Topic(s): Europe
Date Posted: 11.25.08

Some of you may be familiar with the group Tiqqun, a radical group of thinkers and activists who have published a variety of books and were also responsible for publishing a journal. Some of those individuals associated with the group have in recent years been involved with resuscitating a small village in France and exploring the limits of an embodied politics. I cannot profess to know extensively about their activities, but these arrests are alarming and the accusation seems reminiscent of the kind of witch hunts or state sponsored sabotage we know of in the 60's/70's in Europe, the US, and beyond. But in this case, it may even be a far more trivial affair, which has been met with an overly eager police state. It should be noted that the purported act of terrorism resulted in some train delays. Now, I know some people take punctuality seriously, but these arrests (+accompanying accusations) are perverse and opprobrious. The tran

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Topic(s): Palestine / Israel
Date Posted: 11.23.08

UN on Gaza: "People are going to start getting hungry"

Gaza – Ma'an – The situation in the Gaza Strip is shifting from "collective punishment to genocide," said Jamal Al-Khudari, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and head of the popular committee against the siege in Gaza.

The trickle of humanitarian aid previously allowed into Gaza, on which 80 percent of the population depended, has now been stopped for nine days by the Israeli army. The delivery of medical supplies and industrial fuel donated by the EU has also been blocked. The fuel was needed to power Gaza's sole power plant, which has now shut down, leading to rolling blackouts throughout Gaza.

UNRWA storehouses in Gaza are empty and Israel has refused to let emergency supplies through to the UN agency, which is responsible for providing basic goods to 750,000 Palestinians in the Strip.

Aid from the UN, the WHO and other Palestinian, Arab and international relief organizations are the main source of food for the 80% of the population in Gaza that live under poverty line and the 140,000 Gazans who are unemployed.

"People are going to start getting hungry," said U.N. spokesman Christopher Gunness.

As the crisis escalates and bakeries close due to power cuts resulting from the Israeli refusal to allow fuel into the area, the international community has come out with a wave of condemnations against the Israeli closure.

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Topic(s): Palestine / Israel
Date Posted: 11.23.08

War Crimes in Gaza - Interview with Donna Wallach

by Anis Hamadeh

Donna Wallach was on the first Free Gaza boat that came from Cyprus in August 2008 and has stayed in Gaza since. She comes from California and is of Eastern-European Jewish descent. Donna lived in occupied Palestine in the Tel Aviv area from 1981 to 1997 and experienced the impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinians living inside Israel as well as the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. She also was in Ramallah during its siege in 2002.

How is the elecricity, food and medical situation in the Gaza Strip today?

The last shipment of fuel was 420,000 liters, not even enough to power the Gaza Power Plant for one day. Electricity is off in many places at least 12 hours a day and in some places 20 hours a day. Some areas are without running water 12 hours a day. Today, 21st November Beach Camp was without running water all day. Jabaliya Camp was without running water and electricity for 12 hours. The The last flour mill closed on Thursday 20th November, they ran out of wheat to mill. This will impact the bakeries which make the various types of bread produced in the Gaza Strip. There were 72 bakeries in Gaza Strip and many of them had already closed, it could be they are now all closed. I heard today that there is no bread to be bought. Access to food is a human right - Israel does not have the right to deny food, or water or medicine. The director of emergency ambulances said that 300 kinds of medicines are lacking here. When the electricity goes out the hospitals are in dire straits, their generators are breaking down and there are no spare parts to fix them. (I was watching the news in Arabic - couldn’t understand what was said - but the pictures showed the neonatal care unit for babies who need incubators. It looked like the doctors were having to care for the babies by their own hands - the incubators weren’t functioning. This could mean death to defenseless babies.)

Were there any Palestinians killed by the Israeli forces?

Eighteen Palestinians have been killed by invading Israeli occupation force soldiers in the past three weeks, the last one was yesterday, 20th November. All the 18 Palestinian martyrs were killed defending Palestinian land and the Palestinian people from the invading Israel occupation force army who were illegally invading Gaza Strip.

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Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.23.08

Just in case the worry was only directed toward his selection for chief of staff or chief of the treasury. What follows is a signal call for preparing for the struggles to come. -rg

This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House
By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet
Posted on November 20, 2008, Printed on November 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/107666/

Click here to view this guide as a single page.

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:

-- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;

-- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;

-- His labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization;"

-- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;

-- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem "must remain undivided" -- a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;

-- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;

-- His refusal to "rule out" using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.

Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy circle -- including some who have received or are bound to receive Cabinet posts -- supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. "After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington's Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little 'change you can believe in,'" notes veteran journalist Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

As news breaks and speculation abounds about cabinet appointments, here are 20 people to watch as Obama builds the team who will shape U.S. foreign policy for at least four years:

Joe Biden

There was no stronger sign that Obama's foreign policy would follow the hawkish tradition of the Democratic foreign policy establishment than his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Much has been written on Biden's tenure as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands out. Biden is not just one more Democratic lawmaker who now calls his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq "mistaken;" Biden was actually an important facilitator of the war.

In the summer of 2002, when the United States was "debating" a potential attack on Iraq, Biden presided over hearings whose ostensible purpose was to weigh all existing options. But instead of calling on experts whose testimony could challenge the case for war -- Iraq's alleged WMD possession and its supposed ties to al-Qaida -- Biden's hearings treated the invasion as a foregone conclusion. His refusal to call on two individuals in particular ensured that testimony that could have proven invaluable to an actual debate was never heard: Former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran diplomat and the former head of the U.N.'s Iraq program.

Both men say they made it clear to Biden's office that they were ready and willing to testify; Ritter knew more about the dismantling of Iraq's WMD program than perhaps any other U.S. citizen and would have been in prime position to debunk the misinformation and outright lies being peddled by the White House. Meanwhile, von Sponeck had just returned from Iraq, where he had observed Ansar al Islam rebels in the north of Iraq -- the so-called al-Qaida connection -- and could have testified that, rather than colluding with Saddam's regime, they were in a battle against it. Moreover, he would have pointed out that they were operating in the U.S.-enforced safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan. "Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam," von Sponeck wrote in an Op-Ed published shortly before the July 2002 hearings. "The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest."

With both men barred from testifying, rather than eliciting an array of informed opinions, Biden's committee whitewashed Bush's lies and helped lead the country to war. Biden himself promoted the administration's false claims that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, declaring on the Senate floor, "[Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons."

With the war underway, Biden was then the genius who passionately promoted the ridiculous plan to partition Iraq into three areas based on religion and ethnicity, attempting to Balkanize one of the strongest Arab states in the world.

"He's a part of the old Democratic establishment," says retired Army Col. Ann Wright, the State Department diplomat who reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2002. Biden, she says, has "had a long history with foreign affairs, [but] it's not the type of foreign affairs that I want."

Rahm Emanuel

Obama's appointment of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff is a clear sign that Clinton-era neoliberal hawks will be well-represented at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A former senior Clinton advisor, Emanuel is a hard-line supporter of Israel's "targeted assassination" policy and actually volunteered to work with the Israeli Army during the 1991 Gulf War. He is close to the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and was the only member of the Illinois Democratic delegation in the Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many of his colleagues, Emanuel still defends his vote. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel promoted the campaigns of 22 candidates, only one of who supported a swift withdrawal from Iraq, and denied crucial Party funding to anti-war candidates. "As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we will have a position," he said in December 2005. As Philip Giraldi recently pointed out on Antiwar.com, Emanuel "advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 soldiers and creating a domestic spying organization like Britain's MI5. More recently, he has supported mandatory paramilitary national service for all Americans between the ages of 18 and 25."

While Obama has at times been critical of Clinton-era free trade agreements, Emanuel was one of the key people in the Clinton White House who brokered the successful passage of NAFTA.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-a-vis Obama's stated foreign-policy goals.

Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush's invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the war, but aided the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising to support the measure in October 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."

"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"

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Topic(s): Corporate Crime
Date Posted: 11.23.08

Locking in the Loot at the Reagan Library
Paulson's Cascade of Lies
By MICHAEL HUDSON

Weekend Edition
November 21 / 23, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson11212008.html

On Thursday, November 20, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presented,
even by his own lamentably low standards, an amazingly deceptive speech
at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
In its false framing of Washington's financial giveaway to Wall Street
it rivaled some of the outstanding fables created by the Master
Imagineer himself, for whom the library is named.

What prompted the speech seems have been Congressional criticism of Mr.
Paulson's bait-and-switch transfer of public funds to Wall Street, and
the Federal Reserve's transfer of an amount twice as high as Congress's
$700 billion. His most urgent aim was to ward off accusations that the
Treasury and Federal Reserve have acted illegally. `Federal law, and in
particular the Anti-Deficiency Act, prohibits Treasury from spending
money, lending money, and guaranteeing or buying assets without
Congressional approval. The Federal Reserve can and does lend on a
secured basis, but only if it expects not to realize losses.' (Italics
added.)

