "reset" has powerful enemies in Washington (and in Moscow), it was an important American acknowledgment that Russia will remain a serious player in world politics and that partnership with it is indispensable.

I am convinced that it is time to return to the path we charted together when we ended the cold war. Once again, the world needs new thinking, based not just on the recognition of universal interests and of global interdependence but also on a certain moral foundation. Today one often hears that politics is a dirty business, incompatible with morality. No, politics becomes dirty and a zero-sum, lose-lose game only when it has no moral core. This, perhaps, is the main lesson to be learned from the past two decades.

Robert Reich: Who Is Sheldon Adelson and What Has Newt Promised Him?, Reminder: A Great Event This Sunday

2012-01-28T07:23:00.000-08:00

Hi. Here's a partial answer to some of Robert Reich's question. Adelson is the major financier of the illegal settlers in Palestine and friend to the most extreme elements in Israel's government, society and policies. Yesterday's Democracy Now reminds me that he owns one of Israel's largest newspapers and is a financier of 'TheThird Jihad,' the rabid anti-muslim film shown to over 1500 NYPD trainees and cops; right now raising a city-wide and City Council demand that Bloomberg fire NY Police Comissioner Ray Kelly. When Newt was asked why he got this money, he said it's because Adelson knew he'd support the Israel of Adleson's close friend, Binyamin Netanyahu. Gingrich then ourlined what that was 'there are no Paestinian people and they deserve no homeland nor right of return, and there's nothing to negotiate. (That's even to the right of Netanyahu and AIPAC), and is pushing for war on Iran. There's more - but for another day, if needed. -Ed

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9619-focus-who-is-sheldon-adelson-what-has-newt-promised-him

Who Is Sheldon Adelson, What Has Newt Promised Him?

By Robert Reich

Robert Reich’s Blog (1/25/12)

(Editor’s Note: How appropriate that a casino owner is one of the big power players in the biggest “suckers lose” gambling operation on the planet – the Corporate States of America! – Mark L. Taylor)

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner, is now the poster boy for what’s terribly wrong with our campaign-finance system. Adelson, you may recall, had, before the South Carolina Republican primary, donated $5 million to the pro-Gingrich Super Pac “Winning Our Future” – giving Newt a pile of money for negative advertising against Mitt Romney in South Carolina.

Adelson has done it again. He and his wife Marian have cut another $5 million check for Gingrich to go negative on Romney in Florida. The money won’t go as far as it did in South Carolina – TV ads cost a lot more in Florida

– but it’s enough to give the Grinch a solid footing.

And, who knows? The Adelsons are billionaires. They might decide to put in another $5 million or perhaps $20 million into Gingrich’s Super Pac. The point is, there’s no limit.

Do you know who Sheldon and Marian Adelson are? Do you know what Gingrich has promised them, or what they think they’ll get out of a Grinch presidency? I don’t. But if Newt becomes President of the United States, they’ll be singularly responsible. And we better find out, because Newt will owe them big time.

Forget the Lincoln Bedroom. The Adelsons and their kids will have the run of the White House, including the Oval Office. Hey, they’ll take over the Old Executive Building next door and turn it into a casino.

Never before in the history of American politics has a single couple given more money to a single candidate and had a bigger impact – all courtesy of the Supreme Court and its grotesque decisions that speech is money and corporations are people under the First Amendment.

* * *

From: estee chandler [mailto:losangeles@jewishvoiceforpeace.org]
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 7:57 PM
___

Sunday, January 29th - JVP-LA is a proud Community Sponsor of A Child's View of Gaza - Art Exhibit Opening in Los Angeles - Hollywood Woman's Club 4-7pm 1749 N. La Brea Avenue, LA 90046 - Event Reservations 310.657.5511

A Child's View of Gaza is an exhibition of 25 children's drawings from six children's centers in Gaza: Afaq Jadeeda Association, Life makers Center, Culture and Free Thought Association, Khan Younis, Qattan Center for the Child, Rachel Corrie Children's Center, and Al-Assria Children's Library. The exhibit will be on display at the Inside/Outside Gallery, Levantine Cultural Center, Jan. 17-Feb. 17, 2012. A special event will present the exhibit with guest speakers and the Naser Musa Ensemble at the Hollywood Woman's Club on Sun., Jan. 29, 4-7 pm, 1749 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles CA 90046. No ticket charge but donations will be requested. Event Reservations 310.657.5511.

In May 2009, an ad hoc delegation of 13 Americans traveled to Gaza to witness the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead. After visiting many children centers, homes, NGOs and seeing the powerful art the children had made during art therapy sessions, the delegation discussed how they could share Gaza's stories and needs with the world. A Child's View of Gaza lets the children share their own experiences through art.

More about the exhibit here:

http://www.levantinecenter.org/about-us/press-releases/gaza-chidlrens-art-exhibit-opens-los-angeles-after-bay-area-controversy

Peace and HOPE,

~estee chandler
JVP-LA Organizer

"The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference." Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

We the People, by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Roert Weissman

2012-01-27T07:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/we-the-people_b_1219573.html

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert Weissman

We the People

Posted: 1/20/12 02:52 PM ET

If you are concerned about the collapse of the middle class, you should be concerned about how American campaigns are financed. If you wonder why the United States is the only country in the industrialized world not to have a national health care program, if you're asking why we pay the highest price in the world for prescription drugs, or why we spend more money on the military than the rest of the world combined, you are talking about campaign finance. You are talking about the unbelievable power that big-money interests have over every legislative decision.

An already horrendous situation was made much worse two years ago this month when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission that multinational corporations have a constitutional right to spend whatever they want to influence election outcomes. A bare 5-4 majority lowered the floodgates on unchecked, unlimited, unaccountable corporate cash in political campaigns. Corporations were equated with people. A century of laws regulating business spending on elections were upended. In one fell swoop, five justices fantasized for corporations a right never conceived by the founders whose preamble to our Constitution begins with the words, "We the people..."

The ruling not only poisoned our political process. It contaminated the legislative process. It cast a permanent chill over all policymaking. Will the merits or the money tip the balance when an issue comes before Congress? What do you think? If the question is on breaking up huge banks, for example, every member of the Senate and the House, in the back of their minds, will ask themselves what the personal price would be for taking on Wall Street. Am I going to be punished? Will a huge amount of money be unleashed in my state? They're going to think twice about how to cast that vote. Not to put too fine a point on it, you will see politicians being adopted by corporations and becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate entities.

We already have seen what kind of damage Citizens United can cause. In the first election after the decision was handed down, corporations in 2010 poured hundreds of millions of dollars into independent organizations not formally affiliated with parties or candidates. About half of the $300 million spent by independent organizations came from undisclosed sources. In 60 of the 75 congressional races in which power changed hands, the unaccountable outside groups backed the winners. They spent freely and overwhelmingly on negative ads. The early phases of this year's elections bear witness to projections that the Citizens United effect will be much worse. Karl Rove has announced plans to raise $240 million. The Koch brothers promise to spend $200 million. It's fair to assume the Chamber of Commerce will spend at least as much. The Super PAC supporting President Obama, Priorities USA Action, aims to play in the same league. Hundreds of millions more will be in play.

It's a virtual certainty that all of this spending will fundamentally distort our democracy, tilting the playing field to favor corporate interests, discouraging new candidates, chilling elected officials and shifting the overall policymaking debate even further in the direction of giant corporate interests and the super-wealthy.

So now we face a choice. Americans can let Citizens United remain the law of the land, or we can have a functioning democracy. We can't have both. We choose democracy. With no reason to think that this court will reconsider its decision, we need a constitutional amendment.

Yes, legislative reforms could mitigate the damage. We should require better disclosure rules. We should make shareholders approve corporations' political spending. We should provide public financing of elections, but entrenched money interests have thwarted that for decades.

But nothing can truly cure the problem unless Citizens United is overturned with a constitutional amendment.

The Saving American Democracy Amendment in the Senate and a companion proposed in the House by Florida Representative Ted Deutch would do just that. The amendment would establish that constitutional rights belong to real people, not for-profit corporations. The amendment would prohibit corporations from making election-related expenditures. It would clarify that Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign spending, overturning the doctrine that election contributions and expenditures constitute First Amendment-protected speech and therefore may be subject only to limited restrictions. And it would affirm that nothing in the amendment limits freedom of press.

It's no easy thing to enact a constitutional amendment, but momentum for an amendment is building. People who have honest differences of opinion understand that there is something profoundly disgusting with what is happening in Washington and that there is something wrong with American democracy when you have a handful of billionaires and businesses putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process. Very few people think that has anything to do with American democracy. The American people desperately want to restore our democracy and return to rule by all of the people, not corporations and the superrich.

Bernie Sanders is a United States Senator from Vermont. Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.

Democracy Is For People

Sign the petition to support Sen. Sanders' Saving American Democracy Amendment.

Follow Sen. Bernie Sanders on Twitter: www.twitter.com/senatorsanders

Fisk: The Demise of the Dollar - a must read!

2012-01-26T13:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/9635-focus-the-demise-of-the-dollar

The Demise of the Dollar

By Robert Fisk, Independent UK

26 January 12

n the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning - along with China, Russia, Japan and France - to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place - although they have not discovered the details - are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil - yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.

The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power - along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system - which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.

Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.

China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq - blocked by the US until this year - and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.

Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.

Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements - the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system - America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

Scheer: Obama's Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

2012-01-26T07:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_faux_populism_sounds_like_bill_clinton_20120126/

Robert Scheer's Columns

Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

Posted on Jan 26, 2012

AP / Saul Loeb

President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012.

By Robert Scheer

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed? Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”? Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?

When Obama declared Tuesday evening “no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas,” wasn’t he aware that Jeffrey Immelt, the man he appointed to head his jobs council, is the most egregious offender? Immelt, the CEO of GE, heads a company with most of its workers employed in foreign countries, a corporation that makes 82 percent of its profit abroad and has paid no U.S. taxes in the past three years.

It was also a bit bizarre for Obama to celebrate Steve Jobs as a model entrepreneur when the manufacturing jobs that the late Apple CEO created are in the same China that elsewhere in his speech the president sought to scapegoat for America’s problems. Apple, in its latest report on the subject, takes pride in attempting to limit the company’s overseas suppliers to a maximum workweek of 60 hours for their horribly exploited employees. Isn’t it weird to be chauvinistically China baiting when that country carries much of our debt?

I’m also getting tired of the exhortations to improve the nation’s schools, certainly a worthy endeavor, but this economic crisis is the result not of high school dropouts as Obama suggested, but rather the corruption of the best and brightest graduates of our elite academies. As Obama well knows from his own trajectory in the meritocracy, which took him from one of the most privileged schools in otherwise educationally depressed Hawaii to Harvard Law, the folks who concocted the mathematical formulas and wrote the laws justifying fraudulent collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were his overachieving professors and classmates.

If he doesn’t know that, he should check out the record of Lawrence Summers, the man he picked to guide his economic program and who had been rewarded with the presidency of Harvard after having engineered Clinton’s deregulatory deal with Wall Street.

That is the real legacy of the Clinton years, and it is no surprise that GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich has been campaigning on his rightful share of it. The international trade agreements that exported good U.S. jobs, the radical financial deregulation that unleashed Wall Street greed, and the free market zealotry of then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was reappointed by Clinton, were all part of a deal Clinton made with Gingrich, House speaker at that time.

As Gingrich put it in the first Republican debate in South Carolina: “As speaker ... working with President Bill Clinton, we passed a very Reagan-like program, less regulation, lower taxes.” Even the 15 percent tax break that Mitt Romney exploited for his carryover private equity income was a result of the unholy Clinton-Gingrich alliance. Both principals of that alliance were pimps for the financial industry, and that includes Freddie Mac, the for-profit stock-traded housing agency that Clinton coddled while it stoked the Ponzi scheme in housing and that rewarded the former speaker with $1.6 million to $1.8 million in consulting fees.

There were, finally, some bold words in Obama’s speech about helping beleaguered homeowners, but they ring hollow given this administration’s efforts to broker a sweetheart deal between the leading banks and the state attorneys general that would see the banks fined only a pittance for their responsibility in the mortgage meltdown. Obama could have had success demanding mortgage relief if he had made that a condition for bailing out the banks. Now the banksters know he’s firing blanks, and they are placing their bets on their more reliable Republican allies to prevent any significant demand for helping homeowners with their underwater mortgages.

Of course, Romney, Obama’s most likely opponent in the general election, will never challenge the Wall Street hold on Washington, since he is the personification of the vulture capitalism that is the true cause of America’s decline. Obama should shine in comparison with his Republican challenger, but there is little in his State of the Union speech to suggest he will chart a much-needed new course in his second term.

DN Interview at Sundance: "Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare"

2012-01-25T07:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/23/medical_whistleblower_dr_steven_nissen_on_escape

Medical Whistleblower Dr. Steven Nissen on "Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare"

Democracy Now

January 23, 2012

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation’s largest festival for independent cinema. And we thank our host, Park City Television.

One of the issues raised over and over in the Republican presidential primary is the cost of healthcare. Since President Obama fought to pass his healthcare reform agenda, the issue has been the center of intense political debate. During the Republican presidential debate last Thursday, Newt Gingrich slammed Obama’s healthcare plan.

NEWT GINGRICH: The American people are frightened of bureaucratic, centralized medicine. They deeply distrust Washington. And the pressure will be to repeal it. And a lot of what Governor Romney just said, I think, is actually pretty good, sound stuff for part of the replacement. I would always repeal all of it, because I so deeply distrust the congressional staffs that I would not want them to be able to pick and choose which things they kept. But let me make one observation. You raised a good example. Why is President Obama for young people being allowed to stay on their parents’ insurance until 26? Because he can’t get any jobs for them to go out and buy their own insurance. I mean, I have an—I have an offer—I have an offer to the parents of America: elect us, and your kids will be able to move out, because they’ll have work.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Newt Gingrich, who won the South Carolina primary. Many say Obamacare is very similar to Romneycare. That’s the healthcare bill that Mitt Romney signed off on when he was governor of Massachusetts. Still, Romney is equally fierce in his criticism of President Obama’s plan.

MITT ROMNEY: We have to go after a complete repeal. And that’s going to have to happen—that’s going to have to happen with the House and the Senate, hopefully the Republican. If we don’t have a Republican majority, I think we’re going to be able to convince some Democrats that when the American people stand up loud and clear and say, "We do not want Obamacare, we do not want the higher taxes, we do not want a $500 billion cut in Medicare to pay for Obamacare" — I think you’re going to see the American people stand with our president and say, "Let’s get rid of Obamacare." But we’ll replace it.

And I’ve laid out what I’ll replace it with. First, it’s a bill that does care for people that have pre-existing conditions. If they’ve got a pre-existing condition and they’ve been previously insured, they won’t be denied insurance going forward. Secondly, I’ll allow people to own their own insurance, rather than just be able to get it from their employer. I want people to be able to take their insurance with them if they go from job to job. So, we’ll make it work, in the way that’s designed to have healthcare act like a market, a consumer market, as opposed to have it run like Amtrak and the post office. That’s what’s at risk here—at stake here. Do we—we go back to this. Ours is the party of free enterprise, freedom, markets, consumer choice. Theirs is the party of government knowledge, government domination, where Barack Obama believes that he knows better for the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: That was presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Well, we turn now to one of the most talked-about documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival. The film tackles the powerful forces behind the battle over healthcare cost and access. It’s called Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare.

To talk more about the question of healthcare reform, we’re joined now by Dr. Steven Nissen, whose work is featured in the film. He’s chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s leading clinics, and served as president of the American College of Cardiology. Dr. Nissen’s research into Vioxx and Avandia led to severe restrictions by the Food and Drug Administration reducing the use of both drugs. He features prominently in Escape Fire.

We welcome you, Dr. Nissen, to Democracy Now!, here in Park City. It’s great to have you with us.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: It’s great to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I know you’re a star in the field of cardiology, but now you’re a star in a film here that has just premiered. We’re coming out of the South Carolina primary. A major focus of attack against the Democrats is what the Republicans call "Obamacare." Can you talk about the criticism and talk about what we need today, especially in light of one of the headlines we just brought out, the Citizens United decision? Why would that weigh in? Why would you care about that as a doctor in this country?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, many things to talk about here, but first of all, let me say that I don’t like the use of the term Obamacare. What’s happened here is they’ve made this into some kind of a personal thing about Obama. Obamacare, or what they call Obamacare, was really a bill written by lots of people on Capitol Hill, and it happened to be supported by the President. Now, many of us think it didn’t go far enough, but it was at least an attempt to fix the system.

And my question is, if we’re not going to do—if we’re not going to do healthcare reform, what do these candidates—what do they want? We have a country where we’re spending 16 or 17 percent of every dollar on healthcare, and we’re not any healthier than our counterparts in Western Europe and other countries where they spend half that much. So, the problem is, we spend too much, we get too little, and the system isn’t working. We’ve got to fix it. Now, repealing the healthcare bill isn’t going to solve the problem. And I’d like to know is how they want to solve the problem.

AMY GOODMAN: How—talk about the forces at play. You’re a fierce critic of the pharmaceutical industry.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, let me, first of all, say that the pharmaceutical industry does lots of good. I mean, many new drugs that have saved lives have come from this industry. But selling pharmaceuticals is not the same as selling other kinds of products. There is a moral imperative here. And my concern is that, in several instances, drugs that their manufacturers knew were harmful, that harmed large numbers of Americans, continue to be marketed.

