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Massimo Calabresi’s ‘Path To War’

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | March 5, 2013

On February 28, TIME reporter Massimo Calabresi published a lengthy piece on the Iranian nuclear program and the Obama Administration’s attitude toward it, notably reflecting the same, tired mainstream myopia and uncritically accepted false choice over the Iranian nuclear program. Calabresi quotes Netanyahu cipher Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s senior Middle East adviser, as saying, “There was a debate within the Administration over prevention vs. containment.”

Never, in the course of Calabresi’s report, is there a question that Iran is actively seeking nuclear weapons (or, at least, “capability”), despite the fact that no evidence exists to support this assumption.  No one quoted in the article ever suggests Iran is anything but intransigent, its intentions are obviously assumed to be nefarious.  It comes as no surprise then that TIME would title the piece, “The Path to War: Inside Barack Obama’s Struggle to Stop an Iranian Nuke.”

Calabresi, whose access to senior officials appears to rely on his fealty to government talking points and never questioning American benevolence, claims that Obama “has worked hard to avoid war” with Iran before praising the president’s efforts “to slow or derail the Iranian program through a combination of diplomacy, sanctions and covert action.” One wonders how the United States would classify having its economy deliberately targeted and being the victim of collective punishment, cyberattacks, industrial sabotage, surveillance, espionage, and lethal operations conducted by foreign-backed terrorist organizations. The word “war” certainly comes to mind.

Nevertheless, Calabresi credits Obama for “pushing the timeline for war back at least 12 months,” despite his ominous determination that “eventually time will run out,” leaving Obama to “soon face the hardest decision of his presidency.”

While there is nothing new revealed in Calabresi’s report, he readily repeats a number of disingenuous claims and some outright falsehoods right off the bat which set the tone for what follows.

He writes that, throughout 2009, “Obama had been delivering on his dovish campaign pledge to reach out to the regime in Tehran.” Calabresi explains,

He beamed in a conciliatory greeting to the entire country on the Persian New Year and had offered unconditional talks. In Cairo that June, he offered to let Iran keep a peaceful nuclear program. But Iran’s leaders rebuffed Obama’s efforts, and in the fall of 2009 the Obama Administration revealed that Iran was building a secret uranium-enrichment plant deep in a hillside outside the holy city of Qum.

The misinformation and mythology contained in these mere three sentences is staggering.

What Calabresi leaves out of his glowing assessment of Obama’s noble outreach to Iran is that just nine days before delivering his much-touted March 2009 Nowruz message to Iranians and their government in which he declared that his commitment to diplomacy and “pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community” would “not be advanced by threats,” Obama had already announced the extension of economic sanctions on Iran in place since 1995. It has also been reported that the earliest versions of the Stuxnet computer virus were deployed in June 2009, less than three months after Obama supposedly extended an open hand.

Furthermore, Calabresi oddly believes that the President of the United States of America is somehow responsible for doling out nuclear programs to those nations he deems worthy of such an honor. This is not actually true. Iran’s program is not, under any circumstances, subject to the beneficence, generosity, or magnanimity of any other state, government or world body. Its right “to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination” is “inalienable” and enshrined in international law by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The idea that Obama is in a position to “offer” Iran anything in this regard is not only patronizing, it is pure imperial arrogance.

In his Cairo speech, President Obama declared,

No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons. And that’s why I strongly reaffirmed America’s commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons. And any nation — including Iran — should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is at the core of the treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it. And I’m hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal.

What both Obama and Calabresi apparently don’t know – or willfully ignore – is that Iran has never been found to have breached its NPT obligations as such a violation could only occur if Iran began “to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons.”

Obama’s own intelligence and military agencies have consistently concluded that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. On February 3, 2013, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta begrudgingly reaffirmed this assessment on Meet The Press in response to ignorant leading questions from Chuck Todd. “What I’ve said, and I will say today,” Panetta told Todd, “is that the intelligence we have is they have not made the decision to proceed with the development of a nuclear weapon. They’re developing and enriching uranium. They continue to do that.”

After Todd curiously wondered why Iran would possibly be enriching uranium, Panetta explained, “I think– I think the– it’s a clear indication they say they’re doing it in order to develop their own energy source,” adding his own factually incorrect opinion, “I think it is suspect that they continue to – to enrich uranium because that is dangerous, and that violates international laws.”

Still, Todd pressed harder. “And you do believe they’re probably pursuing a weapon, but you don’t– the intelligence doesn’t know what… ,” he said before Panetta cut him off. “I– no, I can’t tell you because– I can’t tell you they’re in fact pursuing a weapon because that’s not what intelligence says we– we– we’re– they’re doing right now,” Panetta said.

The third sentence in Calabresi’s litany is perhaps the most absurd.  First, Iran hardly had a chance to “rebuff” any American diplomacy since there never was any to begin with that didn’t consist of intimidation, ultimatums, threats and take-it-or-leave-it demands, hardly the stuff of honest (let alone “conciliatory”) negotiation.

Moreover, the enrichment facility outside Qom was not “revealed” by the Obama Administration, but rather by Iran itself on September 21, 2009, days before the sensationalist press conference held by Obama, Nicholas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown, on September 25, 2009. At that time, IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire had already told reporters, “I can confirm that on 21 September, Iran informed the IAEA in a letter that a new pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction in the country.”

Obama even acknowledged this, noting, “Earlier this week, the Iranian government presented a letter to the IAEA that made reference to a new enrichment facility.” He omitted, however, the inconvenient fact that Iran was well within its legal obligations as it had announced the facility to the IAEA far in advance of the 180 days before becoming operational as required by Iran’s Safeguards Agreement. At the time, the facility was still under construction and did not actually begin uranium enrichment until early January 2012, a full 840 days after it had been officially declared.

As journalist Gareth Porter has noted, IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei later recounted that “Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s special advisor for nonproliferation and arms control, had informed him on Sep. 24 about U.S. intelligence on the Fordow site – three days after the Iranian letter had been received.” When ElBaradei “demanded to know why he had not been told before the Iranian letter… Einhorn responded that the United States ‘had not been sure of the nature of the facility’, ElBaradei wrote.”