But Congress did not approve the Treasury's $250 billion of `preferred'
stock investments in Wall Street banks. The happy recipients, their
stockholders and officers evidently worried precisely that20this
`investment' would end up taking losses. That is why the Treasury
stands in back of bona fide creditors. That is why `preferred' stock
was preferred by existing stockholders to loans and guarantees (which
have priority in case of bankruptcy), not to mention the conditions
that Congress thought it had laid down calling for these institutions
to renegotiate mortgages to bring them in line with the debtor's
ability to pay.

The Fed has refused to let Congress know any details ` any details at
all ` about its cash-for-trash swaps with these institutions. This is
what concerns Congress, and what has prompted reporters at Bloomberg
to bring a lawsuit in order to discover and publicize the details. It
is not hard to see why this curiosity exists. The only reasonable
explanation as to why investment banks, American International Group
(A.I.G.) and commercial banks apparently headed by Citibank (whose
shares plunged yet another 26 per cent on Thursday) have turned over a
trillion dollars worth of illiquid mortgage securities, junk bonds and
who knows what other junk to the Fed is to avoid taking a loss on these
bad loans and investments. As Mr. Paulson explained matters, `the
Federal Reserve has statutory authority to lend against a pool of
mortgage loans on a fully secured basis. The Fed was able to assist the
JPMorgan purchase because they believed that there was a reasonable prospect of avoiding losses.'

What time frame are we talking about here? Evidently one in which Mr.
Paulson will have left the administration, sticking his successor with
the losses and, presumably, the blame.

Everything seems to have been unexpected to Mr. Paulson ` as if
ignorance is a defense. `When I came to Washington in 2006,' he
reminisced, `markets were benign.' We were still in Alan Greenspan's
idea that inflating asset prices on credit constitutes `wealth
creation.' At that time I myself was only one of many who warned that
the real estate market had come to rest on a foundation of junk
mortgage lending. Every banker with whom I spoke at the time knew this.
But most were still seeking to make hay while the making was good, and
it was still quite good ` for the banks, that is. Matters were not
benign for the increasingly debt-ridden U.S. economy, but at least they
were rosy for Wall Street. Bank executives were paying themselves
enormous salaries and even larger stock options. Meanwhile, the smarter
money managers were beginning to shift their funds out of the U.S.
economy in a wave of capital flight of a magnitude not seen since
Russia in the mid-1990s.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.23.08

Given the financial upheavals and the problems in the world at-large, like the siege of Gaza, it may seem a bit stupid to keep posting articles about Rahm Emanuel, but this one was too funny to pass up. It also points out that he was one of three principals lobbyists for the NAFTA Free-trade agreement. -rg

RAHM EMANUEL'S POLITICAL PIROUETTES
by John R. MacArthur

The Providence Journal
November 19, 2008

God help me, but I had to laugh when I heard the news that Barack Obama
had named Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff. What else could
I do? Without even so much as a symbolic gesture in support of reform,
the great agent of "change" immediately selected as his chief political
enforcer a figure who epitomizes the Washington consensus of the past
two decades â€" pro-"free trade," pro-Iraq invasion/occupation and,
perhaps most importantly, pro-pork barrel.

Which isn't to say that Emanuel does not possess great talents
essential to the success of an Obama administration. It just depends
on how you define success. If Emanuel's legendary aggressiveness were
put to work in the service of "good government," he might, indeed, do
wonderful things. But I somehow doubt that's what Obama has in mind for
his friend from Chicago as he embarks on his 2012 re-election campaign.

Like Obama, Rahm Emanuel was launched in politics by the Daley machine,
but he really made his name in the Clinton administration as one of
three principal White House lobbyists for the North American Free
Trade Agreement, in 1993.

Working alongside Mayor Richard M. Daley's brother, William, and
then-U.S.

Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, Emanuel developed a reputation
for having "a personality that killed plants on contact," in the
words of Margarita Roque, a former House staffer.

I can confirm Roque's assessment, since in my own interviews with
Emanuel, he outdid himself in ferocious candor. Asked to describe
the effectiveness and reliability of his pro-NAFTA allies at the
Business Roundtable, Emanuel was effusive in his praise of Allied
Signal Chairman Larry Bossidy and a few others at Boeing and IBM. But
as for "the rest of business â€" not worth a bucket of warm spit."