Now, you asked the question about the forces that are aligned against healthcare reform. And that indeed is the problem, is healthcare has become such a huge business that the forces that don’t want change—the insurance industry, the hospital industry, even physician professional societies—have so aligned to keep the system as it is that it’s very hard to overcome that. My fear in this election, because of the Citizens United ruling, is massive amounts of money from people with a huge stake in making a profit from healthcare are going to influence the electorate with just an amazing amount of money, television, every other media, and that could really turn the tide against what I thought was at least some momentum for healthcare reform.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about the drugs that you investigated yourself. Start with Avandia.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, Avandia was the most recent of these. And, of course, it was a terrible tragedy. This was a drug introduced about a decade ago. It achieved enormous market success, eventually becoming the number one selling diabetes drug in the world. What is particularly shocking is that, early on, the manufacturer of this drug had very good evidence that it increased the risk of heart disease events. And it’s important to know that heart disease is the leading cause of death in diabetics. About 70 percent of all diabetics will die of heart disease. The company knew. They successfully concealed that information. And I was fortunately able to find enough data on the studies the company had done to do an analysis, which we published on May the 1st, 2007, that showed that the drug increased the risk of heart attack by about 40 percent. When you take a drug being used by diabetics, and if it increases the risk of heart attack by 40 percent, it’s truly a medical catastrophe. Over the next three years, a public battle was waged, involving the FDA, the media, ourselves, science, and eventually this drug was removed from the market in Europe completely—you can’t buy it there—and so severely restricted in the United States that nobody gets it.

AMY GOODMAN: Avandia hid this.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: They knew—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the company.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: The company knew, yes. The company knew.

AMY GOODMAN: You found it by googling—

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —and finding a report from what? London?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, it turns out there was a website. There’s a very interesting story here. Eliot Spitzer, when he was attorney general of New York, sued GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Avandia, for concealing evidence that their anti-depressants were increasing the risk of suicide in children and adolescents. And rather than take a monetary settlement, the settlement of that suit was that the company had to post the results of all their clinical trials for all their drugs. And they did so at a website, that was not easy to find, in the U.K. We found it. We analyzed the data. And what we saw was frightening, to say the least. And we published it.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the criminal liability of [GlaxoSmithKline]?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, it’s interesting, because rarely, if ever, have these sorts of problems reached the level of the criminal courts. My own view is that they should. Importantly, it would create a deterrent. It would say, look, if you conceal information that can cost the lives of our citizens, that that should be treated the same way we would treat other violent crimes. Now, I don’t think it’s going to happen. You know, the whole idea of white-collar crime being treated differently is a problem in America, but the reality is, is a lot of people were very severely harmed.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people do you think needlessly died?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, the FDA Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology, which does this kind of analysis, estimated anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000 people either died or had a heart attack as a result of the marketing of this drug when it was marketed.

AMY GOODMAN: Vioxx?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: And Vioxx is a very similar story, yeah. In 2001, we analyzed data from a clinical trial of Vioxx, data that had not—

AMY GOODMAN: Who makes Vioxx?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Vioxx was made by Merck. And that data was concealed from a manuscript that was published about the drug. We got access to the data through the FDA website, again, through an unusual source; published it; and there then ensued a three-year battle, public battle, that ultimately led to the withdrawal of the drug from the market completely, worldwide, in 2004.

AMY GOODMAN: Because it did what?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: It caused heart attacks. It dramatically increased the risk of heart attack, stroke and death.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about the calculation that a company that Glaxo—well, the official name of the company?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: GlaxoSmithKline.

AMY GOODMAN: GlaxoSmithKline. So often they merge that I get confused.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: GlaxoSmithKline, GSK.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And Merck. What are the calculations they make, in terms of what would it cost to reveal the information, what would it cost not to reveal and just pay out lawsuits when people die and some family members sue?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Yeah. Again, I want to say, make sure that everybody understands, that these are our outliers. I mean, there are very good and very ethical companies in the pharmaceutical industry and companies I work with every day. But there are also forces at play, powerful economic forces, that can cause companies, if they don’t have good supervision, to do the wrong thing. And what they did in both these cases is they looked at the information, and they literally did a calculus. What would it cost if we revealed the hazard and lost the sales of the drug? What would it cost if we took our chances that somebody will find out? And they decided that it was less expensive to conceal the information than to reveal it.

AMY GOODMAN: This was, in the case of—in the case of Avandia, an actual memo that you saw.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: There is. There is a document that surfaced in court cases that literally makes a calculation of how much it would cost if this came to light and how much it would cost if it didn’t. And the ultimate calculation was it was better to keep this under wraps.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, does the new legislation, the new healthcare bill, do anything about this, regulate this in any way? Would it change the situation?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: No, it doesn’t. And again, what we ended up with healthcare reform bill was a bill that just kind of moves the needle a little bit in one direction. Now look, I think it was a step forward. At least it goes forward towards making certain that the 50 million Americans—it’s just scandalous that in a country with our wealth, 50 million of our citizens don’t have any health insurance. And they’re one illness away from bankruptcy, from the kind of catastrophes that can befall famillies. So this bill did help to close that gap, but it really was more about insurance reform than it was about healthcare reform. It is still light years away from what we need to solve the problem of healthcare in America.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is? What do we need?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, I think we need to contain costs with a system that doesn’t reward doing the wrong things. We have what I like to call "perverse incentives." And this is talked about in Escape Fire extensively by myself and by Don Berwick, the former administrator of Medicare, that these incentives basically pay physicians to do procedures, to do things to patients. We aren’t being paid for quality, we’re being paid for quantity. And as a consequence, we drive more and more utilization, more and more procedures, and that’s why we spend so much and we get so little.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your own clinic. Cleveland Clinic is known throughout the world, and it’s a very interesting model. It’s similar, Dr. Steve Nissen, to Mayo Clinic.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Yeah. It is actually a little different, the Mayo Clinic. And I’ll tell you one thing that I am proud of in our institution, is we are not reimbursed on a fee-for-service basis. Every physician that works at the clinic gets a salary. So when you see a patient, there is no incentive to do procedures that may be not needed. There is a simple formula that says you get paid for coming to work every day and taking care of patients. You do your job. Now, we’re well paid. The physicians are well paid. And they all know they could make more money in private practice, not in an institution like that, but people feel very proud of the fact that we are not incentivized to do things to people.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you an example, the stent.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Why would a doctor in a different situation maybe deal with things differently?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, there’s been a lot of criticism—and I’ve been one of those that have criticized—the overuse of coronary stents. We now know that in patients that have chronic chest pain, that stents do not prevent heart attack or extend life.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do doctors put them in? And what are they exactly?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Stents are these little metal mesh devices that prop open the coronary. The coronary is narrowed. And they’re used very widely in millions of Americans. And in the right setting, they’re very useful. The problem is, we’re twice as likely to use a stent in patients in the United States as they are in other developed countries. And part of the reason is that every time you put a stent in, a bill is generated, and that represents revenue. Now, look, well-meaning people do respond to economic incentives. It’s the way our system is built. And so, I believe you have to take some of that incentive, some of that profit incentive, out of the system. And that’s what you do when you move toward a system that basically is a salary-based system, rather than a fee-for-service-based system. We’re a long way from having that in America.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does the American Medical Association stand on that issue?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, the AMA has not been on the forefront of healthcare reform. You know, you may—many people don’t realize that when Medicare was first proposed, the AMA was vehemently opposed to Medicare. They said it was socialized medicine to pay for healthcare in senior citizens. And now, they’ve come a long way since then, but they haven’t come far enough.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Steven Nissen, as we wrap up, what you feel people should understand, take from the problems with medicine, about the issues we must deal with in this country, like regulation? I dare say that everyone from Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich would be deeply concerned if the medical devices and drugs that they themselves or their family members were given were not highly regulated. And yet, we are talking about a political discussion now that has to do with targeting regulation as the problem, the jobs killer in America today.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, it’s a terrible, terrible way to approach this problem. You know, regulation—under-regulation of the financial industry led to a catastrophe. And under-regulation of the medical industry has led to similar catastrophes. But believe it or not, there are people, on the right, who believe that the FDA should be abolished. And I’ve actually been interviewed on some channels, like Fox, where people have said, "Well, why do we need the FDA, Dr. Nissen? Why can’t the market regulate this? I mean, if drugs aren’t safe or effective, people won’t use them, right?" And the very idea is chilling, and should be chilling, to Americans. We need regulation. We need thoughtful regulation. Regulation is not a four-letter word. And we need regulation, and we need a government that looks out for the interests of its people, rather than the interests of business. And right now, most of the efforts of the federal government, many of these agencies, are so closely aligned with the business community that they’ve lost sight of what their real mission is: to represent the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: How does diet fit into this picture?

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: It’s a huge issue. I mean, look, we could prevent a lot of the diseases that we now treat, if we could deal with the problem of obesity. But, you know, obesity is also a problem of poverty. You know, you ask, why is obesity so problematic? Is because the most fattening foods are the cheapest and most easily obtainable. And that’s why, in low-income populations, obesity is on the rise. We need to do better. And that’s why, I think, when I hear comments like Obama is "the food stamp president," thank God for food stamps. Without food stamps, we’d have a lot of people starving in the streets.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to take that on in our next subject. Raj Patel will join us. Among his books, Stuffed and Starved. Dr. Steven Nissen, I want to thank you for being with us, but ask a final question. We are here at the Sundance Film Festival. You’re here because you’re one of the subjects of this film called Escape Fire, dealing with America’s healthcare system. Explain why the film was called Escape Fire, what that means.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Well, there was a fire a number of years ago, where an individual, in order to actually escape the fire—

AMY GOODMAN: The firefighter.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: The firefighter, built a fire around himself.

AMY GOODMAN: So the flames were coming at all these firefighters that were going in to fight the fire.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: That’s right. And he fought fire with fire. And—

AMY GOODMAN: He actually lit a match—

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: And formed a fire—

AMY GOODMAN: —in front of himself.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Exactly. And that—

AMY GOODMAN: Horrifying the other firefighters.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: Exactly. He did, indeed. And, you know, I think that the analogy here, among others, is that we need to now fight fire with fire. And so, one of the things I loved about working on this film, with this wonderful crew, is that Escape Fire, they—it was done by people who share our passion for improving healthcare. And I think the film really speaks to the problem and talks about some of the solutions.

AMY GOODMAN: And just to say, with this firefighter, he encouraged the other fighters—firefighters to join him in the circle. He lit a flame. The fire would burn the area around him, and then the fierce fire that was coming at them would not scorch them, because the land would already be scorched. The firefighters thought he was crazy, ran away, and they were all enveloped in the flame and killed.

DR. STEVEN NISSEN: And unfortunately, the best solutions for the healthcare problem, people are running away from them, not running toward them.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Steven Nissen, one of the country’s leading cardiologists, featured in the new film Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare. Dr. Nissen is chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s leading clinics.

This is Democracy Now! We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, from Park City Television. We’ll be back looking at another film that takes on an issue that is central to the debates that are taking place in this election year. It’s the issue of poverty and hunger. Stay with us.

The Idiot's Guide to Fighting Dictatorship in Syria While Opposing Military Intervention

2012-01-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

From: Sid Shniad [sid-l@googlegroups.com]

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4065/the-idiots-guide-to-fighting-dictatorship-in-syria

The Idiot's Guide to Fighting Dictatorship in Syria While Opposing Military Intervention

by Bassam Haddad

Jan 20 2012

Writing this in Beirut is apt, where there is a deep polarization between those who would die for the Syrian regime and those who just want it to die, at any cost. Those who do not support either position "as is" are dubbed cowards and opportunists by both sides, as well as by the pro-Saudi camp. Outside the Arab context, pro-Israel commentators do not like the nuanced position herein, because it puts Israel and the United States in a bad light. Good company. The author does NOT assume this is the best rendition of a nuanced position: just one of them.]

After almost five decades, when the time came to publicly oppose authoritarian rule in Syria, one would have thought that it was the rational and decent thing to do. And it is. More than that, it is incumbent on anyone who cares about Syrians (let us leave “Syria” alone for a moment) and their struggle for the establishment of a political system that is free(r) of all forms of oppression. So, what is the problem?

Why Fighting Dictatorship Is Intuitive

It is easy, rational, and just to adopt unequivocal opposition to the decades-long history of the Syrian regime’s authoritarian rule. It is equally easy, rational, and just to severely condemn and oppose the regime’s ten-month crushing of independent protesters. Yet regime supporters and some in the anti-imperialist camp retort that some of these protesters are agents of external forces or armed gangs.

While there may be a grain of truth in this argument, it is empty. It is, in fact, an insult to the intelligence of any Syria observer. It overlooks the regime’s brutality in the last ten months of the uprising. It baldly erases decades of oppression, detention, imprisonment, silencing, excommunication, and torture that the regime has dealt to any mere hint of opposition. This is the regime that will turn fifty next year.

Indeed, it is only Saddam Hussein’s relentless authoritarianism in Iraq that has surpassed the legacy of the Syrian regime’s repression. This is not a secret. It is not a controversial description. It is true despite Syria’s relative stability until March 2011. Its institutions were poor but sufficiently functional. Its cities were relatively safe. And after the late 1980s, its urban centers boasted an increasingly bustling and dynamic life. The regime peddled these characteristics as a model of “social peace”.

The threat of heavy reprisal along with the formation and state cooptation of an exceptionally corrupt business class were among the painful threads that held this brittle “social peace” together. Important too, in this regard, was the fact that the Syrian welfare state was able to provide the minimum needs for most Syrian citizens until the 1990s—though the countryside was largely neglected. Ultimately, It is precisely the relationship between the state and top business echelons after the mid-1980s that gradually exacerbated Syria’s social and regional polarization. After the 2000 succession of Bashar Asad and eventually his team of so-called “liberlizers”, the Syrian Ba'ath Party (out of all places) introduced what they called the Social Market Economy in 2005. It was to respond to various calls not emanating from the Syrian majority. Within the still constitutionally socialist republic, the new announcement was intended as a near-formal blow to the remaining vestiges of a state-centered economy.

A resulting series of camouflaged neoliberal policies and bad fortune exacerbated existing structural disparities and social discontent among the less privileged. The increasing withdrawal of state subsidies and welfare, the gradual introduction of weak market institutions to replace corrupt but functioning institutions of the state, alonside continued notorious mismanagement of the economy became a recipe for social unrest. The scant rainfall during the past decade further caused massive migration and a loss of jobs in the countryside, adding fuel and, if I may say so, location, to the fire of social protest potential after 2010. All it took was a spark. Bouazizi provided it. Syria’s "social peace" was exposed and decimated.

But it did not all start in March 2011. Beneath the serene and comforting streets of Damascus and Aleppo lay and still lie thousands of political prisoners. Stuffing Syria’s jails and solitary confinement units, even prior to the uprising, were Islamists and atheists, liberals and communists, and everything in between. Prisoners came in all shades and indeed comported with the Syrian regime’s official rhetoric. They included those who dedicated their lives to defend the Palestinian cause against the apartheid state of Israel. They also included those who built honorable records for opposing the United States’ duplicitous and brutal policies in the region, its support of dictatorship, and its launching of barbaric wars on false accounts.

The prisoners’ fault was not that they were conspirators. It was that they opposed the regime. Their imprisonment and torture highlighted the fact that anti-imperialism has never been, nor will never be, the regime’s priority. Clearly, the Syrian National Council (SNC) will not be any better on this count. In fact, the council is already much worse when it comes to related matters of autonomy from external actors.

The tragedy is that the rise of such a problematic body—the SNC—with varying degrees of local support is an undeniable testament to the regime’s deep repression and bankruptcy. Some may argue that the regime’s bolstering of various legitimate regional causes or “ the cause” is a subterfuge for its horrendous domestic repression, creating resentment even among the causes’ proponents. Many Syrians are fed up with this duplicity, which has come at their expense. They may even appear uninterested in regional issues and calculations. Many in the "pro-resistance” camp read this deprioritization of anti-imperialism, or even the domestic call for external intervention, only as a betrayal. They fail to see the exasperation, desperation, vulnerability, and ultimately the motivational force of self-preservation. It is none other than the regime that has given birth to this imperative of self-preservation.

Imperialism Is Not the Issue for the Syrian Regime or the Protesters at All Times

It is one thing for analysts living outside Syria to oppose and condemn foreign intervention (which this author does unequivocally). It is another to assume that all those calling for it in Syria under current conditions are part of a conspiracy.

Again, it is the Syrian regime’s brutality since March 2011 and before that has created conditions for the street’s increasing support for foreign intervention to stop the killing. Certainly, some may have had ulterior motives, connections or designs as supporters of intervention all along. But the majority of those calling for intervention have been brutalized into doing so. They are not thinking in terms of supporting or opposing imperialism at this time.

Bear with me for a moment here. Let us imagine a wild scenario whereby the United States would have intervened to stop the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza in January 2009. Would Gazans, under daily bombs and bullets, have objected on the grounds of the US record of imperialism? Or perhaps, Gazans might have objected due to their suspicion of the United States’ potential designs for the post-intervention stage? Surely many outsiders will think so, and some insiders may too. But most Gazans would likely not have been entertaining ideology and geostrategic reflexivity, as their skies rained death from above. Moreover, even if, in this wild scenario, Gazan's acceptance of external intervention would have been perhaps short-sighted, it would have beeen patently ridiculous to claim that all such Gazans were part of an imperialist conspiracy.

Imperialism is not always the issue for everyone. To not recognize this is to lose the fight against imperialism.

The “resistance” camp seems to want or expect hunted and gunned down individuals and families on Syrian streets to prioritize the regime’s anti-imperialist rhetoric over the instinct of self-preservation and their fight for freedom from authoritarism. Again, the fact that some inside Syria are abusing this dynamic to call for the kind of external intervention that the regime’s regional and international enemies have long dreamed of does not negate that fight.