ElBaradei subsequently described the facility at Fordow as “a hole in a mountain” and “nothing to be worried about.” Since then, the IAEA has consistently confirmed that “all nuclear material in the facility remains under the Agency’s containment and surveillance.”

Calabresi also claims that Obama “made bolstering the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty a top priority,” in spite of Obama’s clear refusal to advocate and encourage a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East even though every single country in the region, save Israel, supports its establishment.

The voice of Dennis Ross (or is it Netanyahu?) is prevalent throughout the article and it is clear he is the primary source for most of Calabresi’s  information. The piece is premised upon the notion that the Iran-U.S.-Israel stand-off is in its “final stages,” thereby presenting a situation that demands tough choices by Obama. This is straight out of the Ross (or is it Netanyahu?) playbook.

In December 2012, Ross told The Times of Israel that 2013 would be a critical year for Washington and Tehran. “I think there’s the stomach in this administration, and this president, that if diplomacy fails [to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons] — to use force,” Ross said at a gala dinner for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an AIPAC-spawned D.C. think tank, that was held in his (and convicted criminal Elliott Abrams‘) honor.

Such a statement is nothing new for Ross. At a WINEP event in January 2012, he said that “the Iranians should never think that there’s a reluctance [on the part of Obama] to use the force.”  Ross has long advocated a policy of economic warfare against Iran while pretending to conduct negotiations, all for the purpose of making what he believes is an inevitable military confrontation more palatable and justifiable to the American public.

When determining the risks and consequences of American military attack on Iran, Calabresi warns that such an act “would likely mean the deaths of American service members–and civilians too,” as well as precipitating a spike in oil prices and having a negative effect on the United State’s “reputation.” He also points out that an attack “could mean the devastation of [Iran’s] nuclear program and much of its armed forces, plus unimaginable costs to its economy.”

Never once does Calabresi mention the lives (or deaths) of Iranian civilians in his calculus, even though such an assault would potentially kill tens of thousands of Iranians (at minimum). Such is the level of concern for Iran’s population in both government policy and mainstream reporting.

Calabresi’s article is yet another example of how facts about Iran and its nuclear program are routinely dismissed, ignored or misrepresented in our current discourse. Such irresponsible journalism has misinformed and terrified the American public into believing that Iran poses a looming threat that must be dealt with through force, threat or coercion, an impression that bares little resemblance to the truth.

Unfortunately, the path to war – all too present under our feet these days – continues to be paved by people like Massimo Calabresi.

Related article

March 9, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

The BBC’s ‘Bogeyman’ Narrative on Hugo Chavez

News Unspun | March 7, 2013

Highslide JS
The BBC maintained a strong a record of misleading reporting throughout the presidency of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died on Tuesday, following a two year battle with cancer. Yet today’s article by Jon Kelly, ‘Hugo Chavez and the era of anti-American bogeymen,’ takes a particularly spiteful slant on the issue of what is presented as ‘Anti-Americanism’ in Chavez’s stance toward US foreign policy.

The premise of Kelly’s analysis is that Hugo Chavez is simply the latest in a long list of ‘bogeymen’, identified by ‘anti-American’ sentiment. To illustrate the ideological company that Kelly suggests Chavez kept, his image appears on the same panel as murderous despots and terrorists such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden. This may have been normal practice for news organisations such as Fox News, but for the BBC it must be noted that this is a move particularly devoid of integrity, perhaps a new low.

Kelly writes that Chavez was by turns ‘portrayed as a six-times elected champion of the people or a constitution-fiddling demagogue’, implying that the polarisation of commentary concerning Chavez’s presidency makes it difficult to perceive where the truth lies. Perhaps if Kelly had indulged in the journalistic habit of presenting the bare facts, it might help to dispel such confusion. It is factually accurate to acknowledge that Hugo Chavez was democratically elected six times, also that his base of support was amongst the poor, the vast majority of Venezuelans. The ambiguous claim of ‘constitution-fiddling’ is in line with the speculative approach the BBC has consistently leaned towards in reporting on Venezuelan politics, relying on the hyperbole of the opposition, yet lacking in facts (in a similar vein, the link to the BBC video on Hugo Chavez’s life on the BBC website has been updated and is now titled ‘Life of people’s hero and villain’).

In discussing US-Venezuelan relations, Kelly does not mention probably the most seminal event of the last fourteen years: the US-backed coup in 2002. As an interesting aside, straight after the death of Hugo Chavez, in the BBC ‘look back’ at his life, the coup was also omitted by James Robbins, who instead described events as ‘a general strike’ when ‘Chavez was briefly pushed from office’.

Kelly creates a ‘spectrum’ of ‘bogeymen’ with ‘anti-American’ tendencies: socialism to secular Arab nationalism to Islamic fundamentalism. The article ties together the homogenously applied label ‘anti-American’ and the term ‘bogeymen’ to somehow equate the two: if you don’t like the behaviour of the US this mode of reasoning renders you no less than a bogeyman, an object of fear and a threat. Kelly comments that where Hugo Chavez belonged on this spectrum was hotly debated. He presents as indisputable the claim that Chavez should be viewed as a ‘bogeyman’; it is only where he sits in relation to other bogeymen that is up for debate.

The article notes that Chavez ‘floridly lambasted “imperial” American policies’, the word ‘imperial’ placed in double quotes, and the notion that the most powerful country in the world with 900 military bases in 130 countries might have imperialist tendencies portrayed as ludicrous. In fact, the BBC never refer to US imperialism without quotation marks; imperialism is a word for history books it seems, today’s western militaries simply invade countries for the greater good. Those who think the US is an imperial power are simply ‘anti-American’ goes the gist of this article.

Anti-American

The term anti-American is one applied to negate critical positions on the policies of the US. Noam Chomsky has commented on the term ‘anti-American’ that it ‘is an interesting expression, because the accusation of being anti-nation is used typically in totalitarian societies, for example, the former Soviet Union accused dissidents of being anti-Soviet. But try “anti-Italian” or “anti-Belgian,” people in Milan or Brussels would laugh’.