Ordinarily, I might appreciate such a remark, but Emanuel was only
expressing a certain type of politician's contempt for anyone who
is not a politician or their surrogate â€" for people insufficiently
ruthless to "get the job done," as Obama puts it. That Emanuel dared
to say this during his brief tenure as an investment banker only
accentuates his sense of superiority over the mere mortals who live
outside the charmed triangle of Capitol Hill/K Street/Democratic
Party power.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.21.08

Great expectations
The weight of the past, present and future will add drag to Obama's ascent to the White House

Tariq Ali
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 5 2008 21.00 GMT

Barack Obama's victory marks a decisive generational and sociological shift in American politics. Its impact is difficult to predict at this stage, but the expectations of the majority of young people who propelled Obama to victory remain high. It may not have been a landslide, but the vote was large enough with the Democrats winning over 50% of the electorate (62.4 million voters) and planting a black family firmly in the White House.

The historic significance of this fact should not be underestimated.

It has happened in a country where the Ku Klux Klan once had millions of members who waged a campaign of deadly terror against black citizens with the support of a prejudiced legal system. How can one forget the photographs of African-Americans during the first three decades of the last century being lynched under the approving gaze of white families enjoying their picnics as they watched – in Billie Holliday's memorable voice – "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees"?

It was the mass struggles for civil rights in the 1960s that forced desegregation and the black voter registration campaigns, but also led to the assassination of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (just as he was beginning to insist on the unity of blacks and whites against a system that oppressed both). It would be trite to remark that Obama is not one of their number. He is seen as such by the 96 per cent of Afro-Americans who spilled out of their homes to vote for him. They may yet be disappointed but for the moment they are rejoicing, and who can blame them.

It was barely two decades ago that Bill Clinton was warning his Democrat rival, the liberal governor of New York State, Mario Cuomo, that America was not yet ready to elect a president whose name ended with 'o' or 'i'. It was only a few months ago that the Clintons were openly pandering to racism by repeatedly stressing that white working-class voters would decisively reject Obama and reminding Democrats that Jesse Jackson, too, had done well in past primaries. The new generation of voters proved them wrong: 66% of those between the ages of 18 and 29, comprising 18% of the electorate, voted for Obama; 52% of the 30-44 age group (37% of the electorate) did likewise.

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Topic(s): Palestine / Israel
Date Posted: 11.20.08

No free pass for Rahm Emanuel
Remi Kanazi, The Electronic Intifada, 19 November 2008

James Zogby isn't just an Arab American with an opinion. He is the president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a well-known writer, and an esteemed leader within the Arab American community. Many non-Arab Americans highly regard his analysis and look to his articles as a resource to understand the Middle East.

This is precisely why his latest article, "Rahm Emanuel and Arab Perceptions," published by The Huffington Post, is so disturbing. In the piece, Zogby tries to calm the fears of Arab Americans about United States President-elect Barack Obama's first appointment, Rahm Emanuel, to White House Chief of Staff. Zogby expressed shock and dismay that his constituency, once euphoric over the election of Obama, was now sending him angry and cynical letters. Zogby described the emails and calls to his office as "troubled and troubling -- because much of the reaction was based on misinformation and because of what the entire episode reveals about the larger political dynamic."

Zogby immediately followed up with what he calls "the facts" (i.e., a long list of Rahm Emanuel's accomplishments), while conveniently leaving out any of his troubling positions related to the Middle East, namely that he was a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq and he has expressed hawkish pro-Israel views. The forcefulness of Zogby's tone is elucidated in phrases such as "he knows how to get the job done" and "it's as simple as that." Right off the bat, Zogby informs his readers that if they don't understand what a gem Emanuel is, they either cannot properly discern the facts, or their judgments

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): US Analysis
Date Posted: 11.19.08

Fronting for Paramilitaries

Holder, Chaquita and Colombia

By MARIO A. MURILLO

First the good news: We're two months away from President George W. Bush's last full day in the White House. The countdown for the end of the nightmare has begun in earnest.

Now the bad news: As Barack Obama puts together his cabinet and eyes a slew of former Clinton officials for key staff positions, it is becoming ever more apparent that all those calls for change coming from progressive circles in the U.S. – and abroad - have fallen on deaf ears.

Most striking, at least for the time being, is the soon to be named position of the top law enforcement official of the country. It looks like the first African-American President will appoint the first African-American attorney general in the coming days, something that on the surface looks like an advance, but should actually sound alarm bells for anybody seeking true change in the way things are done in Washington, especially when it comes to bringing corporate criminals to justice.