If die-hards among the "pro-resistance" camp feel indignant or distraught by these calls, they should recount the modern history of Syria. Indeed, it is the anti-imperialist, pro-resistance camp that has some accounting to do at this stage. Any type of anti-imperialism must necessarily include a rejection of authoritarianism. Supporting resistance to imperialism at the expense of an entire community’s most inalienable rights can only spell defeat. Let us therefore cease this silly and insulting game of accusing the detractors of the Syrian regime as necessarily pro-imperialist.

Finally, as the regime strongmen, subjects, observers, and detractors know well, the regime’s priority above all else has been and continues to be its own preservation. From the regime's perspective, if it engages in or enables resistance to imperialism, which it has certainly done more than any other in the region of late, that is all the better. If not, well, staying alive is good enough, even if it might require siding with the United States or reactionary Arab regimes at times. This is similar to the problematics of the United States’ self-image supporting democracy worldwide; if it can engage in promoting democracy, that is all the better. If not, promoting dictatorship to serve its interests (as is the case in the Arab world) will do just fine. This is because the United Sta objective was never to create democratic regimes, merely compliant ones.

Finally, it is of crucial importance to disentangle the sources of criticism of the Syrian regime. Does the critique proceed with the interests of Syrians in mind? Or does the criticism proceed from the best interests of, say, the United States’ or Israel’s foreign policy establishments and their proponents? This is not to mention the relevance of distangling an entire coterie of other actors such as Saudi Arabia and their minions, various European countries, and what is left othe Lebanese March 14 movement.

The call for the downfall of authoritarianism is, as stated above, both rational and just. But we must be necessarily weary when it is the likes of Elliot Abrahams behind the call for democracy.

Why Foreign Intervention Is Loathed

Protecting and defending authoritarianism on the political grounds that it serves as resistance to foreign intervention has become desperately short sighted from the very-same pro-resistance perspective. By the same token, to not understand the implications and consequences of foreign intervention in Syria at this juncture is equally short-sighted in all respects. This moment of regional turmoil and unsavory political alignments linking the worst in foreign policies of “East” and “West”, dating decades now (longer than the Syrian regime’s record of oppressing its own citizens, really), is cause for serious caution. In other words, Syria is being used by various powers—including the United States, Saudi Arabia, and their chorus—as an occasion to accomplish their respective or collective objectives in the region. And their aims are reactionary ones, to be sure, in terms of the interests of most people in the region as the past decades behind us attest and as current uprisings against the “fruits” of such objectives make clear, even to some skeptics. This does not mean, however, that we should withdraw our opposition and halt the struggle against dictatorship in Syria. It only serves to remind us how not to do it.

One must start with the simple and undramatic assertion that the Syrian situation is more than just the Syrian situation. This assertion, however, should not come at the expense of Syrian lives. Since the mid-twentieth century, when mainly European designs for dominating and influencing the countries or politics of the Middle East through schemas such as the Baghdad Pact, Syria was an important regional prize, mostly in a passive manner. After Hafez al-Asad took power in the so-called “Corrective Movement” of 1970 and 1971, Syria became a more fortified regional actor that could not only determine its own internal politics but also, on occasion, those of other countries.

Notably, Syria became a leading member of the "rejectionist front": a front that sought to confront Israel without succumbing to bilateral “peace” plans that did not aim for a comprehensive and just settlement of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Save for a brief stint of confrontation between Syria and Israel in 1982—when Israel downed several Syrian fighter jets in a pathetic air power confrontation—the story goes that the Syrian-Israeli border was the safest place on earth, despite the occupation of the Golan Heights. However, by proxy, and mostly via non-state actors such as Hizballah and Hamas, Syria became the last and only state to confront Israel. Regionally, the Syrian regime acquired a reputation of bravado. This was not because it actively fought Israel’s outlaw behavior and racism. It was because all other Arab states were, more or less, wimps, to use a sophisticated word (though some claim they were rational, we leave the latter claim for another time).

In 1993, Syria’s stance as the "lone" confronter state was further fortified. This was due, on the one hand, to Iraq’s military irrelevance and defeat. On the other hand, “peace” with Israel proliferated on multiple fronts: the Oslo accords, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, and deeper flirtations between Israel and various Arab countries, notably Qatar and Morocco. When Qaddafi paid off the United Kingdom and the United States for being bad boys and promptly joined the community of lawful nations, it was none other than the great intellect of George W. Bush that deemed Qaddafi a model of sorts. By the mid-2000s, the Syrian regime was the only remaining Arab country that would not pay lip service to the United States.

The Syrian regime went further. It continued to support resistance to the Israeli occupation by supporting Hizballah as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad (both of which had offices in Damascus). It opposed the brutal and arrogant invasion of Iraq in a manner that no Arab country did. It continued to be the only well-endowed secular and explicitly, if only rhetorically, anti-imperialist state in the region.

But for the United States, Israel, some European countries, Saudi Arabia and its minions in Lebanon and the Gulf, it is the Syria-Hizballah-Iran axis that still constitutes the most formidable challenge. Taking out Syria as it stands would weaken Hizballah and isolate Iran, the big prize. With Syria out of the way, Hizballah would be starved of its safe arms transport corridor and less able to meet a strike against Iran with reprisal.

An Iran strike would also confront Turkey with a dilemma. Quite aside from its two-faced posturing on Syrian authoritarianism as it simultaneously oppresses Kurdish resistance, Turkey would have to balance two conflicting desires. On the one hand, the Turkish administration hopes to nourish its grand vision of regional hegemony through the consent and admiration of the Arab street. But it is that very street that rejects the United States–Saudi Arabia alliance that Turkey is implicitly supporting as it strives to isolate the Syrian regime.

In any case, precluding Turkey, the actors that are amassed to benefit from the fall of the Syrian regime are, in the final analysis, no less problematic than the Syrian regime itself. In sum, these actors are certainly more violent, discriminatory, and anti-democratic in terms of their collective and/or individual long-term vision for the region. In unity, there is strength! Whether one supports the Syrian regime or not, the fall of the Syrian regime is more than the fall of the Syrian regime.

This does not mean that it's fall should not be opposed or overthrown by domestic means. As I have argued elsewhere (here 1 and here 2), Syria’s past or potential regional role should not be an excuse for supporting its sustenance. Conversely, supporting the demise of the Syrian regime by any and all means, including external military intervention, is extremely reckless, especially if the objective is to save Syrian lives or set the stage for a post-regime path of self-determination.

Any external military intervention supported by the above array of the awkward and brutal will devastate Syria because of a host of intended and unintended consequences. The strange and cruel affront would exponentially increase the death toll of Syrians in both absolute and relative terms, without achieving any discernable conclusive outcome. Moreover, an external factor would reignite another local and regional struggle rather than simply end domestic authoritarian rule and pave the way for democratic developments.

One can be moved by the urgency of saving Syrian lives today but if this is the ultimate purpose, and if Syrians’ self-determination is the desired outcome, one can easily see the perils of military intervention that will make the current killing look like a picnic. Ideological considerations aside, the magnitude of the complexity and mayhem can be discerned simply by anticipating a conflict that will involve Iran, Hizballah, and an intense chunk of the Syrian population. Internal and regional opposition to external military intervention in Syria will swell the more an attack is imminent. Unless the regime brutality reaches even higher proportions prior to the intervention (apologies for the coldness of the calculation here), it will be counter-productive, to say the least.

As for the hoax of no-fly zones that is deemed to be asked by the many, as opposed to full scale military intervention, I am reminded of how some young(er) boys used to promise their girlfriends that they would not go all the way. No-fly-zones are equally unrealistic and much less pleasurable in the end. I cannot say more here, and I cannot believe I am keeping the above text in the post.

In sum, both positions are doable simultaneously: opposing the regime and opposing external military intervention. The problem arises with the question of agency.

The Residual Problem with This Article

Not to be outdone by this article, it is crucial to point to a flaw, or lack thereof, within it and to introduce a anti-climactic caveat. First, I must admit that the tenor of the position elaborated in the lines above lacks a clear agency (e.g., an institution, party or movement) that might convert it to a real and actionable path. The SNC is certainly not the answer. But this question has never been the object of the debate discussed herein. Hence, this article is a very modest and hopelessly insufficient attempt at engendering a discussion about locating or catalyzing such a collective.

Some strands of the opposition, including the head of National Coordinating Committees, support a nuanced position but are usually opposed fiercely. According to independent organizers and protesters on the ground in Syria, there is room for the growth and effectiveness of a truly democratic opposition that is not always in line with the SNC. True, both parties may be benefitting from each other for their own purposes today. However, there is growing concern among many activists on the ground about where the SNC is headed, how it is run now, and how it will be in the longer term. This tension, which is evident between the SNC and other smaller opposition groups outside Syria, has not become explicit yet. Perhaps the brightest rays of light are the reports that the larger portion of the Syrian opposition inside Syria does not take its cues from anyone outside Syria, and for good reason, despite some appearances to the contrary. It may only be this indigenous force that can solve the problem of leadership.

The anti-climactic caveat I offer is that no one outside the SNC and part of the domestic opposition is calling for external intervention in an inexorable manner. This status is not for lack of want or desire. Besides the arguments suggested above from a general standpoint, the lack of readiness for external intervention is manifold and not always intuitive.

Largely, it is because of the low pay-offs, some deterrence, and a bit of cynicism, among those in the anti-Syrian camp (against its regime, geostrategic importance, and/or people). First, Syria is neither Iraq nor Libya. It does not have ample natural resources to be used as a mortgage for future reimbursement for the “noble deed" (The West has got to stop liberating people!). Second, unrest in Syria may potentially spill over to the new champions of democracy in and around the Arabian Peninsula, not to mention Lebanon and the thorny derivatives of further instability in that "godforsaken" country. Third, the current Syrian regime has protected its borders with Israel (actually, itself, considering the occupied Golan) for decades. Not a bad thing for Israel’s decades’ long violation of international law, underwritten by the foe it robbed. Fourth, Syria has a lot of friends, big and small, that will not stand still. And some, like Russia, have a fleet docked near Syria's northern shores.

Finally, as the venerable Kissinger used to say in the 1980s (I am paraphrasing): let the Iranians and Iraqis kill each other into impotence, for it facilitates things for the United States thereafter. Thus, some would like Syrians to continue killing each other, for a while longer, before an intervention is advanced. They would be happy to see Syria weaken even further its institutions and infrastructure, while social and political divisions are excascerbated enough to undercut possibilities of collective action for a long time to come. Syria’s long-term trajectory after the Ba'ath fall is an unknown, whether one considers questions of resistance, anti-imperialism or the struggle for restoring the Golan. So, from the perspective of those in the "Kissinger camp", why not wait for Syria and Syrians to disempower themselves further, instead of pushing for a swift conclusion now? If one, or a government, supports the safety of the apartheid state of Israel, what else would be better than a protracted killing field in Syria?

So, for the moment, external military intervention is not seriously on the table yet. But the discursive conflicts on this question will continue. Hence, this idiot’s guide.

[A version of this article was published on al-Jazeera English website]

British M. P.s Call For Closure Of Romney's Cayman Islands Tax Haven

2012-01-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/765978/british_members_of_parliament_call_for_closure_of_romney%E2%80%99s_cayman_islands_tax_haven/#paragraph3

British Members Of Parliament Call For Closure Of Romney’s Cayman Islands Tax Haven

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) admitted last week that his tax rate was about 15 percent because his income mainly comes from investments that are taxed at lower rates than normal income. Romney’s income is also bolstered by the fact that several of his investments — worth millions of dollars — take advantage of offshore tax havens in the Cayman Islands to boost profits.

Many of those investments are associated with Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney co-founded, which has an extensive history of using such tax havens to boost profits at a multi-billion dollar cost to American taxpayers. Those tax havens aren’t just causing outrage among Americans, however. The Cayman Islands are a British territory, and British MP John Cryer, a former member of the British Treasury Select Committee, told the British blog Left Foot Forward that it is “a disgrace” that corporations and investors like Romney and Bain can use them to avoid paying taxes:

“As a former member of the Treasury select committee, I think it is a disgrace that the Cayman Islands, a tax haven, can enable wealthy corporations and individuals such as Mitt Romney and others in the wealthiest 1% to avoid tax and still be cloaked in secrecy. Meanwhile all across the western world, hard-working people are seeing their living standards and take-home pay stagnate or reduced.

“It reminds me of President Kennedy’s comment in his inaugural speech, ‘pay any price, bear any burden’. Except it’s hard-working, modestly paid majority who are bearing that burden.”

According to Left Foot Forward, Cryer proposed a motion last week calling on the House of Commons to immediately close the Cayman Islands as a tax haven. The motion states that the House is “alarmed” by reports that Romney and others are using the Caymans to “avoid paying the same tax rate as other US citizens” and “concerned about the continued use of tax havens by the top 1% in the US and UK to avoid paying the correct tax in their own country.” The motion then “calls on the UK government to introduce urgent legislation to help close tax havens and increase transparency so that the very richest pay their fair share of tax in their respective countries.”

The United States loses $100 billion a year in tax revenue to offshore tax havens like the Caymans, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

By Travis Waldron | Sourced from ThinkProgress

Posted at January 23, 2012, 8:11 am

Juan Gonzales: Astonishing trifecta for nation's populist movement against corporate greed

2012-01-23T07:08:00.000-08:00

Hi. Here's a fine article making important connections, but with a problem. The Wisconsin Union/Citizen uprising began before the Occupy movement, and both of them followed the Arab Spring of Tunision/Egyptian massive uprisings . Occupy Wall Street has exponentially heartened and advanced all national and internationsl struggles, and this in no way demeans the great events of last wednesday, the occupy movement or the article. On the contrary. -Ed

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/occupy-wall-street-looms-wins-sopa-bill-oil-pipeline-wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-article-1.1009005#ixzz1k03tHam3

Astonishing trifecta for nation's populist movement against corporate greed

Occupy Wall Street looms over wins vs. SOPA bill, oil pipeline and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

Juan Gonzaler

NY Daily News: January 19, 2012

This nation’s fast-growing populist movement against unbridled corporate power scored an astonishing trifecta this week.

In the span of just a few hours on Wednesday, three vastly different protest movements all achieved startling success the same way: by mobilizing the fury of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens.

An unprecedented one-day Internet blackout drew the most attention. Organized by free speech advocates, and backed by several major Internet companies, the protest sought to derail bills in Congress that the powerful entertainment industry has demanded against online piracy of movies and music.

If that legislation passes, its critics argue, the government will be able to shut down access to any website suspected of carrying copyrighted works, even if the website operator does so unknowingly, and even before any court hearing is held.

“These bills are very badly written,” Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told me in an interview yesterday. “It’s all well and good . . . to find solutions to criminal behavior online. It’s not OK to set up a censorship regime in response to that.”

Wikipedia and more than 10,000 websites went dark, while firms like Tumblr, Google and Facebook directed millions of their users to flood Congress with phone calls and petitions.

By the end of the day, several stunned senators and congressmen who had originally supported the legislation — including both Democrats and Republicans — had jumped ship, and the bills in their current forms now seem dead.

The Internet blackout was just one citizen victory that day.

Environmental activists were equally elated when President Obama announced his rejection of a permit request by energy giant TransCanada to build a 1,700-mile pipeline to pump oil from Canada’s tar sands through the heartland of the U.S. all the way to Texas.

Republicans in Congress had pushed through legislation requiring Obama to make a decision by February. But he faced strong opposition to the pipeline from environmentalists and midwestern farmers concerned about the potential damage to the land, especially to the country’s largest aquifer in Nebraska.

Last year, more than 1,200 people were arrested in protests against the pipeline outside the White House. So despite the Republican ultimatum, and despite fierce lobbying by the oil and gas industry, Obama finally showed some backbone.

The third grassroots success was in Wisconsin, where an unprecedented coalition of labor unions and citizen groups delivered more than 1 million signatures from voters demanding a recall of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Remember Walker? He’s the guy who pushed through a controversial law last year ending collective-bargaining rights for most public workers in Wisconsin, a law that sparked weeks of massive sit-ins in the state’s capitol.

Those million signatures were nearly twice the number required for a recall. They amount to an astounding 46% of all the votes cast in last year’s Wisconsin elections.

Walker’s fate will likely be decided in a new vote in the spring or summer. That vote will instantly become a referendum on whether workers in this country still have a right to collectively bargain for their wages and labor conditions.

Three amazing victories in one day, for young Internet activists and civil libertarians, for environmentalists, and for union members.

Yes, the Occupy Wall Street camps are all gone now, but the populist fire they kindled still burns bright in the growing number of Americans standing up to the 1%.

FW: Gaza art exhibit event details attached

2012-01-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.1901 / Virus Database: 2109/4755 - Release Date: 01/20/12-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Pearl [mailto:epearlag@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, January 22, 2012 7:32 AM
To: Ed Pearl
Subject: Gaza art exhibit event details attached

Hi, again. Personal note: I've known Dara since she was born, her parents
being my close friends And neighbors on our Venice walk street, Carol Wells
and Ted Hajjar. I baby-sat her, played ball with her, and on. She called
me uncle Ed untl she noticed I wasn't at family events.
Along with her parents, I'm astounded by her developing into the caring,
independent, constantly growing young woman she's become. -Ed

The event is next Sunday, January 29th, 4-7 PM, at the Hollywood Women's
Club, 1749 N. La Brea.

From: Dara Wells-Hajjar [mailto:darawh@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 10:04 AM
To: epearlag@earthlink.net
Subject: Revised pdf & jpg flyers for Gaza art exhibit event attached

Hey Ed, I hope all is well!