By this tendency to apply one label to a range of political viewpoints, Hugo Chavez joins the ranks of the ‘most prominent critics’ of US power have recently ‘exited the spotlight’. The implication here is clear: Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Kim Jong-il have been prominent critics of the US, and if anyone happens to disagree with the US, they are in the same boat. All who do not ‘agree’ with the United States, including disagreement with any and all elements of US foreign policy, are designated to one ideological grouping. Naomi Klein discusses how this approach was taken by critics of anti-corporate protesters following September 11, 2001, who ‘attempt to make ideological links between anti-corporate protesters and religious fundamentalists like bin Laden, as British secretary of State for international development Clare Short did in November 2001. “Since September 11, we haven’t heard from the protesters,” she observed. “I’m sure they are reflecting on what their demands were because their demands turned out to be very similar to those of Bin Laden’s network.”’

The attempt to place a range of political positions in one or another camp (‘us’ or ‘theirs’) works to deter dissent. ‘To engage in dissent in this climate [following September 11] was unpatriotic’, as Klein writes. ‘The new battle lines have been drawn, crude as they are: to criticize the U.S. government is to be on the side of the terrorists, to stand in the way of market-driven globalization is to further the terrorists’ evil goals’.

This is precisely the position propagated by the Bush administration at the launch of the ‘war on terror’, ‘the binarism that Bush proposes’, as Judith Butler described, ‘in which only two positions are possible – “Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists”’. Liberally applying the label ‘anti-American bogeyman’ on the basis of a divergence of position with US policy, as Kelly does, is consistent with this position of binarism.

The BBC claims to take an impartial stance on international issues, yet this article propagates a worldview in black and white terms. In this presentation of political positions as a choice between only two options, that of the US and the political ideology of free market are presented or that of the despotic and terroristic bogeyman.

It is important that the events which have taken place in Venezuela, and throughout Latin America, over the past decade, the development of peaceful, democratic alternatives to the policies of neoliberalism, are not airbrushed from the historical record. The standards of living have improved for millions of people following a process that has had popular, democratic support, yet the international perception of the changes in Venezuela are at risk of being written off as simply the actions of another ‘anti-American’ ‘bogeyman’ due to the media’s relentless negative treatment of the Venezuelan government.

March 9, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Chavez: the Motive-Hunting of a Malignant NGO

By Joe Emersberger | ZCommunications | March 7th 2013

The death of Hugo Chavez provoked HRW to immediately (within hours) smear the Chavez government’s legacy.

“Chávez’s Authoritarian Legacy: Dramatic Concentration of Power and Open Disregard for Basic Human Rights” said the Washington DC based NGO.

If that isn’t harsh enough, in a tweet sent out in June of 2012, Ken Roth, executive director of HRW, described Venezuela as being one of the “most abusive” in Latin America. Ecuador and Bolivia were the other two states that Roth singled out.

In November of 2012, HRW also rushed out a letter demanding that Venezuela be excluded from the UN’s Human Rights Council on the grounds that the Chavez government “fell far short of acceptable standards”

It is staggeringly obvious that HRW did not simply regard the Chavez government as one which could be validly criticized, like any other in the world, on human rights grounds. HRW regarded Venezuela under Chavez as one of the “most abusive” countries in the world. Make no mistake, if Venezuela is more abusive than Colombia, as Roth alleged, then that would  easily place Venezuela among the worst human rights abusers on earth.

The day Hugo Chavez died, HRW rehashed the accusations it has been making for years:

1) “Assault on Judicial Independence”

2) “Assault on Press Freedoms”

3) “Rejection of Human Rights Scrutiny”

4) “Embracing Abusive Governments”

Without exploring any details at all about these criticisms something should stand out right away. Putting aside HRW’s remarkably shoddy attempts to substantiate them, how could these criticisms place the Chavez government among the most abusive countries in the world? How could HRW’s assessment, even taken at face value, make Venezuela unworthy to sit on the UN’s Human Rights Council next to the USA?

Daniel Kovalik pointed out the following amazing facts last year in a Counterpunch article:

… in a November 19, 2009 U.S. Embassy Cable, entitled, ” International Narcotics Control Strategy Report,” the U.S. Embassy in Bogota acknowledges, as a mere aside, the horrific truth:257,089 registered victimsof the right-wing paramilitaries. And, as Human Rights Watch just reported in its 2012 annual report on Colombia, these paramilitaries continue to work hand-in-glove with the U.S.-supported Colombian military….

… the U.S. has been quite aware of this death toll for over two years, though this knowledge has done nothing to change U.S. policy toward Colombia — which is slated to receive over $500 million in military and police aid from the U.S. in the next two years.

…. Indeed, as the U.S. Embassy acknowledges in a February 26, 2010 Embassy Cable entitled, ” Against Indigenous Shows Upward Trend,” such violence is pushing 34 indigenous groups to the point of extinction. This violence, therefore, can only be described as genocidal.

Either Ken Roth is unfamiliar with his own organization’s reports, or something very rotten drives his groups’ ludicrously disproportionate criticism of Venezuela.

I’ll borrow from HRW’s playbook and do some rehash of my own. I’ll rehash some of the questions I’ve been asking them for years. HRW has never attempted to answer.

1) When a coup deposed Chavez for 2 days in 2002, why did HRW’ public statements fail to do obvious things like denounce the coup, call on other countries not to recognize the regime, invoke the OAS charter, and (especially since HRW is based in Washington) call for an investigation of US involvement?

2) Very similarly, when a coup deposed Haiti’ democratically elected government in 2004, why didn’t HRW condemn the coup, call on other countries not to recognize the regime, invoke the OAS charter, and call for an investigation of the US role? Many of these things were done by the community of Caribbean nations (CARICOM). A third of the UN General Assembly called for an investigation into the overthrow of Aristide. Why didn’ HRW back them up?

3) Since 2004, why has HRW written about 20 times more about Venezuela than about Haiti despite the fact that the coup in Haiti created a human rights catastrophe in which thousands of political murders were perpetrated and the jails filled with political prisoners? Haiti’ judiciary remains stacked with holdovers from the coup installed regime.