Although no final decision has been made, the New York Times reports that the President-elect's transition team has signaled to Eric H. Holder Jr., a senior Clinton Justice Department official, that he will be selected as the next attorney general. Holder helped lead the team that selected Sen. Joe Biden as Obama's VP choice.

Most news accounts about the pending appointment seem to be limiting their criticism of Holder to one of his final acts as President Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general in 2001. At the time, on the last day of Clinton's term, Holder apparently said he was "neutral, leaning toward favorable" for a presidential pardon for Marc Rich, the wealthy commodities dealer whose ex-wife, Denise, was a major donor to the Democratic Party. Clinton's pardon of the tax-evading Rich was criticized as politically motivated, leading to a congressional investigation over the matter.

What is not being discussed too much, and was not even mentioned in today's New York Times report, is Holder's key role in defending Chiquita Brands International in a notorious case relating to the company's funneling money and weapons to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, AUC, the right-wing paramilitary organization on the U.S. State Department's own list of terrorist organizations.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.19.08

I haven't seen anyone mention this take on an Obama admin's potential
direction for the development of a new infrastructure investment
program (ala Public Works Administration) by Mike Davis (via Tom
Dispatch). But it presents some interesting challenges to the utopian
progressive notion that building new energy and transportation
networks are the priority.
best - ryan

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175004/
mike_davis_keynesian_shock_and_awe
Why Obama's Futurama Can Wait
Schools and Hospitals Should Come First in Any Stimulus Package
By Mike Davis

America's "Futurama" is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama
of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for
General Motors at the 1939 New York World's Fair, has weathered into
a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to
death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate
landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this
century's equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to
collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully
speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two,
Spain's high-speed rail network will become the world's largest, with
plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of
fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour
prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the
construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger
rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a
single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of
transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this
infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public
investment: "For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to
rebuild America." Originally he proposed to finance this spending by
ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger
military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any
reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the
urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail
transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work.
His "Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class" vows to "create 5
million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of
energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the
Middle East in 10 years, and we'll create 2 million jobs by
rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges."

Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly
ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but
it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the
new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority.
This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of
interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major
public works.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.18.08

Use Your Illusions
Slavoj Žižek

Noam Chomsky called for people to vote for Obama `without
illusions'. I fully share Chomsky's doubts about the real
consequences of Obama's victory: from a pragmatic perspective, it is
quite possible that Obama will make only some minor improvements,
turning out to be `Bush with a human face'. He will pursue the
same basic policies in a more attractive way and thus effectively
strengthen the US hegemony, damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush
years.

There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction – a
key dimension is missing from it. Obama's victory is not just
another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with
all the pragmatic calculations and manipulations that involves. It is a
sign of something more. This is why an American friend of mine, a
hardened leftist with no illusions, cried when the news came of
Obama's victory. Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was
free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.

In The Contest of Faculties, Kant asked a simple but difficult question:
is there true progress in history? (He meant ethical progress, not just
material development.) He concluded that progress cannot be proven, but
we can discern signs which indicate that progress is possible. The
French Revolution was such a sign, pointing towards the possibility of
freedom: the previously unthinkable happened, a whole people fearlessly
asserted their freedom and equality. For Kant, even more important than
the – often bloody – reality of what went on on the streets of
Paris was the enthusiasm that the events in France gave rise to in the
eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe and in places as far
away as Haiti, where it triggered another world-historical event: the
first revolt by black slaves. Arguably the most sublime moment of the
French Revolution occurred when the delegation from Haiti, led by
Toussaint l'Ouverture, visited Paris and were enthusiastically
received at the Popular Assembly as equals among equals.

Obama's victory is a sign of history in the triple Kantian sense of
signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. A sign in which the
memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its abolition
reverberates; an event which now demonstrates a change; a hope for
future achievements. The scepticism displayed behind closed doors even
by many worried progressives – what if, in the privacy of the voting
booth, the publicly disavowed racism will re-emerge? – was proved
wrong. One of the interesting things about Henry Kissinger, the ultimate
cynical Realpolitiker, is how utterly wrong most of his predictions
were. When news reached the West of the 1991 anti-Gorbachev military
coup, for example, Kissinger immediately accepted the new regime as a
fact. It collapsed ignominiously three days later. The paradigmatic
cynic tells you confidentially: `But don't you see that it is
all really about money/power/sex, that professions of principle or value
are just empty phrases which count for nothing?' What the cynics
don't see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom
which ignores the power of illusions.