I am not sure if you got my last email, but I just wanted to send you the
most updated flyer for the Gaza Children's Art exhibit, for you to share
with your email list.

Thanks so much for helping us promote the event, we really appreciate it!

I hope you can come to the opening and bring all your friends!

Peace,

Dara

Gaza children's images of war

2012-01-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

Hi. Next Sunday, January 29th, 4-7 pm, there's an unique exhibit of these paintings at the Hollywood Women's Club on N. La Brea Ave., in LA. The flier came to me separately, as an attachment, which, I've just discovered. disappears when not sent from the original email. I'll now forward that original to you. -Ed

http://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-childrens-images-war-censored-under-pressure-us-israel-lobby/10373

Gaza children’s images of war censored under pressure from US Israel lobby

Nora Barrows-Friedman

The Electronic Intifada

Oakland

13 September 2011

A Bay Area children’s museum shut down a planned exhibition of Gaza children’s drawings.

Middle East Children’s Alliance

Pro-Israel organizations pressured an Oakland children’s museum to cancel an upcoming exhibition of drawings made by Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip. Community leaders say the shutting down of the exhibition is the result of a disturbing — and well-funded — campaign to silence Palestinian voices across the US.

On 8 September, just two weeks before the exhibition was set to open to the public, the board of directors of the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) announced that they had canceled “A Child’s View of Gaza.” The board shut down the show due to pressure from “constituents,” according to a statement made by Randolph Bell, the board’s chairman, in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Oakland museum cancels Palestinian kids’ war art,” 9 September 2011).

The show was curated in partnership with the Berkeley-based non-profit group Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), which has been working for 23 years to advocate for Palestinian, Iraqi and Lebanese children’s rights. Barbara Lubin, MECA’s executive director, told The Electronic Intifada that it was “upsetting and infuriating” that the show was canceled, but she wasn’t surprised.

“Anybody who knows this issue knows that the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs have launched a multi-million dollar project to combat what they call the ‘delegitmization’ of Israel,” Lubin said. “They try and suffocate the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and censor Palestinian cultural initiatives. What they’re doing is financing the work of silencing and shutting down anyone who wants to talk about what’s really happening to Palestinians.”

The Chronicle also reported that the board of directors at MOCHA vaguely cited the “inappropriate nature” of the content of the children’s drawings in their decision to shut down the exhibit. Some of the Palestinian children’s illustrations show tanks, guns and explosions, but the board’s assertion that these images are “inappropriate” enough to censor is clearly selective.

In years past, MOCHA had successfully exhibited strikingly similar artwork by children in Iraq who drew from their personal experiences of war following the 2003 US-led invasion and subsequent occupation. Another exhibition several years ago showed artwork by children made during the Second World War that “featured images of Hitler, burning airplanes, sinking battleships, empty houses and a sad girl next to a Star of David,” the Chronicle added.

Lubin said that the difference in this context is simple: “The pro-Israel groups are afraid that people will start understanding what’s really going on with Israeli policy through seeing exhibits like the one we put together. They don’t want people to know that Palestinian children are suffering. They’re afraid of us hearing that other side. For 63 years we’ve heard one side in this country and around the world, and it’s time for the other side to be heard.”

Stretching Israel’s siege from Gaza to Oakland

The censored drawings were created through local children’s mental health initiatives in Gaza immediately following Israel’s attacks in the winter of 2008-09, during which approximately 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, were killed.

Ziad Abbas, associate director of MECA, told The Electronic Intifada that several art-based organizations in the Gaza Strip began working with traumatized children in an effort to help them channel their fears, anger and trauma through artistic expression. Those drawings resulted in the collection of artwork that was to be showcased at the children’s museum.

“The art projects were born out of a necessity to try to reduce the impact and effects of the attacks which killed hundreds of children in Gaza. These drawings came from that kind of therapy to express their feelings,” he said.

Abbas added that the child artists were thrilled that their work had “broken Israel’s siege on Gaza” when the drawings made their way to a museum halfway across the world.

“It was important for these children to know that their voices were going to be heard in Oakland. However, they didn’t expect the siege to stretch all the way from Gaza to California, which is essentially what happened when MOCHA canceled the exhibit due to pressure from these groups,” Abbas said.

Major donors: “Funding was not jeopardized”

Upon investigation, it emerged that those “constituents” who got the ear of MOCHA’s board chair included pro-Israel public relations institutions with extraordinarily large budgets and organized community outreach programs. In the Bay Area, these organizations include the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), a subsidiary branch of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA); and the local chapter of the Jewish Community Federation (JCF), which operates under the umbrella of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA).

The JCRC and the JCF both receive substantial funding from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, which has also funded MOCHA.

The fund, based in San Francisco, is a major donor to arts, science, social justice and Jewish organizations around the Bay Area across the political and cultural spectrum. MOCHA received $30,000 in grants from the Haas fund in 2011 (Recent grantmaking: The Arts,” Walter & Elise Haas Fund website, accessed 9 September 2011).

However, a program coordinator with the Walter & Elise Haas Fund told The Electronic Intifada that their staff had talked to the museum about possible public concern with the exhibit, but that the art show “was their decision and their funding was not in any way jeopardized with their doing it.”

Pam David, the executive director of the Haas Fund, declined to comment for this article.

John Patchner, communications director for the East Bay Community Foundation — which has awarded tens of thousands of dollars in grants to MOCHA over the years — told The Electronic Intifada that they had “not been contacted by anyone in connection with the cancellation of the exhibit and we’re currently seeking additional information from the Museum of Children’s Art.”

But there are many other foundations that support MOCHA. And in August at least one pro-Israel online campaign encouraged the general public to directly contact MOCHA funders, and published a list of various foundations, in a bid to cancel the children’s art exhibition.

Israel lobby groups claimed the children’s drawings were “anti-Semitic” in a bid to shut down the exhibition.

Middle East Children’s Alliance

“No fight is too small” for pro-Israel groups

Whether or not MOCHA’s funders were directly intimidated by pro-Israel groups in the Bay Area, it’s certain that top leadership from groups such as the JCRC had a hand in shutting the exhibit down. The JCRC has repeatedly thwarted art and cultural initiatives in the Bay Area which highlight the Palestinian struggle, and has used the guise of “fighting anti-Semitism” to censor alternative voices.

At San Francisco State University in 2006, a proposed mural in honor of the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said was attacked by the JCRC, which helped convince the university administration that the mural sent a “chilling” and threatening message to Jewish students and therefore should be blocked (“SFSU president keeping Jews safe with mural censure,” Jewish Weekly, 6 October 2006).

In 2007, the JCRC also worked hand-in-hand with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), one of the largest and most influential Israel lobby organizations in the US, to force the San Francisco Arts Commission to exert pressure on a local grantee of theirs, an organization for at-risk youth in San Francisco. A mural, planned and painted by Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth (HOMEY), depicted symbols of Palestinian struggle and resistance, including a Palestinian woman with a kuffiyeh (the traditional checkered headscarf) and a crack in the wall that resembled historic Palestine.

The JCRC and the ADL put pressure on the Arts Commission to make the artists omit or modify some of the images after claiming that the symbols were anti-Semitic and “out of touch with the overwhelming majority of Jews,” as reported in the San Francisco Examiner (“Controversial mural to be altered in S.F.,” 20 September 2007).

The two organizations also worked together to stifle free speech on college campuses in the Bay Area, censoring academic lectures by attempting to conflate criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism. Other pro-Israel groups, backed by the ADL, have pressured faculty boards to deny tenure to university professors who openly criticize Israeli policies.

Following MOCHA’s cancellation of the exhibit, Rabbi Doug Kahn, executive director of the JCRC, admitted to the online blog Muzzlewatch (a project of Jewish Voice for Peace) that he was “working closely with the Jewish Federation of the East Bay [which is part of the JFNA]” and “shared with the leadership of MOCHA our concerns about the inappropriateness of this exhibit given the fact that MOCHA — an important and valued community institution — serves very young children” (“Oakland children’s museum cancels Palestinian children’s art exhibit under pressure from local Jewish groups,” 10 September 2011).

Rabbi Kahn refused to respond directly to The Electronic Intifada’s questions via phone, but emailed a statement from the JCRC on 12 September. Entitled “Jewish Community Applauds Children’s Art Museum’s Decision on Exhibit,” it alleges that the art show “contains violent images that dehumanize an entire ethnic and religious population.”

The JCRC adds that MOCHA’s leadership “recognized the negative effect that this inflammatory exhibit would have on young children, Jewish and non-Jewish alike,” adding that the drawings could “potentially create an unsafe atmosphere for Jewish children.”

However, nowhere in the children’s drawings are there anti-Semitic images or phrases. The only Stars of David that are drawn are the ones that Israel itself has put on its flags, F16 bomber jets, tanks and soldiers’ uniforms — ubiquitous Israeli national symbols that any Palestinian child living under Israeli military occupation would see on a daily basis, especially during times of wanton attacks.

The cancelation of the children’s exhibition was celebrated as a victory by pro-Israel groups. On 7 September, the day before MECA was informed by the museum’s board of directors that the exhibit had been canceled, the Jewish Federation of the East Bay (JFEB) had already received information that the show was shut down — and boasted about the cancellation of the exhibit on its official twitter account.

JFEB (@JFEDeastbay) tweeted: “Great news! The ‘Child’s view from Gaza’ exhibit at MOCHA has been canceled thanks to some great East Bay Jewish community organizing.”

Pro-Israel groups to “pressure civic leaders” in new $6M initiative

The timing of Kahn’s determination to pressure the MOCHA board is significant. Just eleven months ago, the JFNA pledged to invest $6 million in a new, three-year initiative they call the “Israel Action Network.”

Working alongside the JCPA — of which the JCRC, Kahn’s organization, is a subsidiary — the Israel Action Network “is expected to serve as a rapid-response team charged with countering the growing campaign to isolate Israel as a rogue state akin to apartheid-era South Africa — a campaign that the Israeli government and Jewish groups see as an existential threat to the Jewish state … The network will monitor the delegitimization movement worldwide and create a strategic plan to counter it wherever it crops up” (“Federations, JCPA teaming to fight delegitimization of Israel,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 25 October 2010).

The JFNA stated that this new campaign would seek to influence “civic leaders,” and said that it would be fully staffed and “up and running” by 1 January 2011.

According to their recent tax forms, the JFNA’s investment of $6 million in this new campaign should not be a financial burden — they listed more than $197 million in total assets between June 2009 and June 2010 (Return of organization exempt from income tax, 2009, 2009-2010 [PDF]).

The fact that these enormous, well-funded Israeli advocacy organizations have turned their attention to a singular, modest children’s art exhibition in Oakland highlights the Israeli lobbies’ tireless efforts to silence Palestinian expression. Deborah Agre of MECA agreed, saying that “no fight is too small” for these groups.

MECA’s Barbara Lubin added that the attack on this children’s art show is just one in a long line of such campaigns.

“But this is particularly saddening to me because these are voices of children,” Lubin said. “And as I said to the head of the board of directors at the museum, MECA loses, MOCHA loses, but more importantly, the children from Gaza lose the most. They’ve always been the ones to lose the most. Not only do they have to live through these bombings and the siege, but then when they try to express their experiences through art, they’re shut down.”

“There’s only one winner in all of this,” Lubin added, “And that is the Zionist lobby who intimidate, harass and do everything they can to make it impossible for people to have these kinds of exhibits.”

The child artists in Gaza are upset that their work has been censored, according to MECA staff.

Middle East Children’s Alliance

MOCHA’s board of directors: supporting all children, or just some?

According to its tax documents, accessed from public records, it is clear that MOCHA is a grassroots organization highly dependent on funding from outside grants and foundations. MOCHA listed just over $700,000 in contributions and grants in 2009 — whereas salaries and employee benefits accounted for approximately double that amount. Their fee-based children’s art programs bring in additional revenue of just under $1 million for that year.

If pro-Israel lobbyists indeed placed threatening calls to foundations that support MOCHA, it is understandable that they could feel frightened by the potential loss of money for the next fiscal year and would therefore bend to pressure by these outside groups. But MOCHA may have violated its own mission statement in doing so. On its tax forms, MOCHA states its mission is “to ensure that the arts are a fundamental part of the lives of all children.”

Ziad Abbas said that it’s wrong for the board of directors to put conditions on that support. “Do they really support all children, or just certain ones? Certainly, in this situation, the Palestinian children who made this artwork are not being supported at all,” he remarked.

The Electronic Intifada asked whether the children in Gaza had been informed that their exhibition was shut down, and what their reaction was to the news. Abbas explained that he had just received a call from one of the young artists in Gaza who saw MECA’s press release on the Internet that explained that the show was canceled.

“He was extremely disappointed, and the other children were obviously shocked and sad as well,” Abbas replied. “It’s upsetting to them to hear that a children’s art museum across the world decided that their personal [narratives] are offensive, and then silenced their voices and artwork. When you hear about an art museum that has violated its own mission to censor children’s artwork and children’s artistic expression, it’s extremely disappointing.”

Community support is out in force

Following Thursday’s announcement by the MOCHA board of directors, MECA has been flooded with phone calls and emails from supporters not only just across the Bay Area but worldwide who are appalled at the shutting down of the children’s art show. And Lubin said that while outrage at the museum is understandable, the institution is not the enemy.

“MOCHA is very dear to our hearts,” Lubin emphasized. “We love this organization and respect the work they do. It’s an essential institution in the Bay Area. Our anger is not at the people who work at MOCHA; rather, our anger is at the board who do not have the courage to stand up to this kind of intimidation from the pro-Israel groups. We’re asking people to direct their anger at the board and at the Zionist organizations who do this kind of muzzling. But certainly not at the organization itself.”

MECA has started an email action campaign in an effort to counter-pressure the board of directors with support and gratitude for hosting the Palestinian children’s artwork. They are also asking people to come to the gallery on 24 September, on the planned opening day of the exhibition, in a show of support for the show even if it remains canceled.

Meanwhile, Lubin and the MECA staff are busy figuring out alternative venues for the exhibition.

“We’re not sure where the show will be yet, but we’ll continue to work on seeing that these voices are heard and that these pictures are shown. People want to do something, and have been offering space in their homes, shops and even in schools,” Abbas said. “They won’t shut down these children’s voices.”

Nora Barrows-Friedman is an award-winning independent journalist, and is a staff writer and editor for The Electronic Intifada. She also writes for Inter Press Service, Al Jazeera, Truthout and other outlets, and regularly reports from Palestine.

Related Links

Middle East Children’s Alliance

Tags:

No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.1901 / Virus Database: 2109/4757 - Release Date: 01/21/12

FW: Republican Racism - an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle

2012-01-21T07:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.alternet.org/story/153819/republican_racism_is_an_air_raid_siren%2C_not_a_dog_whistle?page=3

Republican Racism is an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle

Republican candidates are overtly signaling that whiteness and American identity are intertwined.

ByChauncey DeVega

AlterNet: January 20, 2012

He was correct in identifying the work that racism does for the Tea Party GOP and its candidates in their efforts to win over white conservative voters. However, Chris Matthews was too generous and kind. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and other Republican candidates are not engaging in subtle dog whistles to their faithful, where racism and white racial anxiety hides in the background, masked and hidden by other language.

Definitions matter: dog whistle politics are based on a signal or cue to the in-group, and one so subtle that those not in the know will overlook it as no more than quixotic background noise, a blip, a comment without context or meaning.

For example, during the 2004 election, President Bush's mention of the infamous Dredd Scott Supreme Court decision had nothing to do with African Americans and slavery. Rather, it was a wink to a rabidly anti-choice conservative Right-wing audience that Roe vs. Wade would be overturned by his administration.

In 2008, McCain-Palin featured a negative campaign ad which borrowed from the movie The Ten Commandments and suggested that Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ. If one was not part of the Left Behind Jesus Camp Christian Nationalist Dominionist crowd, the visuals and narrative of the commercial were odd, bizarre, utterly strange, and devoid of context. The ugliness of these symbols and metaphors were so covert, that they made sense for those outside of the targeted audience only after Time magazine thoroughly deconstructed the campaign adand its malicious intent.

In 2012, Republican candidates are using overt signals, what are for all intents and purposes blaring air raid sirens and signal flares that race, whiteness, and American identity are deeply intertwined. The appeals to white racism by the Tea Party GOP during the primaries are not background rhythms or subdued choruses. They are the driving guitars of Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla," the chorus of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," the opening moments of the Notorious B.I.G's "Kick in the Door," or the flipped samples of Justice's "Stress". You feel it. You know it. To deny the obvious is to close one's ears to a driving drum line and cadence that travels up through your shoes...and to your bones.

How else can a fair observer excuse away Republican arguments that blacks are lazy parasites, whose children should live in work houses and pick up mops and brooms to learn a work ethic, that "illegal" immigrants should be killed by electric fences, or Muslim Americans should be subject to racial profiling, marked like the "Juden" of Nazi Germany?

In all, the Tea Party GOP's campaign for the presidency rests upon marshaling white anger and rage at The Usurper, a perpetual Other, and one not fit for the presidency by virtue of his birth and skin color--he who we know as President Barack Obama. If Birtherism is not based on this calculation, on what else does it rest?

Race matters to the Tea Party GOP. It matters overtly. And it matters to the white populists of the Republican Party without apology or subtlety. This leads to the following practical question: how do we separate the subtle dog whistle from blaring conservative racism? What are the elements of the racial appeal? How can we identify it so that reasonable folk can neuter and castrate it? Is this even possible?