In honour of Chavez and of the Venezuelan movements which will hopefully expand on the progress made towards making Venezuela a more democratic and humane country, lets recall some achievements of his government on the international stage that HRW would never applaud. Let’s remember Hugo Chavez strongly opposing the US bombing of Afghanistan in 2001; the war in Iraq, the 2004 coup in Haiti, the 2009 coup in Honduras, NATO’s bombing of Libya, the lethal militarization of the conflict in Syria, the attempted coups against Morales in Bolivia and against Correa in Ecuador, Israel’s aggression in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories.

None of that impressed HRW in the least. It may even have aggravated HRW’s hatred of the Chavez government, but it should impress people who really care about human rights.

March 7, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran nuclear issue overhyped: Ex-IAEA chief Hans Blix

Press TV – March 7, 2013

On February 22, 2012, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said Iran considers the pursuit and possession of nuclear weapons “a grave sin” from every logical, religious and theoretical standpoint.

The Leader described the proliferation of nuclear weapons as “senseless, destructive and dangerous,” adding that the Iranian nation has never sought and will never seek atomic bombs as the country already has the conventional capacity to challenge the nuclear-backed powers.
A former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has dismissed as “overhyped” the Western propaganda over the ‘threat of nuclear-armed Iran,’ saying there is no evidence that Tehran is even interested in producing weapons of mass destruction.

“So far Iran has not violated the NPT (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) and there is no evidence right now that suggests that Iran is producing nuclear weapons,” Hans Blix said in Dubai.

He added that no action can be justified against Iran’s nuclear activities on “mere suspicions or intentions that may not exist.”

The former IAEA chief had previously said that Iran has been more open to international inspections than most other countries would be.

Iran has repeatedly expressed its strong opposition to any production, possession or use of nuclear weapons, saying such arms have no place in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear doctrine.

On February 22, 2012, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said Iran considers the pursuit and possession of nuclear weapons “a grave sin” from every logical, religious and theoretical standpoint.

The Leader described the proliferation of nuclear weapons as “senseless, destructive and dangerous,” adding that the Iranian nation has never sought and will never seek atomic bombs as the country already has the conventional capacity to challenge the nuclear-backed powers.

The US, Israel, and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.

Iran rejects the allegations, arguing that as a committed signatory to the NPT and a member of the IAEA, it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

Despite the IAEA’s numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the UN nuclear agency has never found any evidence showing that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.

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March 7, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Will the U.S. Government, Media Seek to Improve Relations with Venezuela?

By Dan Beeton | CEPR Americas Blog | March 5, 2013

Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro’s announced today that President Hugo Chávez had died at 4:25pm. According to Venezuela’s constitution [PDF], new presidential elections are supposed to be held within 30 days.

The news could prevent an opportunity for an improvement in U.S.-Venezuelan relations, but that is unlikely. Earlier in the day, Maduro announced that the Venezuelan government would expel the U.S. military attaché for unsanctioned meetings with certain Venezuelan military officers. While this is of course a significant development in U.S.-Venezuela relations that marks yet further deterioration, unfortunately it seems safe to say that most U.S. media outlets will not provide the crucial context necessary in order to understand current relations and why they are so tense.

Maduro mentioned the April 2002 coup d’etat in his press conference today. Declassified C.I.A. and other government documents reveal the U.S. role in that coup against Hugo Chávez. As Scott Wilson, former foreign editor at the Washington Post has explained:

Yes, the United States was hosting people involved in the coup before it happened. There was involvement of U.S.-sponsored NGOs in training some of the people that were involved in the coup. And in the immediate aftermath of the coup, the United States government said that it was a resignation, not a coup, effectively recognizing the government that took office very briefly until President Chavez returned.

I think that there was U.S. involvement, yes.

(Video clip here. This information has however never been reported this fully in the pages of the Washington Post itself.)

The coup was overturned two days later, but before it was the coup regime headed by businessman Pedro Carmona demonstrated its feelings about democratic institutions by dissolving the congress, the supreme court, and the constitution. The New York Times editorial board applauded the coup, writing, “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.” The IMF explained that “We stand ready to assist the new administration in whatever manner they find suitable.” After the coup was overturned by Venezuelans in the streets and soldiers loyal to the elected government, and Chávez returned to Caracas from the island where his golpista kidnappers had taken him, the New York Times offered a sheepish apology for its previous applause. The U.S. government and the IMF, however, never apologized for their support for the coup.

It is also important to note that U.S. government interference in Venezuela did not stop there. The U.S. has continued to fund various groups in Venezuela opposed to the government – including political parties and media outlets. The U.S. State Department and entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy also have not disclosed who all of these recipients are, in Venezuela nor in other countries such as Bolivia, where the government has also expelled U.S. diplomats, and where the U.S. media has also done a poor job in providing context behind the deteriorating relations.

More recently, last month U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland referred to “how the transition is going to take place” in Venezuela. Not surprisingly, the Venezuelan government also took this to be a form of meddling. Talk of a “transition” was premature, and Nuland’s statement was “nothing less than the open meddling into issues that are for Venezuelans to resolve,” according to Eleazar Diaz-Rangel, editor in chief of Venezuela’s most-widely read – and probably most objective – newspaper Últimas Noticias.

It is hard to imagine U.S. government officials making similar statements if the leader of an ally country such as the U.K. or Israel were fighting for her/his life. But when it comes to Venezuela the behavior fits a pattern of ongoing efforts to undermine the elected government.

It will also be interesting to see how the international community and the media will receive Maduro, should he become Venezuela’s next president. Chávez called on Venezuelans to support Maduro should new elections be necessary, and polls show Maduro would likely win over an Henrique Capriles or another opposition candidate. Both U.S. media outlets and U.S. government officials have often sought to blame poor relations between the U.S. and Venezuela on Chávez’s “fiery” personality; will they do the same with Maduro? Earlier media reports today indicate that the answer is probably yes. Media – and many other observers –also focused much on Chávez’s military background, something that Maduro does not have.

For his part, Maduro got an early taste of U.S. hospitality in 2006 when he was unceremoniously searched at the airport prior to departure back to Venezuela in his first U.S. trip as Venezuela’s Foreign Minister. It was an unfortunate first impression to make on the man who will probably be Venezuela’s next president.