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Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.17.08

Ditch the smooth transition. The people voted for change

Instead of accepting the corrupted bail-out and reassuring Wall Street, Obama's team must start doing the hard stuff now
The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bail-out is not merely incompetent: it is borderline criminal.
In a moment of high panic in September, the US treasury pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed - a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140bn in tax revenue, legislators found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "[the] treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice".
Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals the treasury has negotiated with many of the banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals: "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending - for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions ... is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.
Then there is the nearly $2 trillion that America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg news service believes this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.
Yet the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140bn in missing revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy programme. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.

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Topic(s): 
Date Posted: 11.17.08

The Bailout: Bush’s Final Pillage
By Naomi Klein - October 29th, 2008

In the final days of the election, many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But don’t be fooled: that doesn’t mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door. At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. “How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?” Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bailout.

When European colonialists realized that they had no choice but to hand over power to the indigenous citizens, they would often turn their attention to stripping the local treasury of its gold and grabbing valuable livestock. If they were really nasty, like the Portuguese in Mozambique in the mid-1970s, they poured concrete down the elevator shafts.

Nothing so barbaric for the Bush gang. Rather than open plunder, it prefers bureaucratic instruments, such as “distressed asset” auctions and the “equity purchase program.” But make no mistake: the goal is the same as it was for the defeated Portuguese—a final frantic looting of the public wealth before they hand over the keys to the safe.

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Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.17.08

Uncritical Exuberance?
by Judith Butler
Wednesday Nov 5th, 2008 7:19 PM
This became most salient in the emergence of the counter Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs without having to resolve them.
Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace "national unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I love each and every one of you."

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Topic(s): 2008 Election
Date Posted: 11.05.08

Sad to post this as the first article after the election of Obama. But since Rahm Emanuel is being mentioned as his pick for Chief of Staff, thought this article written in 2006 is useful for contextualizing. How does a president who stands against a war, and got where he is because of that position, pick the only Illinois house member to vote for the war as his 'right hand man?' -rg

From Counterpunch

Emanuel's War Plan for Democrats

The Book of Rahm

By JOHN WALSH

Last week in CounterPunch (1), I wrote that the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Congressman Rahm Emanuel, had worked hard to guarantee that Democratic candidates in key toss-up House races were pro-war. In this he was largely successful, because of the money he commands and the celebrity politicians who reliably respond to his call, ensuring that 20 of the 22 Democratic candidates in these districts are pro-war. So the fix is in for the coming elections.

In 2006, no matter which party controls the House, a majority will be committed to pursuing the war on Iraq--despite the fact that the Democratic rank and file and the general voting public oppose the war by large margins. (I hasten to add that this state of affairs can be reversed even after the sham election between the two War Parties.)

What are Emanuel's views on war and peace? Emanuel has just supplied the answer in the form of a scrawny book co-authored with Bruce Reed, modestly entitled: The Plan: Big Ideas for America. The authors obligingly boil each of the eight parts of "The Plan" down to a single paragraph. The section which embraces all of foreign policy is entitled "A New Strategy to End the War on Terror," a heading revealing in itself since "war on terror" is the way the neocons and the Israeli Lobby currently like to frame the discussion of foreign policy. Here is the book's summary paragraph with my comments in parentheses:

"A New Strategy to Win the War on Terror"
("War on Terror," as George Soros points out, is a false metaphor used by those who would drag us into military adventures not in our interest or that of humanity.)

"We need to use all the roots of American power to make our country safe. (He begins by playing on fear.) America must lead the world's fight against the spread of evil and totalitarianism, but we must stop trying to win that battle on our own. (Messianic imperialism.) We should reform and strengthen multilateral institutions for the twenty-first century, not walk away from them. We need to fortify the military's "thin green line" around the world by adding to the U.S. Special Forces and the Marines, and by expanding the U.S. army by 100,000 more troops. (An even bigger military for the world's most powerful armed forces, a very militaristic view of the way to handle the conflicts among nations. What uses does Emanuel have in mind for those troops?) We should give our troops a new GI Bill to come home to. (More material incentives to induce the financially strapped to sign up as cannon fodder.) Finally we must protect our homeland and civil liberties by creating a new domestic counterterrorism force like Britain's MI5. (A new domestic spying operation is an obvious threat to our civil liberties; MI5 holds secret files on one in 160 adults in Britain along with files on 53,000 organizations.)

There it is straight from the horse's mouth.(2)

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