Knowing is half the battle. To that end, let's work through elements of the puzzle:

The speaker effect. Using one of the most gross examples, when Newt Gingrich talks about lazy blacks on welfare and food stamps who do not know the meaning of hard work he is mindful of his audience. Remember, politics is ultimately about the creation and reinforcement of imagined communities. Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, and Paul know exactly how to talk to their respective audiences in order to get a response. To point: white conservative populists have disdain for non-whites, see them as lazy, outside of the polity, and as rightful targets for appeals based on symbolic racism. In the eyes of the Right, "those people" are not "real Americans." They never can be.

The audience as a public who receives, internalizes, and circulates the Tea Party GOP message about race, white racial resentment, white oppression, and hostility to people of color. The folks in the audience and on the stage during the Republican primary debates "get" the terms of the conversation. In fact, they are deeply attuned to the language and rhetoric of the New Right, as anyone who either goes to one of these events, or votes in a primary election, are deeply invested in its outcome, and a return to white American normality. In all, they are chasing nostalgia and a Leave it to Beaver vision and lie of America. This audience is also "tuned in" to politics. Gingrich and his peers are sending signals to a group primed and ready for his racial appeals...without a need for explanation.

This reality speaks to why there should be no surprise when Republican audiences cheer the death penalty, dying people without insurance, or heckle soldiers who happen to be gay. There are unstated rules, a script, which govern social norms and behavior. The outliers who go to political debates are intimately familiar with this language. Like marks at a professional wrestling event they know when to boo and when to cheer.

Context matters. In isolation, perhaps it would be a more difficult case to suggest that Gingrich's appeals to white audiences about lazy blacks are predominantly and clearly about white racism. However, given that communities are created through speech, and that "discourse" is about a sense of shared meaning with unstated assumptions, any argument for conservative colorblindness is judged to be insincere.

In South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies, there was Ron Paul (a bigot whose newsletters continue to suggest that African Americans are ravenous, craven, criminal, stupid beasts); Rick Santorum (a man fascinated by bestiality and the idea that blacks are parasites who only want to live off of white people); and Newt Gingrich who sees all African-Americans and Latinos as being on welfare and the public dole until proven otherwise. In total, these candidates are a rogues gallery where white supremacist attitudes towards non-whites is a standing rule, one only to be disputed after the fact.

Juan Williams is an object of abuse, a means to prove a point. Juan Williams is a paid pinata for white conservatives. I do not know if he was legitimately hurt and surprised by their reaction to him, or if his pain was not feigned, and rather sincere and real. In understanding the logic of Republican racism and naked appeals beyond the dog whistle, Williams was the stand-in, the object of abuse through which to actualize rage and hostility. Barack Obama was not available. Any black body would do. The cheering, snide glee of Newt Gingrich dressing down uppity "Juan," and the audience's cheering of a "boy" being put in his place, would be missed by only the most in denial observer.

Juan Williams is/was a repository for the fecal matter of white conservative bigotry, and a need to maintain superiority over negroes who dare not to step off of the sidewalk when white folks pass. That in another life Juan Williams would be a critic of "negro agitators" during the Civil Rights movement is coincidental to his designated role on Fox News: he is exemplary of Joel Kovel's theories about white supremacy, and how it manifests as a White society which is collectively (and individually) stuck in the fecal phase of human psychological development--it is all over his face. Juan Williams smiles while cashing his checks at the prospect of his politicalcoprophagia at the ass end of conservative politics. He revels in playing the role of the human centipede.

The excuse of ignorance and a lack of memory. One does not need to understand the root of a thing in order to buy into its power. White conservatives (and others) who traffic in racism do not necessarily need to be able to explain how blacks came to be associated in the White racist mind with apes. Likewise, those who hate Jews do not need to be able to give an exegesis on Nazi propaganda in order to be expert anti-Semites.

This is one of the greatest tools and defenses of the contemporary white racist--I didn't know that, you are being unfair!; You are "playing the race card" for calling out my association of the Obama with watermelons and apes as "racist"; I never associated blacks with welfare or crime, people like you are the real bigots for calling attention to how Republicans talk about such things, we are really all Americans!; stop talking about slavery, my family never owned black people!; (and of course) whites are oppressed in America by Barack Obama!

There is a collective reservoir of symbols, assumptions, and narratives that individuals borrow from in a given society in order to make sense of their world. Knowing the wellspring helps; it is not a requirement to perpetuate common sense understanding(s) of the world.

Ultimately, Chris Matthews was correct in the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. To defeat President Obama, the Republican Party is wallowing in white racism in order to win over racially and economically insecure white voters. However, Gingrich and company are doing this overtly. There is little subtlety. Looking forward, the 2012 Presidential season will make the infamous Willie Horton ad of the 1988 presidential election look like a celebration of Dr. King's birthday. The challenge for liberals, progressives, and reasonable conservatives, is how to make the Republican Party pay for their race baiting, and desperate reaching back to the Civil War, Redemption, and Birth of a Nation as playbooks in order to defeat the United States' first Black President.

Sadly, matters may be so dire that the white identity politics of years past are now "new school" rather than "old school." To marshal that fear, insecurity, and anger one does not need nuance, sophistication, or dog whistles. White conservatives can put such feelings on blast and gin up the psychological wages of white fear, white anxiety, and white rage to try to defeat Barack Obama.

As always, the past isn't even past. It is yesterday. Get ready folks. What occurred in South Carolina is only a warm up for what the Tea Party GOP is preparing to unleash in the months to come. What is coming to pass will be an ugly, wild ride.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Vulture capitalism on trial

2012-01-20T07:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vulture-capitalism-on- trial/2012/01/16/gIQACRSX5P_story.html

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Opinion Writer

Vulture capitalism on trial

"Though it might be odd that such attacks on Romney have originated with Republicans themselves, that they have sparked a national conversation matters a great deal. It allows those who’ve been making the case for years to drive home the critical point that the work of people like Romney is not the stuff of natural free markets; it is the product of a well-funded construct of laws and rules and institutions and values that undermine shared prosperity in a country that once took pride in supporting upward mobility."

Washington Post: January 17, 2012

If you had asked me at the beginning of the Republican nomination fight what candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry would say to win, I would have said just about anything. What I couldn’t possibly imagine was that one of the things they might start saying would actually be the unvarnished, unblinking, stand-up-and-clap-for-it truth.

With their eyes set on Bain’s bane and Mitt Romney’s career, Perry and Gingrich have been astonishingly and appropriately brutal. “There’s a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism,” Perry told Fox and Friends last week. “I don’t believe that capitalism is making a buck under any circumstances.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Gingrich sharpened that point further on Bloomberg.“The question is whether or not these companies were being manipulated by the guys who invest to drain them of their money, leaving behind people who were unemployed,” he said. “Show me somebody who has consistently made money while losing money for workers and I’ll show you someone who has undermined capitalism.” Sing it, Brother Gingrich.

What’s especially ironic about all of this is how much the roles have reversed. Romney, shameless flip-flopper that he is, has stood his ground, while the rest of the Republican field is opportunistically flipping and flopping around him. That, it turns out, is incredibly lucky for the American people, allowing us as clear a picture as we’d ever had of the real Romney just at the moment he’s become the near-presumptive nominee.

His full-throated response to his Republican opponents was deliciously revealing. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with [President Obama],” he said during his victory speech in New Hampshire.“This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.” He warned that we must not be “dragged down by a resentment of success.”

So that’s what he thinks of the Occupy protests, of the 99 percenters, of the millions of Americans who believe income inequality is a real-life problem and that they deserve a fair shot. According to Romney, they’re just jealous, of him, and of people like him, who concocted rapacious ways to make millions of dollars.

This is what he believes, we know, not just because of these comments, but because of his career at Bain. He’s a man who built a personal fortune practicing a form of predatory, you-are-on-your own brand of capitalism that casts workers into joblessness — by design. And he’s a man who thinks those workers’ grievances are just about his “success” and not the system he intends to propagate from the Oval Office.

And so the country is being offered a rare opportunity: the chance to have a conversation about two vastly different visions for our nation and its economy. On one side, the Romney Economy — a vision of deregulation, of tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, of an assault on the middle class and the poor, and of an attack on the social safety net.

But what will be the other side of that debate? We have, so far, a patchwork of answers: President Obama’s Osawatomie speech, Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’spublic fight for the victims of the big banks, the Progressive Caucus and its People’s Budget, and a nascent, but potent 99 percent movement. Stitched together, they provide glimmers of a coherent, inspired response to the excesses and depredations of the Romney Economy.

The difference between the two isn’t only that one is about nurturing fairness and the other, very clearly, is not. The difference is that Romney capitalism — the kind of “vulture capitalism” represented by Bain and so many chop-shop private equity operations — undermines the strength of our economy itself, and the economy’s ability to work for working people. There is, as even Warren Buffett has pointed out, a real difference between investing and building a company that makes something or provides a service that adds value to the economy, and a barbarian-at-the-gate-style enterprise that loots and strips, making millions for its executives by ripping holes in the economic fabric.inShare

The current rules, as set by lobbyists pushing for tax loopholes and deregulations, have been rigged to allow Romney and his friends to make out like bandits. And so this election doesn’t just turn on whether we will change the rules; it is a question of whether we want one of the actual bandits to be put in charge of our future.

Though it might be odd that such attacks on Romney have originated with Republicans themselves, that they have sparked a national conversation matters a great deal. It allows those who’ve been making the case for years to drive home the critical point that the work of people like Romney is not the stuff of natural free markets; it is the product of a well-funded construct of laws and rules and institutions and values that undermine shared prosperity in a country that once took pride in supporting upward mobility.

There are many smart, concrete, not pie-in-the-sky ideas about how we can recalibrate our economy, return it to fairness, how we can reimagine it as one built not on vulture capitalism but on democratic capitalism. The Nation recently gathered many of those ideas in a special issue, Reimagining Capitalism, laying out alternative ideas for a more humane capitalism that works for communities.

This campaign promises to be an MRI of our economic system. If that sounds unlikely, consider that six months ago, few, if any, political leaders were talking seriously about economic inequality — and today, the king of crony politics, the governor of Texas, is complaining about the immorality of vulture capitalists. A lot can change; a lot already has.

Katrina vanden Heuvel

Editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Post.

FW: FRIDAY: 130 cities, 46 states will be "Occupying the Courts", ADAAWE at the Skirball, Friday evening

2012-01-19T12:51:00.000-08:00

From: Ed Pearl [mailto:epearlag@earthlink.net]
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 12:49 PM
To: Ed Pearl
Subject: FRIDAY: 130 cities, 46 states will be "Occupying the Courts", ADAAWE at the Skirball, Friday evening

The National Campaign to End Corporate Personhood and Demand Democracy!

About | Donate | Get Involved

Dear Ed,

This week, Move to Amend and more than 60 organizations representing millions of activists around the country are working to harness the grassroots power of the vast majority of Americans who believe corporations have too much power.

For the second anniversary of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, thousands of Americans will come together in mass protest against corporate rule in this country.

On Friday, 130 cities (and still counting) are holding rallies to participate in Occupy the Courts - a one-day protest at federal courthouses across the United States - including the US Supreme Court. Please watch and then share our video call to action and join an Occupy the Courts action near you. Many events will take place across the country on Saturday as well.

We will stand up for the rights of human beings over corporations. We will stand up for democracy and a government of the people, by the people, for the people. And we will show that the Movement to Amend is growing in size and commitment and that we will make real the promise of American democracy.

Please join us!
Ben Manski, David Cobb, George Friday, Jerome Scott, Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Laura Bonham, Lisa Graves, and Nancy Price
Move to Amend Executive Committee

MOVE TO AMEND
PO Box 610, Eureka CA 95502 | (707) 269-0984 | www.MoveToAmend.org

* * *

ADAAWE

Happy New Year Yuko!

I'm blessed to be starting another year with the wonderful women of ADAAWE. I'm still doing my own music, and more to come on that! But first, I'd love to share our performance in the L.A. Holiday Celebration at the Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavillion on Christmas Eve. If you didn't see it live on KCET, here's a clip.

Next Friday, you don't wanna miss a rare full concert evening at the fabulous Skirball, with special guests on guitar, bass, keyboard and percussion - dancers too! Get ready to get your groove on.

ADAAWE at the Skirball

Friday, January 20th, 8:00PM

ADMISSION

$25 General, $20 Members, $15 Full-Time Students

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

The dynamic and diverse all-women percussion ensemble Adaawe creates uplifting music based on the West African djembe drum and voice.

Their energetic fusion of African rhythms, R&B/pop vocals, arresting Gospel harmonies, and original songs always brings audiences to their feet. Their poetic lyrics embody messages of empowerment, healing, love, and peace. Through creative improvisation, they breathe new life into ancient music based on Ghanaian tradition.

“Invigorating.”—BBC Radio, Scotland

Arrive early and view the exhibition—Women Hold Up Half the Sky will remain open until 8:00 p.m. Program ticket/holders gain free gallery admission!

Peace,

Joselyn Wilkinson

Calabash Productions

...evolution through music

www.joselynwilkinson.com

www.adaawemusic.com

You're receiving this email because you signed up for the newsletter.

Not interested anymore? Unsubscribe. For a more pleasant email experience, complete your profile.

No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.1901 / Virus Database: 2109/4748 - Release Date: 01/17/12

Cult of Personality

2012-01-19T07:06:00.000-08:00

From: Portside Moderator [mailto:moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG]

http://www.fpif.org/articles/cult_of_personality

Cult of Personality

By John Feffer,

Foreign Policy in Focus: January 17, 2012

He is, in the words of Barbara Walters, a "mild-mannered ophthalmologist." Indeed, the rather squeamish leader-to-be chose eye surgery because it didn't involve much blood. He speaks fluent English and can get by in French as well as his native Arabic. His wife is a knock-out, a "rose in the desert" according to a Vogue profile. Reluctant to take over the family business from his father, he interrupted his medical training in London to return home only after his older brother died in a car accident. Then, once at the helm, he released a number of political prisoners and instituted economic reforms that got a thumbs-up from the international business community. He cooperated with the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Even today, he uses all the right words: transparency, dignity, reform.

Bashar al-Assad has also proven to be a ruthless dictator whose crackdown on internal dissent has left more than 5,000 Syrians dead. What happened to the reluctant eye surgeon committed to modernizing his country along Western lines?

Assad is the not the first young reformer to turn out to be a fanatical defender of the ancien regime. In Libya, the London School of Economics-educated Saif al-Islam Gaddafi put himself forward as a voice for reform only to become, when push came to shove, a diehard defender of his father's tyrannical rule. To bolster claims that he was a closet reformer, "Baby Doc" Duvalier released some political prisoners when he took over in Haiti after his dictator father died in 1971, but he eventually fled the country 15 years later with the blood of thousands on his hands. Gamal Mubarak "has been the leading voice in favour of change within the government and the ruling party," argued Lord Peter Mandelson shortly before Egyptians successfully ousted the elder Mubarak and exposed the son's corrupt, U.S.-assisted dealings.

It's not just the sons of dictators that fool outsider observers into equating youth with change. Meles Zenawi was only 36 when he became the president of Ethiopia in 1991. Widely viewed as a "reformer" by the West, Zenawi has been at the helm for the last 20 years, his rule marked by electoral fraud, considerable repression in parts of the country, and military intervention in Somalia. Yoweri Musaveni took over Uganda at the age of 47 and was widely heralded as part of a new generation of African democrats, but war and domestic oppression have characterized his long reign as well.

Nor are democracies immune from this particular political fallacy. Young voices for change (Tony Blair, Barack Obama) often align themselves with powerful economic and political interests (the military, the financial sector), and end up strengthening the very status quo they promised to change.

Newcomers, however committed to change they might be at a personal level, rarely have the institutional clout to make their mark. As they consolidate power, power in turn transforms them. Paradoxically, it's often the old-timers who end up transforming the systems that produced them. The party hacks are the ones who hack apart the party. Taking down a system is easier if you know the system's weak points from the inside. And if you rise to the top of the system, you by definition have a base of support from which to operate.

Mikhail Gorbachev was an apparatchik of long standing, a true believer who ultimately restructured the Soviet Union out of existence. F.W. de Klerk was not only an architect of apartheid but widely considered one of the more conservative National Party members, until he changed his mind, his party, and along with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, all of South Africa. The jury is still out on Burmese President Thein Sein, but as a military man and junta leader who has so far initiated some important reforms, he may well have set out on the same trajectory as Gorbachev and de Klerk. None of these figures, of course, did it by themselves. Behind them, both inside and outside the system, stood powerful movements for change.

We ridicule countries that operate cults of personality North Korea, Uzbekistan and pat ourselves on the back that we reserve such embarrassing displays of adulation for guys who throw balls, gals who star in reality shows, and teenagers who sing pop music. At least our American idols don't kill people. But alongside our celebration of celebrities, we also have a stealth personality cult: We insist, overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that only individuals, not institutions, make history. We are constantly on the lookout for the heroic leader who can single-handedly transform the warp and weave of their society. When a movement is leaderless like Occupy Wall Street or the leadership is dispersed as with so much of the Arab Spring, we're not quite sure what to make of it. We are trapped in the personality cult that our culture of individualism has created.

So, when a transition takes place, as in North Korea, we ask all the wrong questions: who is Kim Jong Un, what are his politics, has his Swiss education influenced him, who are the individuals behind Kim Jong Un, will the young Kim transform his country? But to understand the future of North Korea, you must understand the key institutions in the society the party, the military, and now the rising economic elite. Kim Jong Un's possible love of fondue or American basketball is largely irrelevant. Just as the North Korean authorities are preparing the groundwork for the new leader's personality cult, we unconsciously perform the rites of our own analytical personality cult by focusing on Kim Jong Un's personal predilections.