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March 6, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Purim and Genocidal Phantasies

By Ran HaCohen | March 5, 2013

Purim. One of the most popular Jewish holidays among Orthodox, traditional and so-called secular Jewish Israelis alike. The streets are packed with children and adults wearing costumes, make-up and all sorts of masquerading, on their way from one joyous Purim party to the next. Happy days. But behind the carnivalesque masks, ominous demons are lurking.

Tel Aviv, Sunday, February 24th

Hanan Usruf, a 40-year-old Arab sanitation worker for the city, was savagely beaten by some dozen Jewish men. The Jerusalem Post reported that Usruf’s injuries

include a fracture in his right eye socket and deep lacerations on his right ear and across almost his entire head. His vision is blurred in his left eye, but he can make out small numbers and letters, doctors said.

The Times of Israel added that the victim – an Israeli citizen, one should add – attacked by “drunken youth” required dozens of stitches and that doctors were doing their best to save his eye; under his horrendous photo in hospital, Usruf is quoted saying that

the youths kicked him and broke bottles on his head while shouting racial epithets at him. “They shouted things like ‘f**kin’ Arab’ and ‘get your own country.’

Jerusalem, Monday, February 25th

Hana Amtir, an Arab woman standing at the tram stop near the central bus station, was attacked by a group of young Jewish women. AFP quotes a (Jewish) eyewitness who took pictures of the attack and documented it on Facebook:

Suddenly shouts were heard, and a group of young religious Jewish women confronted the woman and suddenly a young Jewish woman punched her in the head, […] the rest then joined in, hitting and shoving the Arab woman. The woman tried to fight them off but they shouted at her not to dare touch Jews and they continued as a group to attack her and even forcibly pulled off her head covering, […] the incident was witnessed by a security guard from the rail company and a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish students who stood by and did nothing.

Framing

Both events – the lynch in Tel Aviv and the attack in Jerusalem – were reported widely in the Israeli media (separately or even together [Hebrew]), justly framed as hate crimes, sometimes with reference to similar crimes in the recent past. Some public protest followed – a demonstration, petitions and op-eds. However, no report I’ve seen mentioned the fact that both crimes were committed on Purim (24.2), a one-day holiday that lasts a day longer in Jerusalem (24-25.2). At best, one could find the holiday mentioned in passing, for instance in the Times of Israel that also described the Tel Aviv victimizers as drunken: “Police had yet to make any arrests […] After detaining suspects, the police will determine whether the attack was racially motivated, or the action of out-of-hand Purim revelers,” as if racist motivation and Purim revelry were mutually exclusive. But as a rule, Purim was simply ignored as irrelevant.

Is the Jewish holiday really irrelevant? The notion that the attackers were drunken can be easily traced back to the religious duty to get drunk on Purim. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Purim has been identified with Jewish violence (and with accusations of violence against Jews, true or false) for centuries. Just think of the West Bank town of Hebron for example: it was Purim 1981 when Jewish settlers brought down the roof over an Arab upholstery in “Beit Hadassah”, expelling its owner and taking over the house, a crucial step in what has since developed into a full-fledged ethnic cleansing at the heart of the Palestinian town. The settlers’ Purim parades in that city have become a tradition of provocations, with Jewish violence escalating from year to year – culminating in Purim 1994, when a Jewish settler massacred 29 and injured 125 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs. The butcher joined the settlers’ hall of fame: “Purim in Hebron after 1994 was like Purim in Hebron since 1981, only more so – with a new Jewish hero for Jewish children to dress up as,” writes Israeli historian Prof Elliott Horowitz in his excellent Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (2006, p. 8), that documents the roots and history of Jewish Purim violence (alongside its anti-Semitic abuses by Christians) from ancient times to the present.

Why Purim?

Like any legacy stretching from the Ancient World through the Middle Ages to Modern Times, Judaism is a multifaceted culture: it can be universal as well as nationalist; egalitarian as well as racist; liberal, even revolutionary as well as ultra-conservative – all these messages can be found in it. Among other things, Purim, however, has always reflected deep genocidal phantasies of revenge. The Book of Esther, the textual basis for this holiday, tells the story of the miraculous saving of the Jews of Persia from their enemies, most notably the evil Haman. It ends with the hanging of Haman by the Persian King. Consequently, the Jews take revenge and kill Haman’s ten sons, murder several hundreds of non-Jews in the capital Susa, and then massacre seventy-five thousand non-Jews all over Persia. That’s how the Book of Esther ends. The (probably non-existent) historical foundations of these events are irrelevant: it’s the myth and the memory that matter.

The genocidal roots of Purim go even deeper: Haman, as the short Book of Esther repeatedly stresses, is an “Agagite”, that is, an offspring of Agag. Agag was the King of the ancient Amalekites, the archetypal enemy of the Jews, on which the Bible commands to inflict genocide: “you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget” (Deuteronomy 25,19). When King Saul sins by sparing King Agag’s life, God regrets He had made him king of Israel, and Prophet Samuel “hews Agag in pieces before the Lord” (I Samuel 15,33).

These are not just idle interpretations for the learned or deep secrets known to the few; it’s all anchored in the liturgical practice of Purim. While the public reading of the Book of Esther is at the heart of the holiday itself, the Torah-text on blotting out Amalek is read in synagogue on the “Sabbath of Remembrance”, the last Saturday before Purim. Once the Arabs are seen as Haman/Amalek, Purim turns into a carnival of incitement against them.

Educating Israeli Soldiers

The Chief Rabbinate of the Israeli army has recently produced a short video (in Hebrew) to “explain” Purim to Israeli soldiers. It opens by stating the obvious, namely that Persia is today’s Iran; among the images that flash every now and then when Haman is mentioned we see not only Ahmadinejad, but also Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah, as well as (several times) Hitler, and, yes, Jesus Christ, who also makes a brief appearance. In a baseless rewriting of the legend, obviously aimed against present-day Palestinians, Haman and his sons are said to have resided in the Land of Israel, where they were inciting against the Jews and demanding to stop construction in Jerusalem (!) before moving to Persia, where the Book of Esther takes place.

In other words, the army “educational” video draws a line from Haman to Jesus, to Nazi Germany, to today’s Iran and Hezbollah, as well as to the present-day Palestinians. And Haman, as the video doesn’t even bother to remind its viewers, is Amalek, the eternal enemy of the Jews: “you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven, do not forget.”

From Hebron to Tel Aviv

It’s truly amazing that the Israeli media ignored the Purim context of the violent events in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Jewish Israelis are witnessing a trend of “rediscovering of” and “reconnecting to” their “Jewish roots”. In such an atmosphere, one would expect those “rediscoverers” to be aware the Jewish context of the violence: after all, this is also part of the Jewish legacy they are allegedly so fond of. But no: instead of coming to terms with the lights and shadows of the rich Jewish tradition, non-Orthodox Israelis fall prey to ominous Jewish demons without even noticing them, demons that have enjoyed an uninterrupted existence among Orthodox Jews like the radical settlers of Hebron, but have now sneaked even into “secular” Tel Aviv.

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March 5, 2013 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Ricardo Haussmann – a reliable commentator for the Guardian on Venezuela?

By Dr Francisco Dominguez | Venezuela Solidarity Campaign | March 3, 2013

Last Monday the Guardian Comment is Free website carried a piece by Ricardo Haussmann on Venezuela entitled The legacy of Hugo Chávez: Low growth, high inflation, intimidation.

The piece painted a doomsday scenario for modern day Venezuela, arguing that “Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez is a master at holding onto power, but it has cost his country and people dearly.”

Ironically this came out just days before the Venezuelan economy was announced to have grown 5.6% in 2012 on the back of a huge housing stimulus.

Worse still, the piece appeared just a couple of days before the anniversary of the ‘Caracazo’ of 1989.  The Caracazo is the day when the Venezuelan people rose up against a package of cuts forced on them. Over two thousand people were then brutally executed by state security forces in what has been termed Venezuela’s worst human rights disaster in history. In stark contrast, precisely on February 27 (2013), Venezuela was elected by about three quarters of the governments represented in the UN to become permanent member of the United Nations Human rights Council for three years.

What is the link between this and Ricardo Haussmann?

In 1989, he was an economic advisors to the soon-to-be-disgraced president Carlos Andres Perez who carried out the cuts and subsequent Caracazo violence.

As this academic paper points out:  

“Pérez appointed to his economic cabinet a team of radically pro-market technocrats largely recruited from the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA). These ministers–among whom were Miguel Rodríguez, Moisés Naím, Ricardo Haussmann, Gerver Torres, and Julián Villalba–became known as the “IESA Boys,” by analogy to the “Chicago Boys” of Pinochet’s Chile. This team designed the shock “paquete” that Pérez promised in his inaugural address in February 1989 and put into effect two weeks later”.

After that, from 1992 to 1993, Haussmann served as Minister of Planning in Venezuela and as a member of the Board of the Central Bank of Venezuela  also under Carlos Andres Perez. Clearly the ‘Caracazo’ was not severe enough to break his link with President Perez.

Around the same time, Haussmann was Chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee. Judging by the nature and tone of his attack on the current Venezuelan government, one may have expected this to have been the dawn of some golden IMF-sponsored growth across Latin America.

Yet as economist Mark Weisbrot has pointed out, this period marked the worst economic performance of the Continent in a century. Only with the recent leftward shift (in many ways led by Venezuela) was there a much needed combination of economic growth and social justice.

Rejected by the Carter Centre 

Haussmann later based himself in the US at Harvard, but came to prominence again following the 2004 recall referendum against Hugo Chavez, when he published a paper claiming that “statistically” the outcome could have been the result of fraud. At the time, the Wall Street Journal was amongst those who recycled the claim. The well respected Carter Centre  debunked the myth and the politically motivated claims of fraud by stating clearly that “the results were accurate”.

Haussmann’s and Venezuela’s new right

In the run up to last October’s election, won by Hugo Chavez in a landslide victory, it was Haussmann (acting as an advisor to the defeated right-wing candidate Henrique Capriles) who claimed the right-wing opposition would have 200,000 people at polling stations and could then announce their own results before the official ones.

Luckily this plan – which was seen by many as the start of a worrying destabilisation aimed at getting the legitimate results not recognised internationally – failed to pick up momentum due to the scale of Hugo Chavez’s victory, with Capriles himself recognising the results. But this was not before the Spanish newspaper ABC had published a fake exit poll claiming Hugo Chavez had lost.

Surely his role as an advisor to the  right-wing political candidate should have featured in the Guardian piece. This would better explain the reasons for the content of the piece.

Likewise sections of the British media have also recently quoted Diego Arria (who denies the 2002 coup in Venezuela was even a coup!) and the 2002 coup-supporting, hard right-wing MP (and friend of George W.Bush) María Corina Machado. Both are prominent signatories to a recent public petition calling on the Venezuelan military to overturn the country’s elected government. 

Of course, people are entitled to express their views on Venezuela. But it’s clear that the Venezuelan people have time and again rejected the views pushed by Haussmann and the other members of the Venezuelan right recently attracting such interest in certain quarters of the British media.

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March 4, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

AIPAC aims to play ‘major strategic ally’ card to save aid for Israel from US cuts?

RT | March 03, 2013

US aid to Israel may be saved from sequestration and moved into Pentagon budget. That might be the result if the Israeli lobby in Washington gets its way and the American people aren’t paying attention, political analyst Robert Naiman told RT.

The annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is reportedly focused on the congressional designation of Israel as a “major strategic ally” of the US, a unique status that would be enjoyed only by the Jewish state. The move is seen as facilitating Israel’s military action against Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which also appears on the conference agenda.

But according to the policy director at Just Foreign Policy Robert Naiman, the pro-Israel conference is focusing on Iran so as not to draw attention to the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict – as well as protecting US funding of Israel from budget cuts.

RT: The US has been Israel’s faithful ally since the foundation of the state. Why does it need to become official, why the formalization?