We made the same mistake with Bashar al-Assad when we assumed that his personality would shape the Syrian system rather than the other way around. Now that he has proven to be a tyrant in disguise, he must go. "One-man rule and the perpetuation of family dynasties, monopolies of wealth and power, the silencing of the media, the deprivation of fundamental freedoms that are the birthright of every man, woman and child on this planet. To all of this, the people say: enough!" UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said in his recent message to Assad and Syria. It was rather naïve to expect Assad, the product not only of his father but of his father's system, to do the Oedipal thing and kill his father's legacy.

Some in the West have been tempted to call for a Libya-style intervention to support the opposition and remove Assad. As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Paul Mutter points out in Salon, a range of voices from neoconservatives to liberals are beginning to raise the intervention possibility more vigorously. "It is hard for most people to watch the slaughter of innocent civilians in Syria without advocating military intervention from Western countries," writes FPIF senior analyst Adil Shamoo in Syria's Revolution Will Succeed. "However, even with the most morally upright intentions, such interventions are ripe with potential for abuse. An open-ended policy of military intervention is too easily exploited by those who would pursue it for political or economic ends, including not least for control of natural resources."

It's not just a matter of removing the "mild-mannered ophthalmologist" from his perch. Assad represents a large ruling elite aligned with the Alawite religious group, which makes up a not inconsiderable 12 percent of the Syrian population. Civil war indeed beckons, not because Assad is a charismatic leader who commands allegiance, but because his downfall could spell the loss of influence for a large class of people who can't see how they would fit into a post-Assad order. Getting rid of the problematic personality at the top is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for change. It's the entire Syrian political structure that must change. As an operation to save Syria, outside military intervention at this point would likely create more bloodshed than it would prevent. Assad, the squeamish eye doctor, has betrayed his erstwhile profession by spilling so much blood. The international community should not make the same mistake.

To Intervene or Not to Intervene?

The debate on Syria might seem like déjà vu all over again after the heated debates concerning intervention in Libya last year. Here at FPIF, we've decided to take a closer look at the NATO intervention in the aftermath of Gaddafi's downfall and death.

"The NATO intervention in Libya is likely to produce a more militarized and insecure world, and this will be its most enduring legacy," writes FPIF contributor David Gibbs in Libya and the New Warmongering. "The military 'success' in Libya has increased the possibility of new wars. There is a widespread perception that NATO has achieved an easy victory against Gaddafi, and the resulting sense of hubris augments the risk of future military actions against Iran, Syria, and other possible targets."

Michael Bérubé, in Libya for Libyans, has a more positive assessment of the intervention, emphasizing its contribution to Libyan self-determination. "One thing seems certain for now the immediate future of Libya will be determined overwhelmingly by the Libyan people themselves. Critics of NATO's intervention in Libya should explain whether this outcome is unacceptable to them, and if so, why."

They then go head to head in Strategic Dialogue: Libya after Gaddafi. It's an essential discussion that goes to the heart of intervention and solidarity, and what it means for the progressive community.

Things Fall Apart

The situation in Nigeria does not look good.

"Nigeria is facing a perfect storm of crises including a national strike, widespread protests, and sectarian violence in the north," writes FPIF contributor Francis Njubi Nesbitt in Nigeria's Perfect Storm. "Although the strikes, attacks, and protests raise the specter of another civil war in Africa's biggest oil producer, the United States and the international community should avoid aggravating the situation by seeming to encourage a military solution."

The United States has the most powerful military on the planet. And yet still the Pentagon comes up with an assortment of new threats to keep it in business. The latest is cyber war, and, according to retired admiral and Bush administration National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, "we are losing."

That's a load of hooey, writes FPIF columnist Conn Hallinan. "Contrary to McConnell's statement, the United States is more advanced in computers than other countries in the world, and the charge that the country is behind the curve sounds suspiciously like the 'bomber gap' with the Russians in the 1950s and the 'missile gap' in the 1960s," he writes in Cyber War: Reality or Hype? "Both were illusions that had more to do with U.S. presidential elections and arms industry lobbying than anything in the real world.

Also check out the FPIF blog Focal Points for a day with MEK, an explanation of why Latvia is not the model economy it's been cracked up to be, and a conservative plea to go slow on Iran.

No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.1901 / Virus Database: 2109/4751 - Release Date: 01/18/12

Censored - Democracy Now, Move On

2012-01-18T07:07:00.000-08:00

Hi. Please ignore yesterday's warning about a virus. It's a hoax, per several responses - It's longer valid, per others . However , what's below is a genuine, profound danger, like the camel with its nose under the edge of the tent. Stay tuned.

Apologies for the virus notice .

Dear MoveOn member,

Tomorrow, MoveOn.org will go dark. No news, no information, no resources. Why? Because we're protesting Internet censorship.

Websites all over the Internet, including sites like YouTube and even MoveOn.org, could be made unavailable if big entertainment companies, the Chamber of Commerce, and their lobbyists get their way by ramming Internet censorship legislation through the Senate.

That's why tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18, we're joining Reddit, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Wordpress, TwitPic, Boing Boing, and thousands of other sites and blacking out MoveOn.org in protest.¹

You can participate in the blackout too and show the world tomorrow why you oppose Internet censorship.

Do you have a website?

Yes, I have a website and will participate in the blackout.

No, I don't have a website, but I want to participate.

Last summer, these greedy corporations and their lobbyists thought they could wave their wallets and pass whatever bill they wanted that would harm the Internet. But over 230,000 MoveOn members, along with hundreds of thousands of other activists, spoke loudly at the end of 2011, letting Congress know that we would not support Internet censorship. The result of this was a significant weakening of support for the bill in the House.²

They heard us then, and the Senate needs to a strong statement from us now because they're set to vote on this bill on January 24.

So we're taking tomorrow to show just what the Internet would look like in an Internet censorship era. If you don't like it, let everyone you're connected to online know tomorrow. Then stay tuned for the next phase of this fight.

Yes, I have a website and will participate in the blackout.

No, I don't have a website, but I want to participate.

Thanks for all you do.

–Garlin, Elena, Peter, Mark, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. "Wikipedia Blackout: Websites Wikipedia, Reddit, Others Go Dark Wednesday to Protest SOPA, PIPA," ABC News, January 17, 2012
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=269602&id=&id=34811-7187494-q0os35x&t=6

2. "SOPA on hold, PIPA may be weakened as Congress revisits the bills." InfoWorld, January 16, 2012
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=269603&id=34811-7187494-q0os35x&t=7

Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our 5 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.

PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. This email was sent to Ed Pearl on January 17, 2012. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here.

* * *

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

Democracy Now Interview: Tuesday, January 17, 2012

AMY GOODMAN: If you want to know more about two controversial internet anti-piracy bills moving through Congress, you won’t be able to consult Wikipedia on Wednesday. The online encyclopedia and sixth most visited site in the world will join websites like the content aggregator Reddit to "go dark" for 12 to 24 hours in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy, or SOPA, Act and its companion bill, the Protect IP Act. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced the decision to bring down his website last night on Twitter, writing, quote, "Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!"

The White House responded over the weekend to two petitions opposing the bills. The administration’s chief technology officials wrote on White House blog Saturday, quote, "We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

While the White House did not take a definite position on SOPA and the Protect IP Act, it has called for legislation to combat online piracy that has hurt the legislation’s main backers: Hollywood movie studios and music publishers who want to stop the theft of their creative content. Now a vote on SOPA is on hold in the House. The Senate is still scheduled to vote on the piracy issue next Tuesday, a week from today.

Well, to talk more about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the Protect IP Act, we go to San Francisco to talk Corynne McSherry, who is the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Please explain both of these bills. It’s very tough, I think, for most people to understand the technical aspects of this legislation.

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Sure. In a nutshell, what these bills propose are new powers for the government and also for private actors to create, effectively, blacklists of sites that allegedly are engaging in some form of online infringement and then force service providers to block access to those sites. And that’s why we call these the censorship bills, because effectively what we would have is a situation where the government and private actors could censor the net. So, U.S. citizens would basically get a different version of the internet, different from what you might get in, say, Italy or even China.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain the difference between SOPA and the Protect IP Act.

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Well, currently they’re quite—they’re quite similar. As drafted, SOPA was much broader than the Protect IP Act, and the folks behind the bill realized that maybe it was a little bit too broad, so they tailored it down. So now they’re quite similar. One of the differences is that SOPA is, finally, after a great deal of activism, more or less on hold for now. But Senator Reid is saying that he’s going to push forward the Protect IP Act, despite all of the opposition.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who is behind these two acts.

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Well, that’s not a great mystery. Both of these acts are clearly being pushed hard by the big media industries, who seem to think that online piracy is why they’re having trouble, and actually, who insist that they’re having all kinds of trouble and they’re failing immediately if something doesn’t—if legislation isn’t passed immediately, they’re going to all go under, which is not true. In fact, the motion picture industry has been posting record profits for five years straight.

AMY GOODMAN: In a December hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Congress Member Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, talked about the lack of expert consultation in drafting SOPA.

REP. JASON CHAFFETZ: I was trying to think of a way to try to describe my concerns with this bill, but basically, we’re going to create—we’re going to do surgery on the internet, and we haven’t had a doctor in the room tell us how we’re going to change these organs. We’re basically going to reconfigure the internet and how it’s going to work, without bringing in the nerds, without bringing in the doctors. And again, I worry that we did not take the time to have a hearing to truly understand what it is we’re doing. And to my colleagues, I would say, if you don’t know what DNSSEC is, you don’t know what you’re doing. And so, my concern is that there is a problem, but this is not necessarily the right remedy.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Utah Congress Member Chaffetz. Corynne McSherry, your response?

CORYNNE McSHERRY: I think he’s absolutely right. SOPA, in particular, was negotiated without any consultation with the technology sector. They were specifically excluded. And one of the things I think is really exciting, though, is that—you know, no one asked the internet—well, the internet is speaking now. And so, we’re seeing all kinds of opposition all over the web. And there’s going to be a day of action tomorrow. People are really rising up and saying, "Don’t interfere with basic internet infrastructure. We won’t stand for it."

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of President Obama’s position on the bill, Corynne?

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Well, it was heartening to see the White House statement and see the White House sort of stand with the internet and stand with its own commitments against censorship and against online censorship, in particular. Up until recently, we have been very concerned that there seemed to be a contradiction. On the one hand, you had Hillary Clinton criticizing foreign governments for online censorship and for censoring web results and so on. But at the same time, you had these bills rocketing through Congress that would propose very similar things. So, it was good to see the White House stand against that and criticize these bills. On the other hand, I am concerned that the White House seems to think that some kind of legislation needs to be passed this year. And I actually don’t think the case has been made for that.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the whole issue of the protection of artists, for example, the music industry and their concerns.

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Well, look, there’s no question that there’s plenty of infringement online. That’s been true for a long time now. The question is how you’re going to answer it. And the best way to respond—it’s very clear at this point. The best way to respond to online infringement is to give people a better alternative. And when that happens, people go to that. So that’s the best way to do it. It’s not to pretend that the Pirate Bay doesn’t exist; it’s to give people an alternative to the Pirate Bay. And one of the things that we’ve seen is that, actually, independent artists are taking advantage of new technologies to reach the—reach new audiences. Music fans have more access to more music than they ever had before, and different kinds of music. And that’s what happens when you take advantage of new technologies, as opposed to running away from it.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me read you a tweet that Murdoch sent out this weekend: "So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery."

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Well, you know, I think it’s ironic to talk about paymasters, given the amount of money that Hollywood has been spending in Congress to try to ram these bills through. I think it is true that the Obama administration has somewhat stood with Silicon Valley here, but I think Silicon Valley knows how to protect itself against so-called software piracy better than Rupert Murdoch will.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, the votes, where they stand this week?

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Well, what we’re seeing now is Harry Reid, Senator Reid, is insisting that he’s going to go forward with a vote next Tuesday on the Protect IP Act. We’ll see what happens over the course of the week. Things have changed a lot. And after the day of action tomorrow, a lot of us are hopeful that Senator Reid will think better of trying to push this bill through, given the level of opposition. It’s really just a bad idea, particularly when you think about what they’re doing here. This is basic internet infrastructure that they’re messing with. And I think that Representative Chaffetz had it exactly right. It’s foolish to go in and interfere with internet infrastructure when you don’t know what you’re doing.

AMY GOODMAN: And overall, SOPA and PIPA, how they’ve been separated?

CORYNNE McSHERRY: Well, SOPA seems to be on hold for now. If PIPA is rammed through, it may be that in the House of Representatives they will try to revive SOPA and sort of bring the two bills in line. I certainly hope not, because that would be very, very dangerous for human rights, for internet security, and send an extremely negative signal around the world that the United States government does in fact support censorship, as long as you say that you’re doing it in the name of intellectual property enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: Corynne McSherry, I want to thank you for being with us, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When we come back, we’ll be joined by author Rebecca MacKinnon. She has just written the book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

Chris Hedges: Why I'm Suing Barack Obama, Urgent notice on internet virus going around now.

2012-01-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

H i. I got the 'URGENT' virus note from a long time friend. Which doesn't mean it's not a hoax, but it could be real.

Hi. The legal briefs of, and comments on Hedges' suit can be read on the URL, just below.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_im_suing_barack_obama_20120116/

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

Chris Hedges

Truthdig: January 15, 2012

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Section 1031 of the bill defines a “covered person”—one subject to detention—as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.” The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”

I met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. I used to visit Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, in Tunis when they were branded international terrorists. I have spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. All these entities were or are labeled as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. What would this bill have meant if it had been in place when I and other Americans traveled in the 1980s with armed units of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas in El Salvador? What would it have meant for those of us who were with the southern insurgents during the civil war in Yemen or the rebels in the southern Sudan? I have had dinner more times than I can count with people whom this country brands as terrorists. But that does not make me one.

Once a group is deemed to be a terrorist organization, whether it is a Palestinian charity or an element of the Uighur independence movement, the military can under this bill pick up a U.S. citizen who supported charities associated with the group or unwittingly sent money or medical supplies to front groups. We have already seen the persecution and closure of Islamic charity organizations in the United States that supported the Palestinians. Now the members of these organizations can be treated like card-carrying “terrorists” and sent to Guantanamo.

But I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not locked up. Consider the arcane criteria that can make you a suspect in our new military-corporate state. The Department of Justice considers you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more than seven days of food in your house. Adding a few of the obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a seamless process. On the whim of the military, a suspected “terrorist” who also happens to be a U.S. citizen can suffer extraordinary rendition—being kidnapped and then left to rot in one of our black sites “until the end of hostilities.” Since this is an endless war that will be a very long stay.

This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word “democracy” to describe our political system.

The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11. The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea. Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”?

Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the nation and use state and military security to cow the population into submission.

The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

* * *

From: Pat Krommer [mailto:pkrommer@csjla.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 8:27 AM
To: Pat Krommer
Subject: FW: URGENT - DO NOT DELETE - Be aware

, This WARNING is checked out true with SNOPES, Peter

---------- Forwarded Message ----------

Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2012 10:52 AM

Subject: FW: URGENT - DO NOT DELETE - Be aware

From: Martha Knight <knightm47@hotmail.com>
Subject: FW: URGENT - DO NOT DELETE - Be aware
Date: Sunday, January 15, 2012, 10:48 AM

Begin forwarded message:

PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS NOTICE TO YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY, CONTACTS!

In the coming days, you should be aware.....

Do not open any message with an attachment called: Invitation FACEBOOK, regardless of who sent it. It is a virus that opens an Olympic torch that burns the whole hard disc C of your computer.

This virus will be received from someone you had in your address book .. That's why you should send this message to all your contacts. It is better to receive this email 25 times to receive the virus and open it .. If you receive a mail called: Invitation FACEBOOK, though sent by a friend, do not open it and delete it immediately. It is the worst virus announced by CNN. A new virus has been discovered recently that has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.

It is a Trojan Horse that asks you to install an adobe flash plug-in. Once you install it, it's all over. And there is no repair yet for this kind of virus. This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information of their function is saved.

SNOPES SAYS THIS IS TRUE............

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/youtube.asp

=

Happy Birthday, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - March Today!

2012-01-16T07:23:00.000-08:00

H i. This morning's Democracy Now's program consists of Dr. King's Riverside Church speech in 1967 and the speech he made to the Memphis sanitation workers, the night before his assassination. I'm again entranced, profoundly moved and amazed by the profunditry, honesty and contemporaneous relevance of the speeches. This is one time I wish I had Direct TV or whatever, to see the visuals which must have acccompanied such meaning and oration. Peace to you all. -Ed

From: Mitchel Cohen [mailto:mitchelcohen@mindspring.com]
Subject: Happy Birthday, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

http://www.mitchelcohen.com/?p=2029

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Posted on January 14, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

January 15, 2012 would be Dr. King’s 83rd birthday. The airwaves are filled with timid and nostalgic tributes to the great man. Except for WBAI and other non-commercial stations, only Dr. King’s "I Have a Dream" speech - and even there but a tiny snippet of it - makes it onto the airwaves.

Nothing about Dr. King’s analysis in which he castigates the United States as being "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

Nothing about Dr. King’s brilliant and courageous insights into the social and economic calamities of capitalism and the congruence of the oppression of people in Vietnam with that of people of color in the United States.

And, nothing about what it really means to be "Non-Violent". Dr. King castigates those who praised him and the Civil Rights movement for being non-violent in the face of white supremacists in the South but who condemned him for calling on his country to be non-violent in its dealings with the rest of the world.

"In international conflicts the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for our superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the Truth. Ye shall know the Truth, says Jesus, and the Truth shall set you free.

"Now I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam today because I agree with Dante that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

Ever hear any of that on mainstream corporate radio?

All of that placed - and continue to place - Dr. King at odds with many of his key advisers in the Civil Rights movement, and with the President of the United States - then … and now.

His life - and keep in mind that he was assassinated when he was just 39 years old! - is thus relegated more-or-less “safe,” for those in power. The hallowed if troubling days happened back then, which (they say) no longer exist. And so, Dr. King’s complex analysis is distorted and rendered almost meaningless today, and offered in a sense as a paean to "Isn’t America great? Look at how far we have come." Who now hears the entirety of any of Dr. King’s speeches? What insights could this ancient man actually hold for us today, and for our own movements for freedom?

Three years ago, on January 15, 2009, I broadcast Steal This Radio #67 over NYTalkRadio.net. That show included:

A Letter from Lori Berenson from jail in Peru
A perspective on the Pirates of Somalia. (Who knew that the "pirates" were defending the waters from the U.S. and Europe’s dumping of nuclear wastes off the coast of Somalia?)
Mitchel Cohen’s pained and outraged denunciation of Israel's invasion of Gaza
The entirety of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam."

I’ve decided to rebroadcast here that entire show - rather than to excerpt only Dr. King’s segment - because Dr. King’s great orations are simply not "over and done with". They took place in a context of historical forces that are every bit as powerful today as they were back then.

So here, then, is Steal This Radio #67, which includes Dr. King's speech in full, delivered at Manhattan's Riverside Cathedral on April 4, 1967 - exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated. (Forgotten from history is that on the same day, Dr. King also addressed a giant anti-war rally in New York City, the largest rally I’d ever been at, until that point.) This speech in my estimation is simply one of the most profound and greatest speeches of all time.

I've broken the show into six segments (because the requirements of this site prevent the uploading of any files greater than 10 mb). Please click on each of the segments in sequence. As always, your comments are welcome.

Happy 83rd birthday, Dr. King!

(Please go to http://www.mitchelcohen.com/?p=2029 and click on Steal This Radio #67 posted there.)

Mitchel Cohen

http://www.MitchelCohen.com

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen

- - -

From: <kwazinkrumah@aol.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 6:46 AM
Subject: March with the MLK Coalition and Occupy the
Hood on Monday, January 16th!
To: occupyla@lists.riseup.net, occupylaproutreach@lists.riseup.net

*RECLAIM THE LEGACY!*

*MARCH WITH THE MARTIN LUTHER KING COALITION AND OCCUPY THE HOOD IN THE
ANNUAL MARTIN LUTHER KING PARADE ON MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 2012:*

*END MORTGAGE FORECLOSURES NOW!*
**
*FREEZE RENT INCREASES IN LOS ANGELES!*
**
*STOP THE HARRASSMENT AND ABANDONMENT OF THE HOMELESS **IN OUR
COMMUNITIES!!!*

GATHER AT WESTERN AVENUE AND MARTIN LUTHER KING BLVD. AT 10:00 A.M.
**
(More details coming.)

For more information call: Kwazi Nkrumah at (213)884-5190 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (213)884-5190

No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2012.0.1901 / Virus Database: 2109/4743 - Release Date: 01/14/12

FW: U.S. Warns Israel on Strike - as War Clouds Darken

2012-01-15T07:12:00.000-08:00

From: Ed Pearl [mailto:epearlag@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2012 2:03 AM
To: Ed Pearl
Subject: U.S. Warns Israel on Strike - as War Clouds Darken

From: Sid Shniad [shniad@gmail.com]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409004577159202556087074.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

U.S. Warns Israel on Strike

Officials Lobby Against Attack on Iran as Military Leaders Bolster Defenses

By ADAM ENTOUS,JULIAN E. BARNES and JAY SOLOMON

WASHINGTON—U.S. defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over U.S. objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard U.S. facilities in the region in case of a conflict.

Associated Press

Iranians on Friday carried the flag-draped coffin of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a scientist working in Iran's nuclear sector assassinated in Tehran.

President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top officials have delivered a string of private messages to Israeli leaders warning about the dire consequences of a strike. The U.S. wants Israel to give more time for the effects of sanctions and other measures intended to force Iran to abandon its perceived efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Stepping up the pressure, Mr. Obama spoke by telephone on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will meet with Israeli military officials in Tel Aviv next week.

The high-stakes planning and diplomacy comes as U.S. officials warn Tehran, including through what administration officials described Friday as direct messages to Iran's leaders, against provocative actions.

Iranian officials blame the U.S. and Israel for the killing of one of the country's nuclear scientists who was blown up in his car on Wednesday. Video Courtesy of Reuters.

Tehran has warned that it could retaliate to tightened sanctions by blocking oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz. On Thursday, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to punish the perpetrators of the assassination—blamed by Iran on the U.S. and Israel—of an Iranian scientist involved in the nuclear program.

The U.S. denied the charge and condemned the attack. Israel hasn't commented

The U.S. and Iran, however, have taken steps in recent days apparently designed to ease tensions. Iran has agreed to host a delegation of United Nations nuclear inspectors this month. The U.S., meanwhile, has twice this month rescued Iranian sailors in the region's seas.

Covert efforts by Israel's intelligence service to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons have been credited with slowing the program without the high risk of military conflict that could be sparked by an airstrike. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful uses.

But Israel has declined to rule out a strike, as has the U.S.

"It is the policy of the Israeli government, and the Obama administration, that all options remain on the table. And it is crucial that the ayatollahs in Tehran take this policy seriously," said Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the U.S.

Mr. Netanyahu said in a recent interview that Iran has begun to "wobble," a signal some U.S. officials believe suggests he is willing to follow the current U.S. strategy, which seeks to avoid a military confrontation with Iran.

"Recent comments by the Israelis show they understand how tough the sanctions we've put in place are and are giving them time to work," said a senior Obama administration official.

The U.S. military is preparing for a number of possible responses to an Israeli strike, including assaults by pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. believes its embassy and other diplomatic outposts in Iraq are more vulnerable following the withdrawal of U.S. forces last month. Up to 15,000 U.S. diplomats, federal employees and contractors are expected to remain in Iraq.

In large measure to deter Iran, the U.S. has 15,000 troops in Kuwait, and has moved a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf area.

War Clouds Darken: Russia Warns of US Strike on Iran

Ahmadinejad: 'Heartless capitalism is the root cause of war'

-Common Dreams Staff Report: Thursday, January 12, 2012

UPDATE: Robert Baer, the long-time senior CIA officer who spent 21 years working the Middle East, was on MSNBC's 'Hardball' this evening saying that he believes Israel is assassinating Iranian scientists in an attempt to provoke Iran to fight back and draw the US into a full-scale war.

The day after a young Iranian scientist was assassinated, US President Barack Obama and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone Thursday, January 12, 2012. The White House said Obama "reiterated his unshakable commitment to Israel’s security." (AFP/Menahem Kahana) Earlier today, Baer made the same case to the Guardian/UK:

Baer argues that the impact on the nuclear program itself is likely to be so minimal, it is unlikely to be the aim of the murder campaign.

"It's a provocation," he says. "My theory is that Israel couldn't get the White House to agree to bombing. It is not satisfied with sanctions, so the Israelis are trying to provoke the Iranians into launching a missile and starting a war."

* * *

UPDATE: The White House says President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked today amid tensions over the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran. Iranian authorities blame Israel for the attack on the scientist, who was killed by a bomb attached to his car. The U.S. has denied any role.

A White House statement on Thursday's phone call didn't say whether they discussed the scientist's death. It said Obama and Netanyahu "discussed recent Iran-related developments." Obama "reaffirmed his commitment to the goal of a comprehensive and lasting peace in the region" and "reiterated his unshakable commitment to Israel’s security."

*** * ***

Russia Warns of US Strike on Iran

Agence France-Presse reports:

Russian Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev warned that military escalation is likely in Iran, with “real danger” of a US strike, in an interview published on Thursday.

He added that Syria, which has refused to break its ties with Tehran, could also be a target for Western intervention.

“There is a likelihood of military escalation of the conflict, and Israel is pushing the Americans towards it,” Mr Patrushev said in an interview published on the website of the daily Kommersant.

The USS Carl Vinson, a US nuclear powered aircraft carrier, is seen in Hong Kong waters in December, before heading to the Persian Gulf. (AFP/Aaron Tam) “There is a real danger of a US military strike on Iran,” the senior Russian security official said.

“At present, the US sees Iran as its main problem. They are trying to turn Tehran from an enemy into a supportive partner, and to achieve this, to change the current regime by whatever means,” he added.

“They use both economic embargo and massive help to the opposition forces.”

Mr Patrushev said that “for years we have been hearing that the Iranians are going to create an atomic bomb, (but) still nobody has proved the existence of a military component of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Iran said on Wednesday it had firm evidence that “foreign quarters” were behind the killing of four Iranian nuclear experts and demanded UN Security Council condemnation of the deaths.

Meanwhile, a second US aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, has arrived in the Gulf region, the Pentagon has said, calling the move "routine" and denying any link to mounting tensions with Iran.

Backed by a cruiser, destroyer and with almost 80 planes and helicopters on board, the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group "arrived in the US 5th Fleet area of responsibility (AOR)" on January 9," a Fifth Fleet statement said.

* * *

Assassination Blowback?

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Iran Warns of 'Cross-Border' Bombing Response

Iranian security official is quoted as saying those responsible for killing scientist "will never feel safe."

Iran's response to the assassination of a nuclear scientist in Iran Wednesday will be harsh and reach beyond borders, a website aligned with the regime in Tehran quoted a senior security source as saying Thursday.

Those who gave the order for the assassination, the source was quoted by "RajaNews" as saying, "will never feel safe," adding that Iran has a cross-border, cross-regional strategy for striking back. He said that the West and Israel were behind the attacks in Iran.

Agence France-Presse reports:

Furious Iran Wants Action over Scientist's Killing

The assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist sparked deep fury in Tehran on Thursday against prime suspect Israel and against the United States, which said it had nothing to do with the murder.

Some hardline newspapers even called for retaliatory action, with one, Keyhan, saying in an editorial that "assassinations of Israeli officials and military are achievable." [...]

The assassinated Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan posing next to his son.The latest attack dominated Iran's media on Thursday, with many outlets criticizing what they said was the silence of the West over the killings. More conservative titles urged tit-for-tat covert action against Israel.

"The only way to finish with the enemy's futile actions is retaliation for the assassination of Iran's scientist," said the newspaper Resalat.

"It is legal under international law to retaliate for the killing of the nuclear scientist," the daily Keyhan said. "The Islamic republic has gathered much experience in 32 years, thus assassinations of Israeli officials and military members are achievable."

*** * ***

Assassinations Won't Work

Debora MacKenzie writing in the New Scientist today:

Costs of Killing Iran's Nuclear Scientists

The Doomsday Clock – the famous gauge of the world's risk of nuclear annihilation, run by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) – moved a minute closer to midnight on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, another nuclear physicist was assassinated in Iran. Both events reveal a global nuclear situation that seems to be worsening fast.

On Wednesday morning a motorcycle rider stuck a magnetic bomb onto the car of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan Behdast, a chemist at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant who was working on gas separation membranes. The scientist was killed by the blast.[...]

"Nuclear scientists are not terrorists," says Tobey in the BAS this week. Killing them at best delays bomb development, by removing key people and perhaps deterring young scientists from careers in nuclear science. But it will not stop bomb development.

These slim advantages are far outweighed, Tobey says, by the downsides: possible retaliation, reduced chances for diplomacy, tighter security around nuclear installations and a pretext for Iran to hamper IAEA monitoring.

Iran has already accused the IAEA of abetting the assassinations by publicizing confidential Iranian lists of key nuclear scientists and engineers.

The New York Times today quotes Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia, who said he believed that the covert campaign, combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work.

“It’s important to turn around and ask how the U.S. would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed and we were under cyberattack,” Mr. Sick said. “Would we give in, or would we double down? I think we’d fight back, and Iran will, too.”

And John Hudson, writing for The Atlantic says:

The preponderance of evidence suggests Israel carried out the attack, with the possible assistance of the US. [...]

In an odd move, raising more questions than answers, Israel's chief military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai wrote on his Facebook page "Don’t know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but for sure I am not shedding a tear.” According to The Washington Post, the comment "sparked a debate on his page, with some readers saying he should be more discreet."

* * *

'Merely Targeted Killings' or Terrorism?

Glenn Greenwald writing today on Salon:

In the few venues which yesterday denounced as “Terrorism” the ongoing assassinations of Iranian scientists, there was intense backlash against the invocation of that term. Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do.That always happens whenever “Terrorism” is applied to acts likely undertaken by Israel, the U.S. or its allies — rather than its traditional use: violence by Muslims against the U.S. and its allies — because accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos (even when the acts in question involve not only assassinations but also explosions which kill numerous victims whose identities could not have been known in advance). But the case of these scientist assassinations particularly highlights how meaningless and manipulated this term is.

The prime argument against calling these scientists killings “Terrorism” is that targeted killings — as opposed to indiscriminate ones — cannot qualify. After Andrew Sullivan wrote a post entitled “The Terrorism We Support” and rhetorically asked: “is not the group or nation responsible for the murder of civilians in another country terrorists?”, and then separately criticized the NYT for failing to describe these killings as Terrorism, numerous readers objected to the use of this term on the ground that a targeted killing cannot be Terrorism. Similarly, after I noted yesterday that Kevin Drum had denounced as “Terrorism” a right-wing blogger’s 2007 suggestion that Iran’s scientists be murdered and asked if he still applies that term to whoever is actually doing it now, he wrote a post (either coincidentally on his own or in response) strongly implying that this is Terrorism; thereafter, commenter after commenter at Mother Jones vehemently disagreed, on the same ground, with Drum’s suggestion that this is Terrorism (many agreed the term did apply). Meanwhile, Jason Pontin, the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, actually claimed that my use of the term Terrorism to describe these scientist killings is “what turns sober, hardnosed people from the Left” (he’s apparently been elected the spokesman for “sober hardnosed people” turning away from the Left), and then proceeded to insist over and over that these are merely targeted killings, not Terrorism.

* * *

Iran Leader Rails Against 'Heartless' US Capitalism

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flashes peace sign while arriving in Managua January 10, 2012. Ahmadinejad was in Nicaragua on an official visit to attend Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega's swear-in ceremony for a second term as president. FoxNews Latino reports on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Cuba on Wednesday on the third leg of a four country Latin America tour.

At the university, the Iranian leader railed against the United States and its allies and said heartless capitalism is the root cause of war.

"Thankfully we are already witnessing that the capitalist system is in decay," Ahmadinejad said. "On various stages it has come to a dead end — politically, economically and culturally."

"You see that when it lacks logic, they turn to weapons to kill and destroy," he added.

Rodolfo F. Acuña: Going to hell, Marcy Winograd: Turning Green, Marching with MLK

2012-01-14T07:10:00.000-08:00

From: hchsc003 [mailto:hchsc003@csun.edu]
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 11:43 AM
Subject: They are going to hell!

Rough Draft

Tucson's Sin of Scandal

Failing Students

Rodolfo F. Acuña

What is missing in the media's coverage of the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District Mexican American Studies program is that students were learning and they wanted to go to school. I take this travesty personal. One of the reasons I have stayed in education for over fifty-five years is that I wanted to do something about the dropout problem. I always heeded John Dewey dicta that a student failure was that of the teacher. If students drop out then there is something wrong with the educational system.

Arizona education has many problems: taxpayers do not want to pay for schools and it is dead last in student per capita spending. White parents don't want their children going to school with Latinos and blacks as well as other working class people, so charter schools have multiplied to "balance" student ethnicity by making it whiter.

Arizona has blatantly avoided federal court orders to desegregate: more than fifty years after Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), the TUSD is still under a federal court mandate to "balance" the schools. The federal government, meanwhile, has poured millions of dollars into Arizona to help pay for integration purposes.

The truth be told, there has been no improvement. The dropout problem remains over fifty percent. As part of an effort to correct imbalances, the federal court in its desegregation plan, included the MAS program, which federal government paid for.

Because I have been a highly successful educator, I have seen that building student identity ameliorates an inferiority complex ingrained by the educational process. Innumerable studies prove that an increase sense of self motivates students to better their skills and allows them to succeed in school.

The reason that I want to improve education is personal. I am not religious, but I always remember the nuns telling me when I saw a person less fortunate to say, "There for the grace of God go I."

Although I could not do it, I appreciate the work of Fr. Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries. It hurts me every time I see a gang kid because I realize that as a member of society I bear a responsibility for the outcome. My vocation differs Greg's and I work with students by giving them an alternative to gangs when they are young. My feeling is every student that goes to college does not end up in a gang.

The TUSD MAS program was contributing to that end. Despite the racist lies of Arizona politicos it is a model to motivate students. And, despite the actions of the TUSD school board, other districts will emulate and study it.

My feelings about the people behind the destruction of the MAS program are that they have no redemption. They are no better than the members of the mafia who do not care about the outcome or hardships they cause as long as they make a profit.

Democracy has been dealt a blow. The actions of these racist has contributed to disillusionment among many students. They have brought about a loss of faith, which is always difficult whether it be in religion or politics. This loss leads to an emptiness and hopelessness. For instance, I know people who as a result of the pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church have not returned to mass.

In ending the MAS program, the state of Arizona has been complicit in condemning many Latino students to failure. Thomas de Aquinas defined scandal as a word or action that is intrinsically evil, and leads to the spiritual ruin of another person. You don't necessarily have to physically cause someone's sin, but only be the moral cause of the sin. A sin of scandal is not accidental but premeditated as in the case of Arizona elites.