RN: Well, according to lobbyists associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, it has to do with the coming threat of budget cuts. Under this sequester… there’re supposed to be across-the-board cuts to the US budget. So that should mean that the US aid to Israel, which is substantial, billions of dollars a year, should also be cut – but the Israel lobby doesn’t want the aid to Israel to be cut. So their long game is that with this designation of ‘major strategic ally’ they would move things that are currently paid out of the US aid to Israel into the base Pentagon budget. They’ll argue, ‘well, this is about the national security needs…’

So their goal here is to exempt aid to Israel from the so-called across-the-board cuts. But of course they don’t want to announce that on the marquee, because Americans are going to be told: ‘oh, now we have to cut Head Start early childhood education because of the sequester cuts, but meanwhile aid to Israel is going to be protected.’ That’s going to make a lot of people in the United States very angry.

RT: It’s clear how Israel would benefit from this. But the US rubber-stamping the status of Israel as its ‘major strategic ally’ – how do they benefit from it?

RN: Well, they don’t – it has nothing to do with the benefit to the US. This is about what you can get away with if you’re lobbyist in Washington and the American people aren’t paying attention. If AIPAC and members of Congress are in a closed room, they’re going to agree on one thing. If the American people don’t find that out, it’s not reported in the press. This isn’t in the New York Times, it’s not in the Washington Post. It’s in the insider press that covers the stuff, Jewish telegraphic agency, for example, that covers AIPAC. So outside the people who follow such news, this is not in the mainstream American media yet.

RT: The conference will focus mainly on Iran, which is seen as the emerging threat. But the conflict with the Palestinians is very real and has been for decades. Why isn’t solving that on the agenda?

RN: Well, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee doesn’t want to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they’re completely content with the status quo. They want Israel to retain control of the West Bank, they want Israeli settlements in the West Bank to expand, so they’re completely happy with that. In fact, these are the people that do a lot to drive the focus on Iran, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Israeli government, which are like two twin brothers. This focus now actually helps them change the channel from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They don’t want anybody to think about or talk about… three million Palestinians who don’t get to vote for the government that rules their lives, while their neighbors can stir in the Israeli Knesset.

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March 3, 2013 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran Is Not Our Enemy

Video is archived.

Despite what all the media are yammering at you, despite all the fear mongering about Iran’s “nuclear threat” (Iran has been fully verified by the IAEA and ALL the U.S. intelligence community agree and are on record that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons), despite talk that Iran is intolerant, despite the daily barrage of bad press and unpleasant innuendo, Iran is a great country, friendly, cultured, fun and spiritually-minded!

The “Powers That Were” are dead set on taking us to war against Iran, but “They lied about Vietnam… Iraq… Afghanistan…” and “Iran Is NOT Our Enemy ! “

March 1, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Why Isn’t Closing 129 Chicago Public Schools National News?

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Bruce A. Dixon | February 27, 2013

If you don’t live in Chicago you might not know that the CEO and the dozens of other six figure a year mayoral cronies who run the Chicago Public Schools want to close 129 public schools this year, more than a third of the city’s total. It’s not national news for the same reason that closing 40 public schools in Philadelphia last year wasn’t national news, and massive school closings in the poorer neighborhoods of cities across the country is not news either.

It’s not news because school closings and school privatization, the end game of the bipartisan policies the Obama administration, Wall Street, the US Chamber of Commerce, a host of right wing foundations and deep pockets and hordes of politicians in both parties from the president down are pushing down the throats of communities across the country, are deeply unpopular. The American people, and especially the parents, teachers, grandparents, and other residents of poorer neighborhoods where closings and privatization are happening emphatically don’t want these things.

Even the word describing their policy, “privatization” is so vastly unpopular that they’ve taken it out of circulation altogether. The best way, our leaders imagine, to contain and curtail resistance to their deeply unpopular policies is to avoid naming them for what they are, to keep them on the down low, to not report on their implementation, and certainly to not cover any civic resistance to them.

Local elites in each city and school district concoct real or imaginary “crises” to which the solution is always firing more experienced teachers, hiring more temps in their place, instituting more high-stakes testing, closing more public schools and substituting more unaccountable (and often profitable) charter schools, frequently in the same buildings that once housed public schools. In Chicago the “crisis” is precipitated every year when the CPS (that’s Chicago Public Schools – Chicago’s never had an elected school board, they’re all mayoral appointees) honchos announce the schools are in a billion dollar hole. The Chicago Teachers Union of course, took a look over the same books and revealed that despite the host of top $100,000 a year officials whose jobs never seem to be cut, the system was nine figures in the black, not ten in the red. Naturally, local and national media didn’t report that either.

Chicago’s teachers have done what those in New York, Houston, Dallas, L.A. and others have not, and spent their union dues funding outreach and collaboration with parents across the city, so neighborhood hearings on the school closings are packed to overflowing with outraged parents, indignant local business people, angry teachers and concerned students. If CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News gave the school closings and privatization story a fraction of the coverage they gave deceptive and dishonest pro-privatization movies like Waiting For Superman and Won’t Back Down, the outrage against the move to privatize education would be unstoppable. The most coverage the wave of school closings have received lately was a misleading segment on Melissa Harris-Perry’s weekly TV show on whether school closings were “racist” or not, with no examination of the how or why they happen or the growing resistance to them.

Oceans of ink and hot air have been expended claiming that “social media” would somehow take up the slack created by the disappearance of local news gathering organizations, and how these things can somehow fuel and sustain a wave of public outrage that can topple unjust authority and make the will of the people felt. But when it comes to the war of our elite waged to privatize public education, we haven’t seen it yet.

Contact Bruce A. Dixon at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

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February 27, 2013 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYT’ Steven Davidoff Doesn’t Consider the Successful 300 Years of Financial Transactions Taxes In London

CEPR Beat the Press | February 26, 2013

Steven Davidoff really doesn’t like financial transactions taxes (FTT) but is not honest enough to acknowledge this fact. Instead he tells readers that proponents of a tax haven’t thought about its consequences and uncritically repeats every piece of nonsense produced by the financial industry to attack the idea.