From the top on down, Arizona officials know that their actions is causing many Latinos to be stigmatized. They know that they are contributing to their dropping out of school and they don't care.

Mark Stegeman, Michael Hicks, Miguel Cuevas and the newly appointed Alexandre Sugiyama all know it. They are bought men who don't care about the consequences as long as it fills their pockets.

For them, education is business and it doesn't much matter if Mexican Americans get an education. As long as people hate Mexicans, it is easier to cash in on their lack of education.

It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party is not a populist movement. It is racist and driven by right wing funding that includes the Koch brothers who Mitt Romney says are the "financial engine of the Tea Party."

Most Arizonans know the role of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The People for the American Way Foundation and Common Cause have published a report documenting the fact that ALEC has inspired and written most anti- Latino and worker legislation in the state. It is at the forefront of anti-labor, anti-healthcare and anti-environmental. It is behind the privatization of schools and prisons.

Major corporations including Coca-Cola, Kraft, ExxonMobil and GlaxoSmithKline are key players in Arizona politics. Two dozen major corporations have sat on ALEC's board which is insidiously called the "Private Enterprise Board."

Well aware of the growing Latino population, it is to ALEC's advantage to keep the state white and Mexicans disenfranchised. Thus, it has sponsored voter suppression bills that potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans.

The report identifies fifty Arizona state legislators who are current ALEC members. These bought politicos wrote and sponsored SB 1070, Arizona's notorious immigration. It is no accident that privatized prisons are flush with immigrant detainees. Uneducated Mexican Americans also insure future inmate growth. Aside from money to run the prisons, prison labor is competing with free labor.

In Tucson, the Southern Arizona Leadership Council is an ALEC mini-me; an all-white country club whose members overlap with other heavy hitters locally, regionally and statewide. The TUSD superintendent of schools is a former SALC vice-president.

Recently, when Judy Burns, a supporter of the MAS program died, SALC engineered the appointment of Alexandre Sugiyama, a lecturer in Economics at the University of Arizona, to fill her seat. It accomplished its ends by stacking the selection committee.

Sugiyama was obviously selected because he is half Brazilian and half Japanese. He has no ties to the community; he is a lecturer with no publications, or knowledge or interest in education.

His student evaluations are low: "AVOID (reasons): 1. Resents his own job such that he's consistently 15 mins late to 1hr class" Another "if you choose to take this class with this teacher you are in for a real treat. TORTURE. Sugiyama is such a horrid teacher it is unreal. Do yourself a favor and just say NO."

As soon as Sugiyama was appointed, he voted with Stegeman and Hicks to replace Cuevas as chair and then with a 4-1 majority abolished MAS. Democracy in action.

Thus far, what is lost are the Latino students and no one gives a damn. Nobody cares if they end up in gangs, as long as they money for the elites -- that is what counts. Fear of ending up in a class with a Mexican will generate more Charter Schools and more dropouts will insure larger prison populations. Everyone makes money.

The disillusionment is not limited to Arizona politicos but includes the federal government. The federal courts have not enforced federal laws. The Obama administration is paralyzed furthering the feeling of abandonment and encouraging TUSD Tea Party Board member Hicks to go around saying that state law trumps federal law.

My mother would say about the gaggle in Tucson, no tienen madre. They are disrespectful; they don't care about the law, or how many people are hurt by their actions.

I am not as nice as my mother was. I feel much like the people in the Boyle Heights area when the Night Stalker, Richard Ramírez, was terrorizing Los Angeles. They put out signs daring him to come East of the River, and then took care of him when he did.

Hopefully the Tea Party will come to L.A.

* * *

From: gdjohnson2@juno.com
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 11:54 AM

Former progressive Democratic congressional
candidate Marcy Winograd has registered Green.
Below is an introduction she sent out to fellow
Greens.
----------------------------------------------------------

Dear Green Party Friends,

In accordance with protocol, I'd like to introduce
myself as a new Green Party member (as of last
week, when I tweeted I was filling out a new voter
reg form). Thank you for your past support of my
congressional peace campaigns and for your
enduring activism.

Currently, I am serving as a board member of the
Ocean Park Association (OPA), and working with
Mike Feinstein and Linda Piera-Avila on issue-
oriented and logistical campaigns (affordable
housing, Sustainability Bill of Rights ordinance,
voter registration) for Santa Monica Greens. In my
capacity on the OPA board, I will be organizing a
neighborhood preparedness infrastructure, with
block captains in voting precincts and search and
rescue teams.

This year I helped organize OccupyLAUSD to demand
surplus funds be used to open school libraries and
rehire laid-off teachers, librarians, nurses, and
counselors. I also led an OccupyLA delegation to
LACERS (LA City Employee Retirement System) to
express concerns over investments in predatory banks
and environmental polluters.

Some of you may have heard the KPFK interview I
did with Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Jill Stein,
(Dec. 26/podcast/KPFK.org under Connect the Dots
archive) who was both inspirational and enlightening.
Next Monday, Jan. 16, Lila Garrett, host of KPFK's
Connect the Dots, will explore the third party option
when she interviews both me and Dorothy Reik,an
organizer with Progressive Democrats of the Santa
Monica Mountains. Lila will ask me why I have decided
to leave the Democratic Party.

My New Year's resolution for 2012 was to invest my
energy in creating positive alternatives to perpetual war
and consumerism. The Green Party platform is terrific,
with its emphasis on local economies and opposition to
arms sales. With 900,000 DTS's in LA County and
growing realization of wealth inequity, I am hopeful we
can seize the moment to build the Green Party by not only
registering voters but also running for non-partisan
offices: union leadership positions, associated student
bodies, neighborhood councils, credit union and
cooperative boards, pension boards, etc., and creating
formal or informal spokescouncils where identified
Greens within those neighborhood councils, union
positions, etc., work together, as Greens, to advance
key and strategic agenda items. I would love to see
Greens/teachers run on a slate or mixed slate for the
board of the California Teachers Association.

Thank you for supporting my challenge to Jane Harman.
Many of you walked precincts and made phone calls --
and I appreciate your efforts.

I'm excited to work with you.

To Peace,

Marcy Winograd

* * *

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <kwazinkrumah@aol.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 6:46 AM
Subject: [May 19th Movement] March with the MLK Coalition and Occupy the
Hood on Monday, January 16th!
To: occupyla@lists.riseup.net, occupylaproutreach@lists.riseup.net

*RECLAIM THE LEGACY!*

*MARCH WITH THE MARTIN LUTHER KING COALITION AND OCCUPY THE HOOD IN THE
ANNUAL MARTIN LUTHER KING PARADE ON MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 2012:*

*END MORTGAGE FORECLOSURES NOW!*
**
*FREEZE RENT INCREASES IN LOS ANGELES!*
**
*STOP THE HARRASSMENT AND ABANDONMENT OF THE HOMELESS **IN OUR
COMMUNITIES!!!*

GATHER AT WESTERN AVENUE AND MARTIN LUTHER KING BLVD. AT 10:00 A.M.
**
(More details coming.)

For more information call: Kwazi Nkrumah at (213)884-5190 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (213)884-5190 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Rech: The Bain of Capitalism, Scheer: There's Hope for Republicans Yet

2012-01-13T07:10:00.000-08:00

Hi. Bill Moyers returns to tv, with a new series on KCET, tonight at 8 pm, Bill Maher's series resumes tomight @10 on HBO.

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/9377-focus-the-bain-of-capitalism

The Bain of Capitalism

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

11 January 12

t's one thing to criticize Mitt Romney for being a businessman with the wrong values. It's quite another to accuse him and his former company, Bain Capital, of doing bad things. If what Bain Capital did under Romney was bad for society, the burden shifts to Romney's critics to propose laws that would prevent Bain and other companies from doing such bad things in the future.

Don't hold your breath.

Newt Gingrich says Bain under Romney carried out "clever legal ways to loot a company." Gingrich calls it the "Wall Street model" where "you can basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers," and charges that "if someone comes in, takes all the money out of your company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that's not traditional capitalism."

Where has Newt been for the last thirty years? Leveraged buyouts became part of traditional capitalism in the 1980s when enterprising financiers began borrowing piles of money, often at high interest rates, to buy up the stock of ongoing companies they believe undervalued. They'd back the loans with the company assets, then typically sell off divisions and slim payrolls, and resell the company to the public at a higher share price - pocketing the gains.

It's a good deal for the financiers (the $25 billion buyout of RJR-Nabisco in 1988 netted the partners of Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts around $70 million each - and most of Mitt Romney's estimated $200 million fortune comes from the same maneuvers), but not always for the company or its workers.

Some workers lose their jobs when the company downsizes. Others, when the company, now laden with debt, can't meet its payments to creditors and has to go into bankruptcy. According to the Wall Street Journal, of 77 companies Bain invested in during Romney's tenure there, 22 percent either filed for bankruptcy or closed their doors by end of eighth year after Bain's investment.

But, hey, this is American capitalism - at least as it's been practiced for the past three decades. Is Newt proposing to ban leveraged buyouts? Or limit the amount of debt a company can take on? Or prevent financiers - or even CEOs and management teams - from taking a public company private and then reselling it to the public at a higher price?

None of the above.

Rick Perry criticizes Romney and Bain pushing the quest for profits too far. "There is nothing wrong with being successful and making money," says Perry. "But getting rich off failure and sticking someone else with the bill is indefensible."

Yet getting rich off failure and sticking someone else with the bill is what Wall Street financiers try to do every day. It's called speculation - and at least since the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act, investment bankers have been allowed to gamble with commercial bank deposits, other people's money.

So is Perry proposing to resurrect Glass-Steagall? Not a chance.

Gingrich, Perry, and others are putting particular focus on the people who lost their jobs as a result of Romney's Bain Capital. Gingrich's Super PAC will be running $3.5 million of ads featuring emotional interviews with some of them.

But what, exactly, are Romney's opponents proposing to do about layoffs that harm so many people? Millions of Americans have lost their jobs over the last four years - and as a result have often lost their health insurance, their homes, and their savings.

Are Gingrich, Perry, and others proposing to expand health insurance coverage for jobless Americans and their families? All I hear from the Republicans is their determination to repeal the law that President Obama championed - which still leaves millions of Americans uninsured. Do Romney's opponents have plans to keep people in their homes even when they've lost their jobs and can't pay their mortgages? No. Do they propose expanding unemployment insurance? If memory serves, most of them were opposed to the last extension.

I'm all in favor of reforming capitalism, but you'll permit me some skepticism when it comes to criticisms of Bain Capital coming from Romney's Republican opponents. None of these Republican candidates has exactly distinguished himself with new ideas for giving Americans more economic security. To the contrary - until the assault on Romney and Bain Capital - every one of them has been a cheerleader for financial capitalism of the most brutal sort.

The party that has repeatedly saved capitalism from its own excesses and thereby preserved capitalism is the Democratic Party. So the only serious question here is what kind of serious reforms Obama will propose when, assuming Romney becomes the Republican nominee, Obama also criticizes Bain Capitalism.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including "The Work of Nations," "Locked in the Cabinet," "Supercapitalism" and his latest book, "AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America's Future." His 'Marketplace' commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

* * *

There's Hope for Republicans Yet

By Robert Scheer

There is a full-blown debate going on in, of all places, the Republican Party about the failings of the governing, corporate-sponsored kleptocracy. Not so on the Democratic side. Spared a primary battle, the incumbent president need not defend his economic record, which is basically a redo of the save-Wall-Street-first stance initiated by his Republican predecessor.

That bipartisan establishment consensus, in which the enormous power of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve was harnessed to bail out the financial industry swindlers while ignoring the plight of their victims, has been challenged only on the Republican side, where the libertarian Ron Paul has tapped into the enormous populist rage among voters.

There is no comparable dissent among leading Democrats, who have been loath to take on Barack Obama's embrace of crony capitalismthat fatal melding of Wall Street wealth with Washington political powerthe way Paul and even Newt Gingrich have powerfully challenged Mitt Romney, the GOP's Obama doppelgänger.

Yes, doppelgänger, and please don't try to scare me with those hoary tales of how Romney is the second coming of the far right on social issues, when his entire tenure as Massachusetts governor proved quite the opposite. The issue in this campaign is the economy, and on that, by the time of the general election, there will be no serious substantive difference between the two major parties' candidates. Both will squarely be on the side of the financiers who created this crisis.

The attacks on Romney's association with the rapacious Bain Capital could apply with equal force to the Clinton administration veterans whom Obama has entrusted with managing the nation's economy. The list begins with Lawrence Summers, who pocketed more than $8 million in Wall Street loot during the period when he was a top economic adviser to the Obama 2008 presidential campaign. Summers received $5.2 million from the D.E. Shaw private equity fund, which was up to the same sort of shenanigans as Romney's Bain Capital.

Imagine the outrage among Democrats if a President Romney were to rely on three successive chiefs of staff with résumés as steeped in banking greed as those Obama has appointed. The first to guard the gate to the president was Rahm Emanuel, whose political career was generously backed by Magnetar Capital, an Illinois hedge fund that was a major purveyor of subprime mortgage-backed securities. Then came JPMorgan Chase's William Daley, paid $5 million a year as the representative of that company in Washington, working to soften Obama's already tepid efforts at reregulating the banks. And now, Jacob Lew, another Clinton-era retread who made himself wealthy between Democratic administrations by being COO of Citigroup Alternative Investments, specializing in betting that people's mortgages, which other branches of Citigroup sold, would go belly up.

What has changed in American politics is that the growing army of disenfranchised stakeholders now fit as comfortably within what has been thought of as the plutocratic Republican Party as within its faux-populist rival. In an attempt to exploit the palpable populist anger in the Republican base, Romney's opponents, as The Wall Street Journal reported, opened a "Pandora's box of bitter attacks" claiming "in his business career he was a corporate predator, a heartless shredder of companies and jobs and the personification of all that is wrong with capitalism. ..."

It is a line of attack that has worked because, as the Journal's Gerald F. Seib points out, "Today's Republican Party has become steadily more blue-collar, more populist and more influenced by voters who act as much like independents as Republicans. All of that makes the idea of attacks on capitalist behavior arising from the traditional party of capitalists a little less bizarre."

The stats to back up that assertion are compelling; according to exit polls, 75 percent of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire had family incomes of below $100,000, and almost half did not have a college degree. It was from their ranks and among the nearly half of voters who identified as independents that Paul and third-place finisher Jon Huntsman pulled much of their support.

National polls support the notion of a more populist Republican base, and as the combined results of WSJ/NBC News polls over the last year show, blue-collar voters were slightly more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats. Most startling was the finding from those same national polls when respondents were asked which party was responsible for the economic crisis: "Republicans were precisely as likely as Democrats to blame 'Wall Street bankers.' "

But as the presidential election is now shaping up, voters will not be given a choice to rebuke Wall Street by either major party. Expect razor-thin differences between Romney and Obama on the key issues at the heart of our economic crisisthe ravages of predatory multinational corporate capitalism that turns the nation state into a vehicle for ill-gotten gain, mocking both Adam Smith's claims for the invisible hand in a truly free market and the assumptions of Jeffersonian democracy in which governance is in the hands of the common folk who are also stakeholders.

Ed Pearl

Noam Chomsky: Remembering Howard Zinn

Remembering Howard Zinn

Hurrah for Egypt! by Uri Avneri

Krugman: Jobs, Jobs and Cars

Mikhail Gorbachev: Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?

Robert Reich: Who Is Sheldon Adelson and What Has Newt Promised Him?, Reminder: A Great Event This Sunday

We the People, by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Roert Weissman

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert Weissman

We the People

Fisk: The Demise of the Dollar - a must read!

The Demise of the Dollar

Scheer: Obama's Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

Posted on Jan 26, 2012

DN Interview at Sundance: "Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare"

The Idiot's Guide to Fighting Dictatorship in Syria While Opposing Military Intervention

British M. P.s Call For Closure Of Romney's Cayman Islands Tax Haven

British Members Of Parliament Call For Closure Of Romney’s Cayman Islands Tax Haven

Posted at January 23, 2012, 8:11 am

Juan Gonzales: Astonishing trifecta for nation's populist movement against corporate greed

FW: Gaza art exhibit event details attached

Gaza children's images of war

You are here

Gaza children’s images of war censored under pressure from US Israel lobby

FW: Republican Racism - an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle

Republican Racism is an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Vulture capitalism on trial

Vulture capitalism on trial

FW: FRIDAY: 130 cities, 46 states will be "Occupying the Courts", ADAAWE at the Skirball, Friday evening

ADAAWE

Cult of Personality

Cult of Personality

To Intervene or Not to Intervene?

Things Fall Apart

Censored - Democracy Now, Move On

Chris Hedges: Why I'm Suing Barack Obama, Urgent notice on internet virus going around now.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - March Today!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

FW: U.S. Warns Israel on Strike - as War Clouds Darken

U.S. Warns Israel on Strike

More Related Video

War Clouds Darken: Russia Warns of US Strike on Iran

Ahmadinejad: 'Heartless capitalism is the root cause of war'

* * *

Russia Warns of US Strike on Iran

* * *

Assassination Blowback?

* * *

Assassinations Won't Work

* * *

'Merely Targeted Killings' or Terrorism?

* * *

Iran Leader Rails Against 'Heartless' US Capitalism

Rodolfo F. Acuña: Going to hell, Marcy Winograd: Turning Green, Marching with MLK

Rech: The Bain of Capitalism, Scheer: There's Hope for Republicans Yet

The Bain of Capitalism

*** * ***

*** * ***