In the course of a 1300 word essay we get assessments of the tax from Credit Suisse, Blackrock, and the Partnership for the City of New York, which is effectively the New York City Chamber of Commerce. All of these accounts are presented uncritically, as though the purveyors of this information had no interest other than conveying the truth. We are also told that the New York Stock Exchange “threatened to jump across the Hudson River to New Jersey” in reaction to a plan to increase the city’s stock tax in the 1966 (interesting image). Davidoff apparently never heard of businesses making threats to extract concessions from governments.

The NYT running a column like Davidoff’s is like the Iowa City Press Citizen running a column on a plan to cut back farm subsidies where the views  of the state’s leading wheat and corn farmers are presented as unquestioned truth, along with a study from the corn growers trade organization. I suspect that the Press Citizen has higher standards.

Meanwhile when it comes to the proponents of the tax, Davidoff lectures:

“advocates of this neat idea conveniently ignore the century of less-than-successful experience with this tax, including New York State’s own failed attempt.”

This comment is more than a little bizarre. Davidoff writes as though proponents of the tax are completely ignorant of economics and have not done research into the history of financial transaction taxes.

Contrary to this assessment, the proponents of the tax include some of the world’s most prominent economists. Furthermore, there is extensive research on the history of financial transactions taxes. Much of it can be found right here on the European Commission’s (EC) website.

Contrary to Davidoff’s bizarre comment, implying the New York tax is a rare example of a government implementing such taxes, nearly all financial markets operated with financial transactions taxes for long periods of time (more than 300 years in the case of London’s market). Most of the world’s major financial centers, including London, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore, still have financial transactions taxes on their stock exchanges. Perhaps Davidoff should be lecturing these governments on how their taxes really don’t work.

As far as the substance, Davidoff tells us that research shows that the tax will increase rather than decrease volatility. There are two different notions of volatility at play here. One is the volatility associated with normal price fluctuations over the course of a day or week. This is likely to be increased by a tax since it will increase the costs for arbitragers to enter a market. That means that we may see somewhat larger divergences between prices than would otherwise be the case. This could mean that the gap in the price of oil between two markets may rise to 0.4 percent rather than 0.3 percent before arbitragers whittle it down again.

Proponents of FTTs are probably not much concerned about this sort of volatility. The economic consequences are likely close to zero. Furthermore, since the levels of taxation being debated would just raise transactions costs back to where they were 10-15 years ago, it is difficult to believe that the effects could be too severe. (We did have very liquid capital markets in the 1990s.)

The type of volatility that more likely concerns proponents of FTTs are the sharp movements that are not driven by fundamentals, such as the 1987 crash and the flash crash in the spring of 2011. While it is difficult to prove that a FTT will reduce the likelihood of such sharp movements, it is worth noting that such events did not occur in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, when trading costs were much higher than in the last three decades.

As far as the incidence of the tax, Davidoff gives us the assessment of Blackrock:

“that if the financial transaction tax were set at 0.1 percent per trade, an investor putting $10,000 in its global equity fund would lose more than $2,300 in expected returns over a 10-year period. This amount would rise to $15,000 if the money were invested in a more actively managed European fund.”

Incredibly, Blackrock assumes that its trading does not in any way respond to the tax. If this were true then Blackrock’s funds would quickly go out of business since their cost would be far higher than others in the industry. There have been a range of trading elasticities estimated by various studies (see the EC research), with most estimates close to -1.0. (None are near zero.) If the elasticity is near -1 then trading volume would decline by roughly the same amount that the tax increases trading costs.

This means that if the tax doubled trading costs, then trading volume would be roughly cut in half. That means that if Blackrock’s fund managers responded as the research suggests, then they would cut back the number of trades by enough so that the non-tax trading costs for their $10,000 account would fall by roughly $2,300 over the course of a decade or $15,000 in the case of its more actively managed European fund. This would be revenue lost to Blackrock, not to its clients.

In this respect it is worth noting that the sharp decline in trading costs over the last four decades has not been associated with higher returns to investors, but rather to a more than proportionate increase in trading volume. This has caused the total amount spent on trading financial assets to rise sharply relative to the size of the economy. These trading costs are money out of investors’ pockets and a drain on the economy.

Davidoff’s effort to claim that the tax could not raise any revenue approaches the bizarre. He tells readers:

“In Britain, for example, where the financial transaction tax has fluctuated from half a percent to 2 percent, the tax has raised significantly less revenue than one might expect, about £3 billion a year. The reason is that investors who trade regularly in Britain use options to avoid the tax, which applies only to trading in stock. The result may be that the tax pushes investors into more risky securities in their efforts to avoid it.”

First, it is worth noting that £3 billion comes to 0.2 percent of UK’s GDP. (The UK had raised almost 0.3 percent of GDP from this tax before the 2008 crash [Table 2].) This would be the equivalent of almost $400 billion over the 10-year budget horizon in the United States. That is almost 3 times as much as President Obama has proposed to save by cutting the Social Security cost of living adjustment. In other words, in the current budget debates it would be regarded as real money.

Second, the decision to not tax derivatives like options is a political one made by governments that have been closely allied with the financial industry. The tax being put in place by 11 countries in the European Union would tax options and other derivatives. In the 1980s Japan had a broadly based tax that was imposed on a wide range of financial assets including options. This tax raised an amount of revenue that was close to 1.0 percent of its GDP. This would amount to $2 trillion over the 10-year budget horizon in the United States.

At one point Davidoff tells readers:

“As for seeking revenue gains to solve budget problems, if the tax is too small, it will have no effect.”

Huh? The Securities and Exchange Commission imposes a tax of 0.002 percent on stock trades in the United States. This tax raises roughly $1.2 billion to finance its budget. Is Davidoff suggesting that the SEC should get rid of this tax because it is not really raising money?

As I said, Davidoff doesn’t like FTTs, that’s pretty clear from reading this piece even though he tells us:

“This is not to say that a financial transaction tax by itself is such a terrible idea.”

He has a case built with non-sequitors (one example of the horror of FTTs is that traders fled a tax imposed by Sweden in the 1980s and instead did their trades in London, which also had a tax). And he ignores all sorts of evidence that FTTs can and do raise large amounts of revenue without disrupting capital markets. This piece lets us know where Davidoff stands on FTTs, it doesn’t provide much information on the merits of the policy.

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February 27, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

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